The president of a major African-American denomination who earlier this summer participated in a groundbreaking discussion about improving race relations with leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) said Sept. 8 that nonblacks often lack empathy for the plight facing black America.
“I have a lot of friends who are not African-Americans,” Jerry Young, president of the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc., said in a morning session of the group’s annual gathering in early September in Kansas City, Missouri. “They are from the broader community.”
“Love them to death,” the pastor of New Hope Baptist Church, Jackson, Mississippi, said of his nonblack friends, but they have never had to protest in order to gain the right to enter a building, eat at a lunch counter, sleep in a hotel or “the right to just vote.”
‘Insensitive’ to others
“If you haven’t had to protest to do that, sometimes you can be insensitive to those who had to do it,” Young said. “If you are born already wealthy, and you have all you need, it’s hard to understand a little boy from Mississippi born on the plantation. I just think there needs to be some sensitivity to the plight of the folk who have been the oppressed.”
Young said he did not want his comments to be interpreted as a blanket endorsement of everything associated with the Black Lives Matter movement, viewed by some white Americans as encouraging violence against police.
Need for justice
“We want folks to understand that we do believe that black lives matter also, and that we need justice in this country, and we need for justice to be colorblind in this country, yet we cannot decide that we’re going to indiscriminately go around just killing people,” he said. “You can’t be just shooting police officers. You can’t do it that way.”
In June, Young participated with then-SBC President Ronnie Floyd and others in a panel discussion on racial unity and the Church in St. Louis, Missouri, at the SBC annual meeting.
“Those who would like to suggest that racism is not indeed a problem for the Church but rather it is a sociological problem, I would argue it is without question a sin problem,” Young told SBC messengers gathered not far from Ferguson, Missouri, the St. Louis suburb where the 2014 shooting death of a young black man by a white police officer sparked a national conversation about racial profiling, police brutality and racial inequality in the U.S. justice system.
“Since the Church is the only salt and light in town, if there is darkness and decay in America, it appears to me that the Church must be guilty.” (BNG)
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