Racism and 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 inte...