This is the story I can’t stop thinking about from my research.
There’s a woman sitting across a table from a man. She is White and he is Black. Their families are long time friends. They are happy to reunite, share dinner, laugh over small talk. Somehow the conversation leads to Halloween costumes. She says once, back in college, she dressed as the Black Olympic track champion Florence Griffith Joyner.
His eyebrows raise. “You did what?”
She says she copied Joyner’s clothing, bib number, and nail polish. Then she purchased makeup to darken her skin.
He listens, regarding her with what she would later call a certain kind of “gaze.”
“That moment is probably the most charged moment of my whole life,” she told me in an interview.
She had grown up in a predominantly White community, relatively unaware of racism. She attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where only 2% of students were Black. Not only did she not know the history of minstrel shows, the symbolic violence of blackface, and the problematic implications of making skin tone into a costume; at the time she wore the Halloween costume, she didn’t even know someone who could tell her. Now she was sitting face to someone who could tell her. And what would he say?
“His face looked different than I’d ever seen it,” she said about his gaze. “And I know he loves me deeply, right? And he shifted into this other expression that I have seen on Black people since then. … It’s super focused and it’s like they’re trying to communicate something with you. … You know what I think it is? … I think there’s a little part of them that has hope, you know? That this stupid White girl might learn something, like she might just learn something. But then —” She paused before speaking again with emphasis. “I’m sure they’ve been disappointed so many times. Like, do you dare even hope for that?”
How do you hope for something good to come of the agonizing history of racial injustice? How do you hope for a kind of love across unfathomable chasms of difference, ignorance, and harm? He was staring into her face, deciding how to hope.
He went on to explain why her costume was not okay. He gave her a generous piece of education that day, and she received it as an undeserved gift.
Again and again in my research, I hear White people describe transformative moments when they received undeserved gifts in the context of their own guilty participation in racial injustice. I hear people of color describe the freedom that comes of giving that kind of grace, not out of coercion, but of the radical hope that new systems can be built among former enemies.
Grace experiences change people. They build a new kind of hope — a hope that society can be simultaneously worse than we ever believed, and also ripe for the unanticipated interruptions of goodness.
This woman said she’d seen that gaze on Black people’s faces at other times, so I asked if she could describe another example.
“I get a little weepy thinking about it still,” she began another story. She’d been called out by a Black person at work for her part in a racist system, and in despair, she’d decided to attend an event led by an influential Black Christian leader. At the event, she felt something new spreading over her. “I feel like, there’s something hopeful here,” she recalled. “And I wanted to be part of that.” After the event, she talked with this leader about her racist incident. She half expected him to chide her for her guilt, but instead he took time to help her think through the incident from new angles.
She said of that conversation,
I’ll never forget the grace that he had with me in that moment. I didn’t know what grace was, but when I look back at it, it’s ever more profound, like understanding how effed up we actually are, and yet he still —
Here her sentence broke off, and she gave a kind of awed headshake. Her phrase — “understanding how effed up we actually are and yet still” — is one of the best definitions of Christian grace I’ve ever heard.
Grace is not the only element people need to be able to address racism, but I’ve come to believe that it is pivotal. Grace needs to be handled carefully. There’s a fake kind of grace that creeps into justice work—cheap grace designed to avoid dealing with the problems. But the existence of that artificial grace doesn’t mean the real thing doesn’t also exist.
This week I’m thrilled announce that my new academic publication on this topic is now published! It’s called “Unlearning hope: White Christian encounters with grace as a logic of exchange,” and you can read it free with this link. If you’re wondering how to find enduring hope in the context of racial injustice, this is for you.
Or if you’re looking for some lighter reading on this topic, I’ve been writing about hope and grace for a while now. Check out my past newsletters on how grace strengthens people and changes people, and why we need impervious hope.
I’m grateful for all of you who give and receive grace and hope, too.