“What if you don’t like what I’ve got to say- about white people?”
“This isn’t about me. It doesn’t matter how I feel.”
-Aibileen and Skeeter, The Help
Last Tuesday, my team and I went to a Roma camp on the outskirts of Tirana. It was awful the way real, hardscrabble poverty always is when it crashes into my privileged Western life. Children with impetigo scars and bare feet ran between shanties made of sheet-metal and old blankets. Grandmothers with milky, cataract-covered eyespeering out of wizened faces crouched over cooking fires. The man standing next to me smoked unfiltered cigarettes and had dark, curly hair that reminded me of my brother’s.
All of them had copper-colored skin, like dull pennies. This, more than their poverty, more than their nationality, was their identifier. Their skin marked them as lesser, as Roma, as outsiders in Albanian society.
A newcomer to the Roma camp introduced himself as Italian. The women he was standing with playfully slapped him and he corrected himself: “I am ROMA but my parents are Italian,” he told us in broken English.
And I, I felt like saying, am a white girl on a mission trip.
One of our hosts, Sarah*, is from southern India. Her family have been missionaries here for two years. As I sat with her in the square in golden afternoon light, her shoulders sagged slightly.
“The people here, they see our skin and they treat us poorly. They are awful to us- awful!- but then maybe they hear us speak English, and it changes. They treat us better then.” She said.
“Why?”
“We look Roma,” Sarah explained, then shook her head and wouldn’t say more.
But as I climbed up and down the pyramid in the square with her daughter, Rachel*, I saw the glances of the Albanian men as she passed. Three stopped and talked to us as we climbed down, at first more interested in my American-ness, but then one pointed at Rachel half-way down the pyramid and asked, “Where is she from?”
“India,” I said.
“Her? But she is black! No, she isn’t!” The man looked at me with disbelief and a little suspicion. He started talking in Albanian to his friend, and I heard the Albanian word for black and lots of laughter. I hurried down the pyramid, thinking to myself, And I’m a white girl on a mission trip.
In all of these situations, I have been the innocent bystander, never on the receiving end of racism. In Eastern Europe, people who look like me are in power and don’t like those who look different. Here in Albania, it’s the Roma, which roughly translates to anyone with skin the color of dull pennies.
The same holds true in Africa, in South America, in the United States. People who look like me have traditionally been in power in all of these places, and brutally oppressed the people who look different. The people who have dark enough skin.
And I’m a white girl on a mission trip.
In the racist systems of the United States, of Albania, of all the places I am going to this year, I am one of the winners. I get to see reflections of myself on movie screens, billboards, magazine covers, even a presidential debate (finally). I get to see reflections of myself in places of power.
My face is the face of oppression and apartheid to so many people, and I’m on a mission trip representing Jesus.
The Church universal, the Bride of Christ, is such a beautiful and diverse entity that white Anglo-Saxon Protestants like me have tried to white-wash for centuries. How do I reconcile this with the desire for the world to know the gospel? How do I stand next to Roma people in Albania and Africans and African Americans and Hispanic people and ask them to trust me? Because it is not my grace to give, the grace that is forgiveness and reconciliation. It is not my grace to call for.
It makes me tired of being white, and that very thought makes me sick to my stomach.
Because when I am tired of being white, it is because I am tired of feeling guilty. But when Mexicans are tired of being Mexican it is because they are tired of Donald Trump calling them rapists and being rewarded with a gig hosting SNL. When black people are tired of being black it is because they are tired of being killed.
I don’t know the answers to this. I know that Jesus was against injustice. He shared the good news of himself with Samaritans, healed untouchable lepers, gave women a testimony. Jesus overturned the social order and came to heal injustice great and small, and he ended up on a cross.
I’m not a martyr. I wear the skin of centuries of colonialism. I wrote an entire blog post about my whiteness while others are being killed for simply existing in their blackness.
But I deeply believe in the radical love of Jesus. I believe in the power of the Holy Spirit, and her powerful movement in the Church universal. I believe God loves the Roma, and the Syrian refugees, and every other group of marginalized people with the same love he loves me- and I’m a white girl on a mission trip.
*Names have been changed
