The Only Hope For the Black Community (What I learned At Morehouse College: Part 3)

At Morehouse I used to think Black people had to "stick together."  Establish our own businesses.  Never marry outside of our race.  Build up the black family.  I hesitated to marry my Lucy because she is white. I told her this from the beginning.  But she wasn't the beginning of what changed how I saw Black community, because she wasn't the first white woman I considered being with.




The first white woman I considered being with made me think about what I wanted to be as a black man.  I liked her because she had everything I liked in a woman.  But the woman I had imagined was black.  That was a given.  I never considered being with a white woman.  Especially after Morehouse.  So I thought it through:




What is my issue with being with a white woman?


1. What would "The Brothers" think?  Here I am, having changed my name to Olatunde, and marrying white woman. Would they consider me a "sell out/uncle tom step and fetch it?"  I didn't care if they did, really.  I knew I wasn't a "sell out." 




2. What would my mother and aunt think? They had gone through so much during the 60's, and black women were regarded as inferior in beauty to white women.  Would they resent me?  I wanted to honor them, but I knew being with a white woman didn't dishonor anyone, in my community or any other community.




3.  What did I THINK?  Really?  She had everything I LIKED.  I'm the one that's going to be with her, not my Morehouse Brothers, not "the Black community," not my mother or aunt.  Me. I thought about it and decided that I didn't have an issue with interracial dating, but I chose to focus on being with a black woman.  I chose this because it seemed best for my mission at the time, to restore honor to my people.  "My People."  Who were my people?  Or were they really "My People?"  Then the final question, the life changing question, came to me. 




4.  WHAT DID GOD THINK? 


It is written, "From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.  God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us." Acts 17:26-27




In these verses, "nations" has to do with ethnicities.  God established their histories and geographies.  Why?  So that they all may seek and find the God who is near all of them, everyone of them, as they are.  This is what God thinks, but it wasn't what I was thinking.  My people are really God's people, and I have to think about us as He does.  So how does He think of us?




Is God against a black man marrying a white woman?  Against mixed children?  And what does all of that mean any way?  Bible genealogies don't focus on phenotypes from what I can see.  Black and white are not the dividing lines of people groups in this world by any stretch of the imagination.  God sees us as coming from one man, or one blood, from whom he made all of the nations. Who is the one man we all came from?  Noah.  And from Noah's three sons, Ham, Shem, and Japheth, all of the ethnicities exist.  They were brothers.  Relatives. Yes, they separated into their different lands and cultures.  But they were together, from the same father.  Do you think Noah's family was white, or black, or yellow, or whatever?  I don't think so.  In fact, we probably wouldn't be able to classify them at all by the racial standards we use today.  (click HERE for part 4)