In the past few weeks the news has been flooded with talking points on two highly profiled race cases.  First, there were allegations that a private Philly suburban swim club rescinded a membership to a predominately Black camp group following complaints from White members.   Witnesses say White parents pulled their children out of the pool when the other kids arrived, made racial slurs, and then complained to management. The swim club owner went on television saying he, “didn’t want to change the complexion of the club,” but then went on to invite the group back after public outcry. Management claimed safety concerns were the real reason they pulled the membership, as the story went national and hit every major news outlet in the country.  

Last week, a prominent Black Harvard professor was arrested for disorderly conduct after arguing with police officers who came to investigate him breaking into his own home because he lost his keys.  Even upon proving it was his home, tempers flared on both sides, and the cops then arrested him.  

I am not writing this to argue the merits of either side of these cases, nor to comment on how they are indicative of how we do not live in post-racial America.  The issue with both of these cases is the way the media and the public have used the Cambridge police and the Swim Club as scape goats.  The way racism, like all sin, works is that it pervades our culture and communities in such a way that it breaks the fabric of Shalom.  It inserts its evil into everything.  Ultimately, every action I take is laced with some sin, some selfishness, some flaw that I cannot see, and is the equivalent of me giving God the finger thinking I can do it my way. 

Racism is not an academic thought, or a social ill that we can cure. It is a sin that pervades all of the institutions in our society.  We cannot escape it, even if we want to, or think we can. The problem with these two stories is that they allow us to point the finger at Cambridge, and point the finger at the swim club owner.  They are dramatic stories that provide us with a fire escape for ourselves, because it shows us how racist someone else may be.  We demonize both groups, justly or unjustly, without looking at our own thoughts, intentions, power dynamics, or social institutions that have created the situations ripe for gross misconduct to occur. 

As long as our national conversation about race and class is only sparked when there is an ‘outlier’ of injustice, rather than an on-going dialogue about the pervasive injustice occurring all around us, we will be unable to see the structural and individual brokenness and sin that leads to oppression.  It is a lot easier to yell foul play at the White swim club, than it is to examine our own attitudes, agendas, and social arrangements from which we benefit.