The racial unrest in our Country over the past weeks has prompted me to reexamine my roots to determine why growing up in an totally white community did not result in attitudes that often develop there. Instead, I’ve always had a special affinity for people with dark skin and have never understood prejudice and discrimination.
Recently when I posted my blog, “Colorblindness is Hereditary,” one of my cousins suggested that perhaps the reason for our lack of prejudice was the Fresh Air program in which our parents participated when we were children. I was so young that I’m not sure if I remember Johnny and Tony staying with us or if I just remember pictures of them. My older brother, Ron, says that in addition to the boys making visits with us during the summer, he and my oldest sister, Lucy, and my dad visited Johnny and Tony’s family in New York City, and at least their dad, and perhaps others in the family, came to visit us in Maryland.
Ron says there was some talk of us adopting the boys but that never took place—he thinks because of some issues in New York. However, my Uncle Milt and Aunt Bertha did adopt their Fresh Air girls, Jenny and Carmen, and we played together as children. So perhaps, at some level, these experiences with dark-skinned Fresh Air children affected me. But whatever the reason, I’ve always loved people with dark skin and felt fiercely protective of them.
In the mid-eighties, my sister and her husband adopted two beautiful bi-racial children who were welcomed into the Beiler family with open arms. The idea that anyone would object to these adoptions never entered my mind until I read later of people whose families rejected them when they adopted black children. I was and still am mystified by this attitude.
When we began doing foster care in 1991, I longed to have an African American foster child. Several years later, President Bill Clinton signed into law a bill that made this possible and six-year-old Sheerah* lived with us for almost three years. Once again, her reception into Donn’s family and mine was warm and loving. Later, we worked with an organization and did respite care and one longer term of care with many African American teenagers.
Around the same time as we began doing foster care, I met an African American lady who was to become one of my dearest friends. I loved her from the day we met. She had suffered much rejection and her life had been extremely difficult. I prayed her through many difficult days, some of which were due to racism in a church she attended, and had the privilege of telling her story in Guideposts. Years later, I realized she had never really believed I loved her until that day because of all the rejection she’d suffered.
Maybe one of the most difficult issues for me in our Nation’s current racial climate is that suddenly, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, I’ve been accused of being a racist. Why? Because I’m not a member of the correct political party, I’m not in favor of defunding the police, and I don’t support an organization with Marxist foundations whose leader says if this Country doesn’t give them what they want, they will burn it down.
I now may be looked on with jaded eye because I don’t believe looting, rioting and pulling down statues are acceptable ways of protesting, and I don’t believe people living now should be held responsible for things that were done four hundred years ago, while violent protestors aren’t being held responsible for what they’re doing today. I’ve concluded that if we are going to condemn unjust treatment of minorities by police officers (and we should), we must also condemn unjust treatment of police officers and property owners by violent protestors.
As I’ve pondered all this and reexamined my life, I’ve concluded that being a racist is being redefined in ways that are totally without foundation in the present culture. Friends, we must not abandon all wisdom and common sense in our passionate attempt not to appear “politically incorrect” or not to be misunderstood. We must not judge and make assumptions about people based on wide, sweeping generalizations based on current trends. If our Country is to survive, we must be aware of the factions at work to inflame “brother against brother” in order to further their own agenda.
Above all, we must STOP believing that disagreeing with someone means we don’t love and respect them. How will our Country come through the present crisis unless the “silent majority,” those who still think rationally, open their mouths and express sane and rational observations? Who knows but what God has chosen you to be one of His mouthpieces “for such a time as this.” (Esther 4:14)
Father, thank you for blessing the United States of America so abundantly, in spite of the many ways we have offended you. Forgive us for keeping quiet instead of speaking the truth in love. May we be more afraid of offending you than offending those who seek to intimidate us and do harm to the nation we love. Amen.
