I was nineteen years old and was about to meet the father of a woman I had just begun dating. While that is a daunting task for prospective boyfriends everywhere, my fear factor skyrocketed when I discovered that he worked for the local police department. Who in their right mind wants to date the daughter of a cop? Every joke I’d ever heard about a dad introducing himself to the boyfriend while holding a shotgun suddenly seemed way too real. As such, I wanted to do everything in my power to make a good impression, so I made a significant effort to get to know him. This led to one of my most vivid encounters with racism.
This officer often shared accounts of his daily exploits, and his stories tended to be pedestrian. But on this particular occasion, he shared an account that shocked me on every level. He and his partner were patrolling the neighborhood and saw a carful of African Americans driving around the neighborhood. These young men were doing nothing wrong or illegal—an admission that rolled off his lips with ease—yet he felt justified in stopping them based on nothing but their appearance. After pulling them over, each of the four men was subjected to a full-body frisk. They were required to keep their hands on the car as the officers then searched the car. Finally, one of the young men hit his breaking point. He was humiliated and angry, and he began shouting at the officers that they had no legal basis for treating him and his friends that way.
At that point, the officer took a short detour from his storytelling and began to lecture us on how young people today don’t have any respect for authority. He told us that when parents fail to instill discipline in children, it’s the responsibility of others to step in. I was trying hard to follow his logic, but he returned to the story at hand. In graphic detail, he went on to tell us about the beating he and his partner gave the young man who had complained—because they viewed him as disrespectful. The story was already horrible, but it managed to get even worse as he accentuated the fact that the beating happened in front of the young man’s friends. It was very important to the officer that they got the point of the lesson, and he seemed to relish the fact that he got to be the teacher.
As he shared this account, all I could do was stand there in frozen silence. I was stunned not only by the immorality of his actions but also by the confidence he had in admitting to something that was so obviously illegal. I was also aware that this was the kind of story I wouldn’t believe if it were delivered secondhand. If anyone else had told me, I would have been convinced they were exaggerating to make a political point. But there I was, listening to the firsthand account of one who had executed a miscarriage of justice. This was my first adult encounter with unveiled racism, and I knew it required a response.
It may seem obvious what my response should have been. I should have no longer minimized the reality of racial discrimination. I should have realized that the scales of justice don’t weigh equally for every person. It should have been the moment when my cultural identity journey began in earnest and where I never turned back.
But it wasn’t.
Instead I went on an active search for a way to cope with the tidal wave of emotions aroused by that too-close-for-comfort encounter with racism, and I exercised my privilege. I chose to walk away.
Encounters like this are typically necessary for the white awakening process. And yet such an experience alone is rarely enough. A reckoning must happen with the deeper realities that we have been exposed to, and such a reckoning requires that we overcome the overwhelming temptation to move into the second stage: denial.
Why is denial a predictable stage in the cultural identity journey? This is a notoriously difficult question to answer because denial is slippery. Once it’s spotted, it begins to disintegrate, and it struggles to remain undetected at all costs. (This is why we need to name it!) So, in an attempt to pin denial down, let’s use my story as a test case. How could I have such a close contact with overt racism and still find a way to deny its existence?
The first answer is the way the encounter shook the whole foundation of my worldview. It was shocking for me to hear a police officer openly brag about profiling a car full of young, African American men. It was even more unsettling to hear him boast about provoking them to the point that he felt justified in assaulting one of them in order to teach a lesson in respect for authority.
As I stumbled away from that conversation, I felt shaken to the bone. Up to that point, it would have never occurred to me that a US citizen of any background would have a reason to fear the police. I remembered being taught as a child to see the increased presence of police as a strictly positive contribution to the neighborhood. I also remembered the deference with which adults in my neighborhood spoke of the importance of the men and women who took the oath and badge to protect and serve the community.
But for the first time, I had seen this authority abused. Instead of protecting and serving the entire community, an officer had targeted and essentially terrorized the black residents of this neighborhood. I wasn’t presuming that the actions of this officer were representative of others. Yet since I’d seen this encounter up close, it unleashed a series of unwanted questions: If there is one police officer targeting African Americans, are there others? What does that say about the racial views of the police department as a whole? Is it possible that many of them are good people but deeply affected by racism nonetheless? And if I’m going to make a mental allowance for the policing system, what about society as a whole? Is the vision I’ve clung to about our country true? Are we indeed a nation created to treat all people as equally valuable? Or have we been stained by a racist ideology that treats some of our population as second-class citizens?
