November 2024

     It has been an extremely full fall season for us. Chris has resumed basketball and has one of our grown up guys helping with the coaching duties. It is a win-win. Chris doesn’t enjoy the coaching and our young coach is looking for experience and practice leading a team. I wish I could say that basketball is always a positive, but the world of aau basketball here in the Minnesota suburbs is fraught with the racism that plagues our nation–but manifests itself in behaviors and attitudes our young people have to cope with every day. 

     Chris came home a few weeks ago from an exhausting day of basketball where a parent from the opposing team targeted and harassed one of our players to the point that the man had to be ejected and escorted from the gym. Even though the referee, the opposing coach, Chris and our coach all witnessed this man’s son stumbling on the floor and tripping on his own feet, the parent assigned blame to one of our players and continuously verbally harassed and berated him until he was escorted from the premises. 

     As Chris, who was scorekeeping on the bench as he does now during games, was intervening in the situation another older white man started yelling at him, asking him what he was doing, he had no business speaking, he was only a scorekeeper!!

    Another of our young men, who lives in Edina, had a man walking with an aggressive dog, set his dog upon him as the ninth grader walked home from school, forcing him to run all the way home with the dog nipping at his heels. That same young man was falsely accused of making a threat at school and ended up spending several days in juvenile detention without any apologies upon his release.

     This is the kind of everyday racism that our kids and Black men of all ages have to put up with all the time. It doesn’t matter who the president is or what day of the week it is, there are plenty of people here in America who are ready to tell them that something is their fault, they are trouble, they are less, they don’t deserve to speak, figuratively or literally. So many people are blind to their own prejudices and bigotry; they don’t care what kind of harm they cause to others and choose to ignore that they are the devil’s handiworkers.

     It is this kind of climate, this kind of world, in which our young people must live. How did a fifteen year old feel, being attacked and berated by a grown man in his forties? What kind of inner trauma and suffering is inflicted when you are treated like a criminal, a troublemaker, a problem? When you have done absolutely nothing to account for such behaviors toward yourself, how do you come to feel about the world around you, when it is hostile and unwelcoming or cruel?

     Chris has often had one of the boys tell him that I am one of the only white people that they have a genuine relationship with–where I am not connected to them by a job or position, where I hold no authority over them except that built by relationship and respect for Chris and for me. I don’t take that position lightly. The way I show love to the boys is through service– I make them food, bake them brownies, wash people’s clothes, provide transportation and most of all, I try to reflect every single time I see them, that I am delighted–so that there is a human face to  Jesus’ love for them. 

     However, I know that none of the things I do can begin to affect what the world has already inflicted on them because of the color of their skin. I know that is why, even after all these years, we remember all the time, Tom Skinner’s adage, “It takes God to be a Black man!!” Only God can heal the hurts the world inflicts. Only God can build minds and hearts and characters in the midst of a harsh and difficult world that seeks to steal and kill and destroy. We ask that you pray for our young men and that you pray for our misguided world–one that elevates the powerful and cruel and ignores the harms and hurts inflicted upon the powerless. May you be one of those who prays everyday to ask God what your part is in bringing God’s kingdom alive in our world as you do justice, love mercy  and walk humbly with the one who loves us and who especially loves those the world despises.