Starting a dialogue

It turns out that an hour’s public dialogue on race with people who favor legal discrimination against gay people can be … not horrible.

You’re not going to change the world by having a couple of Southern Baptist clergymen chat about race with a governor and mayor before 550 mostly white people at a “city center conversation” put on by a conservative west Little Rock megachurch, Immanuel Baptist.

But there was merit to be found Friday night in the Robinson Center ballroom overlooking the Broadway Bridge and Arkansas River.

The backstory is that Little Rock’s significant gay community took great exception to new Mayor Frank Scott’s participation. It did so because the special guest—young Los Angeles County Baptist “church planter” D.A. Horton—has a website that, being Southern Baptist, after all, condemns gayness.

Scott, a Baptist pastor himself, countered that his message of unity necessarily encompassed talking with people with whom he disagreed.

The discussion Friday evening was almost exclusively about race except that, twice, Scott did what he came to do. He made it a point to say and repeat that the pursuit of unity was not merely about inclusiveness by race, but by sexual orientation, gender identity and socioeconomic status.

The others—Horton, Gov. Asa Hutchinson and Immanuel pastor Steven Smith, who was doing the moderating—ignored him on that. But at least Scott got it said.

The city’s first popularly elected black mayor has fashioned a fancy message on these issues. It’s that we need “intentionality and intersectionality toward real inclusion.”

That sounds like so much blahblah except when he elaborates. He explains that we must set out with the intent to interact with those of different colors, orientations, statuses and beliefs. We can’t just wait for it to happen. Then, from that purposeful interaction, we can begin to move toward some measure of understanding and acceptance.

Scott told the mostly white audience to make it a point to go to church with, and have dinner with, people who are different. He encouraged parents to think about the friends their children were having in for sleepovers and whether those kids were all the same by color and belief and economic status.

That’s affirmative action by a less-offensive name and by individuals rather than institutions.

It’s Green Book on steroids. It’s about a whole fleet of Morgan Freemans and Miss Daisies becoming travel-mates not by happenstance, but design.

It won’t fix the drug epidemic or gang violence or neighborhood neglect or police relations with the black community. Those tragedies will never be fixed directly. Sadly, their erosion can only occur in the way erosion happens—slowly. A better day on those issues can only emerge as a byproduct of healthier human behavior.

So, sure, let’s talk, black and white, Baptist and agnostic, homosexuals and heterosexuals, discriminators and fair-minded.

The young special-guest preacher, Horton, had solid things to say about race even if his website offended otherwise.

And, of that offense, let’s be inclusive: The supposedly moderate United Methodists had just days before reaffirmed their official discrimination against gays. But I like some local Methodists. I’m not going to quit talking with them.

Horton said he dislikes the term “racial reconciliation” because many Christianity-professing persons with histories of racism and prejudice have never been conciliatory in the first place. He called for confession and repentance.

He dismissed the argument between “theological conservatives” who advocate merely preaching the Bible with its “spiritual commands,” and “theological liberals” who say Jesus was about service to “social commands.”

Horton said Jesus was about both and that we’d best be about both.

Hutchinson seemed a little uncomfortable, admitting that the discussion of theological principle was an easier context than the practical political application.

But he became moved to bring up entirely of his own volition one choice issue—that Democratic state Rep. Charles Blake, who was in the audience, should be thanked for having recently brought up a conversation “we need to have.”

Hutchinson plainly was referring to Blake’s bill to provide that the star on the state flag commemorating the Confederacy be redefined by statute as commemorating Native Americans.

The governor’s Republican mates in a legislative committee had rudely rebuffed the measure two days before, essentially standing up for honoring slavery of black people. The governor’s office had taken no position.

After the event, I hurried to the front to ask Hutchinson if he was giving new thought to Blake’s failed bill.

“I’m always giving thought to bills,” he said.

OK, then: What kind of thought was he giving to that one?

“I’m thinking I need to have more conversations about it,” he said.

Minutes later, Asa and Blake were having a conversation.

Their one-on-one visit was a precise microcosm of the evening.

What could possibly be wrong with their talking with each other? Nothing.

But will anything come of it? I don’t know. Probably not, absent more talking. So, maybe.

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