5

Where Healing Begins

Confession

I remember the day well. I was a little girl sailing high on my swing, higher than the other boys and girls around me, showing off. I loved to swing (and I loved to show off), but I got a little too big for my britches, and on my way back, I slipped out of the blue plastic seat. I came down hard and scraped my face on the gravel under that swing set. I’m sure I cried, though I don’t remember the tears. I’m sure I was embarrassed about falling in front of everyone, though I don’t recall saying as much to my mother or father. Still, that tumble is burned into my memory for one particular reason: it resulted in my first experience of colorism.

My mother was cleaning me up, washing my face with as much care as she could. She pulled a bandage from the box, peeled the wrapper off it, and, just before she pulled the backing off the adhesive, reached up and traced a line on my face with her finger. That’s when she said the words that shadowed me for years: “What if your face were this color?”

The question came out almost as an afterthought. No malice in it. No cruelty. But she said it as if having a different-colored face—a pinker, lighter face—might be possible. She said it as if it were a thing too good to be true.

In that moment, I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant, but later that night I pulled back the bandage and stared in the mirror at the fresh pink patch of raw skin, a scuff on my otherwise very dark complexion. My mother’s words came back to me.

What if your face were this color?

And I wondered it too. What if my face weren’t the color of dark chocolate but instead the light pink of all the White people I knew? Or if not light pink, what about a few shades lighter? I reached up and touched the edges of that cut, much the same way my mother had touched it, and I liked it, because even though it hurt, I thought it was pretty.

Every time I picked away the scab, there it was: a patch lighter than my real, very dark skin. But as my skin healed, as the scar tissue vanished, the pink faded, became a shade darker. Another day passed, and it was darker still. A few weeks after my fall, my entire face was dark skinned again. And still, I couldn’t shake the words.

What if my skin were lighter?

The question followed me through my childhood, mostly because other African Americans pointed out just how dark my skin was. My cousins often made fun of me, called me Blacky. I got good at laughing it off, but their name-calling stung more than when I scuffed my face on the pavement. And later, after my parents separated and eventually divorced, my mom would sometimes call my dad “Gene, Gene, the black jelly bean” as a way of deriding him. Each time she said it (which was quite often), I looked at my own skin and noticed how it was the same shade as my father’s. I internalized her comments, and as I did, I came to believe she was making fun of me too.

Does she believe I’m a black jelly bean?

Does she believe my skin is too dark, that I don’t look pretty?

Does she believe my darker skin is less desirable?

Why doesn’t she accept me the way I am?

I couldn’t laugh off my mother’s comments. Over time they drove a wedge between us.

As I got older, my grandmother on my father’s side (who wasn’t as dark skinned as I was) reinforced the message that light skin was better. She bought me a bleaching face cream designed for lightening darker splotches of skin, but she didn’t want me to use it on spots. She hoped I’d use it on my whole face. And even though it didn’t have a strong bleach component, I knew why she was giving it to me: she hoped that cream would make my skin lighter. Because it was my grandmother, because I loved her, I used that cream all through college, believing it made my skin a shade lighter. Believing it made me more beautiful.

I wasn’t the only one who received this message. Whenever children were born into the family, we’d look at the cuticles on their fingers. We’d look at the tips of their ears. We’d do our best to look into the future, to see how dark their skin was going to be. When we saw signs pointing to lighter skin, we felt a kind of relief. After all, with lighter skin, wouldn’t they have fewer issues fitting in? If their skin was darker, though, there was lament.

This colorist belief wasn’t unique to my family. It flowed through society at large. It reared its ugly head everywhere, even in the makeup aisle. Well into college, I found it difficult to purchase cosmetics that worked with my darker skin. One day on a trip to the mall, I found shades of foundation that matched my complexion. At first I was surprised. Then delighted. Then I grew emotional. Over makeup. How did such a little thing hold the power to make me feel as though I fit into this country, this culture?

Then I moved to Austin.

Running low on IMAN foundation, I breezed into an Ulta store. I searched the aisles but couldn’t find the color to match my skin. I searched and searched, becoming angrier and more embarrassed as I considered what I might say if someone asked whether they could help me. (I knew they couldn’t.) I left the store, my mother’s comment playing in my head.

What if your face were this color?

How could such a little thing—no makeup for my skin color—make me feel as if I didn’t exist, as if dark people didn’t exist? How could it make me feel so invisible and unwanted?

I’ve come to learn that no one in my family meant to hurt those of us with darker skin. I know my mother loves me dearly, and we’ve long since mended fences. So many of my older family members grew up in a world of colorism, in a world where darker-skinned women couldn’t find beauty products and didn’t have prominent positions in media and weren’t celebrated as princesses. They grew up in a culture in which having lighter skin might bring certain advantages, and they simply played out those implicit biases. And though it seems crazy to me now, we never called out or confessed these colorist beliefs.

