Growing Up, and Learning to Understand This Complex World

By Travis Jones

Introduction

This month, we are going on a journey to hear from others’ experiences. We are going to take a look at our communities and ask the question, “How has racism, with its roots in greed, shaped our community and propagated poverty for generations?” Maybe you have already been thinking of this, maybe this is your experience. But for most of the people in Oregon, this is not a question that is often asked or considered.

This is an important question to ask and discuss for us at LoveINC because we work with a disproportionate number of minorities compared to the demographics in Clackamas County. And so we have to recognize that how our communities are set up is not an accident. The systems set up in our community are designed to give us exactly what we are getting. And if that means people are at a higher risk of falling into poverty simply because of the color of their skin, then we need to talk about it and figure out a better way forward.

This month, we selected a number of authors with a deeper and more personal understanding of this topic and how it has played out in the Portland metro area, and Oregon. I am so excited to share their work for this month, and if you want to discuss any of this with me, don’t be afraid to reach out. I am happy to hear your perspective, concerns, and anything else you’d like to share. Thanks for joining us! Here’s a little introduction to this discussion.

Growing Up, and Learning to Understand This Complex World

Growing up, I always wanted to become a police officer. I admired what they do in the community and wanted to help keep people safe. Three of my cousins were also police officers and my uncle was a retired police officer. Needless to say, I grew up with a high view of law enforcement.

As I was in my early teenage years, I also became a huge fan of hip hop music, specifically Christian hip hop. This was not so common in my family, but it communicated the faith and talked about life in a way that seemed new to me, and that I really connected with. The way the artists played with the words to communicate different ideas mesmerized me and still does.

My connection to the Christian hip hop movement exposed me to many new cultures I would not have normally been exposed to. One way that it deeply influenced me was on the topic of racism. I had always assumed as a kid that since Martin Luther King Jr.’s work, racism was not an issue anymore. I surely wasn’t racist, no one I knew was racist, racism was dead. But as I listened to the songs, I heard stories that challenged my understanding of racism. What ultimately led to my cognitive dissonance were these stories from real people, real Christians who had influenced my own faith, sharing their own personal experiences.

As I entered my early adult years still seeing the world pretty black and white, my own experiences began to help me see more nuanced views of these issues. For instance, only a few weeks after finding out we were pregnant, the doctors told my wife and I that it was actually an ectopic pregnancy. This meant that our child had no reasonable chance of surviving and that allowing the pregnancy to continue posed a significant risk to my wife and her health. So, after much prayer and time, we chose to end the pregnancy before it could cause irreparable harm. But we still wrestle with this decision, it was not an easy or quick choice.

While the people in our lives never voiced any judgment towards us for making this choice, we have friends who have faced similar situations and faced harsh judgment from loved ones for making a similar decision. It has been heartbreaking to hear of the pain that this inability to understand the complexities of their situation has caused in their lives, especially as someone who has felt that pain and wrestled with the decision myself.

This experience and the grief we felt from it, deeply formed us, and helped me to see how complicated this world is. While I had always seen abortion simply as wrong, I began to gain a deeper understanding for what someone going through that might be feeling, and what might drive them to the point where they would choose to even entertain the idea of abortion.

This difficult experience opened my eyes to see that our world is not all that simple. I recognized that social issues are never as simple as right or wrong.

So, when tensions around racism and policing gained national attention in the late 2010s, and it seemed like there were only two sides of the issue, I was able to recognize both the reality of people’s lived experiences of racism at the hands of individuals, police, and larger systems in our society, and still recognize the value law enforcement has in our community when done well. I was able to see that just because we have broken systems in our society does not mean we should discard them completely, nor does my support of the good in those systems mean I should ignore the issues and injustices they are causing.

And as followers of Christ, we need to see beyond the politicization of social and ethical issues and see the complicated people behind them. We want to love people in the name of Christ and that means we cannot be led away from listening to and loving our neighbors by polarizing political issues and rhetoric. We need to recognize their humanity, regardless of how much we agree with them, and we need to seek to better understand their perspectives.

¹I write more about this topic, my experience, and having a more personal stance on it in an essay from my ethics course in seminary, you can read it HERE.