Fr. Alex Goussetis: Welcome to Family Matters. My name is Fr. Alex Goussetis, and today I am speaking with Fr. Martie Johnson. Our topic is: the next conversation about racism. Rev. Dr. Martie Johnson is the Chief Operations Officer at the Neighborhood Resilience Project located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is a senior consultant for federal occupational health in the US Department of Health and Human Services and works as an executive coach for the US Department of Homeland Security. He ministers as rector at St. Anthony Antiochian Orthodox Church in Butler, PA. He is also a crisis counselor, suicide prevention and response instructor, and a facilitator for outpatient cognitive intervention. He serves on the board of trustees of St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in South Canaan, Pennsylvania. He is also the Director of Student Life and Formation for the Antiochian House of Studies. Fr. Martin is a former US Navy chaplain, retired. He is married to Khouria Melinda Johnson, who is the Development Officer at Ancient Faith Publishing. Welcome, Fr. Martie.

Fr. Martie Johnson: Hi! Thank you. Great to be here.

Fr. Alex: Last year around this time, I interviewed Fr. Paul Abernathy for a Center for Family Care webinar titled “Explaining Racism to Our Children.” Our ministry team felt it important to follow up that webinar with this conversation with Fr. Martie. The starting point of today’s dialogue is a document recently produced by the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese titled “For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church.” Let me read an excerpt from this document and follow that with Fr. Martie’s perspective and practical application in our daily lives.

We are called [...] not to accommodate ourselves to [...] the world as we find it, but instead ever and again to strive against evil, however invincible it may at times appear, and to work for the love and justice that God requires of his creatures, however impractical that may at times prove. On the path to communion with God, it is humanity’s vocation not merely to accept—but rather to bless, elevate, and transfigure—this world, so that its intrinsic goodness may be revealed even amidst its fallenness. […]

We find the most resplendent examples of Christian social morality, in fact, in the life of the Apostolic Church, which in an age of empire created for itself a new kind of polity, set apart from the hierarchies of human governance and all the social and political violences, chronic and acute, upon which those hierarchies subsist. The earliest Christians were a community committed to a radical life of love, in which all other allegiances—nation, race, class—were replaced by a singular fidelity to Christ’s law of charity. It was a community established in the knowledge that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, nor any division in dignity between man and woman, because all are one (Galatians 3:28).

So, Fr. Martie, what are we as Orthodox Christians living in America to make of this document and the excerpt that I’ve just shared?

Fr. Martie: I think it’s a document that we should all certainly read. It’s not very long, but it is very pointed and substantive. It allows us to take a look at what we’re singing and praying in the liturgy and what it looks like to have an ethos that we would share with the world. Specifically, it goes after—the whole document goes after the idea that we are to bring light even in a dark world, and it goes into how to do that. And the specifics are approaching the theology that we know, which is that the person that came as a slave was Christ, and we are followers of him. So, with that as our allegiance, with that as our belief, and with that as our faith, then we are to turn away from those things in this world that do not represent the belief and teachings of our faith.

And we know a lot about turning away, because we know that repentance means to turn back toward God, so we’re actually asking those around us who both share and not-share our faith to see the turn we make. If we are committed to repentance, then the turning that we are doing is toward Christ and away from those things that do not build up another human being. Why? Because every human being is the image and likeness of God. We should see that first. We should share that very piece of knowledge with everyone we walk with in this world and say if you want to turn from the things that the world tells you, it’s not just about the turn, it’s about the turn toward. If you will, I think this ethos, the social ethos doctrines and the flesh-out that’s made of this document is saying: it’s one thing to simply turn; it’s another to turn toward Christ. And that’s why it’s referencing our very apostolic beginning. That’s why it’s referencing the Scriptures we know well, because we do have a place, not just to turn, but we have Christ to turn to. So that’s the best way I see the document, and putting that in a way that says: this is the practical way of taking the liturgy that you celebrated to become a liturgy that you share with your life in the world.

Fr. Alex: So it’s really grounded in the faith, tradition, and Scripture that we abide by.