The Black community has its own sort of embedded racism, rooted in society’s unconscious bias toward lighter skin. For years we applied this standard against our own people. But where did that bias come from?

Born from white supremacy, colorism among African Americans grew from the belief that whoever had features closer to those of the White slaveholders (often the biracial children of raped slaves) was more valuable, was more beautiful, and as a result would be treated better. This belief has caused deep divisions within our community as lighter-skinned African Americans treated with contempt those with darker skin. This devaluing of our brothers and sisters has perpetuated a kind of self-hate within the youth who have dark skin like mine.

Thankfully, I’ve seen a shift beginning to take place within our community when it comes to colorism, much of it in the past ten years. We’re moving to a healthier place, in which each member of the Black community is accepted no matter how light or dark his or her skin. In part, this might be because darker-skinned women have risen to positions of prominence. Michelle Obama took her place as the first lady and was celebrated for her assertiveness and intelligence. Actress Lupita Nyong’o won an Oscar, and Lancôme made her a spokesperson for its cosmetics line. These and other dark-skinned women have moved the needle on colorism. (My Latinx and Asian friends have shared about the historical cultural pressure in their own communities to lighten their skin. This pressure remains strong, but it’s my hope that the shift I’m seeing in the African American community will take place in their communities too.)

When darker African Americans see themselves represented, it helps diminish the stereotypes. When I think of Mrs. Obama in the White House or Lupita winning an Oscar, when I see either of them gracing magazine covers and doing it all with their dark skin, it gives me a boost. And if it boosts my self-confidence, think of what it must do for a teenager.

I get a lot of compliments on my skin color now, and it always reminds me of my own history, how there were times I wished my skin were lighter. It reminds me of the ways I celebrated lighter-skinned family members or friends as beautiful or the ways I laughed off comments about being “dark chocolate.” It reminds me that for years I, too, engaged in colorism. And what is colorism if not a form of white supremacy?

This is my confession.

The Healing Power of Confession

Confession requires awareness of our sin, acknowledgment of it, and the desire to move past the shame and guilt, but those aren’t the only conditions for confession. Confession also requires great humility and deep vulnerability. While this might feel risky, consider the risk of not confessing our sins.

In the book of Proverbs, Solomon, the Old Testament’s wisest man, highlights the link between confession and receiving God’s forgiveness, writing, “People who conceal their sins will not prosper, but if they confess and turn from them, they will receive mercy.”¹ Solomon knew the truth. Concealing our sins robs us of true prosperity, which is not found in fattened bank accounts or an increase in our national gross domestic product. Concealing our sins robs us of the riches of God’s merciful forgiveness.

Throughout Scripture, confession and mercy are linked. In the first letter of John, the disciple of Christ reminds us that confession puts us in alignment with God’s forgiveness. He wrote, “If we confess our sins, [God] is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”² According to John, then, failure to confess undercuts our reconciliation with the Father and keeps us locked in unrighteous patterns, such as racism, bigotry, and colorism.

James, brother of Jesus, adds his own words on confession: “Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results.”³ James seems to imply that only through confessing our sins against each other to each other can we find true healing, true reconciliation.

The sin of racism—as well as my sin of colorism—disrupts God’s order of justice and righteousness. It denies the image of God in our brothers and sisters. And though we must name our individual sin, we must also confess our corporate sin. Just as Ezra and Daniel felt the weight of guilt and shame and confessed it to the Father, seeking his healing, we should too.

As people of color, it’s easy to point to the injustices perpetrated against us. We can bring attention to atrocities such as slavery, the unjustified taking of native lands, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. We can point to current systems of oppression too, to police brutality and inequity in systems of education in predominantly non-White communities. And it can be tempting to bypass our own personal confession as we wait for confession from others. But that’s not the way of bridge builders. Bridge builders don’t refuse confession just because the wrong done to them feels greater than the wrong they’ve done. For instance, to experience reconciliation with God and others, I confess how I’ve allowed the sin system of white supremacy to have a foothold in my life, how I’ve hated the darkness of my own skin and rejected the image of God in which I’ve been created.

Confession of our entanglement in racism and systemic privilege is essential for complete healing and restoration. And none of us is off the hook. Not White southern evangelicals. Not White northern progressives. Not the African American community either. And if I haven’t made my point through my personal story, allow me to offer two historical examples that show both White and Black America’s complicity in colorism.

Plessy and the White Application of Colorism

Colorism has a long and sad history, not just in my life but also in the United States as a whole. It played a key role in the case of Homer Plessy. A mixed-race man, only one-eighth Black, Plessy bought a first-class ticket in the Whites-only section of a passenger train in New Orleans. Aware of Plessy’s lineage, the train operator allowed him to board the train but then made a spectacle of him, asking him to move. He refused, was arrested, and ultimately challenged the arrest in open court.

