Berkley Center

Bryson White: ... as a kid, I didn't really think about race at all, even though, probably, everybody did when they looked at me because as a kid, you're looking out, I'm not looking in the mirror. I am me and this is who I have always been. But then people make comments and you realize, "Oh, they see me as the Black guy in the group," or something. Even though in my mind it's like, I'm not the Black guy. I don't feel different in that way, but because of the social dynamic, right?

Taylor Dalton: No, that's real, man. That situatedness really matters. I started kindergarten when I was four, we were playing in the sandbox and we're playing space and astronauts. And he was like, "You can't be an astronaut because you're Black." And I was like, "Why not?" And so that was my very first experience of being racialized as other. There's a whole host of those other experiences over the years, but that's a trip that both me and him, and as a young child, that he had ingested those logics, you know what I'm saying? And that he, in a sense, even though he was victimizing me in that moment, he too is a victim of white supremacy and racial thinking.

Bryson White: It's hard to untangle the mess of all the influences. There's so many different overlapping pieces of it. In recent years, I really wrestled with how could both people who are Christian and call themselves Christians and are all American, but have these really different views of how to treat each other because of color of the skin or background or culture. If you watch the video of George Floyd being murdered by the State and a church can't talk about that because it's too racial, then that really was a signal to me like, "What's going on here? There's something else that's deeply at issue."

And at least some of the churches, particularly the evangelical churches, that has been a struggle the last few years, to talk to other people who maybe don't want to talk about some of those racial issues, even though that it seems like a perfect fit with the gospel to care for one another and lift each other up, care for the weak. And that compassion seems to be lacking in some areas. And that's where I see hope is hopefully the kids, we can instill some compassion in them and to care for one another and take care of one another rightly.

Someone falls, you help them up. So hopefully we can give them the tools they can use to make the world better.

Taylor Dalton: Yeah, that's right.