The coming race wars?

I originally hadn’t planned on writing about the goings-on in Ferguson, Mo. — I really hadn’t. But one of my Facebook friends made reference yesterday to a “race war” taking place on that social media site and which I’ve personally witnessed. And I think William Pannell has proven to be a prophet.

Who’s he? The African-American author of the 1992 book “The Coming Race Wars? A Cry for Reconciliation,” during which he refers to the history of racism in this country and especially in evangelical Christian circles.

I’m not going to get into the specifics of the book because that would take way too long. I will say, however, that if we don’t deal with the war among ourselves we won’t have the authority to model the kind of reconciliation that Jesus died to provide. I’m not a fearful guy, but if I were that would scare me to death.

The basic facts are beyond dispute: A black man in his late teens took six bullets from a policeman, causing unrest in that community — and the local police, complete with military hardware coming from the Department of Homeland Security, rolled in. In such an atmosphere that’s asking for trouble, especially given history of African-Americans’ longstanding, even historical, beef with police.

Beyond all that, the incident has exposed yet another instance of a power imbalance between black and white, in this case in that suburb of St. Louis, with two-thirds of the citizenry being African-American but virtually all the political power in the hands of whites — not to mention the police force being virtually all-white and armed to the teeth.

Let me say something that may anger or insult some of you but needs to be addressed: If you’re getting most of your information from the Fox News Channel or conservative blogs, you’re part of the problem. Such media have always played into the narrative that, among other things, poor blacks are violent, drug-addicted miscreants who don’t want to work and thus slant their stories that way for the sake of ratings. They especially are culpable in this ongoing conflict.

And as for the accusations that the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton came in to “stir up racial strife,” give me a break. They don’t go anywhere without being invited, if you hadn’t heard, because people listen to them to determine what it can do to cause change. (Perhaps that’s a threat, especially considering that they’re independent operators. Keep in mind that, two generations ago, the same charge was leveled against Martin Luther King Jr.)

The Rev. R. Loren Sanford, a white Pentecostal pastor in Colorado Springs, wrote last year on charismanews.com in response to the George Zimmerman trial that he had previously prophesied increasing racial strife, which he attributed directly to white Christians not being willing to listen to their African-American brothers and sisters in the LORD. Based on what I’ve seen over the past couple of weeks, he was absolutely on the one. I know what some people are already thinking: “Why can’t they just …?” But if you understand that history, it’s not all that simple.

I had hoped that Pannell was wrong in his bleak assessment of the state of evangelicalism when it came to race relations, but as Malcolm X said on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, because we live in what he considered a violent society, “The chickens are coming home to roost.” Maybe this is the wake-up call we need to start rethinking our relationships with people of color — maybe.