It was with some level of unsettledness that I approached our staff’s social justice pilgrimage to Montgomery, Alabama. 

The feeling was something like when the doctor comes out to the waiting room and asks in a somber tone to speak with you. You know you must face the news, whatever it is, as it is, but some part of you wants to stay (for the moment) comfortably ignorant. In this case, what you don’t know can kill you, so you steel yourself, rise, and go back with the doctor.

There was something else going on in me, too — something I didn’t recognize until after walking through the Legacy Museum, an immersive history of slavery in America. I realized some part of me had been bracing to be blamed, to be accused, to be shamed and even punished. 

It’s one thing to face a diagnosis with a doctor who’s focused on healing. It’s another thing to face a doctor who’s determined to make you feel the full degree to which the diagnosis is your fault. I never met that second doctor. Indeed, I met the first doctor, who, without mentioning it, exposed the defensive, self-centered posture of this middle-aged suburban white guy.

Our gracious pilgrimage guide, John Williams from the Center for Restorative Justice, prepared us ahead of time for the possibility of white shame and guilt. We might be tempted, he cautioned, to focus on ourselves, to seek absolution and comfort rather than to sit with the sorrow. 

And what I experienced while walking through the Legacy museum and memorials was not an accusatory finger pointed at white people. It was more like a light — a light exposing injustice, a light revealing resilience and resistance, a light on a path toward a different way of being together. 

The point wasn’t: see what people that look like you have done. 

The point was: see and don’t look away; see what was and what is and how you can participate in what can be — righteousness and justice and peace on earth as it is in heaven.

The last hallway of the museum brims with photos of hopeful and shining young black faces. The exit sign reads:

The Legacy Museum is dedicated to creating a society where the children of our children are no longer burdened by the legacy of slavery, no longer presumed dangerous and guilty, no longer haunted by racial inequality.

Reading it, my lingering defensiveness fell away. This journey wasn’t an accusation but an invitation — an invitation to see and, in the words of Isaiah, to ​“learn to do right, seek justice, defend the oppressed.”