Racism is the air we breathe, the water we swim in, says the Rev. Dr. Donnell FitzJeffries. During a conversation about the complexities of racism and the challenges of honest conversations, we are encouraged to be “holy surprised” at how the church can lead the way to be transformed by our collective diversity.
Guest: The Rev. Dr. Donnell FitzJeffries
- FitzJeffries is an ordained elder in the Western North Carolina Conference of The UMC.
- He serves as pastor at University City United Methodist Church in Charlotte, N.C.
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This episode posted on Sept. 20, 2024.
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Transcript
Prologue
Racism is the air we breathe, the water we swim in, says the Rev. Dr. Donnell FitzJeffries. During a conversation about the complexities of racism and the challenges of honest conversations, we are encouraged to be "holy surprised" at how the church can lead the way to be transformed by our collective diversity.
Crystal Caviness, host: Donnell, welcome to "Get Your Spirit in Shape."
Donnell FitzJeffries, guest: Hey, it's good to see you. Thank you for inviting me to be here with you.
Crystal: You're welcome. I'm so excited that you're here. I'm going to just tell this story right off. I told you I would tell it later, but I can't wait. I was at Western North Carolina's Annual Conference a couple months ago, a few months ago now. I was sitting in the plenary session and you walked up on the stage and I leaned over. My sister was there too. I leaned over and I said to my sister, I went to second grade with him. And I had missed your name in the introduction. I don't know if I came in late. And she looked at me like, what? And I said, I did. I know. I know I went to second grade with him. And so in fact, we were in second grade together, I believe in Mrs. Butler's class at Johnson Street Elementary School in High Point, North Carolina, and then we ended up going on through school together. So I'm just so thrilled that we've reconnected in this space. So I'll stop my story and I'll let you start sharing yours. Tell us just a little bit about yourself.
Donnell: Well, as you said, I'm from High Point North Carolina, but then we both graduated high school back in 1980. Wow. That was so long ago. I went off to Boston to go to college and that's where I met my wife. We were both RAs on campus there and matter of fact, that's where my last name is FitzJeffries now. She was Fitzgerald and I was Jeffries and we got married and decided to combine our names,
Crystal: Which did throw me for a loop at first. When I did get your name, I was like, well, I don't know what that's about, but I know I went to school with him.
Donnell: I've been pastoring for 37 years in the Western North Carolina Conference and been loving the work, been challenged by it. Sometimes I want to scream at the walls and everything else, but it's always good because what's the old saying, if you love what you do, you don't really work. It's good to get paid, but you don't really work.
Crystal: I have heard that, yes. Well, when you spoke that day at the plenary session, I was so really intrigued by a lot of what you were talking about. You were talking about racism, racism in the church, racism in our world, and it's a conversation that the church has been having for a long time and in recent years, really with the murder of George Floyd. That conversation bubbled back up in maybe a more dominant way perhaps, but you were talking about that and I was really fascinated with and intrigued with some of the things that you were saying. So I wanted to invite you here to just have that conversation together today. Let's talk about racism and why is racism still so prominent in our world, in our churches, in our communities?
Donnell: Well, in the Western North Carolina Conference, we had a last quadrennium, and for those of you don't know, a quadrennium for us is every four years we had an ethics training, which is mandatory for all of us pastors, and we were encouraged to bring some lay people to the train as well. But the training was anti-racism training, and I served that time as the chair of the conference justice and reconciliation team, and I was on the connectional table for the annual conference or for the conference as well. And we went through that training as a connectional table. And one of the things that was brought out is that in America, we swim in racism like fish swim in water. It is simply the air we breathe. It's not that you talk about people being individual racist, but it's the system in which we live from the very beginning of this country, it was built that way.
I founding documents the fact that our founding fathers, so to speak, could speak of freedom and could speak of one and be liberated from oppression in England while at the same time enslaving people from the African shores that tells you that it was just the air we breach, it was seen as normal and natural and there was no cognitive dissident in their minds. It was just the way it was God ordained. And I think that has followed us for all the years since the founding of our country and we're still swimming in it and we don't know how to choose different air right now. And I think we're trying to get there. I think the browning of our country will help us to get there. And my prayer is that we will get there with a sense of peace in the Holy Spirit and not a sense of, well, my hope is that we can start writing our history and blood and start writing it with hope.
Crystal: One of the things that you said when I was hearing you speak is that one of the consequences of racism is that we lie to each other. That really stuck out to me. Tell me what you mean by that.
