“I believe that if racial reconciliation is going to have any chance, it’s up to the people of God,” said Russell Morrow, pastor of Forest Heights United Methodist Church, during MOSAIC’s discussion on responding to racial injustice in love on Friday, March 20.
As the stacks of Little Caesar’s pizza slowly dwindled, conversation grew between students, Morrow and Matthew Marshall, director of the center for reconciliation at Union. It was an open discussion moderated by MOSAIC vice president Gabby Bonner, senior biology major. She asked questions and gave students a chance to respond before letting Morrow and Marshall answer.
Questions ranged from the correlation between injustices of the past and present to comparing Martin Luther King’s protests to recent demonstrations in places like Ferguson, Missouri.
Marshall stressed that our society is not post-racial. Despite progress made in recent decades, there is still much work to be done, he said.
“What the Trayvon Martin case did, and the Michael Brown and countless other cases have done is really to pull back the curtain and show what was really there all along,” he said.
Several students referenced the book “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander and pointed to the lack of rehabilitation in America’s prison system as further evidence of an ongoing societal injustice. Marshall agreed, and pointed out that understanding problems in the present requires understanding history.
As an example, he explained the origin of Jim Crow laws, which were put in place by southerners after the Civil War to stop African Americans from gaining land, voting rights and societal power.
“These things don’t just happen on their own, it’s a whole system that has happened over years and decades and hundreds of years,” he said. “But when we talk about the injustices of today, we tend to zoom all the way to the present.”
While Marshall and Morrow both stressed that the problem of justice is systematic, they said every individual plays a part in productively changing that system. They also pointed out that it is necessary for Christians to love mercy and be slow to pass judgement on others.
MOSAIC president Alma Hernandez, senior biology major, said she hopes conversations like this will lead to door being opened into other issues of injustice as well.
“When my family travels, police will ask for our documentation even though we were born here just because we’re Hispanic,” she said. “Yes, this is an uncomfortable discussion … one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation is so y’all would feel comfortable talking about these issues.”
Though the discussion was a look at problems both past and present, Morrow and Marshall said they were hopeful that seeing society’s needs clearly and having the love and power of Christ will enable students to make positive changes.
“I believe the hype, the hype of the gospel of Jesus Christ,” Morrow said. “I suggest that in order to be who God has called us to be, we put our Christology above our ethnicity, politics and economics. Y’all got a great task ahead of you. I’ve got your back, but you’ve got a great task ahead.”
