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Chick-fil-A CEO says most whites 'oblivious' to racism, must repent for it

June 19, 2020

Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy spoke out about racism, recently, imploring "white Christians" to repent for racism and fight for their black "brothers and sisters," according to the Christian Post, which first covered the story.

Cathy's comments came in a recorded discussion on race in America that has already caught another one of conversation's participants, Atlanta's Passion City Church Pastor Louie Giglio, in the eye of a firestorm of condemnation for remarks he made that appeared initially to refer to slavery in positive terms, as NBC recently reported. 

Cathy, Giglio and and Christian rapper, Lecrae, participated in the roundtable together on June 14 in Atlanta. Two days earlier, the city -- which is also very near Chick-fil-A's headquarters -- was the scene of the shooting death of a black man, Rayshard Brooks, at the hands of white police officers there. That shooting death came just three weeks after the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis on May 25 and other similar acts of death and violence on blacks at the hands of law enforcement in recent months. 

"Most of us, white people, we're out-of-sight-out-of-mind oblivious to it," Cathy said about injustice against black Americans, according to Fox News. "We cannot let this moment pass. …"

"I think we have to recognize we are in a very special moment right now that the answer is not just for this to go off the radar screen, go back to talking about COVID-19, to talk about world peace, the environment, … politics is going to be coming up here this fall," Cathy said as quoted by The Christian Post, adding,  I believe if we miss this moment we would have failed in our generation." 

Lecrae brought the very real firsthand account of a black individual growing up in the U.S. to the conversation. 

"The first time a gun was pulled on me by a police officer I was 13 years old," Lecrae said. "And I was unarmed. I was pushed on the ground. I had a knee in my back but this was just my reality. At 14 years old, because I was caught skipping school I was put on a gang list. I didn't know what was going on. My mother had to go to the police station to explain to them, 'just because he's skipping school does not mean he's out participating in gang activity.'" 

In the same conversation, Lecrae recounted how he has been repeatedly stopped by police while driving without any apparent cause for the traffic stop, which law enforcement officer are required to have evidence that would warrant such an action. He recounted an instance recently when he was pulled over by police as he drove a rental car. 

He said officers pulled the seats out of the rental vehicle to search for drugs, even though Lecrae told the roundtable participants that "no dog's alerted, there's drugs here." 

Cathy responded that Lecrae's experience was one that he could simply not imagine the "emotional indignity" of and another example of the reasons white Americans need to become more involved in the issue at every level, saying that whites have failed to talk to blacks enough about racism in their lives. 

He said that he has recently had in-depth conversations with black staffers at Chick-fil-A to learn about the similar challenges they face in the corporate setting. 

"This is ... about the grind of that kind of indignity and other expressions of it. … Even in an environment like Chick-fil-A. That's where, that's what's put so much edge about the situation.

He added that an act of contrition -- which is part of the process of confessing sins in many Christian denominations -- was necessary for whites "before we start to jump into action."

"We've got to have a sense of empathy of what led to this. This is the tip of the iceberg of incredible amounts of frustration and pain that the whole spectrum of the African American community, that somewhere or another that can quickly illustrate Lecrae, just as you did, that most of us white people are just simply out of sight out of mind. We're oblivious to it. We cannot let this moment pass."