Confessions: A Reflection – Harriet Sider Bicksler

For eight months in 2021 and early 2022, I participated in a Be the Bridge (to racial unity) discussion group organized by my congregation’s Peace and Social Justice Commission. Be the Bridge is grounded in the belief that racial reconciliation is a reflection of the Bible’s call to all Christians to be involved in the ministry of reconciliation in Christ. Joining this group seemed like a natural next step in my personal journey toward greater racial awareness and action that likely began when I was a child in colonial Africa. The vision of John in Revelation 7:9 challenges me: “I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.” If that’s what heaven will be like, what am I doing now to make that vision a reality?

Besides me, there were five other white people and four African Americans who regularly attended the Be the Bridge group. After the group concluded, I debriefed with the leader, an African American woman. She described an incident in one meeting where I had been talking about my childhood as a missionary kid, in particular my affection for an African nanny I had as a toddler. She reported that I said my father had talked to the nanny in a demeaning way, and she asked how that affected me. She said I replied that it didn’t affect me at all. I was stunned because I don’t think I would have described my father that way and I can’t imagine I said that anything in my missionary kid experience didn’t affect me. I have spent most of my adult life trying to figure out how having been raised in what was functionally an apartheid system has influenced my attitudes toward race. Clearly, I had miscommunicated badly.

To back up a bit: I am a seventy-something white woman who grew up in the church. I believe that God calls us to be on the side of people who are poor, oppressed, or marginalized, to make peace, and to be agents of reconciliation. I have been speaking out and writing about the biblical imperative to make peace and do justice for most of my adult life. These days, I am slowing down and trying to cut down on responsibilities; I’m retired from paid employment. I’m also an introvert, so I usually prefer to be in the background. My mind is still active, however, and I pay attention to what’s happening in the world and reflect on how to respond.

Lately, I’ve been reflecting a lot on race in America. As anyone who keeps up with current events knows, there are racial and ethnic tensions in many places including here in the United States. Debates over immigration, policing, voting rights, what gets taught in schools, affirmative action, whether a president was actually born in the US—all these have race at the core, whether or not we’re willing to admit it. I think back over my life and what has brought me to this point where one of my core Christian (and human) commitments is to be as anti-racist as I can. That story has to start with my childhood and the larger question implied by our group leader: How did growing up as a missionary kid in colonial Africa affect my subsequent attitudes toward race in America?

I lived in the former British colonies of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) from my birth in 1948 until my parents left missionary service and returned to settle into American life at the end of 1961. While my parents and their missionary colleagues believed in the humanity of black Africans enough to think them worthy of the gospel and treat them respectfully, the overarching colonial mentality was clearly present. Missionaries and their families lived in separate quarters on the mission compounds and hired blacks as house servants. Missionary kids went to all-white British-style boarding schools where blacks did the menial work (cleaning, yard work, etc.). I often heard remarks from missionaries that weren’t meant unkindly but were nonetheless condescending and patronizing. I think it would have been extremely difficult for me to have survived my childhood without absorbing a sense of my innate privilege (and frankly, superiority) as a white person and some implicit if not explicit bias against black people.

I have no memory of ever questioning why we lived separately, why we went to white schools, why blacks were not allowed to swim in the city pool, why blacks and whites had separate bathrooms. It never occurred to me that there was anything wrong with any of that. It simply was the way it was. My parents dearly loved the African people and would have called many of them friends. My father once helped a young girl with very poor eyesight get medical care; the girl grew up to be a teacher and an influential church member. Decades later, when she visited the US, I took her to my parents’ gravesite, where she poured out her prayer of thanks for the missionaries who traveled to her country to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. Yet the reality is that she was black and my parents were white and their lives were very separate. She and her compatriots did not enjoy the same privileges we did, and I never questioned any of it. Why?

We settled in the US in the early 1960s, a turbulent time. We lived in a very small white town, in a mostly white county. I went to an all-white church (except for the occasional black person from Africa), an almost all-white high school, and then to our denominational college which was also almost all white. In those days I had very little if any interaction with African Americans, but my dad was a news junkie. Time magazine arrived each week; we listened to the news every day. Consequently, I was at least somewhat aware of big things that were going on—like the Civil Rights Movement.