Donnell: Okay. Well, like I said, we all swim in this water of racism, and as a consequence of that, over time we've come to understand that white Anglo brothers and sisters are considered the standard, the norm. And since they are the standard in the norm, anything that's not white is not abnormal, but sub normal. And there is this belief that everybody lives the standard, although subconsciously we know that people who are not white will never be seen as nor accepted on the same level and given the same standard of being white. Therefore, our conversations with one another are based on that deception. We can believe on the surface level that we're all the same and we can have conversations on the surface level that we're all the same. However, when we get into our affinity groups, like when blacks gather with blacks and whites, gather with whites, the conversations are very different.
I've always been amazed at how we can be at a district event or a gathering of clergy and we will hear a sermon and we will talk with each other and the fellowship talk to each other in the parking lot. But the next two or three days when I would gather with my brothers and sisters who are African American, the conversations we would have would be a critique of the whole event and we would then start talking real stuff to each other. Something we would never say to people who are white, because if we said it, it would cause not just discomfort, but probably anger. And if you say it to people who have authority and power, it can be life altering as far as your career path. So in this country, the conversations we have are people who are white get to say and speak things that people who are not white don't get to say and speak for fear that if you do say and speak it, it could be detrimental to your life, to your goals, to your career.
It can break up friendships and it can prevent certain things from happening. So we learn this pleasant speak, this acceptable speak that we give to one another. And I don't know what it's like when white people gather in their own groups, but I suspect from what I've been told, that it's the same sort of thing happens on a different kind of level, that there's a conversation that takes place that is very different than when there's a mixed group. It's just not the same language that's in a mixed group. And so then we talk past one another to the point of it getting uncomfortable. Then when it gets uncomfortable, we tend to back off just when it gets real, that's when the possibility for things to fall apart. Does that help you?
Crystal: Yes. I thank you for that explanation. So we know why it happens or we think we can see why it happens, but what's the danger? What's happening to us as fellow Christians? What's the danger here when we're not being honest with each other, when we hold back from how we really believe or when I hold back from being honest with you and vice versa, what's happening to us as Christian brothers and sisters?
Donnell: This is the part that people don't like when we refuse to be genuine with one another because we're holding on to being black. Are we holding on to being white? We by necessity refuse to be genuine with God. The scriptures are quite clear. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. And the second is like the first part of that commandment. You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself. Well, when we're not genuine with one another, we are not loving one another. In essence, we're not loving ourselves because we refuse to be as we are created by God to be, and therefore we cannot stand before God with full integrity. That's called the sinful nature of human beings. There is repentance of that, of course, and we believe that we are forgiven and that God remembers the best in us.
However, racism is something that we are not yet ready to fully repent of because to face being genuine with one another means that all of us have to risk losing our identity as we understand it, blacks have to risk losing their identity as African Americans, white have to risk losing their identity as Anglo or white Americans so that a new theme is created. And so how do you risk losing who you believe yourself to be, to accept who God wants you to be, while at the same time valuing the good things that have enriched your life and brought you this far, those things that have made you strong and have given you the ability to overcome. So it's complicated and it's scary, the idea of becoming something new in God, we embrace that I think intellectually, and we embrace it on an individual level, but to embrace it as a community, as the beloved community, as the peaceable kingdom, that's a whole nother way of being.
It will require that we decenter ourselves, we take our identities out of the center, our political Republican, democrat, conservative, liberal, middle of the road, we take our cultural identities out of the center of life and truly put Jesus Christ in the center. And then we started to understand blackness from a different perspective, whiteness from a different perspective as not the primary resource for who we are, but God is the primary resource. And then our identities as black, white, male, female, gay, lesbian are simply further expressions of who God is in the world. Does that make sense?
Crystal: Well, it makes sense and I easily understand how difficult that is because we all are so, our egos are so entrenched in everything that we do. And I guess I think what I hear you saying is the way through this is to set our egos aside, maybe just not be driven by our ego, but to be driven by the spirit and come together and work in that way. So that feels really difficult. And I would think it gets more difficult when we are together with others. I mean, you and I may be able to have a conversation and perhaps make some headway on that, but we start bringing in other folks and it feels like in a church setting and it feels like it gets more complicated.
Donnell: Yeah, it's funny, I was preaching Sunday that the word humility is actually a word that Christians coined. Before Christianity. Humility was seen as something bad, but Christianity was a thing that took humanity and made it a virtue because putting Christ in the center means that we have to compare ourselves not to one another, but to the love of perfect love of God, and then have a self-assessment that says, compared to that love, I see myself my sin. I see where I've gone wrong, I see where I've missed the mark. And then the goal becomes to set my faults aside and to allow God to become as a scripture, say perfect in my weakness. And for some of us in our culture, that means those who have privilege and that's mostly white Americans would have to desire that everybody else have the same privilege that they have. The privilege is not bad. I mean, if you like it, probably everybody else is going to like it too. So there's not that you want to get rid of it, but we just want everybody, the desire is everybody gets to have it in the same way so that the privilege no longer becomes privilege, but the way of life for everybody.
