Two Words That Changed My View About Race

I live for (and die with) the comment section. The general public’s insight and humor on a story, a social media post, or a YouTube video is just as informative as the piece itself. Comment sections – the new chat rooms – have drawn me in to the point where I almost don’t engage any content that doesn’t allow comments.

But what comes along with the comedic relief and different perspectives that I find delightful are comments from ill-informed, uneducated, and just simply mean-spirited people who like the attention they get from negative comments. The positive always outweighs the negative, but the negative, for some reason, can speak so loudly to us rational humans to where it makes the positive non-existent.

One night I was looking at videos about the Civil Rights Movement on YouTube and reading the comment section. Between the video content and the negative comments, I found myself overwhelmed with anger. The content itself can easily enrage someone because it speaks to the horrors of American institutionalized racism that lasted so long into the country’s existence, but the negative comments take the recent past into the present and reveal the number of people, because of their own racism, who either continue to justify that behavior or minimize it to varying degrees.

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. (New International Version, Eph. 6.12)

My mentor gave me this guiding principal about the difference between positive holy anger and negative human anger. When your anger is directed at a person, it is a guarantee that God didn’t incite that type of anger within you, but when it is directed at the forces of darkness and their destructive works, your Heavenly Father is calling you to take action.

As I read the comments on the YouTube videos that night, my anger was directed at people. I caught myself because I knew in that moment whatever message was finding a place within me wasn’t from God so I prayed. These two words were impressed upon my heart as I spoke to God – Human Race.

I have known for quite sometime that the concept of different races of human beings is a social construct and not a biological or biblical reality. God created different tribes and tongues (or as we say today – nationalities), but He didn’t create different races of people. The purpose that our modern-day racial classification system came into existence was to promote division and supremacy. At its very root, the belief system that there are different races of people is antagonistic towards the unity God intended to exist among humanity.

I’ve heard plenty of times that there is nothing wrong with racial pride or racial identity regardless of the origin of our modern-day racial classifications. My response to that is would you be comfortable with someone of another race expressing their racial pride to you? Without fail, people honestly aren’t comfortable in that scenario. The reason for that is race is inherently divisive because it was created to be divisive and there isn’t any way it can be recast to remove the spirit of division that is connected to it.

Today, with God’s perspective about the human race, I am no longer comfortable with racial classifications. When I hear people talk about their race and affiliate themselves with a race to distinguish themselves from other people, I clearly see how that undermines unity and promotes division and strife. I strongly believe that race is one of the most powerful tools diabolically used to prevent people from living the life God intended for them.

I purchsed a t-shirt that sums up my stance on race. It has differenct races listed on it with boxes next to each them, but the only listing with the box checked is next to the word human. People have and continue to fight against racism in our world, but if we want to end racism, we have to abolish the belief system at the root of racism – race.