Episode 03: Racism & the modern day church

Did my title make you uncomfortable? Maybe even mildly enraged? Maybe it helped you make sense of some of your own experiences? It has taken me years to allow myself to say it out loud. You can’t imagine my relief when this all dawned on me. Sadly, this is the truth of my reality. Lean in and let me tell you a story.

I am a black woman. I live in Ontario. I have 5 sons. When people see me with my boys they jokingly remark,”oh boy, you certainly have your hands full!” I am quick to respond, “nahhh, I have my heart full.” You have to meet them to know them, but to meet them is to love them. I tell no lie. Well, there is the obvious mothers bias but still, I tell no lie.

Through homeschooling and general everyday life doing, My partner and I have had the distinct pleasure of being intimately involved in their lives and we often marvel at their joy, interests, and incredible perceptive on life. For the most part we have managed to curate a charmed existence for them to revel in. But they are black boys growing up in a North American city. So, You do the Math.

I grew up in West Africa. I left my home at 16 and came to Canada to study Microbiolgy at McGill university. I often say, I didn’t know I was black until I came to Canada. Truly. My identify was wrapped up in the countries of my birth and my childhood and there, blackness wasn’t a thing. I identified as West African. And if you pushed me I would say, I was born in Lagos, grew up in Togo, and my mother is Ghanaian and Father Sierra-Leonian. See, I am west African!

I remember when I discovered that I was indeed black. I was a week or so into my time in Montreal. My program was at the Macdonald campus at McGill in Ste Anne de Bellevue and it’s is pretty far from all the action and fun I imagined was to be had in Downtown Montreal. one day I decided to leave St. Annes and visit St Catherine street. My plan was that I would check out the cool stores and also the  Eaton Center Mall. It was an exhilarating walk and I remember roaming the streets and subsequently the mall with excitement and no real plan. I just wanted to feel the cities vibe . I had no intention or need to buy. I checked out different stores whiling away time exploring this part and that part as my curiousity was piqued by my new world. Eventually I tired of the lights and crowds and decided to head back home.

As I walked towards the metro, I noticed an elderly white man walking towards me, mad as hell. At first I thought he was yelling at someone that was within earshot who perhaps had upset him. I looked left. I looked right. Nope. Nobody. Plus he was staring straight at me. Perplexed I wondered if perhaps I was doing something wrong that I was unaware of. I didn’t think so. Oh well. I decided I would just avert my gaze and soon enough we would walk past each other and be gone our separate ways.

He was barely alongside me when he did it. He hocked up a thick wad of phlegm from what sounded like the depths of his being  and spat on me. Yelling in French, I heard him use the word nigger amongst other hate-filled racial slurs. I was stunned. I was deeply embarsssed. I was filled with shame. For the first time in my life I felt deep shame  of who I am. A black woman. As I wiped the phlegm off my face, I wondered, Had anyone seen that? It didn’t seem so. No one stopped. Wow, I thought to myself. It is almost like I am invisible. I guess this is what it means to be black. Invisible to some and or the intentional target of hate to others.

Fast forward a few decades and I am now the doting mother of 5 beautiful black boys. We live in downtown Toronto. Their dad and I who are both crazy in love with the city make sure they catch the T.O love. Like I said we do a good job of curating a wonderful world for them but they are black boys living in a North American city. So, you do thé math.

I expected that racism will rear it’s ugly head it their world. But I thought I would be able to get ahead of its ugly identity wrapping narrative. This was not to be the case. Sooner than we thought, the systemic racial prejudices interwoven into people and the DNA of society found them.

And it found them in the church. Go figure.

See, By now I had fully acclimatized to my identity as a black woman in Canada and learned to live with the racial micro and macro aggressions that come at people of color on the daily. I picked up some coping mechanisms from my husband, who was born and raised in Canada, and, I developed some strategies of my own.

My husband and I we recognized we had to pass on these coping mechanisms to our sons too. We knew it was coming but we didn’t think the church would be the place that would jumpstart this conversation for us, catapulting us into explaining to our boys the truth about the church, the so-called community of peace and justice.