Once the floodgate opened, I struggled to stop the tide. It didn’t take me long for the questions to become personal; I began to wonder if my own family structure was as race-neutral as I presumed. I had been raised with a colorblind ideology that intentionally de-emphasized racial differences in the hopes that we see all people as the same. This seemed fine in my growing-up years, but now I was wondering if that approach was flawed. I wondered, If society treats people of color differently than it treats white people, is my colorblindness just an excuse to happily depart into la-la land? Is it possible that my grandparents, whom I adore, are part of this larger racial problem? Is it possible that my parents are part of it? And what about me? Am I part of the problem? Are we all good people that are just ignorant of race? Or worse, are we closet racists who are unwilling to acknowledge the problems out there—as well as inside of our own hearts and souls?
In the game Jenga, each player takes a turn removing a block from a carefully stacked bunch of blocks. The goal is to avoid knocking the whole thing over by removing blocks very carefully. So you don’t pull blocks from the base level because if you mess with the foundation, the whole thing could easily come toppling down. That is an imperfect but real metaphor for what my life felt like after that encounter with racism. An unending series of questions about race in America was shaking the base-level blocks of how I viewed reality. The more I considered them, the more I felt my foundation shaking. I feared that staying there too long would cause my whole worldview to come crashing down.
When I look back now, I see that this is exactly what was supposed to happen. A faulty foundation may stay propped up for a while, but it isn’t worth keeping in the long run. It doesn’t matter how high you build; it’s still going to crash at some point. It occurred to me later that this must have been what Jesus was referring to when he said,
Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash. (Matthew 7:24-27)
Jesus concluded the Sermon on the Mount with this image, and it summarizes the results of denial. Encounters with racism serve as the rain/water/wind storm in the lives of those of us in the dominant culture. The storm shakes us to the core and reveals what foundation is built on the rock and what foundation is built on the sand. The revelation of where our foundation lies can be terrifying, but it also can be liberating.
It’s of ultimate importance that our view of reality is built on the rock and not the sand. And if we can learn to interpret the nature of these storms as a gift from Jesus, we’re halfway home to defeating denial.
Though an individual choice to pursue wisdom and rebuff foolishness is important, we must recognize the depth of denial that grips our nation as a whole. It doesn’t seem to matter how much exposure white America has to racial injustice or how many encounters we have with systemic inequality, we can’t seem to snap out of our collective slumber and admit the faults in our foundations.
I’ve heard Mark Charles, a theologian, speaker, and writer of Navajo heritage lecture on national denial on multiple occasions, and I credit him as the primary influence on my understanding of this subject (and many others). A sermon he gave to my own congregation sparked my appreciation of the challenges of attempting to foster a national awakening. As he specifically addressed the communities of color within River City Community Church, he first sympathized with the ongoing oppression that many of them needed to overcome. Then he moved on to suggest how they could better understand the collective denial of white America. He wrapped it around a pair of words that make a lot of conceptual sense: white trauma.
Charles said that reconciliation conversations tend to focus on the historical trauma that communities of color have faced, and he affirmed that this must continue to be the case. The problem, he suggested, is that the conversation around trauma stops with them. But what about the white community? While the traumas experienced by victims and by oppressors are qualitatively different on every level and can therefore never be compared, it’s impossible to be complicit with centuries of traumatizing oppression without becoming traumatized oneself.
This was a groundbreaking idea for me. While I had grown to recognize the ways our racial history has traumatized communities of color, I had never considered the ways white America had also been traumatized by this same history. I had a new appreciation for why denial is such an accessible temptation for every white person: it’s easy to turn a blind eye toward history at an individual level when our nation still does so at a corporate level.
When we consider some of the ways we treat history as a nation, we see the fallout from white trauma. Take Columbus Day, for example, a legal holiday recognized on the second Monday of every October. Search it online or in almost any history book, and you’re most likely to find this description: it’s a holiday that commemorates the discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus in 1492.
Discovery? Really? Can any thinking person say with a straight face that what Columbus did when he got to America was “discover”? How can one discover a nation that’s already inhabited by millions? Charles highlights how ludicrous this claim is by asking his listeners to consider leaving out their wallet, phone, or iPad so they can experience what it’s like to have their property “discovered.”
Yet we’ve made the conscious decision to tell the history of our nation as one that was discovered by Columbus and other explorers.1 Some questions beg to be asked: How have we convinced ourselves to embrace something that sounds more like a fairy tale than a factual account of history? How do otherwise logical people voluntarily look past the documented facts and pass on a false narrative? There is only one explanation that makes sense: We are traumatized, and we are therefore in denial. Acknowledging that all our land was stolen from Native people feels like too great a burden, so we create an alternative reality that allows us to disengage emotionally from the truth.
