Beginnings are such tender things ...

It seems to be a principle of starting a new thing that you have to be willing to suck at it. Anything worth doing is worth doing badly in the beginning. So far, this has applied to roller-skating, dancing, golf, parenting, partnering, and the Guitar/Dissertation.

Yes. Guitar/Dissertation.

See, I was a little nervous about starting to write something that's supposed to end up around 300 (bazillion) pages. So I decided to start learning to play the guitar at the same time. That way, when I got tired of sucking at the dissertation, I could go suck at guitar.

(This is sort of like the year I learned Greek and Hebrew. At the same time. Two new alphabets, two foreign languages, one year, and a whole lotta flash cards. Kept me out of trouble.)

The Guitar/Dissertation ruse worked. Sort of like the penguin in Happy Feet that tricks himself into falling off the cliff that his buddies have just slalomed down. (Yes, I was annoyed that the movie used Robin Williams for a Latino pinguino; why not just use a Latino actor, as appears to be the case for the other pinguinos? At least the Latino pinguinos were the coolest, as opposed to the Spanish-accented villains that Disney usually puts up ....) Somewhere between the D and G7 chords, suddenly I was Writing the Dissertation, and I didn't even mind that it wasn't my best writing. It was a whole lot better than my guitar playing.

Trying to be a white anti-racist is a lot the same ... you have to be willing to do it badly because you just so much want to be doing it and being it at all, and you are going to be bad at it, especially in the beginning. (But that's okay, because perfectionism is one of the things that you get to pitch along the way ... and that's helpful in all kinds of ways.)

Even when you have been at it for awhile, there are still so many times you are not sure what to be, or say, or do ... and for that, we have another saying: "Feel the fear and do it anyway." That's not a license to be stupid, or uncaring: it's what you say when commitment runs up against ambiguity; while the outcome may not be clear, the community's calling to you is.

So, if you are teetering on the edge of the cliff of trying to do something about racism, here are some ways to trick yourself into beginning. Study your ethnicity's history. Read up on and really look at the geography and politics of the place you came from, and where you are now. Try to see who benefits from your decisions and your spending; then look at what people groups benefit from your community's/state's/federal government's decisions and spending. Listen to the leadership of communities of color (you can start by Googling MALDEF and NAACP and American Indian Heritage Foundation). See what's happening locally. Look and listen for a couple of years, and see what you think then.

Oh, and don't forget to pray. Ask God if there's something it would be good for you to see, know, be, understand ... the surprise will come.

Remember. It's not like you have to be good at it to start. We are not asked to be perfectionists; we are asked to be lovers.