We attended a local church in Toronto called C3 Toronto. My boys, precocious and intelligent as they are had little patience for the kids program and would often ask to sit in the adult service. Almost without fail, at least once a month someone from the pulpit would have something either mildly disparaging or outright racist to say about marginalized communities. I was horrified! At first, I responded like I did to the white guy who hocked spit into my face. I was filled with embarrassment. Then shame. For myself and my kids. Then I looked around. Nobody seemed fazed. Wow. Then I began gas lighting myself. Perhaps I heard wrong and  that was an honest oversight. Otherwise how come no one is outraged storming out the doors and or calling BS on this. My world turned upside down.

It didn’t take long for me to tire of the racists rhetoric that came out of the mouth of the lead Pastor and his sister, who leads the kids church. Going to church on Sunday was was like getting stuck between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, In the adult service you were bound to hear something that made you wince, as the words callously scrapped at the scabs of generational pain of racism and bigotry. On the other hand, In the kids church, you were assured that if you raised issues of color and representation would be ignored at best or penalized at worst. Any effort to broach the race conversation was immediately shut down. Especially if it came from a woman. I had the distinct honor of the pastor asking my husband to literally put me in my place when I objected to their objectifying of the suffering of African children. Drove me mad.

It was at this point that I came to the stark realization that the church was not even desiring to be a safe place for people of color. As I began to plot our eventual departure, My husband and I also began in earnest to teach our kids the gut wrenching truth about this particular church and it’s leadership blatant disregard for the well being of people of color and the struggle for equity and justice for all marginalized people.

It broke my heart to tell my sons, all of them including my 3 year old that it had been made abundantly clear to me that c3 Toronto did not care about our people’, black people’s, humanity, dignity and struggle. But, the sad truth is, this conversation is a necessary rite of passage in the life of a black person and the silver lining way Is that we got to begin the process of was strengthening them, thickening their skins, pun intended, for the reality of their lives as young black men.

Hope they say springs eternal. Despite the turmoil my family and I stayed on in the hopes of being the change we wish to see in our world. However, After almost a year and a half of tireless advocacy in this church, c3 Toronto, I recognized that this was not where we were going to be safe. And I am not only speaking of being safe as persons of color. my advocacy included asking that their leadership see vulnerable and marginalized people as precious in the sight of God. All vulnerable and all marginalized people. I thought if I could get them to make this first step then maybe just maybe us black people, who are vulnerable and marginalized,  won’t be invisible to them. I am so sad that this didn’t work out as I had hoped.

Ever since I left that church and also pulled away from church in general I have spent a lot of time considering why it was so hard to move the needle on racism and injustice at c3 Toronto. I think the issue of complex in many ways. Personality and styles of leadership certainly played a role in this church’s inability to self-reflect and move towards change. I also think however that just like the police systems in places like the United States were made as a continuation of slavery, the modern day church, and I can only speak to the evangelical ones I have attended, have not yet fully reckoned with the ugly truth that they helped shaped the narratives that encouraged slavery to thrive, created in many cases the ideas that kept the slaves unempowered and in captivity and last but certainly not the least passed on a heritage of the slave:master mindset and dynamic that I saw so clearly at the c3Toronto church in modern day Canada.

At this point I have to admit this other truth. C3 Toronto is not the only place in the. It’s culpable of this. I have encountered different levels of racism at other churches as well. Perhaps c3 did it best with its overt in-your-face white-centeredness. The detail that I think gets lost in the conversation is the churches role as co-architect of racism and it’s reluctance to examine and splice out this part of its DNA.

So where is the Dove then? In my time spent away from formalized places of worship, I have found peace in seeking gods fingerprint in all places. It is soul-consoling to feel the warm caress of divinity in the forest, my baby’s smile and the call to prayer for a mosques minaret. The poetry of Rumi, the lyrics of a Beyoncé song, The dance moves that are pulled out of me when I hear the fontomfrom of the African drums. God’s divine presence.

As odd as this may sound all of the above glimpses and sometimes even baptisms of gods presence in my very mundane existence has eased my soul and reminded me that god is everywhere. Even. In. The. church.

I may not be able to un-see the cruelty, the injustice, the dehumanization and pain the church has architect-ed and perpetrated over its history. But I can also shine my eye well well as my Yoruba people will see and see the glimmers of Love, Joy, and strength of connection. I call out These three and more as loud as I can. I call them out for my children’s sake, my ancestors sake and for my own.

So there you have it. The Dove in the details of the historical and present truth that the Christian church is not only a potential part of the solution to racism but has also very much been a part of the problem too.