Another major historical reality that has shaped the fabric of the United States is the seventy-plus years of black lynchings. The Equal Justice Initiative, an organization started by Bryan Stevenson, published an important report on this topic, titled “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,”2 which tells a real-life horror story that lives outside the scope of white Americans. The report documents 3,959 lynchings of black people in twelve Southern states between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950. Think about that. Close to four thousand human beings were publicly murdered for acts as simple as having a conversation with a white female.
Why do we not talk about lynchings more? In the United States, every year we honor the 2,996 people killed in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, as we rightly should. But have you ever heard of an honor ceremony to acknowledge the 3,959 lives lost to lynching? And if I were going to pry, as I often do within my friendship circles, I would ask how much familiarity you have with the history of lynching. I point a finger at myself first, because I was ignorant of this history. I’m ashamed to admit that until my late twenties, I had no reference point for the word lynching except for people using the word as slang. I certainly had no in-depth knowledge of the history of lynching, nor could I comprehend how the terror of that period left aftershocks in the black community that have been felt for decades.
Some uncomfortable questions need to be asked. Why do we reverently remember the casualties of those attacked by terrorists from outside our country (again, as we should) but turn a blind eye to the black lives lost in acts of terror at the hands of those within our own country? Why, in an Internet search on “terrorist attacks in American history,” does lynching not even appear? Why is it that most culture history books pay scant attention to lynchings?
The most plausible answer is white trauma. At a corporate level, it’s traumatic that a country that aspires to be a place of equality for all people did this to its own citizens. And the risk of trauma is high at a personal level. Once we open up this history, who knows what else we’ll find? I think of a white friend who came from a long line of preachers and the anxiety he felt about exploring his lineage. He knew his grandfather pastored during the height of the KKK, and he was quite apprehensive about what he might discover if he began to poke around. Versions of this same anxiety live within many of us. We want to believe our grandparents and great grandparents were noble people who were on the right side of history. But something inside of us also knows that the true story could be very different. These are traumatic possibilities, and denial always looms as a tempting option for avoiding the truth.
One last example: in my early twenties, I became close to a man of Japanese American heritage, and through our friendship I learned about the historical significance of internment camps. Did you know that two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order that all Japanese Americans had to evacuate the West Coast? (Contrast this with the fact that no internment of German Americans occurred, despite being at war with Germany at the time.) This resulted in the forced incarceration of nearly 120,000 people, the majority of whom were US citizens, into ten internment camps across the country.
I was shocked to discover this. I then learned that in 1988 President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act, a piece of legislation that admitted to government actions being a result of “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” As a result of this admission, each camp survivor was rewarded with reparations of $20,000 each. As I learned about this recent history, I found myself again wondering how I had learned about World War II in school yet had never heard of internment camps, national admissions to racism, or the corresponding reparations. How could something this major have happened within the century and go unmentioned in a history class? By now you know my answer: white trauma is the most plausible explanation.
I have already used Nicodemus as an archetype for the awakening journey, and his story once again provides a template for transformation. The conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus began with the importance of learning to “see” the kingdom through spiritual rebirth and then culminated with what is arguably the most famous verse in the Bible, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” By finishing the conversation there, Jesus pronounced to Nicodemus (and to us) that the ultimate expression of “seeing” the kingdom of God is to see Jesus himself. To see the kingdom is to see Jesus as the beloved Son. To see the kingdom is to Jesus as the ultimate incarnational expression of God’s love. To see the kingdom is to see that life is found through Jesus Christ alone.
The unique way that Jesus proclaimed the gospel in John 3 is incredible enough, but he also provided a significant biblical resource for addressing national trauma. Just before he talked about how God sent his beloved Son into the world, Jesus said this: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him” (vv. 14-15).
When Jesus alluded to Moses lifting up the serpent, he was drawing from a story in Numbers 21 that describes one of the more traumatic experiences of the Israelite community in Old Testament times. Carlos Ruiz, a pastor at River City for close to ten years and a therapist, wrote this in a chapter on trauma in Intercultural Ministry: Hope for a Changing World:
A biblical story that has been helpful to me as a paradigm of healing is found in Numbers 21. When the Israelites were in the wilderness and then, after sinning against God, serpents came out and bit them, leaving many Israelites dead in the desert. They must have experienced a traumatic terror as they saw friends and family being attacked and dying by the frightening serpents. After they repented of their sin and asked for help to Moses, it would have made sense for God to remove the serpents right away in order to heal them. However, God did not do that. On the contrary, God asked Moses to build an icon of the very creature that was causing them to die, a serpent of bronze. Whenever they would look at the serpent of bronze, they would be healed and live. In this story God tells Moses that they need to look at the figure of the snake of bronze so that people could be healed and live . . . an odd way of being saved. It is odd and scary because they realized that if they looked at the traumatic icon, instead of running away from it they would live.
