I felt my skin
Have you ever felt your own skin? I don’t mean touching your arm or hand. I mean, have you ever been aware of your own skin?
In 1895, the first black professional baseball player, John “Bud” Foster, wrote about the discrimination he faced at not being able to join a team because he was Black.
“If I had not been quite so Black, I might have caught on as a Spaniard or something of that kind. The race prejudice is so strong that my Black skin barred me. My skin is against me.”
I remember the first time I felt my skin. I was sitting in a soccer stadium in Gaborone, Botswana, with two other white people surrounded by thousands of Africans. For the first time in my life, I was conscience that I was white and I was in the minority.
Throughout my time living in Botswana in the early 1980s, I made countless trips across the border to South Africa, which was in the grip of apartheid, a system of legalized racial segregation. The term comes from the Afrikaans word apartheid, which means "separateness."
For a kid from North Missouri who had never witnessed that level of discrimination, it was jarring to see signs reading “Whites Only.”
Jack MacGorman taught New Testament and Greek at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for 50 years and was one of the nicest gentlemen I’ve ever met.
Writing about 1 Corinthians 9:22, MacGorman insists Paul’s willingness to “become all things to all people” is not a compromise of the Gospel or your own identity.
"To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some." – 1 Corinthians 9:22
However, “It costs to do this,” MacGorman wrote, “for there is security in cultural rigidity. It has all the time-honored traditions, all the familiar structures. There is a minimum of risk-taking or surprise if one never moves far from his cultural base. A problem arises, however, when men equate their cultural rigidity with orthodoxy.”
As we reflect on the life of Martin Luther King Jr. today, take a moment and feel your skin. Think about how your skin determines so much of your life and cultural identity. Now, ask yourself what it might be like to be in someone else’s skin.
Scott Collins is retiring senior vice president of communications for Buckner International. He retires Jan. 31 after 30 years of service.
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