For as many people of color who have suffered injustice, racial slurs, microaggressions, and discrimination, it has been largely by our professing Christian white brothers and sisters. An introspective conversation needs to happen where our white friends need to acknowledge

the racism that exists in their homes and churches, the mindset that they were raised in that gives rise to fear and distrust of people of color, the neighborhood dynamics and demographics of their social networks that have fostered a privileged existence

where they rarely come into close proximity to people who don't look like them and don't come from similar socio-economic backgrounds. Racial prejudice doesn't come from nowhere. People are discipled into it.

Conversations need to take place among white Americans about their own families--about those who opposed the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s, who owned the lands that many African Americans and other minorities tended as sharecroppers and tenant farmers,

who kept their children in segregated schools and then established private schooling options for their children after integration, who romanticized the confederacy and fought to preserve confederate monuments and icons

with little regard for how they serve as symbols of oppression and violence against African and Native Americans, who failed to teach their children the horror of their family's racist past or how to leverage their privilege to fight for the rights of the marginalized.

These are the conversations that would be most helpful at targeting the heart and coming to grips with the legacy of racism in families so that they do not repeat the horrors of the past. Just as the wayward history of Israel and their rebellion was written for our instruction,

that we might endure and have hope, white families need to look at their racist history and understand how difficult the road of endurance has been for minorities in America, how they have contributed to it,

and how repenting of this past and actively advocating for the well being of minorities in America is the pathway that leads to hope for a better future for us all.