Inner Healing meets Social Justice - Forgiving my racist ancestors

My faith community has been exploring forgiveness and repentance on a deep personal level and I have been wondering what it might look like to apply these truths to social problems and systemic injustices. Although I acknowledge systemic injustices exist, I can only engage with these as an individual. I can’t take on responsibility for the whole unjust system. However, I want to explore what it looks like if an individual takes responsibility within an unjust system, and in particular focusing on the brokenness of racism. 

I will be using my experience of Jesus’s life and teachings as a framework for this spiritual exercise, as these have been vital in my own personal journey of healing and freedom. However, before I begin, let me briefly explore the key concepts of forgiveness, repentance and prayer.

Forgiveness before repentance - what comes first?

"For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, 

your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 

But if you do not forgive others their sin, 

your Father will not forgive your sins."  

Matthew 6: 14-15

Our being wronged and our own wrongs are so intertwined that usually we need to pursue both forgiveness and repentance. My pastor has, from experience, seen that often people struggle to find freedom from thoughts/actions that they don’t want to do (but end up doing) despite many prayers of repentance. He proposes that this stuckness could be because they haven’t forgiven the original injustice that took place against them, which in turn, has set in motion lies, feelings and emotions that drive their wrong behaviour from which they now seek freedom.  Being guided by this wisdom, I shall start with a prayer of forgiveness. I admit, it does feel counter-intuitive, but it has been fruitful for me in other areas of my life and so I trust the process. 

So, based on this above premise, before I deepen my repenting from believing the lie that "white is better and black is less" (Please read more about this here before you continue), let me start by forgiving my ancestors for their role in setting up or participating in racist systems that still plague our nation today.  

A bizarre story offering a deeper way of seeing

The story she told went something like this. 

Once there was a village living beside a river. One day the people of the village saw a baby floating down the river, and as expected, motivated by compassion they quickly mobilized to rescue it. One family offered to care for it whilst trying to think what the next step should be. However there was not much time to strategize as the next day more babies were found floating down the river, and more rescuing needed to be done. This continued every few days and soon, most people in the village were helping either to rescue or to care for the babies.

Then someone had the idea to find out what was going on upstream that was causing the babies to be in the river. So a group left the village to investigate. After walking a couple of days, they came across a large contraption, a big machine that was snatching babies from upstream villages and throwing them into the river.

I heard this rather disturbing story at The Justice Conference in 2017, where it was shared by speaker, Lisa Sharon Harper, in order to highlight the importance of, not just dealing with the symptoms of  social problems, but to find the root causes that might be driving the problems. It was a call to dismantle the systems and structures that were oppressing people.