Every generation thinks it is the best. Perhaps we believe that because when we’re growing up we are shielded from some of the more difficult things and don’t know about economic collapse, war, racial inequality, and other problems.
However, I have been thinking a lot about my generation, the one that isn’t considered the best, or even the one that overcame the most. I often hear people of the World War II generation talk about how they saved the world for democracy, or the baby boomers talk about how they stopped the war in Vietnam and fought for Civil Rights. Rarely do I hear either of these generations talk about their shortcomings.
My generation didn’t have a great war. Instead we had endless war in small parts of the world. We didn’t have a great march that saw the signing of historic Civil Rights legislation. Instead we had slow-burning racism. And I will admit that we were blind to both.
My generation grew up believing that the world had solved the race problem. We grew up with Bill Cosby, Prince, Michael Jackson, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordon, and Tiger Woods. They were loved and adored by millions of people. They were rich. We grew up in a time when rap music went mainstream, when white people wanted to dress and act like the cool Black people we saw on MTV.
It seemed that people of color, with the shackles of segregation gone, were thriving. There was no race problem. We didn’t need quotas, reparations, voting rights protections, or anything else. We had finally realized Dr. King’s vision that people be “judged by the content of their character.”
We were wrong. We didn’t see what maybe should have been obvious. Racism was hiding within all of those assumptions.
It was hiding behind the idea that Michael Jordan’s universal popularity was proof that the systems of racism had been eradicated.
Looking back, I see how naive we were. What made it worse was that often we would dismiss those who told us this was not so. We would shut out those who told us their stories of oppression. We thought they were crazy, or blatant self-promoters. We would tell them not to try to divide us along racial lines. We didn’t want to listen to Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Johnnie Cochran, Spike Lee, or Marian Wright Edelman. We wanted them to move on and get on board with the program of a colorblind America.
We would say, “I don’t see color.” We said it with pride as if we had solved the racial issue.
We were wrong. We listened to those voices that said we lived in post-racial America because we wanted to believe ourselves to be righteous and good.
Since I am a pastor, I deal in repentance and forgiveness. I deal in death and resurrection. I deal with Good Friday and Easter Sunday. I confess my sin, and the sin of my Generation X.
We were blind to the pain of our siblings. We turned a deaf ear to the cries of those who tried to tell us that police harassed them, educational opportunities escaped them, and that they were dying because of the systems we celebrated.
Our inability to listen and understand has led us here to this place. I am here to repent. I am here to ask for forgiveness. I am here to pledge myself to being a better listener, a better neighbor, and to stand alongside our Black and brown siblings, and fight for a better world, the world I thought we lived in.
I hope those of my generation, the one that wasn’t the greatest or the one that boomed, the one that merely tried to get by and live, will be roused to repent and to take action.
(The Rev. Jonathan Hopkins lives in Concord.)