Preaching on America’s Birthday – The 4th of July for Black Americans
Racism is ever-present, but it is not all-powerful
Every year, the Sunday before the Fourth of July, I stood in the pulpit and felt the same knot in my stomach. The flags were up. The choir was not singing anything patriotic. They never did. They sang the rousing gospel songs, full of hope, the kind that make a congregation stand up whether they meant to or not. And I knew the congregation was waiting to hear one of two sermons. Either America had been good to us, or America had been unjust to us. I never could bring myself to preach just one of those sermons, because both of them were true, and I refused to lie to the people sitting in front of me.
Consider Oprah Winfrey. Born in Mississippi to a teenage mother, raised for a time on her grandmother’s farm, wearing dresses made from potato sacks. She became the richest Black woman in the history of this country. Consider Joe Dudley, who failed the first grade, was labeled mentally retarded by his teachers, and sat in special education classes because the adults around him had already decided what he was capable of. He built Dudley Products into a multi-million dollar hair care empire and spent the rest of his life training other Black entrepreneurs to do the same. Consider Barack Obama, raised by a single mother and grandparents of modest means, who became President of the United States. These are not legends. These are facts. This country, for all its sins, made room for these people to rise about as high as a human being can rise.
And at the very same time, this is a land of economic injustice for Black people. Redlining was not an accident. Banks drew literal lines on maps marking Black neighborhoods too risky for loans, and generations of families were locked out of homeownership, still the main way American families build wealth. Black households remain far more likely to live below the poverty line than white households. Black Americans are roughly 13 percent of this country and something like a third of the people sitting in its prisons. None of that happened by accident. Somebody wrote policy. Somebody made a decision at a bank or a courthouse or a school board, and Black families are still living with the consequences.
So which sermon do I preach? That was my frustration every July, and honestly most Sundays of the year. I came to believe both things had to be preached together, because they are both true together. Racism is everywhere in American life. It is in the housing market, the courtroom, the classroom, the loan application. That racism is everywhere is something every Black person understands in their bones and something most white people never quite grasp. That is what people mean by systemic racism, a term I rarely use, because the moment you say it to a white audience, too many hear an accusation aimed at them personally and the conversation ends before it starts. Black people cannot afford that luxury. We have to understand the system and teach our children to see it, because that understanding is part of how we survive and part of how we succeed in spite of it. At the same time, racism is not equally limiting for every Black person, and it is not the final word over anybody’s life. Racism is ever present. Racism is not all powerful. That is the line I had to walk, and it is a hard line to walk from a pulpit, because people want you to pick a side.
If I preached only the injustice, I ran the risk of raising up permanent victims, people who came to believe the barrier was so total that trying was pointless. I have watched that kind of ideology settle into people like a sickness. It steals their initiative and hands them an excuse, and an excuse is a poor substitute for a future. But if I preached only the opportunity, I ran the risk of raising up naive people, folks who would walk into a bank or a courtroom or a hiring committee with no understanding of the water they were swimming in, and blame themselves entirely when the current pulled against them. Neither one of those is honest. Neither one of those is love.
What I settled on, over the years, was something closer to radical hope. Tell the truth about the wall. Then tell the truth about the people who climbed it anyway, and teach the congregation what those people actually did, the discipline, the delayed gratification, the refusal to quit, so that climbing the wall stops being a mystery and starts being a method. That conviction is a large part of why I built DFREE®, because financial freedom for Black families was never going to come from picking one sermon over the other. It was going to come from telling people the truth about the whole terrain, the injustice and the opportunity both, and then handing them something to do about it.
I still don’t know if I ever preached that balance perfectly. I know I preached it honestly, every Fourth of July, whether the congregation wanted both halves of the truth or not.