Charlottesville

There is not a single pure heart among us, and the most judgemental are perhaps the most tarnished.

The less time we spend loving and enjoying and encouraging others, the less our life is worth living.  The more time we spend criticising and judging and blaming others, the more we corrode our minds and waste our years.

The racist extremists in Charlottesville don't need me to protest against them.  They don't need me to throw rocks at them.  They don't need me to crash my car into their midst to convince them they're on the wrong path.  It wouldn't change their minds.

They do need a better solution than the one they've got.  They need a hope that's real and healthy and noble.  The need to see magnificent life for themselves.

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Extremists are a small fraction of of our population.  For every one such dark mind, there are a hundred or a thousand reasonable folks. So then, do we hide ... or step in? And how might we take advantage of this opportunity?

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One unusual fellow sought out the KKK members and made friends.  They ate dinner together and talked things through.  His friendship lead to two hundred KKK members changing their minds and leaving the organization.  He is Daryl Davis, the famous musician.  And he is black.

"When two enemies are talking, they're not fighting," Davis said.  A Chicago-born Christian, Davis traveled the world in his youth.  After many countries and racially mixed cultures, coming home to America where folks could throw rocks at him because of his color was confusing, to say the least.  It lead to a lifetime of confronting racism.  His surprisingly successful tactic: friendship. 

Not everyone agreed with his tactics.  Davis recounts:  I had one guy from an NAACP branch chew me up one side and down the other, saying, “you know, we've worked hard to get ten steps forward. Here you are sitting down with the enemy having dinner, you're putting us twenty steps back.”

I pull out my robes and hoods and say, “look, this is what I've done to put a dent in racism. I've got robes and hoods hanging in my closet by people who've given up that belief because of my conversations sitting down to dinner. They gave it up. How many robes and hoods have you collected?” And then they shut up.

Davis's father, a senior Foreign Service officer, believed that his son engaged with the Klan because he needed to make sense of their hatred, to seek common ground. He remarked to The Washington Post that his son "has done something that I don't know any other black American, or white American, has done."