A Crisis of Trust by Seminary President Gregg Mast

October 3, 2014

Staten Island, Ferguson and now Cleveland are simply the tip of an iceberg that is invisible to many, if not most, white Americans. White families never are required to have the “talk” that Mayor De Blasio of New York City recounted yesterday. We send our children into the world believing that it is a fair place, and thus a trustworthy and safe one.

Every poll I have read that has measured the issue of trust reveals that people of color more often than not don’t trust the world, and thus understand it to be an essentially dangerous, rather than safe, place. They talk with their children, especially their boys, about a world where they will be watched and followed and stopped because of the color of their skin. They talk with their children about a world where one wrong move can mean their very lives.

Oh how I wish these were problems that we could simply pin on our police departments or our justice system, but it is far deeper. While white folk can’t or won’t see or feel the size of the iceberg, people of color can’t see the world without it.

It is for that reason that a single grand jury decision is understood not by itself, but adding new evidence of a deeply wounded and sinful world. To be sure, this moment needs to be grasped as a time for us to demand that our world be changed. But let us not be naïve, for it has taken centuries for this iceberg to form, and it will take enormous commitment, great vision, and time, lots of time, for the iceberg to disappear and for the wounds to heal.

And in this time, let us heed the words of Jesus- “I send you out as sheep among wolves, and so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” The forces that seek power and privilege will not easily be changed. Those who don’t see and understand the size and pervasiveness of the problem will not easily be transformed. And while “the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice,” as Dr. King observed, in these painful days, it feels like the arc is particularly long and very painful.