Repairing the Breach

“I wasn’t there. I didn’t do it.” That’s what I said when “Repairing the Breach” first wormed its way into my consciousness [the Episcopal Church’s attempt to enlighten and heal prejudice].The separation between blacks and whites wasn’t important to me—until I became bombarded with the images of how we [my government and my civilian compatriots] have insulted, degraded, brutalized, and even murdered “them”—people different from me.
The Chinese while building the trans-Pacific railroad. The Indians while we expanded our way across the country. The children in sweatshops. The Jews in factories. Even the Catholics. Foreigners [non-Wasps] of all
extractions. And the coloreds, whom I was raised from birth to consider inferior. This was subtly conveyed by innuendo, never directly.
The embarrassing fact is that a bit of that still governs my thinking, as “broad-minded” as I like to consider myself. Even living for two years in Jamaica, where class, not color, is the demographic by which one describes people, didn’t burn it out completely. I came to realize that whites are, on average, more privileged by virtue of history, economics, and education, NOT by color. And, on some level, we react to it.
Then came the initiative “Repairing the Breach,” with its revealing, disturbing movie, “Traces of the Trade,” exposing the little-known story of the prominent Episcopal [my long-time spiritual home] New England [my long-time geographic home] family who were the biggest slave traders in my country! And while these kidnapped folks were in chains in a prison in Ghana, underneath an Episcopal church, those “Christians” had the gall to change their prisoners’ names and baptize them! Can you believe such hypocrisy? And, as much as it hurts to admit it, the results of this irreverent subjugation still haunt us.
We’re never too old to learn, and I’m still learning!