Just as we must never forget the Holocaust, we must never forget what happened to Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy murdered by white racists in 1955. His murderers were acquitted of their crime, then sold the story of how they killed the child to Look magazine.
The reason Emmet Till was murdered was that he was thought to have "flirted" with a young white woman. That was unacceptable in the Jim Crow South.
We must never forget the poisonous, murderous barbarisms that racism incites and justifies. Yet, to this day, there are white people who want to erase the memory of Emmett Till, just as there are white people who want tours of the Old South's slave labor camps (otherwise known as plantations) to go easy on references to slavery.
Unless we reckon with the reality of the sin of racism and the place it has played in our history and plays in our present, we will not be free to become the society we are called to be. Racism is a sin, a violation of God's command that we love our neighbors, even those that our ethnic communities have taught us to hate or disdain. (See here.) Like all sins, God can forgive racism for which we repent in the name of Jesus. But until we honestly wrestle with racism and own it before God, we cannot be forgiven or have any part of God's kingdom.
This report from NPR's All Things Considered today was sobering.
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