Though Plessy appeared to be White, Louisiana applied the one-drop rule: anyone with at least one drop of non-White blood was automatically classified as “colored” under the law. Plessy argued that applying the law to exclude him from a train car violated the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed equal protection (and treatment) under the law. The Supreme Court did not agree. In 1896, it upheld Louisiana’s separate-car law, allowing for segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine, a devastating loss for African Americans and a reinforcement of the white supremacy that already had claimed such a stronghold in the South. It turns out it’s one thing to have a Constitution and another thing entirely to make sure its guarantee of equal protection is applied justly for all image bearers.

But it isn’t just the White majority culture that has applied color tests in racist ways. In fact, the earliest days of the civil rights movement were marked by colorist sentiment in the Black community.

Garvey, Du Bois, and the Black Application of Colorism

Colorism in the United States was long promoted by the White community as a way to divide and conquer African Americans. In 1787, Samuel Stanhope Smith, theologian and future president of the College of New Jersey (now known as Princeton University), claimed that domestic servants had advanced above the field slaves by “acquiring the agreeable and regular features” of “civilized society”⁴—meaning they had lighter skin, straighter hair, and slimmer noses and lips. (Smith failed to mention that many of these lighter-skinned slaves had received their features from the slave-owner fathers who had raped their mothers.) That train of thought continued unchanged well into the twentieth century. In 1917, sociologist Edward Byron Reuter published “The Superiority of the Mulatto,” in which he argued that any advancement within the Black community—any significant achievements in literature, medicine, business, and other areas—had been accomplished solely by biracial, light-skinned people. He argued that the original Africans swept away from their own continent by slave ships were in fact lesser humans than White people and that only by intermarrying with Whites had dark-skinned people improved their own genetics.⁵

This twisted ideology was used to give lighter-skinned Black people a leg up in society while holding down those with darker skin. Throughout the early 1900s, churches, fraternities, sororities, and other organizations used what has come to be known as the brown-paper-bag test to keep in check the upward mobility of people of color, especially Black people. If a Black person’s skin was the same shade or darker than a paper bag, he would not be permitted in certain communities, organizations, and churches. If his skin was lighter than a paper bag, he might get a pass. This practice wasn’t just confined to White communities. Within the Black community, Mulattoes—those who were biracial—were promoted, given more opportunities, and held up as role models, while their darker-skinned neighbors were disregarded. So the Black community wasn’t simply fighting against the ideology of white supremacy; it was fighting against itself.

Marcus Garvey recognized the problem of colorism from the minute he set foot on American soil. A Jamaican-born Black man who visited America in the hopes of raising money for a school in his homeland, Garvey made his way to the NAACP office, intending to connect with and enlist the help of W. E. B. Du Bois. What he found when he entered the NAACP office was alarming: colorism at its worst, aimed primarily at those working there. Remarking on the lighter-skinned (but decidedly Black) staff, he stated that he was “unable to tell whether he was in a [W]hite office or that of the NAACP.”⁶ Garvey noted that those with features more akin to White people had better jobs within the organization. On the other hand, African Americans with darker skin were confined to menial jobs or tasks that weren’t as public in nature. Garvey viewed this as evidence that racist ideology had reached all the way into the very organization that was supposed to be advancing opportunities for all people of color.

Garvey condemned those who promoted and benefited from this inequitable system, including W. E. B. Du Bois and those who worked with Du Bois at the NAACP. Believing that the system fed into white-supremacist ideals, Garvey viewed the lighter-skinned Blacks with disdain, a fact that wasn’t lost on Du Bois. In fact, Du Bois criticized Garvey, calling him “a little, fat black man; ugly, but with intelligent eyes and a big head.” Garvey shot back, calling Du Bois “a little Dutch, a little French, a little Negro…a mulatto…a monstrosity.”⁷

The feud between these two revealed the deep impact of white supremacy on people of color. It showed how systems of privilege based on color can become systems of oppression. It showed how easily the sin of the oppressor can trickle down and become the sin of the oppressed.

Martin Luther King Jr. said it best: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”⁸ The colorism perpetuated within the Black community is unquestionably such an injustice. Aligning ourselves with racist ideologies—ideologies that came from oppressors—only perpetuates more racism, more oppression. And ultimately, capitulating to this form of injustice will lead to more explicit forms of sin.

Garvey’s own colorism, his disdain for the lighter-skinned African Americans, led him down an ugly path. Holding darkness as the standard of blackness, he joined racist eugenicists who advocated for racial purity. He opposed interracial reproduction. He met with the KKK, some believe with the intent to solidify racial divisions in America and to expedite the exodus of Blacks to mother Africa. Because he couldn’t confess the truth of his sin, because he couldn’t move into reconciliation with God and his fellow man, Garvey became what he disliked in others: someone who used skin color as a measure of worth. That is the power of the unconfessed sin of white supremacy, racism, and resulting colorism: it leads to death, sometimes physical, sometimes metaphorical.

