A confession
I look into the mirror every morning at a beautifully stained cocoa brown face. It is a face I have grown to increasingly appreciate as I age. I have noticed my now-gone hairline, the bags under my eyes from sleep or lack thereof, and my maturing face that reflects a lifetime of experiences, good and bad that I have experienced. But my color has driven much of my social location and how I have experienced life. Although I identify as Black, I have researched my family and a DNA test. I am ethnically 80% Igbo and 20% Scotch-Irish Welsh. But people don’t see that when they look at me, they see my skin. This paper will discuss my social location and place it within gender, class, ability, religion, sexual orientation and geographic location.
My pastoral context is a medium-sized congregation in a Minneapolis suburb in Minnesota, USA. I have lived here my entire life and was raised within rural, urban, and suburban contexts. My upbringing resembled the Cosby show. My parents were entrepreneurs, and we lived an upper-middle-class lifestyle focused on the values of God, country, family, privacy, rugged individualism, and capitalism in that order.
I didn’t experience a lack in my life until I was a struggling young adult, which influenced my workaholic tendencies, hyper-career focus, and community leadership with an eye towards developing skills to make more money. I quickly realized why my parents chose to be entrepreneurs and stressed this or government service. I spent several decades working eighty-hour work weeks, missing children’s birthdays and wedding anniversaries, trying to move up the corporate ladder in investment banking only to find that because of my race, I would only be allowed to go so far. Realizing this spiraled me into a deep depression because I had given everything for my career and could do nothing about how God made me.
I tried to push this fact into the background. Although I have ADHD, I have tested profoundly gifted on multiple IQ tests. I had double majored in college, been student body president, and coordinated over 150 political campaigns. I have served in uniform. It all meant nothing because there was a ceiling that I could do little to advance beyond. There are cities in Minnesota I will never be allowed to buy property in. All, because I look a certain way, makes the majority in my state uncomfortable, and they wish to keep me at a distance.
As a CIS Black male who is heterosexual, the inability to provide the life I wanted for my children was emasculating. I was brought up to believe that it was my responsibility to make sufficient income to care for my family, and there were times I failed at this not for effort, but because I could not make enough. When money and time away became too much, my ex-wife left with the kids, and I was left with nothing. But…
I got up and went to the source, which is God and asked what to do. I had lost everything, and I could do nothing about my skin and wouldn’t if I could. During prayer, God asked what I was committed to. I told God I was committed to serving God and my community as a good husband and father. I gave up on financial security, which would never happen in my life. And God restored me, and my life now is so much better.
I have had to find joy within a society actively trying to harm me through state violence in the form of financial, social, emotional, and physical violence. I have chosen to be happy despite my circumstances. That doesn’t mean I am accepting it, however. I am committed to using political structures and my role as pastor to push for greater inclusion of marginalized people like me and to seek a society based on justice, mercy, grace, and peace. But even if I could change my skin, I wouldn’t. I love that God crafted me the way God did. I seek for others to see me as an equal in society, worthy of opportunity and abundance. That is my confession and social location.