In 1964, as a senior in high school, I wrote a short story for an English assignment about a black family unable to find decent housing. It’s clear that I knew and cared about what was happening to African Americans and thought it was unjust. I feel some pride that at age 16, I chose to tackle such a difficult subject, but why in the world did I write the story from the black family’s point of view rather than use my own white narrative voice to speak out against the injustice? Without any personal knowledge of what blacks thought about the civil rights protests, why did I use the story to parrot the white party line against protests that sometimes turned violent? Why did I argue in the voice of the black mother in the story that such protests hurt “the cause,” when in fact protests were one factor in turning the tide towards passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 later that summer?

I was writing from the safety of my white enclave where such injustice was not visible, and I wouldn’t have known what to do even if it were visible. So while I am impressed that I was aware enough of racial discrimination, specifically in housing, to write the story, I believe my white privilege sanctioned the way I told the story.

Fast forward to 1975 when as a young married couple with a toddler daughter, my husband and I bought and moved into our first house in the city of Harrisburg. The move was a practical one, not motivated at all by the racial diversity of the city. We were looking for a house we could afford, and this one was available at the right price from someone we knew. Before we moved, and for a while , people concerned for our safety would ask, “What are you going to do about the schools?” I now think these concerns and questions were likely code for “aren’t you afraid of all the black people?” although no one would have said that out loud.

A Greek family lived in the other half of our house. A large Muslim Indian family, refugees from Idi Amin’s Uganda, lived directly across the street. A Puerto Rican family lived a few houses up on our side of the street, and there were several black families as well. It was a multi-racial and multi-cultural community, and we liked the diversity. Our young daughter very soon became friends with the neighbor children near her age. We enjoyed delicious Greek food courtesy of our neighbor.

Our second child, a son, was born three years after we moved. We did not experience any racial tension until the kids got older. Our daughter dated only black and Latino boys in middle school and high school. One time she went to a party at the home of a black boy she liked, but soon called us and asked us to pick her up. The boy’s mother told her she was not welcome; apparently, she did not approve of her son dating a white girl. That hurt. Later, our daughter had a steady black boyfriend for two years. It seemed to be getting serious and we liked him, but at the same time, his difficult family situation caused their relationship to become more and more dysfunctional and co-dependent. I frequently had conversations with myself about whether I objected to the relationship because he was black or because I didn’t think he was right for her. I think it was the latter, but I can’t deny that implicit bias may have had something to do with how I felt.

Our daughter played in the high school marching band known locally for its high-stepping funky marching style. I was a member of the band boosters club and helped to plan for and operate a concession stand at home football games. An article in the local newspaper included some observations about the band’s style that the black members of the band boosters found offensive (and racist, I think), and they asked me to write a letter to the editor on behalf of the band boosters. I thought about it for several days, then declined telling them I didn’t know what I would say. I have always regretted that decision. On the one hand, I probably didn’t know what to say because I didn’t understand fully what was so offensive about the article and so could not have represented them well; on the other hand, I could have asked them to help me understand and I could have put aside my white privilege and discomfort to be their ally.

While our daughter generally thrived in her city school environment, graduated from high school with honors, and headed into college and adult life with a strong commitment to racial justice. our son struggled. He did well in elementary school, but then in middle school, things began to fall apart. He was bullied on the middle school bus. Our house was burglarized with mostly his things stolen (he was sure one of his black friends did it but we never found out). When he went to the mall, black boys from his school would taunt him and tell him to stay away from “their” black girls. He confessed years later that he carried a knife in his backpack while walking home from elementary school because he was scared of being attacked. And, he was not doing well academically, apparently feeling that it wasn’t cool in his class to be a good student.

Consequently, in the middle of his year, we sold our city house and moved to an almost all-white suburban neighborhood. While the move did not resolve all his issues, he no longer feared for his safety. To what extent the safety concerns had to do with race, I don’t know, but it certainly seemed like it was a factor. I worked hard during those years to separate my feelings about specific things that happened to our son any tendency generalizations about all black people.

