Equality

The values I have discussed so far in this series of articles based on the Quaker SPICES (Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, and Community) have been fairly straight forward. I have taken each value and reflected on my beginner’s view of it, and then gone on to share how I have grown to see it over time.

But as we come to the value of “Equality,” I bring my own shame to the conversation.

As a young person, I learned morality as part of my spiritual training. As a teen, I was instructed to avoid alcohol and drug consumption. There were warnings about sexual temptation and how to keep oneself from it. Of course, stealing and lying were off limits.

All of this was a good place to start for a young person navigating spiritual realities. I did about as good as can be expected with all of these moral teachings. I avoided the supposed major sins.

But now as time has passed, there is one incident from my youth that I look back upon with a great deal of remorse. Ironically, it was not one of the major moral issues that I heard talked about it.

Though the incident took place when I was in first grade, with the ignorance that comes at that stage of life, it is still difficult for me to write about it.  A girl who was a fellow student in my first grade class was a refugee from Cambodia. Back then I did not understand what it really meant to be a refugee. Everyone else in my class looked pretty much the same. She looked different. A few boys in my class resorted to teasing her and calling her derogatory names because she appeared different from the rest of us. Without ever considering the implications of my actions, I joined them one day in their mocking refrain.

Mrs. Maxwell, our teacher, heard the ridicule that day and promptly sent us boys out into the hallway. As a first grader, being banished to the hall was a fairly significant punishment, and one that I had never encountered previously in my school career.

The usually gentle, soft-spoken Mrs. Maxwell soon emerged into that hallway where we boys had been sent. But this was a different Mrs. Maxwell. She was enraged with our conduct. I saw a side of her that day that had never come out on previous occasions. I do not even remember what she said to us, but her outraged sense of injustice communicated a message. There would be no more teasing this girl in her classroom. That was understood.

As I have reflected on that incident, I have experienced much shame. I am not sure that anything I have done in my life may have been as potentially damaging to a soul as what I did that day. Perhaps there have been worse miscues of which I am unaware. But now that I understand a bit more of what that young girl had experienced as a refugee from a troubled land, what horrors she may have experienced, and how challenging it may have been for her to relocate to our community, I worry about the impact of my mean-spirited words.

I have no way of finding her now. I do not even remember her name. But I have prayed for forgiveness for my words, and for blessings on her life, several times over the years.

Four decades later my work led me to become friends with three African American men who were getting ready to lead projects with the nonprofit organization for which I work. Our staff team met with these three men for a day to map out strategy.

Somewhat on a whim, we took a moment and asked these three men to tell us what we did not know about the racial issues they had faced in their lives. They must have known our inquiry was sincere, because they shared in great detail. They revealed stories from their life that shocked us. They risked vulnerability in telling us things we had never heard before, things we did not know about how inequality plays out in real lives in everyday circumstances.

Soon after that impactful conversation, many of the same racial issues they described started becoming news headlines. Young black men were shown on television suffering the exact same kinds of injustices that these three men had told us about. I suspect that I may not have taken those news stories very seriously if those men had not risked vulnerability in their sharing with us. The course of events altered my perspective on the ongoing struggle for equality in the places where I live and work.

So the value of “equality” means more to me these days. I began as a little boy who, despite his impeccable moral training, did not know any better than to ridicule someone who was different in spite of her suffering.  As a young man I was taught to avoid certain parts of my city because of the despicable things that people who were not like me did there. Over time, I became convicted that my attitudes and actions were flat out wrong. Some of this came through reading and reflecting. But most of it came through getting to know several people whose backgrounds were greatly different from my own.

The work of equality is one of the most important moral convictions of my life now, one that I hope to embody for the remainder of my days. May I have better stories to tell someday.

My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.

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