Learning and Unlearning

This week we are hearing from another guest and I am very excited for you to hear her insights on our topic this month. Our guest this week is Sarah L. Sanderson, who has a unique connection to our LoveINC here in Clackamas County. Prior to her recent move to the east coast, Sarah and her husband pastored at one of our partner churches, Oaks Hills Presbyterian Church.

Sarah L. Sanderson is a writer, speaker, and teacher who believes in the life-giving freedom found in radical honesty. Her work has appeared at PBS NewsHour, Blackpast, Christianity Today, Fathom, The Unmooring, Christ and Pop Culture, The Other Journal, Motherly, Relief, Stark and Main, and Brain, Child, among others. She is also a monthly contributor to Three-Fifths. She is also the author of The Place We Make: Breaking the Legacy of Legalized Hate, a book I had the pleasure of reading earlier this year and was challenged, convicted, and at the same time so encouraged by the difficult work she has done of honestly confronting the racism present within herself and her family heritage. I have learned a lot from her work and hope you are as blessed by it as I have been.

-Travis Jones, General Editor

By Sarah L. Sanderson

As a white person who desires to do better in the area of racial justice, I’m aware of two major areas where I need to continue to repent. First, on the societal level, I need to keep learning. To keep asking questions about history and its harms. What is the history of my city, my state, and my nation? What forces have shaped the way people of different races live in this place today? How might my own family have contributed to those outcomes? And how might I join with others, now, to help repair the harms that still linger from the past?

But then, on the individual level, I need to keep unlearning. To unlearn what I’ve been taught by my society about the worth and value of individuals outside my own racial group. To stop making assumptions about any given person standing in front of me. It’s easy to say I don’t hold these kinds of prejudices. It’s another thing to recognize them when they crop up in my subconscious, and to root them out.

For example, it’s important for me to understand the history that has led to the racial wealth gap, the fact that the typical white household in this country owns about 9 times more wealth than the typical Black household. Understanding that history will help me to be ready to do whatever the Holy Spirit may be calling me to do to repair that gap. But on the individual level, it’s equally important for me not to assume that the Black family next to me in the church pew is poorer than my own family. Austin Channing Brown talks in her book I’m Still Here about the pain she’s felt being on the receiving end of those kinds of assumptions.¹

To keep learning about how to repair society-wide harms. To keep unlearning implicit biases towards individuals. Both of these are difficult challenges that require intentionality and work.

While living in Oregon, I wrote a book about my journey of uncovering how my ancestors had contributed to historical racism in that state. But recently, my family moved across the country to Maryland, where I’m beginning the process all over again. I’m now learning about the history of this place, and making connections with people who live here. It would be easy to allow the pressures of day-to-day life to prevent me from asking these questions. To simply say, “That’s not my problem.” “I’m too busy.” “I already wrote a whole book about that.” I’m realizing that I need to stay soft to what the Holy Spirit is asking me to learn, and to do, in this new place.

I’m also recognizing, as I learn to live in a new place with different patterns of interactions between racial groups, that I’m not done repenting of gut-level racism toward individuals. I’m still guilty of making racialized assumptions about how dangerous a particular neighborhood might be, or what kind of job the person in front of me in the grocery store line might hold. I’m grieving these assumptions as I catch them, and asking God to remove them from my heart.

I strongly believe that the Holy Spirit is doing a new thing around racial justice in our time and in our land. But I’m realizing that in order for me to be ready to join in, I need to embrace the work of learning and unlearning. It’s something I deeply want to get better at. Lord, have mercy.

¹Austin Channing Brown, I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness, (New York, NY: Convergent, 2018).