During this time of raising our kids, I was also continuing to work out my calling as a Christian to make peace and do justice through the church and in my career. It seemed like a natural extension of that calling to accept an invitation to join the board of Mennonite Central Committee U.S. (MCC US). In the mid-1990s, MCC US embarked on an intentional effort to “broaden the vision” to include more people of color on the board and staff and to address structural racism in the organization. For the first time in my journey on race, I participated in training events on dismantling racism. While I was chair of the board, I helped to manage a organizational conflict when an administrator was accused of racist behavior, and I participated in many painful conversations about issues related to race. I remember that I thought the language of “anti-racism” to describe part of the mission of MCC US was too negative. The “anti” part bothered me—why not state it more positively? I failed to understand that “anti-racism” is a powerfully positive and direct term, leaving no doubt about the intention. I also started hearing first-person stories from black colleagues on the board and staff about how they experienced the world in general and MCC US in particular.

In my professional life, I began work in 1992 as an editor and writer for the Pennsylvania Office of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services (OMHSAS), specifically in the children’s mental health division. Instead of the language of “anti-racism,” the mental health system used the term “cultural competence.” The work of undoing racism was described as being on a continuum, beginning with cultural destructiveness and continuing to cultural incapacity, cultural denial/blindness/indifference, cultural pre-competence, cultural competence, and finally cultural proficiency. I found this continuum helpful because it recognizes that becoming culturally competent is a journey and everyone is at a different point. I participated in multiple cultural competence trainings and again engaged in many conversations about race with black colleagues. I had never heard of “driving while black” until one black male colleague explained why he wouldn’t want to venture into my white neighborhood.

At MCC US and OMHSAS, I finally began to understand that racism isn’t just about personal attitudes and actions. It is more than personally repenting of racist attitudes and behaviors, asking for forgiveness, and committing to the work of reconciliation and reconciliation. Racism is embedded in systems of laws, policies, unspoken assumptions, and implicit biases. I learned about white privilege and began to recognize my complicity, unwitting as it was. Peggy McIntosh’s seminal essay, opened my eyes to the fact that not wanting to be racist or not intending to be racist, or even being deliberate about acting in non-racist ways, was not enough. There is an underlying system of white privilege and white supremacy, often enforced by public policy, that requires deliberate action to undo. Whites, including Christian whites, far too often
deny that systemic racism even exists, let alone try to do anything to undo it.

I’ve been off the MCC US board for fourteen years and retired from OMHSAS for seven years. What I learned during those years continues to shape my thinking, along with my personal journey. My congregation’s Peace and Social Justice Commission, on which I have served for decades, has sponsored two month-long sermon series and Sunday school classes on racial justice, first in 2017 and then again in 2021, added numerous books about racial justice to our church library, and sent people on an annual Civil Rights Bus Tour. We are one of twelve local congregational recipients of a grant from Messiah University to “determine ways individual congregations can come to be characterized by racial justice.” One of our commission’s continuing priorities is racial justice, trying to figure out what exactly that means for a congregation geographically located in a majority white community.

brings me back to my Be the Bridge discussion group. I joined the group determined to listen and learn; to stifle my natural tendency to become defensive when confronted with ideas that feel threatening to my sense of self; to not assume that just because I have been thinking about race for many years, I already know most of what there is to know; to learn more about what I can do personally and corporately to dismantle racism. I wanted to understand more, to be able to engage in difficult conversations, to gain new skills in confronting racism when I see it happening in the grocery store, on my block, or in my church. Those goals were partially met, but I also learned how much I still don’t know. Our during the course into the nature of “whiteness” taught me about what I take for granted as a white person, in contrast to my black friends who describe with tears how they are aware every single time they step out of their homes that they are black and must negotiate the world with that in mind. That increased awareness has had a profound impact on me.

For the Be the Bridge homework assignment during the lesson on confession, I wrote this:

I confess not knowing, and not knowing that I didn’t or don’t know.
I confess not knowing, and not knowing what I didn’t or still don’t know.
I confess that even when I know, I often don’t act.
I confess not knowing what to say or do, so I don’t say or do anything.
I confess that I know a lot, but I still don’t say or do enough.
I confess not knowing that even when I may have done or said something, it may have been the wrong thing.
Forgive me, Lord, and help me to do better.

This is a confession I need to make every day as I try to determine what it means to do better and act on what I know about race at this point in my life What does it mean to follow the Jesus who broke down racial and ethnic barriers? How do I hold fast to my confession of faith and spur others to love and good deeds (see Hebrews 10:23). How can I continue to be faithful to God’s call to be a peacemaker and pursue racial justice?