A Good Neighbor

As I worked on my piece in response to this bible passage, I thought a lot about not only what it means to love your neighbor, but also how do you recognize who your neighbor is. Having grown up in the deep south as a woman of color, I became used to "self segregation" which I feel is still perpetuated in our society — perhaps even more so now as stereotypes of the "other" are pushed onto us by the media and fear impedes our ability to get to know each other on a meaningful level.

It is easy to love someone who we recognize as our neighbor: someone who looks, thinks, and acts in a manner similar to ours, someone we can relate to and understand. But what about those people who we don't really see as equal to us, or who we see as 'foreign' to us? To take this a step further, I wanted to examine the subtle ways in which we may still treat others as less than our neighbor, even when there is an outward, actionable attempt to do something kind for someone else. To me, the perfect setting to examine this passage is in our present day climate of navigating race relations including micro-aggressions, generational gaps, and deep seated prejudices.

How do we live together when our behavior towards each other is directly linked to a country's dark and complicated history? How do those of us who are "privileged" recognize that privilege, and then use it for good? And, ultimately, how do we begin to make a real effort to meet each other in the middle in order to make things better for everyone?

Through the journey of exploring, and responding to this passage I discovered that the simplest, but most difficult answer to these questions is that the work has to start within us as individuals in order to truly love our neighbors as ourselves.