Crystal: So it's not that just we're lying to each other, but we're lying to ourselves.
Donnell: Yes, a lie told is a lie that lives within you. I would say that we're struggling to find our true identity as a Christian people, and we're trying to get there. I think we're trying to be faithful. It's just that there are certain pain points that we're not willing to go through yet in a certain yielding that we have to give to God that we're not sure we're quite yet ready to let go of that control.
Crystal: Yeah, control. That is definitely a part of it. We were talking earlier about the reading of the Bible or even the Christian experience and how our own experiences are a lens for that. We'll bring the audience in on that conversation a little bit and let's talk about that because I've often, someone brought that to my attention as something I would read in the Bible. I was reading it as a white person, and this person who was talking to me was a black minister, and he was saying, I read that same verse with my experience as a black person. That sounds so obvious, Donnell, but it had never occurred to me.
Donnell: Back in the nineties, the conference had this program called Bridge Builders, and the leader of that group that I was with asked the question. It was about maybe three or four of us were black and about seven were white in the group. And he asked, he said, tell me where in the Bible you find scripture that's most comforting. And we each answered, and for the most part, all of our white brothers and sisters said, we find the assaulter, the psalms, the place where we find most comfort and most sense of belonging in the sense of God's love for us. And my answer was Exodus. And he looked at me and said, did y'all hear that? He says, for most white people it is the Psalms, but he's talking about Exodus. He said, why do you say exodus? I said, because that's the story of how God liberated the Israelites out of slavery. That's the story of God walked with them and brought them to the promised land in the room there was this aha, like, oh, we do come to this from very different perspectives, and we live in very different kinds of worlds that we may live right beside one another and our churches might be right beside each other, but there's a reason that our churches are beside each other
Crystal: And we're not in church together
Donnell: And we have fellowship. But the actual worshiping together, that's dangerous on a day-to-day basis and week to week basis because that means something might change.
Crystal: Well, yes, and that change. Change is always uncomfortable. But didn't Jesus say I came to do a new thing?
Donnell: Yes, indeed. The church where I serve now in University City is going through a lot of change. One of the things I was impressed with when I was appointed is that the leadership, we have a single board governor here called the Board of Stewards, and one of the goals they have set is for us to become a multicultural church. In any given Sunday, we probably have about 20% of the congregation is not white, and this has been historically a white congregation. We have a lot of people here from Africa. That's the highest majority of people who are not white here. Then we have African-Americans, Asians, Americans, to a lesser degree. Really no people who speak Spanish here, but this church is changing it's culture, and that growth comes with some pain points because historically this has been a very conservative church. It didn't disaffiliate, but it has historically been, and I've just discovered a very conservative church.
And some of the things that happened here, like some of the conversations, things were in meetings, and then I'll bring out some of my understandings of that and it will shut the room down because they're hearing it but don't know quite how to take it. And then I say, this is where we are seeing the difference between you and me in this country, both claiming Christ, but being raised in very different worlds. And the amazing thing is they haven't asked me to move. They're keeping me here even with the pain points that come up. And that is also for me to have to hear and experience my own pain points as I take in the full humanity as well.
Crystal: And what you're describing, the goal I would think, is to appreciate all the diversity of God's people in a single place. And we've just not done that well. We have intentionally segregated ourselves for comfort level or probably a lot of different reasons, but primarily probably because it's more comfortable.
Donnell: Remember, it is the water we swim in. It's the air we breathe. It was seen as natural and normal. Even though the scriptures talk about there should be no male, no female, no Jew, no Greek, no slave, and no free. Even though that is clearly in scripture, we human beings have a great ability to compartmentalize and to interpret it in ways that will match the air we breathe and the water that we swim in. I think you're right. It's comfortable, but it was also seen as normal, natural, and the discomfort would be to move from that normal to a God normal, not just as individuals, because individually it's easier. It's easier to move as individuals and say, I'm getting closer to God. I feel God's spirit more within me. My walk of God is getting stronger as individuals. That's easier than as groups as a whole culture because cultural shifts, that takes a lot of work.
Crystal: Do you see places Donnell where we're doing it well?
Donnell: I think we're doing it slowly.
Crystal: Okay.
