S2:E18: Jemar Tisby on prophetic imagination
Thursday, January 28, 2021
-------
We’re proud to be sponsored by Delta Wines, whose dedication to fighting climate change is rivaled only by the quality of their delicious wines. Use the code SHELTER to get 10% off your order and support this show.
Thank you for sharing Shelter in Place with your friends! When your friends subscribe using the link below, we'll send YOU a special thanks!
-------
FUTURE HINDSIGHT PROMO
Here at Shelter in Place, we believe that transforming our communities begins with transforming ourselves.
Today I want to tell you about a podcast that is a great companion to Shelter in Place. Future Hindsight aims to spark civic engagement, inspire hope, and reinvigorate our social contract. Their current season examines systemic racism, and recent guests have included Robert P. Jones and Mari Matsuda. I hope you’ll check it out Future Hindsight wherever you listen or find them at futurehindsight.com.
-----
Shelter in Place exists today because our listeners have shared it with others, so we’re trying something new: when you share Shelter in Place using our unique referral like, we’ll give you gifts to show our gratitude. Each month we’ll also recognize our listener of the month, the person who shares Shelter in Place with the most friends. Check out the show notes for more information, and go to https://refer.fm/shelter to get started. Thanks for subscribing, and helping us expand our community!
--------
Laura: This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about coming together in a world that pulls us apart. From Oakland, California to Hamilton, Massachusetts, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.
Jemar: I find it very frustrating that in the face of so much historic and ongoing racism, the response of so many people is to just say, “Let's not talk about it. Let's say the past is the past and move on without ever seriously acknowledging the injury and the harm that is done.” And when you do that, it's a way of weaponizing a virtue--a Christian virtue--of forgiveness against the people who have been victimized by injustice and sin.
Laura: A few years ago, I had drinks with my friend Becky. It was a chilly night, and as we sat down on the outdoor patio, we were both a little nervous. I had asked Becky out for a very specific reason: she’d recently led a talk at our church about systemic racism. Our church has engaged in social justice efforts from the very beginning, and this was Oakland, after all, the birthplace of the Black Panthers, a place where murals of Bay Area hip hop legends graced the walls of parking lots and highway underpasses. But Becky wasn’t just telling our church to fight racism; she was suggesting that we were complicit.
I didn’t know then that my conversation with Becky that night would set me off on a journey that has continued for more than three years.
If you’ve been listening, then you know that the latest chapter of that journey has been my family’s very unexpected migration from California to Massachusetts, set in motion by the California wildfires and a distance learning-induced breakdown of pandemic parenting. That Pandemic Odyssey has been the backdrop of season 2. You are welcome to listen to these episodes out of order--Homer’s Odyssey jumps all over the place, after all--but if you’d like to get the story from the beginning, it begins back in September with the prologue to our Pandemic Odyssey.
Our temporary move has been more about our kids than our culture, and I am endlessly grateful that traveling to family was even an option for us.
But given the content of today’s episode, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that our journey has taken us from one of the most diverse counties in the nation to a place that at last count was 94% white. My Chinese-American father-in-law is part of that remaining 6%.
This New England town where my husband grew up is a nice place. We often leave our car unlocked. Especially in a pandemic when we’re not seeing anyone but family, it would be easy to tell ourselves that this is all there is, that because I don’t see racism in my daily life, it doesn’t exist.
There’s a scene in Homer’s Odyssey where Odysseus has to visit the Land of the Dead, the place where dead souls finally receive justice. He’s not eager to go there, but it’s an important part of his journey. The dead souls can only speak the truth--but before Odysseus can learn anything from them, he has to find the prophet Tiresias. Tiresias doesn’t just show Odysseus his future; he helps Odysseus understand how his past mistakes have produced the danger that is ahead.
The history of racism in this country is full of dead souls waiting for justice. Hearing from those souls can feel a bit like visiting the Land of the Dead. But like Odysseus, we need to hear the hard truths. We need guides who can help us understand why our past mistakes are still shaping our future. I’d like to introduce you to one of those guides today.
