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I once sat in a workplace meeting to discuss the needs of the at-risk youth we were serving. We were brainstorming best responses to overt violations of the expectations set before the teens as a condition for remaining in the program.

I was young and sheltered and white and, in many ways, blissfully sequestered from the harsh realities too many of these kids experienced. But I was sincere, and I was eager to help if I could. I don’t even remember what I said when it came my turn to speak. It was something to do with the importance of applying consistent consequences for rule violations. What I do remember with crystal clarity is the intensity of Robert’s disdain as he shook his head and rolled his eyes at me as I spoke.

“Of course you would think that with your white porcelain face,” he interjected dismissively. “You have no idea what black folk face.”

I was instantly flooded with shame, and, not yet confident enough in my own skin to push back against his disrespectful approach, I shut right up and slunk down in my chair, embarrassed by what, apparently, was registering as complete and utter ignorance to the rest of the staff. I hadn’t even mentioned anything about skin color. Half of our clients were white. But the subtext wasn’t subtle; Robert was accusing me of privilege, ignorance, and even covert racism. Disagreeing with him would not end well for me. I wasn’t going to win this debate.

Robert himself was a big bold black man whose personal testimony of overcoming drug addiction and life on the streets made him something of the perfect candidate for mentoring the kids we served. They listened to him. He had earned their respect. I had not.

And in retrospect, Robert was not entirely wrong about my opinion. It’s objectively true that my thoughts were not informed by the hard-earned wisdom of experience. I didn’t grow up on the streets. My father was not incarcerated. My mother was not a junkie. I didn’t know what it was like to worry that a bullet had my name on it. I didn’t know what it was like to go hungry. I had not lost any of my siblings to gang violence. And he was right that I didn’t have much of a grasp on the psychological patterns involved in the behaviors I was observing, nor had I done the hard work of humbling myself to learn the language from those who were eager to teach me, so it’s more than possible that my counsel would yield disastrous fruit, if followed.

But Robert was wrong in his approach to me. He weaponized my skin color against me as a silencing convention, and he led with shame as a power-play. He had never so much as spoken one full sentence to me directly, so he had no idea what I did or did not know about life. What he knew is that I was white and young and female, which instantly categorized me as an illegitimate voice in his book. Nothing I had to say was going to compute as valid or helpful, and he made it perfectly clear that it was costing him emotional energy to merely tolerate my presence in the discussion.

It’s been nearly 20 years since this happened, but I’ve thought about it often and the impact that it had on the way I engage my own areas of expertise and the the topics about which I’m passionate.

I have not been shy in expressing my frustration with how much of the church responds to allegations of abuse or stories of trauma, for example. Like Robert, I am sometimes tempted to angrily dismiss a lot of the leaders who trumpet their proposed solutions to problems they clearly do not understand at all. Whether the topic is sexual trauma or abortion or domestic violence, I often want to shout, “Shut up and get out of the way so those of us who actually know what we are talking about can get the work done,” especially when they’re arrogantly peddling “solutions” that will make the problems infinitely worse. (Ahem, abortion abolitionists.)

And there’s a real need for Christians as a whole to pause, wherever we are in our activism, and invite the Holy Spirit to illuminate our blind spots and flood us with enough humility to acknowledge when we’re hoarding the megaphone that would be better served in someone else’s hands.

I think this all the time when I see angry men shouting “Murder!” outside of abortion clinics. A+ for passion, guys, but if you actually want to make a dent in reducing abortion, you need to recognize that you’re the wrong spokespeople. Give the mic to a post-abortive woman who regrets her decision. Give the mic to a woman who survived a crisis pregnancy and is now thriving. Give the mic to someone who actually knows what the struggle is like. The point of speaking, in these contexts, is to persuade those who disagree with you to reconsider their positions. You will not accomplish this by demonizing them with a bull horn.

But once we have the mic in the areas where we are legitimately qualified to speak, I think the way we use it also really matters. Robert’s approach was deeply problematic. It shuts down conversation. It breeds resentment. It stops conversations and inspires people to check out when what’s desperately needed is for them to lean in. Instead of hearing what you have to say, their focus turns to self-protection. Nobody wins this way.

Not only that, but once you set yourself up as the ultimate authority on a topic, then no one else can challenge your blind spots either, and that’s equally unhealthy. Just because you can correctly diagnose a problem doesn’t mean that you alone have the monopoly on solutions.

Expert opinion is a good place to start a conversation, but, definitionally, true conversations must include more than one voice. Expertise should not magically exempt anyone from criticism either. If your position is actually strong, it should be able to withstand some scrutiny. But how often do we see people using their expertise as a silencing convention? I would argue that it happens a whole lot more than it should.

“Trust the science.”

“No uterus, no voice.”

“Are you a biologist?”

Look how manipulative these appeals to authority are beneath the surface. What they actually communicate is, “March in lockstep with the rules someone else decides on your behalf without your consent.”

I’ve also seen this cropping up in abuse survivor communities, where self-appointed advocates essentially assert that anyone who questions them in any capacity is an enemy of women. It’s a pretty ridiculous power grab. (I’ll probably write about this one with more specificity in the future because it’s getting a bit out of hand, but that’s going to have to wait for the moment.)

I guess what I’m saying is that humility is needed on all sides. We need to cultivate the self-awareness to know when we’re out of our lanes. We need to be humble enough to change our minds when presented with new information and humble enough to receive new information from people we might not initially be inclined to hear. But when we ARE in positions of leadership, we should do what we can to cast a wide net and invite, not quash, important dialogue. Granted, there will always be naysayers and antagonists determined to throw tomatoes at our efforts, and once we identify them, we don’t owe them anything but a solid boundary. But generally speaking, if someone shows up to the conversation with sincerity, we should honor that and gently challenge blind spots rather than bashing them over the head with a lecture about how ignorant they are. I have not always done this perfectly. I am working on it on a daily basis. Long term growth only happens through collaboration. Change happens one person at a time. We need patience, humility, and a laser beam focus on the actual goal rather than our own egos.

And in the spirit of this piece, I’m opening up the comments for discussion. Thoughts? Observations? Insights? Concerns? What do you think?

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