When I began high school, it was a relief to see so many people I knew. Despite there being more than a thousand students at the school, I mostly saw the same group of people over and over. They were in my advanced classes, and they made up most of my world.
Most, if not all, of the students in my classes were middle-class or wealthy. They were clever, curious, sometimes competitive. There were a few people of color and about an even mix of genders. This was normal to me.
What wasn’t normal were the thronging crowds in between classes where you needed a survival strategy to get from point A to point B. What wasn’t normal were the only two classes that I had that weren’t advanced: choir and P.E.
People seemed different in those classes – unfamiliar, unmotivated, even unkind. I remember early on that I was in a P.E. class and the teachers were dividing us into groups for some game. There was a Black student whose friend circle of choice was other Black students. When the teacher assigned her to our group, she ended up with mostly White folks. As she made the slog over to our group, her friends called out after her, “Poor, Genesis! Has to be with the White kids,” and they laughed.
We didn’t know her, and she didn’t know us, but she seemed hostile to the whole class. It seemed that she made up her mind about us from afar and, I regret to say, I didn’t do anything to change her mind.
By my way of thinking at the time, she was the problem. She had a bad attitude. She wouldn’t give us a chance. For years, I remembered this story as one of bigotry. She and her friends had been taught to suspect and dislike White people. We were perfectly nice and fine.
This perspective began to change during one semester in my junior year, I had a hole in my schedule. There was one block that had nothing to bolster my college applications and nothing I wanted to take. Simply to have something to do, I took a U.S. history class that was regular level. It wasn’t AP; it wasn’t advanced; it was just regular.
I had a lot of assumptions going into the class. I thought the students would be unruly, unintelligent. The teacher would be overwhelmed, unmotivated, and probably mean. I didn’t look forward to that class. Yet, when I got there, the teacher was kind, engaged and encouraging. He believed in his students. The class seemed to be trying their hardest to succeed. They weren’t dumb – there were just things they hadn’t learned yet.
The students in that class were a lot more diverse than I was used to. Compared to the students in my advanced placement classes, more of these students were poor — living in sections of town I had never even heard of. When we talked between classes, they were dealing with things that astounded me. They had to work to be able to eat; they didn’t have a computer at home (in the year 2000!); gangs roamed their neighborhoods.
Some were angry, but they had good reasons to be angry. They saw the difference between their lives and the lives of others. Often these differences fell along racial lines. We lived in totally different worlds, and I was a stranger to theirs.
I was so sure about that speck in Genesis’s eye. I was so sure that she chose to see the world through an unnecessary fog of anger. The log I had placed in my own eye protected me from seeing any difference. She suspected that we wouldn’t care about her, wouldn’t welcome her, and we didn’t.
Jesus told us not to judge, which is hard to do. All day, every day we try to discern good from bad, good from evil. We look for people to join our church families. We try to welcome anyone who comes through our doors. Over years of ministry, I think I have learned that it is not our knee-jerk reactions to people that are the problem. We will always be put off by people who are unkind to us. Rather, the problem is that it’s not for us to declare final judgment over people. Who is good or bad? Only Christ can say and not me.
While I am here, it is my job to give people a chance, to seek to understand and to love as well as I can. Indeed, it was those students in history class who showed me grace by welcoming me as a friend. This is one lesson I learned in school that I pray I never forget.
