One of My Greatest Lessons in Race Relations

The summer after my freshman year in college, I had a job working on the night crew of a Shop-Rite supermarket. This was in the days before grocery stores were open 24/7. I and a half-dozen other guys, most of us college-aged, would clock in at 10 p.m. and perform a variety of assignments before leaving work at 7 the following morning.

 

Our night crew manager was a fellow named Joe. Instead of spending most of his time in the manager’s offices, as bosses on the day shift typically did, Joe would alternate working alongside each of us on the night crew. He’d help one guy in stocking the shelves and organizing his assigned aisle one night, and the next he’d work with me or one of the other guys. 

 

No matter what the job was – unloading new product off the trucks, “facing” the shelves to make them presentable to shoppers the next morning, even sweeping and mopping the floor – Joe would be right there, working with us instead of retreating to the office eating snack cakes and listening to the radio, as other managers preferred to do.

Did I mention that Joe was black? (The term, African-American, wasn’t commonly used back then.)

 

One evening Joe was working with me in my aisle, opening boxes of canned goods I’d brought on a cart from the back room, pricing and putting them on the shelves right along with me. Out of curiosity, I asked why he spent much of each evening working with us – mere grocery clerks – rather than giving us our orders for the night and then just relaxing, acting “managerial.”

 

Joe’s answer was profound. He replied, “I’m never going to ask anyone to do anything that I wouldn’t be willing to do.” I don’t recall asking for further explanation, but his actions demonstrated he wasn’t just offering a platitude. Joe meant what he said.

 

I’ve never forgotten that, and in fact have strived to live up to that philosophy myself, never regarding any job that needed to be done as one that was beneath me. But that brief exchange involved more than the expression of a work ethic. 

 

Joe indirectly was also teaching that we were equals. He didn’t treat anyone on the night crew as someone of lesser standing – and the subject of race never came up. We were fellow employees of Shop-Rite, and he saw his role as one of helping each of us to do the best job we possibly could. To my recollection, I never thought of Joe as “that black guy I work for.” To me, he was a role model, a man I greatly admired.

 

I wish I’d bothered to question him further about his willingness to do everything and anything he asked others to do – whether it was a perspective someone else had taught him, a spiritual conviction or something else. But in the Scriptures we find this principle of equality clearly expressed. Speaking of everyone who belongs to the body of Jesus Christ, Galatians 3:28 states, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

 

Over the years the Lord has brought a number of African-American men into my life whose friendship I have valued greatly. Forces in our society seem intent on dividing us, concentrating on external racial differences rather than the commonality we share as fellow strugglers in this epic drama called life. I’ve found that if we invest the time and energy to get to know one another, we’ll discover that skin color – the melanin or lack of it – isn’t nearly as significant as we’re led to believe.

 

We do have a tendency to judge by externals – how people dress, the kinds of cars they drive, the houses they live in, the job titles they hold, and the hues of their skin. But as followers of Christ, we’re called to disregard such differences. 

 

When the Lord was leading the prophet Samuel to identify a man to succeed Saul as king of the Israelites, He dismissed several sons of Jesse who would have passed the “look test.” Instead, God waited for David, a lowly shepherd boy, to arrive and become His anointed. “But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not consider his appearance or his height…. The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). 

The answers to racial tensions that have existed throughout human history and likely will continue into the future, ultimately are not found in government or legislation or a reinterpretation of history. It’s in putting in the necessary time and effort to truly get to know one another, learning to do as God does – not looking at the outward appearance, but looking at the heart.