Fr. Martie: Yes.

Fr. Alex: So, Father, when talking about racism, there’s so many perspectives to consider. Americans, Black or white, may have a different view of racism compared to peoples in Africa, for example. So how would you compare the similarities and differences?

Fr. Martie: Sure. North America is a very interesting place, because it has the indigenous people, the First People, if you will, the Native Americans; then it has all those folks that came from various parts of the rest of the world, Europe and Asia, that also came as immigrants or otherwise; and then there’s the Black American today which in history came in chains. So I want to start with… It kind of does go to how you got here. So as a Black American, there’s a legacy of being brought as the servant class, which is not to say the only one, because many other immigrants came and were certainly at the bottom of society, whatever it looked like in the United States before it was the United States we say today.

So I want to make sure that, in a conversation about race that is certainly heightened today and certainly we’re looking at treatment of Black Americans in a very direct way, I do not want to miss the fact that this whole country is made up of immigrants, and while it’s true that Black Americans came in chains and were trashed and still had systematic and institutional things done and are continuing, I also don’t want to miss that just two or three weeks ago in 2021 there were Asians killed in Atlanta based on the “Chinese virus.” We can’t—we cannot dismiss the fact that there is, if you will, an ethos of some groups in this country that say, “We are the American, and someone that doesn’t look like what we are is not.” So even in a conversation about racism, we just saw Asians also be picked out, profiled, and injured.

But to speak to racism in the US today, I think Black Americans are still experiencing what I want to say is not just the legacy of looking away and looking to block the American experience from a group of people, but also to say that there is some kind of—it appears, anyway—some kind of… Let’s put it this way: some kind of ideas that speak to the true colors of every human being in this country. What I want to say is the last year we’ve seen some horrific actions with men and women in custody who were Black Americans. Let’s speak right to it. And in those instances, we saw the agents of the institution—police or whoever—and we saw the courts and other things arrive, if you will, at the scene only to do things that Black Americans knew well, which is to see things that both appear unjust and indeed in a number of rulings in the last year were unjust.

So it’s important for us to look at what this racism is for what it is, and I want to say it this way. Often when human beings, when we have to interact with one another, we do compete, and if you think about what slavery is and the aftermath of slavery, it is one set of people saying, “I’m going to put another set of people to work for me”—you can be a person; you can be a country—and to do that, you’ve got to look at somebody differently. You’ve got to say, “Those people are not in the image and likeness of God. Those people are not persons. Those people are not humans. Those people may have injured us and we’re going to get them.”

So racism has at its center the reality that says that I am better than you and I’m going to make sure it is that way and it stays that way. So I think the United States is once again looking at an underbelly, if you will, where these scenes of the last year have shown—revealed; it’s better to say revealed: most of the time racism has to be revealed. You’ll hear the phrase “hey, that person finally showed their true colors.” No, that’s not it at all. What happened is a scenario presented and an interaction which had to come together, and in that interaction something was revealed about how one person views another, and I’ve always said that true colors are revealed; they’re rarely shown.

Nobody’s a racist until someone comes to the door. Who would say, “Hi, we’re here to have a conversation. Will all racists raise their hand?” While it is certainly true that there are some that would say, “Yes, I am,” by and large most people are not going to say, “Yes, that’s on my resume.” However, when there’s a scenario or an instance or a competition for something, then you’ll see—in my mind—things that can be revealed about our very human nature, and I think the Church can speak to that.

Fr. Alex: At the same time, a Black person in America will see racism different than a black person in Africa, for example.

Fr. Martie: Yes, that is true. So the United States has a very different history. One way to think about that is in the Civil War between the North and the South, it was a war about a lot of things—the economy, certainly slavery was part of it—but we have to also look at the fact that both when the war began and when the war ended, the only people that had a seat at the table were white. So even a war that was between the states was at least 50% about slavery if not more, the beginning and the end was white people deciding how it’s going to start and how it’s going to end.

