Sports commentators remembered fondly former National Football League All-Pro Reggie White, who died in Cornelius, NC on Sunday, as much for his athletic prowess as for the way his Christian faith shaped his manner towards colleagues and friends.
But no obituary about the certain Hall-of-Fame defensive end was complete without mentioning his 1998 address to the Wisconsin Legislature, which many journalists criticized at the time as perpetuating ethnic stereotypes and bashing homosexuals. White played for the Green Bay Packers – almost a religion itself in Wisconsin — and delivered the 45-minute speech two years after his team won the Super Bowl.
White somewhat clumsily painted a portrait of all races, where “black people are very gifted in what we call worship and celebration” and “Hispanics are gifted in family structure” because they can put 20 or 30 people in one home, as a composite that “forms the complete image of God.” But White’s remarks also were a call to political and religious leaders to fulfill their calling, and to promote an attitude of personal responsibility among the youth in their communities.
White and his wife, Sara, started the nonprofit Urban Hope, which trains minorities in entrepreneurship and helps them start businesses. The ministry originated in Green Bay but White also started a chapter in Cornelius, which was an outgrowth of the philosophy he preached publicly: “taking the ministry to the streets.” But he said two years of preaching in Philadelphia, where his NFL career began, had little effect because “we met no needs.”
“We didn’t create jobs,” he said in the Wisconsin speech. “We didn’t help the young girl that was pregnant through her problems.
“I realized really reading in the Bible, that really before Jesus told anybody who He was, He met their needs first.”
After attempting to start Urban Hope in Milwaukee, where White said there were too many “turf issues,” he launched the project in 1998 in smaller Green Bay. The ministry’s first class graduated 13 people, and the two students with the best business plans each received $2,500 grants.
“Our goal for Urban Hope is to teach responsibility, to make people responsible,” White said almost seven years ago. “People in our cities have been given so much free money lately that they’re not toting the responsibility, and the money goes. It’s only temporary. We have to make it lasting. We have to teach responsibility.”
White attributed the problems in cities’ poor black communities to the destruction of their families, where “a majority of young peoples’ fathers are either in jail or dead.”
“One thing I really admire about the Jewish community is that when they give their sons bar mitzvah when they’re at the age of 13, they give their daughters bat mitzvah at the age of 13, they’re celebrating their man and womanhood. Because you’re a man (or woman), you’re going to have to become responsible.
“In our inner city communities we have no situations to when we can celebrate young children’s manhood or womanhood, and because we don’t do that and we haven’t done that…our children are running rampant.”
He said one solution is for parents to educate their children.
“We’re giving our kids over to other people to teach when they need to be taught at home,” he said. “We’re actually giving them over to babysitters. They need to be taught by their mothers and fathers, and if they’re taught by their mothers and fathers, they will respect everyone around them.”
White said greater compassion from successful Americans and their churches are needed for communities where broken homes abound.
“There are many churches that say they don’t know what to do, and I believe that,” he said. “But there are many people that don’t care what happens in these communities. There are many people that would rather incarcerate our children than to educate our children.”
White, an ordained Baptist minister, told Wisconsin lawmakers that the privileged needed to apply their faith, much in the way Biblical heroes cited in Hebrews chapter 11 did.
“If you look at the men and women that were in that chapter, you understand that these people didn’t think or believe that God…was going to do something for them,” he said. “They did what God told them to do.”
White laid the blame for inner-city malaise more at the feet of churches rather than government, saying “there’s more politics in church than even in the government.” He claimed that churches have plenty of resources and should emphasize missions at home rather than overseas.
“I don’t really strongly blame the government for all the problems,” he said. “To be honest with you, I blame the church more than any institution in America for the problems that we’re dealing with today, because there’s too much money running through the church.
“So there has go to be ways that churches have to be forced, in particular wealthy churches, to put monies into the communities of America, and then once we take care of our own then we can take care of other people’s people.”
White not only called upon churches to redirect their financial resources, but he asserted that the nation as a whole needs to adhere to a Biblical morality. He said America will dissolve, much like the Roman empire, if it doesn’t repent from sinful behaviors where fornication and homosexuality are considered socially acceptable.
“Sometimes when people talk about (homosexuality) they’ve been accused of being racist,” White said in Wisconsin. “I’m offended that homosexuals will say that homosexuals deserve rights. Any man in America deserves rights, but homosexuals are trying to compare their plight with the plight of black men or black people.
“Homosexuality is a decision. It’s not a race.”
But White emphasized that he wasn’t singling out homosexuality as more egregious than other sins.
“People from all different ethnic backgrounds are living (the homosexual) lifestyle, but people from all different ethnic backgrounds are also liars and cheaters and malicious and backstabbers.
“We’re in sin, and because this nation is in sin, God will judge it if we don’t get it right.”