Anti-racism has become a global obsession, and rightfully so. Racism and racial oppression are repulsive. I don’t have a racist bone in my body — or so I thought. Lots of people have dark sides, maybe everyone.
I know I do.
Several years back, comedian Michael Richards, who played Cosmo Kramer on Seinfeld, saw his racist tirade at black hecklers ignite a firestorm. Richards apologized profusely. Prominent black comic Paul Mooney said Richards told him privately that he “didn’t know he had that ugliness in him.”
I could identify with Richards’s surprise at his darker inner impulses. My own failing was private rather than public, differing in degree but not in kind. It taught me valuable lessons.
Growing up in the South, I learned from my parents and educators to be racially tolerant and accepting in a culture that often was not: segregated schools, neighborhoods, restrooms, drinking fountains, and more. Racism still makes my blood boil. For decades, I’ve sought to promote racial fairness. But an important discovery early on fueled this mission.
One summer, while I was in college, I joined several hundred students (most of us white) for a South Central Los Angeles outreach project in primarily black neighborhoods. We spent a weekend living in residents’ homes, attending their churches, and meeting people in the community.
A friend and I enjoyed generous hospitality from a wonderful couple. Sunday morning, their breakfast table displayed a mountain of delicious food. Our gracious hostess wanted to make sure our appetites were completely satisfied. It was then, eyeing that bountiful spread, that it hit me.
I realized that, for the first time in my life, I was living in a black family’s home, sitting at “their” table, eating “their” food, using “their” utensils. Something inside me reacted negatively.
The strange feeling was not anger or hatred, more like mild aversion. Not powerful, not dramatic, certainly not expressed. But neither was it rational or pleasant or honorable or at all appropriate. It horrified and shamed me, especially since I had recently become a follower of Jesus.
The feeling only lasted a few moments. But it taught me important lessons about prejudice. Much as I might wish to deny it, I had repulsive inner emotions that, if expressed, could cause terrible pain. I, who prided myself on racial openness, had to deal with inner bigotry. How intense must such impulses be in those who are overtly less accepting? Maybe similar inner battles, large or small, go on inside many people.
Holocaust survivor Yehiel De-Nur testified during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi leader responsible for killing millions of Jews. With Eichmann present in the courtroom, suddenly, De-Nur sobbed and collapsed to the floor. De-Nur later explained: “I was afraid about myself. I saw that I am capable to do this … exactly like [him]. … Eichmann is in all of us.”
Jeremiah, an ancient Jewish sage, wrote, “The human heart is most deceitful and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?” A prescription from one of Jesus’s friends helped me overcome my inner struggles that morning in South Central: “If we say we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and refusing to accept the truth. But if we confess our sins to [God], he is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from every wrong.”
Lots of people have dark sides — maybe everyone, maybe you.
Could there be some of Michael Richards’s flaws, or mine or others’, in all of us, inner compulsions that could benefit from divine help? Where society’s racist laws, policies, and practices need changing, we should change them. But it would be a mistake to neglect the need to change our own individual human hearts.
Rusty Wright is an author and lecturer who has spoken on six continents. His film reviews and columns have been published by newspapers across the country and used by more than 2,000 websites.
