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Jim Wallis
Eight minutes and forty-six seconds is a long time. It is enough time to stop, take some deep breaths, feel your body, to pray if you choose, think, reflect, and ask what you’ve been missing. That’s what many are learning as we take a knee for nearly 9 minutes at protests and vigils around the country in response to the killing of George Floyd.
Perhaps because a pandemic has closed down our nation and we were all watching, millions of white people now see what they have missed because of their resistance to stop and learn the meaning and consequences of 401 years of the racism and slavery that founded the United States of America. Now we are beginning to understand more fully the consequences of America’s original sin of racism, and how it still lethally lingers today. The call: The transformation of the United States. Will we heed that call or not?
To use biblical language, many of us are seeing this as kairos time, or “a propitious moment for decision or action,” as opposed to chronos, the regular, chronological, and sequential passing of time. Another definition of kairos calls it a time “when things come to a head.”
How we define things matters. Merriam Webster announced this week that in response to persistent requests from Kennedy Mitchum, a 22-year-old Black woman from Missouri, they will update their definition of racism this month (for the first time in decades) to specifically name systemic oppression.
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