The answer to white supremacy isn’t black supremacy. The answer to colorism within the majority systems is not corresponding colorism among non-White groups. Any supremacy, any colorism, should be acknowledged and confessed if we’re to find hope of healing. In fact, all forms of racism and bigotry—using racist slang, laughing at racist jokes, entertaining the privileges of color—must be confessed before we can move together toward lasting reconciliation.

The Confession of Bridge Builders

Among the most difficult aspects of bridge building is practicing confession. In the context of racial reconciliation, confession requires owning our part in racism and racist structures, the ways we’ve benefited from systems of oppression. But it also requires each of us to admit our own private racist or colorist beliefs, beliefs we know aren’t right and that we may not want others to know about. Confessing those privately held beliefs presents a roadblock for many. But confession can be so freeing. I know. I’ve watched members of our Be the Bridge groups do it time and time again. It bears repeating: confession isn’t just for those in the majority culture who’ve benefited from or perpetrated discrimination; it’s for people of color too.

Adora Curry, one of our Be the Bridge leaders, described her experience with confession in a Be the Bridge group:

Growing up in a predominantly White environment where Black boys openly told Black girls we were ugly because of our hair or complexion, I didn’t realize the deep resentment I developed for interracial relationships. After six years together, my now ex-husband discovered his preference for White women, which he later admitted he’d suppressed until he was thirty-five. He cheated on me with a White woman. While he regrets hurting me and our kids, once we were divorced, he felt more liberated to date White women because his preference had finally been revealed to his family and friends.

I still wrestle with the pain of his decision, but I also lead a single mothers’ ministry, where I see women of all backgrounds, ages, shapes, sizes, and ethnicities. It has been very humbling to discover my inner hypocrite—how I often judge those with traditionally White features. I can’t call others out for their discriminatory and oppressive actions if my thoughts about White women and interracial relationships are just as discriminatory.

As a result of her history, as a result of her ex-husband’s actions, Adora had developed racial preferences, which led her to discriminate against White women, even if only in her heart. Confessing this took great vulnerability.

In another Be the Bridge group, a White woman confessed that when she saw affluent African American women, she found herself filled with jealousy and envy. She hadn’t realized just how she’d been wired to believe that the success of African Americans took something away from her or had somehow come at her expense. She didn’t realize just how deeply her subconscious thoughts were rooted in white supremacy. It wasn’t until she understood the history of how the farms and property of African Americans and Native Americans had been stolen or burned because of someone else’s jealousy that she realized that her own feelings were just a continuation of that system of racism. As she confessed her hidden racism, she mentioned she’d never seen African Americans as deserving success. As hard as it was, she came clean and in doing so found the freedom to move into real racial reconciliation and restoration.

Have you ever looked down on others because of their ethnicity, their race? Have you ever thought less of them because of the way they looked? Have you ever played zero-sum games as it relates to those of other ethnicities, believing their opportunities came at the cost of yours? Have you ever been afraid of someone just because of the color of his or her skin? If you have, whether you’re White, Black, or Brown, you have confession work to do. And if you don’t do this work of confession, you’ll shortchange your healing and the healing of others. You’ll undercut the work of racial reconciliation.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION

1. In Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, he wrote, “He who is alone with his sin is utterly alone…. But it is the grace of the Gospel, which is so hard for the pious to understand, that it confronts us with the truth and says: You are a sinner, a great, desperate sinner; now come, as the sinner that you are, to God who loves you.”⁹ What does he mean about being utterly alone? And what changes when we embrace the grace of the gospel?

2. James 5:16 says, “Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.” Why is it important for us to confess our sins to one another? How does this differ from confessing our sins to God?

3. Name some historical examples of confession leading to repentance. What about times in your own life?

4. One of the major fears about confession is wondering what others will think of us. What do you fear your confessions will lead others to conclude about you? How do you think others might respond to seeing the real you?

5. How is confession an application of the gospel? What scriptures support this belief?

6. If confession isn’t optional in our faith, why has the church found it difficult to confess its racist past in many cases? How could the church lead the culture and set the example in what confession as a step toward reconciliation can look like?

7. List specific historical injustices the US and other countries need to confess.

8. Describe a personal experience you’ve had with racism or colorism. How does that experience, or retelling it, highlight for you the value of confession?

A Prayer of Confession

God, I have been blind to the plight of my fellow image bearers. I have been deaf to their cries for justice and for mercy. I have been mute when there was no one to speak for them.

Lord God, unbind my mouth.

Place your healing over my eyes that I might see, and unblock my ears that I might hear.

I lay my sins at your feet that you might cleanse me, heal me, and send me to do your holy work of reconciliation with my brothers and sisters.

—CORREGAN BROWN