If you look overseas at Africa, it’s very different, because if you look at Africa, in a number of countries, they still had the yoke of colonialism until the ‘60s and ‘70s, ‘50s and ‘60s really. So they, in my view, and I’ve been to Africa a couple times… It’s very different because there Africans are the majority of the people, whereas in the US, no: the United States, Black Americans make up less than 15% of US population. So, for lack of a better way to say it, you can marginalize a group that’s not even 25% pretty easily. You can’t get away with that in countries where the dominant 90% are black Africans. In some ways, you’re on borrowed time, as I think South Africa opens the door for us to see. It was 300 and 400 years certainly true that South Africa was under domination of Europe, but you don’t have to watch the movie Gandhi or the movie—I can’t remember the other one, with Nelson Mandela—they were fantastic movies about the nature of racism and what Europeans did to create classes, whether they were Indians, which is Gandhi, which is an excellent text about how they were brown, too, and immigrants, and how even below that were the actual Africans of South Africa. So it is very different when being black and being an African means you’re the dominant body of people. I think there’s a lot for us to learn there; there’s a lot for us to learn even though we’re less than 15% in the United States.

Fr. Alex: Our conversation began with an apostolic viewpoint, historical. Let’s look at more recent times to influential people in the field of racial dialogue in the 20th century, with Martin Luther King and Bishop Desmond Tutu, among many. What can we learn today from their leadership and message as it relates to racial dialogue today?

Fr. Martie: It’s fantastic. I think I’ve always enjoyed both of the documents that they’ve produced, great texts. There’s nothing like reading “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” I think that should be mandatory. Martin Luther King really penned some universal truths from the faith, and I think Desmond Tutu did the same as an archbishop. I think he really had an incredible conversation about forgiveness, because I think if you put them both together, they both are making a call, both to humanity and to the Black community. I think Desmond Tutu had a major call to the Black community which in my mind may have been one of the hardest calls you can make, which is: How are we going to move forward if we cannot forgive the Europeans that did this? That’s something… It’s hard for me to say it. I don’t know how he did it. I don’t know how that country moved from that kind of just classism, injury, pain, deaths, terrorists, terrorism, to a movement from the minority group losing power and the majority group getting power without massive bloodshed. I’m still shocked by that.

On the other hand, with Martin Luther King, I think fantastic what he did in terms of my own country in the United States, which is to say there is nothing more powerful than non-violent resistance. You’re going to have to turn those hoses on; you’re going to have to let those dogs go, to a bunch of people saying, “We just want to be able to feed ourselves. We just want to be able to go down a road without being molested or attacked. We just want to have access to everything that everyone in this country has.” So when Martin Luther King is talking about “we are a people and we are human,” then whoever is going to attack or assail a body of people that I am among, the Black Americans here, you’re going to have to be pretty deliberate about saying that these people deserve this treatment because they are not human.

So I think in both cases, Martin Luther King revealed for us what some of us believe about other human beings; Desmond Tutu revealed for us that no matter who you are, perpetrator or victim, you’re going to have to find a way to move forward in a situation that was absolutely horrible. I think both of them, both speak to each other and speak to the world even as they were saying things differently, and they were certainly in very different contexts.

Fr. Alex: So as a Black American and as an Orthodox Christian, let’s compare those messages at that time with the messages of Malcolm X, Black Panthers, a more militant perspective, to this day. How do you reconcile or understand those contrasting messages?

Fr. Martie: Sure. There’s… The reality is that if the legacy of love and forgiveness can help us move forward, there’s an equal amount of pain, injury, and, if you will, the seeking of retribution. We have to know ourselves. We have the capacity to love and we have the capacity to kill and to injure. So for those in the Black community who also said, “Our voices need to be heard in the United States for our treatment, and we can’t negotiate, we can’t work forward with the majority culture who continues to injure us, hurt us, and remove us from society,” I think it’s important that their voices were there and heard, but as an Orthodox priest and as a Christian myself, while I certainly want the voice and I want that to be representative of many of the voices of the Black American community, I’m not sure that it drives us to the more perfect union that this country is founded upon, firstly; and, secondly, to what happens after you found a way to forgive those who hurt you mightily and how the same must be true for them. Even saying that, that’s difficult, because there was murder; there were laws that murdered my people. There were all sorts of things that the first response is anger and hurt, and we will avenge this.