When I think about this story, I cannot help but think that similar situations are occurring in our communities today. There is in all of us, especially in our environments where we want to pursue and experience reconciliation, a big desire to move on and not look at the snakes that have come out to bite and kill for generations. We are afraid, we are helpless, and we are ashamed of the little “progress” we have made to the point that we want to push harder or completely disengage. The story of the serpent of bronze doesn’t let us do either of those options. On the contrary it tells us that we need to look at our own serpent of bronze if we want to embrace healing and live. The very trauma we suffer and want to escape from is the very trauma we need to look at.3
This would have been an extremely traumatic experience for the nation of Israel, and it would have been understandable if they had attempted everything in their power to put distance between themselves and this distressing memory. It must have been tempting to forget it happened, to bury it, or at least to try to minimize it. And if they couldn’t outright forget it, it would have been tempting to at least revise the history to make it more palatable. But God refused to give them the option of national denial. Instead God insisted that they look directly at the trauma if they wanted to embrace healing and life.
Why does God ask traumatized people to look at the trauma they initiated through their sin and rebellion? For the same reason God asks us to: it is the truth, and we are free only when we lift up the truth.
This is why denial is such a dangerous coping mechanism. While it may lull us into a feeling of temporary comfort, it means living in a lie. I want to be cautious about overstating this, but it would seem that the words of Jesus suggest the possibility that denial (or any other form of lying) is not only dangerous but also demonic. One of Jesus’ most terrifying statements came in response to a group of Pharisees who refused to acknowledge truth: “Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:43-44).
Jesus said that the native language of the devil is lies, and he graphically warned against any alignment with the one who not only lies but whose very identity is rooted in those lies. While denial often presents itself as a lesser version of lying, we must be vigilant to avoid being deceived about its treacherous nature.
If the native language of the evil one is lies, we can safely say the native language of God is truth. Upon our conversion, the Spirit of God immediately begins to guide us into all truth (John 16:13). This truth is what connects us to the very person of Jesus (John 14:6) and what ultimately leads to deliverance and healing. In the same passage where Jesus condemns the deceitful nature of the evil one, he triumphantly holds up the power of truth: “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).
There are powerful examples of nations that have followed this path in recent memory, and we would do well to learn from their example. In Germany, for example, the shadow of the Holocaust looms large, and it must have been tempting for Germans to fall into the trap of denial. But instead of revising the historical narrative, they have consistently and courageously lifted up the truth. If you visit Berlin, you will see many monuments marking the places where Jewish families were abducted from their homes and transported to concentration camps. Germany is searching for healing not by running from the truth but by lifting it up.
South Africa knew the only way to pursue healing after apartheid was to acknowledge that history honestly, and in 1996 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was formed. In 1999, Rwanda formed the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission to address the genocide their country had experienced. Canada launched a similar commission in 2008 in an effort to comprehensively acknowledge and address charges of abuse to First Nations children at residential schools. All of these serve as models for beginning to chart a national course for lifting up the truth.
When addressing the reality of white trauma, Mark Charles regularly quotes Georges Erasmus, an Aboriginal advocate, political leader, and well-respected spokesperson for indigenous peoples in Canada. Erasmus says, “Where common memory is lacking, where people do not share in the same past, there can be no real community. Where community is to be formed, common memory must be created.”
As Charles points out, this quote gets to the heart of both nations’ problems with race: our citizens do not share a common memory. People of white European ancestry remember a history of discovery, open lands, manifest destiny, endless opportunity, and American exceptionalism. Yet communities of color, especially those with African and indigenous roots, remember a history of stolen lands, broken treaties, slavery, boarding schools, segregation, cultural genocide, internment camps, and mass incarceration.4
This is the choice that lies before us both as a nation and as individuals: Will we continue to live in denial and allow our home to be built on the weak foundation of myths and half-truths? Or will we have the courage to live up to the truth and allow God’s holy fire to burn down the old and erect a new home that can hold us all?
These are the salient questions of the denial stage. With an encounter comes the beginning of an awakening, but awakening always requires that we choose a path. Denial or truth? Sand or rock? Fear or courage?
Let us boldly choose to follow the One who is Truth.