Donnell: And the church unfortunately is not always taking the lead and sometimes where we've fallen behind, but the debate that we're having about healthcare is one place where we're trying to find some equity, some justice, some sense of is it true that when we are born into this world that we offer each other some things that are unmerited that are just what you're given because you are alive. I think a whole battle of healthcare is about that. Do you receive it because you're alive and because you're alive, you get to have it or do you have to earn it? And if you can't earn it, you don't deserve it. And that sense of merit falls into the racist culture because there are certain groups, we just don't allow to ever merit it. One of the things that came out was that when social welfare was given first started, there was no problem.
Nobody had any problem with welfare. This came out in our training for our ethics training in racism. Nobody had any problem with people receiving social welfare. The problem came when certain people started to highlight that the people who received this were also not white. And then there was a stigma that only not white people receive social welfare. Even though the statistics show that in this country the majority of people receiving social welfare are white people because that's the vast numbers in our culture. And then we start talking about corporate welfare, the way that we give incentives, tax breaks to corporations, and that's seen as something that's good business, but social welfare has come to be stigmatized because welfare queens are seen as black women.
When that started to happen and that became through a political decision back in the eighties, it starts to then denigrate all poor. And I had a discussion with one of my parishioners, and the saddest part is white poor get totally ignored When you uplift black poor as the example of what poverty means in the evils of it, white poor are ignored, and you have a vast number of people who become very angry because they know they're being ignored when they were told there's supposed to be people of the promise. So racism has some weird, strange ramifications that is not just about what it does to black people, it's what it does to the souls of white people as well.
Crystal: And as we talked about before we started recording the podcast, racism is foundational to other, I believe your phrase was other isms. Let's talk about that a minute. We've seen that, I believe we see that in the church all the time, and the really, the church is in culture, is in society, so whatever's happening in society, you're going to see in churches also because we're the people. But let's talk about that, just what racism also leads to, the effects.
Donnell: When we were going through the training, it's interesting, we were in our groups and we started talking about racism and the effect of racism on people of color and how it affect their white people, and it always comes up, well, don't forget women, and then they say no, because that's a distr. While it is true that women in our culture have also experienced injustice, inequity, dehumanization, that is often used as a distractor when it comes to discussions about racism because what is not discussed is that white women in black women have very different experiences in our culture. For example, how we appoint pastors in the Western North Carolina conference, we were appointed by the bishop in the cabinet as the extension of the bishop's office. Only recently have black pastors started to be appointed to churches of significant salaries. Only recently, white women started being appointed to churches of significant salaries years before that.
So if we can look at racism and fix or heal racism, I think we will also see sexism begins to dissipate. Because once you humanize the dehumanize, and once you give privilege that you have to those who don't have it, it won't stop. The privilege that males have over females will be healed, and the privilege will also become the privilege offered to everybody biases with language, you have to speak English. That will start to fade in dissipate because we will see the value of learning other languages in order to better understand who we are. Because learning a new language reshapes the mind, and you start to see how all of their subtleties gives you a whole new perspective on the world from French to Spanish to Swahili. It just gives you a new perspective about how to interpret the very same theme. You talk about a chair or you talking about male and female ways of describing things. It's amazing. The English language is very limited, but when you start to dehumanize those who've been dehumanized, when racism is healed, I think we're going to see we have a much less of an issue with people who are in the L-G-B-T-Q-I community.
You heal that, everything else follows.
Crystal: Yeah, I think we call that intersectionality where it's all related. It's all coming together, and we can't really talk about one without talking about the other.
Donnell: Because the danger is, and this is not, it's intentional subconsciously, the danger is you pit one group against the other and it works to the advantage of those who have privilege because you keep those without it nipping at one another, fighting with one another, so they don't come together. My wife is Irish Catholic in background. When Irish people came to this country, they were considered dirt. They weren't accepted. They weren't even considered white. What happened was white people in this country became white in order to prevent Irish Americans from intermarrying with black Americans. There is a book out there, I forgot the exact title, but how white people became white. It was to make sure that this group of people we call white would not intermarry with people who are not white. And as a consequence, especially in the south, white people lost their ethnic identity.
If you go up north to certain cities, you would see heavy ethnic identities in High Point. You weren't raised with, you didn't talk about Italians neighborhoods, and you didn't talk about Armenians. You didn't talk about Irish. It was just black and white, and that's a consequence of racism. Ethnic identity is lost. That history becomes like a vestigial organ rather than something that can be claimed and cherished. So when you cure racism, you free people to embrace a whole new understanding of who they are and to reclaim that, which was taken away from them years ago, generations ago.
