At Goshen
College, MLK day—a celebration of the courage and contributions of Martin
Luther King Jr. toward justice and American race-equality—is trumpeted with speakers,
activities, and numerous opportunities for the campus and the community to get
involved. The visiting author, Dana Johnson, and speaker, Dr. Wilburt Smith (who
is also, incidentally, an author, film producer, board member for the community
colleges of Southern California, and director of an insurance agency) of the
2012-2013 school year both hail from sunny California and are both key figures
in American race relations. They each spoke at Monday’s opening convocation preceded
by a Goshen College choral group, The
Parables, who sang a powerful, repetitive refrain that asked over and over
again: would you harbor a stranger, a foreigner, a felon? Dana Johnson, the
first speaker, then read a passage from her novel, Elsewhere, California about an African-American middle school
student moving from inner-city Los Angeles to the suburbs, with novel with some
autobiographical influences. Dr. Wilburt Smith then shared about his recent
film, Hole in the Head, and his
friendship with Vertus Hardimon, a man who, as a child, had been the victim of radiation
experimentation. In the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr., Hardiman’s story was
a story of forgiveness and redemption. As Hardiman said to his friend Dr. Smith,
who was recording and publishing his story, “I think [God] wanted me to live,
to tell the story. I think He wanted it told to show the magnitude of His
mercy.”
As college
students, as contributing members of a larger community, and as citizens of nation
that has known the great chasm of racial hatred and the painful reparative process
of forgiveness and reconciliation, all of us here at Goshen College were blessed
by the powerful stories of Dana Johnson and Wilburt Smith. Their stories moved
me to tears, to laughter, and to a renewed sense of the power of forgiveness
and grace. When, during the trailer for Smith’s, A Hole in the Head, many members of the audience—myself included—turned
away from the sight of Hardiman’s painful disfiguration (he literally had a
large hole in his head), Smith admonished us for our insensitivity. “Do not look away,” Smith rebuked, and I was
sorry that I had. I was reminded that in order to begin the process of healing,
I must look injustice full in the face. I must take ownership for wrong, share
in the pain of the oppressed, and believe in the redemptive power of grace. Like
Hardiman, I must be attentive to blessing: “I can see, I can hear, I was raised
in my right mind this morning. That’s a blessing. That’s three blessings.” After seeing and hearing a brief piece of his
story, I would like to add to his list: today I have witnessed the miracle of
forgiveness, that’s four blessings.
Both
Johnson and Hardiman’s stories were a good reminder of—in my own role as an
emerging teacher—the ways that I must be sensitive to racial differences in
current and future classrooms. Some teacher’s tout “color-blindness,” as an
effective means to equalize racial differences within the classroom, but I would
argue that color-blindness is merely another tool for denial. Rather, I think
teachers must promote “color and difference appreciation.”
White students and black students often come from different cultural norms, and
within each group are various subgroups with similarly different values and
expectations. As a teacher, I want to model this value for color and
difference-appreciation and to encourage my students to do the same, honoring
their differences with respect, sensitivity, and, naturally, appreciation. Furthermore,
I want my students to remember; to remember
the dark emptiness of the oppressor and to known the bleak fear of the victim’s
pain. Most of all, I want my students to be moved—to be really moved—by the power of forgiveness and to
know that while grace doesn’t erase all wounds, it can heal them. Finally, I want students in my classrooms to look at
a scarred, broken nation 50 years after the Civil Rights Movement and to see
the way it continues to stumble haltingly along… to fall. I hope most of all
that I equip my students to get up and stumble along with it, lending here an
arm, there a shoulder… and knowing that their imperfect help, however small or
seemingly insignificant, is everything: it is a blessing.
