WASHINGTON, D.C., USA — Berset-Harris: Most things we hear [are] negative these days but your focus is always finding the positive in everything, what is 'the third option'? Let's start there.
McPherson: You know in our culture we live in an us vs. them culture. If you watch television you're always forced to pick a side even every discussion about race and every discussion about the division, 'what side are you on? Are you black, white, hispanic? Against the police, for the police?' 'The third option' is that we honor what we have in common. That all the people in the world have more in common than different. I was in a prison ministry and this white supremacist walked by me and I called him over and we were face-to-face and what we didn't realize is that we were 99.5% genetically the same and so if you look at all the people in the world, were about 99.5% genetically identical. We all want to sleep. We all want to enjoy food, our family, understand our purpose in life and if we were to focus on and identify the things that we have in common we'd be able to honor one another and honor those things and move past the differences that we have.
Berset-Harris: You're multi-racial, you're black, white and Chinese, right?. What was that ubringing like and trying to figure out where you belong?
Miles McPherson on Great Day Washington
McPherson: Yeah, all my grandparents are from Jamaica. I have a white grandmother, a half Chinese-black grandmother...I grew up in a black neighborhood, got harassed cause I wasn't black enough and then went to a school in a white neighborhood and got harassed cause I was black and so I had that experience on both sides of the track. But my football teams I played on, we were diverse but we always got along. We had a common goal and a common enemy. Now the church I pastor is 20,000+ people and dozens and dozens of nationalities and for the most part we get along. We worship God every Sunday. We serve the community every Sunday. We do about 5 million dollars of volunteer service. So, I wrote this book to give them tools on how to take that message out to a broader community because I see it work everyday. What we have to do is remove the labels we use for people. You know, the greatest commandment is to love God with your heart, mind and soul and the second is like it, to love your neighbor as yourself. So, I am commanded to love you as I do myself as long as you're my neighbor. But, if I rename you something less than neighbor I give myself permission not to love you. So in our culture we've given people labels that dehumanize them whether they're white, black, hispanic, immigrants, illegals, we give them these labels, we dehumanize them, we give [ourselves] permission to mistreat them or allow them to be mistreated. So, we have to rename people, acknowledge people's color. I know its fashionable to say you don't see color but we do and we should honor it. You know when people get a tan they want to show it off and celebrate it, but when a person gets a tan in the womb we want to invalidate it. Well you know, brown is brown and all of us are different shades of brown. So, the book is designed to give people tools on how to bring honor into every relationship you have.
