A toddler builds a tower out of blocks. He knocks it down and starts again, examining the blocks as he builds. He examines the colors, shapes, sizes, as he builds his creation.

How often do we kick down the towers we’ve built and look at the pieces?

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Black voices surrounded me, singing words like ‘sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us’ and ‘we have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered’, and they sing, but I can’t.

This is not my song. That is not my history. It feels too sacred for me to touch. I don’t even realize that this is the Black National Anthem and I don’t know what I don’t know.

But as I sat there in that black church service, as I listened to the black pastor tell the white bishop that the greater church needs to know about black heroes of the faith, as I listened to him recount a story where a white Christian prep school class shouted their pride at being white, it was as if I could see the tower of whiteness I had built with the blocks I had been given.

That tower has been (partially?) knocked down, and I sit amongst the rubble and wonder how it got built in the first place.

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Most people don’t explicitly say black people are less than. But they still manage to get that point across, because it’s there subconsciously.

When I grew up being taught that white people and black people have two different cultures, that they are just so different from us, so of course we should be separate, I learned that white is normal and black is not. And that white people are under no obligation to interact or understand, because it is outside the realm of normal.

Or when a white woman says to me that the big black church downtown doesn’t preach the Bible, I understand she’s not trying to be racist; she’s just being a white, conservative Christian. These black churches hold MLK, Jr. up as some kind of hero, even though everyone knows he was an adulterer, so it’s not racism, it’s just biblical truth. When faith is filtered through the lens of conservative family values, and sexual purity is #1, then of course a culture and a church that takes Martin Luther King, Jr. seriously is not to be taken seriously. The Bible serves as the perfect cover for racism.

White Christians don’t have to broadcast their opinion that black people aren’t real Christians, or even important people, because their preaching and the way they live does it for them. Do we ever stop to ask ourselves why we don’t seek out black churches, black music, black books, black movies?

These racist seeds are so small, so insidious, they’re like a mustard seed or a pinch of yeast.

They’re in the way we pray, the songs we sing, the verses we read. They’re in the way we are unable to empathize with anyone who is different from us. They’re in the conferences we go to and the authors we read. The pinch of racist yeast in the dough of the church is like walking into a bakery. You can’t see it, but you smell it. It’s everywhere and only a dismantling of the building will remove it.

I still have a visceral reaction when I hear Jeremiah Wright’s name. I hear Sean Hannity railing in my head. I understand why people question Obama’s faith and his love for America. Because according to the white world, what they say doesn’t make sense. And if white people don’t understand it, then it’s not right or true or good, and white people don’t see how this is white superiority. When you’re a fish swimming in water…

The seeds of racism take root when ‘no sex outside of marriage’ is code for ‘real Christians don’t have baby mamas and baby daddies’. White churches preach family values and the Protestant work ethic, so they condemn poverty and its effects, they blame the broken families and the myth of fatherlessness without recognizing their role in the initial destruction of the black family.

White conservative Christianity never taught me to look at anything besides how it affects me and mine. God saved me. He is concerned about me. Put your own name in John 3:16.

But I sat in this black church service and listened to a black woman read Psalm 137:3 and Galatians 5:1. The liturgy was riddled with references to Jesus and liberation, freedom and oppression, and they quoted MLK non-ironically.

Surrounded by so many black people – old Southern black people – I was so aware of history. This was not a cultural experience for them. Not just an exercise in discomfort. Oppression and poverty and a legacy of slavery is not just theoretical. I am routinely faced with the socio-economics of that. But it is rare that I am faced with it in the context of faith.

The white Jesus I grew up with was merely theoretical. And when the white church creates leaders that continue to keep us safe and comfortable, how are we ever going to know anything different? White Christians don’t have a history of embracing the tension, the awkwardness and so how do you do it?

There has been an awkward silence on #BlackLivesMatter from the majority of white christians, because of course they matter. #AllLivesMatter. If black lives don’t matter – well, that might implicate us in some way, and we don’t have any frame of reference for that. We have no grand white Christian outpouring of support for #BlackLivesMatter because we don’t know how to handle our guilt, our responsibility, our shame, in part because we think we aren’t guilty any more.

Jesus paid it all. We’re washed white as snow. Our cross at the front of our church says so. The lyrics we sing say so. Jesus paid the ultimate sacrifice so I don’t have to die. I don’t have to die to myself, to my whiteness. I don’t have to lay down my life for anyone, my pride and rightness for anyone, because Jesus did it all. White Jesus has absolved the white church of responsibility.

And so we end up with this whole weird thing where the Oscars are visibly racist and the white church is complicit, but black people are all over the stage and of course they would have been nominated if they had been good, and white people don’t see how the white gaze determines goodness and white Christians don’t understand what the big deal is. They don’t understand how their faith has been tried and found wanting.

White Christians have inherited a mostly weak faith. We don’t really know what love or courage, or even faith is, because so often the people exhibiting those characteristics do so in the face of our fear and greed. It’s hard for us to understand when Common sings ‘freedom is like religion to us’, or to recognize the determined faces of the singers onstage, because whiteness doesn’t recognize hopeful desperation or defiant dignity.

Whiteness doesn’t recognize the shrines it builds to itself, the way it steals blocks from other people to build its tower higher and higher. But white Christians don’t know what they’re missing out on when they refuse to challenge white superiority. They don’t know how they injure themselves and the world by dismissing blackness. I have only gotten a glimpse of what I never knew and it keeps tumbling more blocks down and I’m so grateful.

We will never understand the pieces of our lives unless we are willing to take them apart, and until we do so, we will be incapable of building anything better.