And it’s like anything else. A people can be traumatized, and a people can be in stages of grief. I think Desmond Tutu kind of figured that out. And everyone wasn’t on board: it’s like anything else. Jesus did a lot of miracles; only some followed him. So I think that to have a message for the Black community is to stand in this faith that we have and look for ways not to have the faith hold our tongue, but have it be shaped by one that says, “What is the best and loving thing I can do, even to the person that has injured me?” I’m not going to sit here and say that the voices of those who would be militant should be silenced; I will say that that’s not exactly turning the other cheek. And Martin Luther King reminds us that non-violence achieved more than any revolution in that respect, and, if you will, Archbishop Desmond Tutu also runs a commission which was also non-violent, and turned a country.

So we have models that say that, and, if you will, we have Jesus Christ of course. He will turn a centurion, and he will take a thief next to him with a cross to paradise that same day. So we can be turned with non-violence and the truth. And again, that’s difficult to say with the amount of injury and with what we see in the last few years.

Fr. Alex: So, Father, the focus of this podcast series is to serve marriages and families in the faith. What should families be discussing at home as it relates to race?

Fr. Martie: I think—and this is such a great question, because… I think that one of the things we all need to talk about in the family is where we come from and that we’re part of the human race and we’re all on earth. Here’s what I mean. I mean that we do have to have conversations about the fact that at high school or in college or wherever we are, it’s easy to be in the groups that we already have affinity with, but we do have to ask our self: Have we or would we befriend the person that’s in our class or in the cafeteria that we normally would not, or where there isn’t a context? A lot of times—listen, I have lots of friends who are Black and white, and it’s amazing. My white friends are fun, because they’re like: “Listen, I was never around anyone Black.” I’m like: “Right. I get it. I totally get that.” Well, right.

So what I would say there is that in the family, I think the conversation is about, well, I bet there’s all sorts of people in your school, and I’ll bet they’re in the same kind of clubs that you’re in, or I’ll bet that where you go here and there, there are people who don’t look like you and don’t eat the same things you are [eating]. Are you curious enough to find out who they are versus whom you already know and whom you know we already are?

Secondly, I think it’s important to have conversation about our own families. I would have to talk about the fact that, you know… I told my daughter my mother explained to us… She was born in the ‘40s, so explained to us: You’re only one generation from a “Colored Only” sign. Okay, that was an important conversation, because she was reminding us that my brother and I were born in the ‘60s. She’s like: “Do you understand when you were born? When I was around at your age, there really were signs, and I went to the side to get in the skating rink.” And she was reminding us that in time, I was born when the signs were going down. Okay, that gave me a huge context for both who I am, what my parents may have experienced—I wasn’t there—but to give me a sense of that. And I think that’s important for every community, everyone in this country. It is important to honor every immigrant that came here, to honor every family that has survived, every family that’s found a way, and to say, “This is what we’re about,” but it certainly didn’t include stepping on someone else to do it. It didn’t include injuring or getting there in ways that put someone else at risk or denied them something that we were trying to access. I think that’s a real conversation that families should have, because it opens the door for all sorts of things going on in our individual lives and gives it space to be expressed.

Fr. Alex: We’ve been blessed today to be speaking with Fr. Martie Johnson. Our topic has been the next conversation about racism. Our purpose today was not to arrive at any conclusions or any resolutions, but simply to continue the conversation, and, God willing, we’re going to have another conversation with Fr. Martie and with others so that we can continue having this conversation and keep moving this forward, so that we can come to a place of mutual respect and understanding, so that we can move beyond so much of the pain that we’ve experienced over this past year and of course prior to that.

So, Fr. Martie, thank you so much for your wisdom, your faithfulness and willingness to share of your story and your experience of faith and racism.

Fr. Martie: God bless you. Thank you very much, Father. I appreciate it.