Terror:  Two planes ending 300 lives in fiery collision.  Mass graves filled with the bodies of the innocent.

Terrorist: A man with a box cutter and a one way ticket in his pocket.  A dictator waging war from an underground bunker.

These are the definitions in the minds of my white audience.  As I speak about shalom and quote the commands of Jesus to refrain from anger, love the enemy and even sustain his life, their brows furrow.  Their lens is present tense.  They listen as innocent people terrorized.

But a few days ago, for the first time I can recall, I taught these same lessons to a crowd speckled with brown faces.  Maybe a dozen African-Americans scattered throughout the audience, smiled and nodded as some of their white neighbors winced and grimaced.  Their perspective is more than a little divergent from ours:

Terror: Abduction in the middle of the night by men with with skin a color that’s never been seen.  Separated from family and home and loaded onto a boat bound for who knows where.  Half of your fellow travelers perish in route.  Chained to a plow like an ox in the new land.  Your back shredded by the whip.  Your grand children “freed” by a war and a president to live in a new kind of slavery.  Free to worship God, from a balcony.  Free to get a drink, from your own fountain.  Free to eat, but not with whites.  Free to live, the way the government says you can and as long as the terrorists allow you to.

Terrorist: Any white person with a gun, or a knife, or a rope, or a whip or a cross and matches.  Any police officer with a billy club or an angry dog.  Any governor with state troopers.  Any sheriff with an empty cell.  Any Christian who believes you to be cursed by the Creator.

And if these African American students know their history they remember the choice that was once made between Huey Newton, founder of the Black Panthers, and Martin Luther King, Jr., a preacher from Birmingham. Newton: “Sometimes if you want to get rid of the gun, you have to pick the gun up. “ King: “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”

They remember that their parents’ parents joined King’s army, not Huey’s.  They chose non-violent protest over bloody revolution.  And as insults and stones were thrown they marched.  They marched across the South.  They marched all the way to Washington.  They marched to Martin’s death in Memphis.  They marched peacefully to freedom.

I have a question for the white faces in my audience, dimmed with disapproval: Does the shoe America is kicking her enemies with today fit Martin?  You and I, well, our grandparents and their parents, were the terrorists once.  They stole humans, caged them like animals, denied them the practice of their religions.  They blew up a church and killed three little girls.  They made it legal to rape a dark skinned woman.  They lynched and burned “niggers.” Their politicians and Sunday School teachers hid behind Klan hoods.  And the goal of many whites was to eradicate African Americans or, at the very least, keep them from participating in our government and society.  It’s as if their generation wrote a chapter of the dictator handbook used by our enemies today.

Would you have argued in the sixties that terrorized African-Americans should follow Huey?  Would you have argued for “regime change” and cheered an army of dark faces fighting the U.S. government for “justice, freedom and democracy” with bullets and bombs?  Would you have defended their violent revolution by quoting Just War doctrine?

Is it only godly to “kick @$$” now that we’re the one’s wearing the shoe?  What about when we were the ones so many wanted kicked?

I wondered why the darker faces in the crowd this past weekend smiled instead of wrinkled when I spoke about biblical nonviolence, until I thought about all this.  Could it be that they, surrounded by white friends today who in a world before King would most likely have been their enemies, are constantly reminded of the power of non-violence and love over terror?  Could it be that they know non-violence in the name of Christ is the right choice to make because they’ve made it before?