Black people have never known honor on U.S. shores. From the auction blocks to the voting booths, honor has been as elusive to us as reparations for hundreds of years of slavery and subjugation that extends to today.
Yet Jesus modeled honor—across culture, across gender, across society’s dividing walls. In John 4, Jesus, a Jewish man, approached a Samaritan woman who was so ashamed of her sexual history that she was fetching water at the hottest part of the day; Jesus honored her by offering her living water, a water better than any fancy designer water we could buy today.
In Luke 23, as Jesus’s life hung in the balance on the cross, he, a blameless man, honored a thief who hung beside him. “Truly I tell you,” Jesus told the believing man, “today you will be with me in paradise.” (Luke 23:43, NIV)
In these passages, Jesus showed us that honor is not reserved solely for those who have crossed every “t” and dotted every “i.” It’s for those who’ve made a mess of their lives, in one way or another, people who’ve been told that their actions have made them the least deserving of honor.
On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis Police officers were called to Cup Foods grocery store after a store clerk alleged that a forty-six-year-old Black man named George Floyd used a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill to make a purchase. The officers didn’t come armed with honor. Instead, they came armed with guns, clubs, and hearts crudely corrupted by assumptions, disrespect, and dishonor. We know this because a petty crime—committed either unintentionally or intentionally—was deemed punishable by death. The police officers surrounded Mr. Floyd, detained him and pinned him to the ground like an animal en route to slaughter. One officer bent down low to crush Mr. Floyd’s body onto the concrete street. His knee stayed there, while Mr. Floyd writhed in pain and cried out for his mama. It stayed there, while the other police officers watched and did nothing to stop the public display of disregard. It stayed there, tragically, until only death remained.
Let’s take a moment to do an imagination exercise. How would a forty-six-year-old white man have been treated if he had been accused of using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill? Do you think he would have been surrounded by multiple police officers? What if it had been a forty-six-year-old Chinese American woman? Do you think she would have been pinned down to the ground? Do you even think the cops would’ve been called at all on a white man or a Chinese American woman?
Research published out of Stanford University in 2017 revealed racial disparities in how Black and white Americans stopped in routine traffic stops were treated by the police. The researchers used body camera transcripts gathered from Oakland, CA police officers to analyze whether the officer’s language was friendly, impartial, etc. Their conclusion—disturbing, but unsurprising— found that Black Americans weren’t treated with the same respect as their white counterparts.
“We find that officers speak with consistently less respect toward black versus white community members, even after controlling for the race of the officer, the severity of the infraction, the location of the stop, and the outcome of the stop. Such disparities in common, everyday interactions between police and the communities they serve have important implications for procedural justice and the building of police-community trust.”
In “Loving Your Black Neighbor as Yourself,” I wrote about how Mr. Floyd’s neighbors stood up for him in love and honor on the day of his untimely death:
On one video recording, I heard folks in the background, standing up to the officers. One said, “His nose is bleeding.” (23) Another asked, “How long y’all gotta hold him down?” (24) Another said, “He is human, bro.” (25) These witnesses to injustice called out what was wrong. An EMT in the crowd asked someone to take his pulse. (26) While their pleas didn’t save Mr. Floyd’s life, their words invited justice to roll down like a river. (27) Their public rebuke of the officers, coupled with the filming of the event, resulted in a twenty-seven-million-dollar wrongful death suit for Mr. Floyd’s family.
The protests and demands for justice surrounding Mr. Floyd’s murder show that we can become people who honor our Black neighbors regardless of differences in culture, race, gender, and accusations of wrongdoing. We can choose to honor our Black neighbors when they’ve been shunned socially; when they’ve been accused of a crime; and when they are met with the brutality of a law & order culture that emboldened a gang of police officers to commit murder in broad daylight.
We can remember that honor is the way of Jesus.
We can remember that honor can be our way, too.
