Why Racial Inequity Impacts My Faith- Emmy Clarke

The Parable of the Good Samaritan has always interested me. It is one of the most commonly taught parables in Sunday School, but there are countless occasions in daily life when we act like the Priest and the Levite, who saw the man beaten by robbers and left for dead on the side of the road, but passed by without helping. It is no coincidence that Jesus made the hero of the parable, the only person to show kindness, a member of a hated racial minority group. 

I grew up in a somewhat rural area of South Carolina. My church and elementary school were about 98% White. My high school was about 55% White and 45% Black, but from the classroom to the cafeteria, it looked nearly segregated. As a teenager, I thought everyone just chose to hang out with people who were like them. I didn’t think any sort of inequity was at play. 

I took a community health course my senior year of college. I remember my professor sharing that infant mortality is more than twice as high for Black babies than White babies. Suddenly, racial inequity wasn’t about who sat where in the cafeteria; it was about the lives of innocent babies, made in the image of God. A new gravity sunk in. 

After college, I taught high school for a few years in a wonderful school that happened to be in an immigrant hub. I taught students from Latin America, Eastern Europe, East Africa, India, Asia, and the Middle East. A few of my students were refugees, and a few others had come to the United States as unaccompanied minors. Many of my students practiced Islam. I still hold these relationships dearly. I was honored that a few of them felt safe enough to share their stories with me. I saw with fresh eyes how discrimination, xenophobia, and Islamophobia hurt people I cared about.

In the summer of 2015, I worked at a camp in Wyoming for low-income students. I was there when the news broke that Dylann Roof had murdered nine Black people at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston. I’m from South Carolina. Every student in the program was Black or Latino. There was a lot to process. At camp, I was one of very few Christians. I kept thinking, “Where are the other Christians? Why haven’t I heard Christians praying for racial justice my entire life?”

It didn’t happen all at once, but God humbled me. He showed me that my proximity to suffering is a gift (Matthew 5:3-4), and that I am not God and cannot answer every hard question (Isaiah 55:9).  He also taught me that following Him meant fighting the temptation to be apathetic towards injustice (1 John 3:17, James 2:14). 

Learning about Black infant mortality, teaching immigrant children, processing the Mother Emanuel shooting - these were my “man on the side of the road moments.” These are the experiences God put in my path that forced me to reckon with how the realities of racial and social injustice should impact my faith and daily life. 

I don’t know why the Priest and the Levite passed by. Maybe helping him would have been too uncomfortable, too expensive, or too socially compromising. I have to ask myself, what is God calling me to do for the sake of justice that might cost my comfort, finances, or social position? Far too often, I’m still like the Priest and the Levite. But God, in his mercy, is making me more aware, more compassionate, and more eager to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with him (Micah 6:8).

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Emmy Clarke came to Trinity Park in 2019.