Crystal: I never thought about that. You're right. I never grew up. It was new to me when I went to college and people identified very strongly as Italian or Irish. That was very new to me because that wasn't a part of the conversation that I grew up in High Point, North Carolina.
Donnell: It was a way of making sure that they were privileged and unprivileged of keeping power here while making sure power was not there. You're one of us. So keep the cultural rules of being us.
Crystal: This is such a clearly, this is a complicated situation. I'm not asking you to fix it for me as a white person or for the entire church, but what are some best practices, if that's even the best way to say that. What are some ways that we can start being just aware and intentional about this honesty and about the naming it even?
Donnell: I think things like what our conference has done with the training, we need to keep training going about anti-racism, and I think our Congress has started doing good work with how we appoint pastors. I was joking with the bishop. We were in England back in July on the Wesleyan Heritage Tour, and I was joking with the bishops and some district superintendents, wouldn't it be wonderful if you could appoint lay people to other churches and they didn't get to choose where they went, but as Methodist, you got to appoint them to different churches because right now we choose churches on the comfort of, it's like a consumer model. Does this church match me? Does it the right things for my children? Are they the right kind of people? And for the most part, we choose churches that are in the same socioeconomic range.
Crystal: I mean, we use the term church shopping.
Donnell: Yep. Yeah, we do. As a consumer model, the Roman Catholics did a little differently. They would place you in your neighborhood inside your local parish. Now, it did end up being sometimes Italian Catholic, Norman Catholic, Irish Catholic and that sort of thing. But we have to challenge ourselves to choose different churches. We have to challenge ourselves as Christians to say, I'm going to move into a neighborhood where the majority of people don't look like me and are not at my same economic status. I'm going to move into this neighborhood with the idea that I'm not going to cause the taxes to go up, so the neighborhood becomes gentrified and I push out others. The church can lead the way in that challenging us move to a place that's not like you, not to change it, but to be changed by it, and in the process changing those around you. I think our bishop and cabinet are doing some good work in challenging themselves to take off the blinders to kind of change what we've been doing for what, 200 years or more of, well, 54 years, I guess, of United Methodism, but maybe 200 years of Methodism in this country in one form or another.
Crystal: As we finish up today, is there anything that we didn't talk about that you were hoping that we would talk about?
Donnell: I had no idea what we were going to talk about. I'm always surprised. I love to be holy surprised going to it just blind and say, God, do what you're going to do.
Crystal: I love that phrase. Holy surprised. That's an awesome phrase, Donnell. Well, thank you to being open to being holy surprised. I will ask you the question that we ask all of our guests on “Get Your Spirit in Shape,” and how do you keep your own spirit in shape?
Donnell: Well, of course there's prayer, there's meditation, and believe it or not, there's science fiction.
Crystal: Oh, tell us more about that.
Donnell: I love science fiction movies and books. I've always loved science fiction for some reason. When I see those stories, especially well written stories and well acted movies, I see the whole human drama being played out in a context that's safe and challenging. It allows us to rethink this thing. I've seen racism played out, sexism played out, and science fiction stories, our political system is played out. It's a safe environment where we can do that and start to imagine what would happen if we start to mix our technology with who we are now. I think that's what science fiction does best. What are the advances and how would these advances change us? Will they bring us together? Will they tear us apart? Will they make us more of who we are? So I love science fiction. It's not just a release. It's also a way to help me think.
Crystal: I love that. Thank you for sharing that Donnell, and thank you for being a guest on “Get Your Spirit in Shape” and for having what is a difficult conversation, but an important conversation for all of us who are trying to just walk and follow Jesus. So thank you for being here.
Donnell: So thank you for inviting me. It's been wonderful. I didn't know what to expect. I always get nervous if I'm not in a pulpit, I'm nervous In a pulpit, it is God and me here. It's like, man, what she going to do to me?
Crystal: Hopefully it was painless.
Donnell: You've been a wonderful host. Thank you so much.
Crystal: Thank you.
Epilogue
That was the Reverend Dr. Donnell Fitz Jeffries, discussing the complexities of racism and the challenges of having honest conversations in the church. To learn more, go to umc.org/podcast and look for this episode where you will find helpful links and a transcript of our conversation. If you have questions or comments, feel free to email me at a special email address just for “Get Your Spirit in Shape” listeners, gysis@umcom.org. If you enjoyed today's episode, we invite you to leave a review on the platform where you get your podcast. Thank you for being a “Get Your Spirit in Shape” listener. I'm Crystal Caviness and I look forward to the next time that we're together.