Jemar: My name is Jemar Tisby. I am a PhD candidate in history at the University of Mississippi studying race, religion, and social movements. I am the founder and CEO of the Witness, Inc., which is an organization dedicated to black uplift from a Christian perspective.
Laura: Jemar is also a bestselling author, speaker, and the co-host of the podcast Pass the Mic. His first book, The Color of Compromise, was a historical survey about the Christian church’s complicity in racism in the United States. Jemar’s second book just came out this month.
Jemar: It's called How to Fight Racism: Courageous Christianity and the Journey Toward Racial Justice. It came out January 5th, which was the day before the insurrection at the Capitol, and so in many ways it was timely.
Laura: Jemar’s work focuses on racism in the church--but his insights have implications for all of us regardless of our faith tradition. His first book, The Color of Compromise, came out two years ago, but it wasn’t until June of 2020 that it hit the bestseller list. In an interview with his publisher, Jemar said that he had mixed feelings about the success. He said, “knowing what it took to get there and what sparked this renewed interest in the topic of racial justice—the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and on and on—is sobering.”
Jemar’s ambivalence echoes what I’ve heard again and again from Black artists, activists, and thinkers: increased public interest in fighting systemic racism is encouraging--but that it took a litany of murders for us to start talking about it is cause for despair. Like most Black people in America, Jemar has been dealing with racism all his life.
Jemar: Just being a black man in America, I am encountering race every day whether I want to or not.
I can remember in junior high and high school my group of friends was mostly Latino and Black folks. And I remember going to the arcade and getting followed by police officers--not once, not twice, but every single time we went. And it was always baffling to me because number one, what are you going to do at an arcade? It's not like there's stuff to just grab off the shelf or something, but they chose to follow us around, and we kind of had that stigma of threat and suspicion. So I was always aware of that.
Laura: Jemar grew up in Chicago. He went on to college at Notre Dame, a prestigious Catholic university known for its excellent academics. After college he worked for Teach for America, a non-profit that places top notch teachers in low-income communities in an effort to tip the scales of educational inequity. It was Teach for America that brought Jemar to the South, the place he calls home now.
Jemar: This place is transformative. It is key, I think, to understanding the nation as a whole.
Oppression limits our opportunity for imagination. When you are so caught up in the struggle just to survive--just to have equality and equity in life--you don't have the freedom, the opportunity, the privilege even of imagining a different future.
You don't have that luxury really.
So I literally live in cotton country. You can see cotton blooming, and there's no way you can drive by that without thinking about sharecroppers or enslaved people picking cotton by hand. I'm in the site where many of the battles of the Civil War took place. And it's one of the poorest counties in the nation to this day, which is directly related to the economic exploitation of Black laborers throughout our nation's history.
We can certainly go back to race-based chattel slavery, which fundamentally was an economically exploitative labor system that refused to pay laborers in order to enrich enslavers and plantation owners and others who've benefited from the system.
That was never compensated when it would have been easy to do so in 1866 immediately after the Civil War. It was never addressed; that idea of 40 acres and a mule (General Sherman's field order number 15) was extended and then quickly rescinded. And the land went back to Confederates and former slave owners, and they devised a new system of economic exploitation called sharecropping.
Laura: A couple of quick definitions here: chattel slavery is when one person becomes the legal property of another. Sharecropping was the practice of renting small plots of land from a landowner in return for a portion of that crop. Order number 15 and the forty acres and a mule that Jemar mentioned were General William T. Sherman’s attempt at reparations. It was a chance for former slaves to finally be able to work their own land and be economically independent.
I don’t want to rush past this part of the story: there was a moment in history when things could have gone very differently, when healing and restoration might have been possible--but instead greed took over. In 1865, as one of the first acts of Reconstruction, President Andrew Johnson ordered that all land under federal control be returned to its previous owners.
Growing up, my history books came down hard on slavery--but it was always presented as a thing of the past. Only in recent years have I began to understand fully that the wrongs of the past were never actually righted--even though they could have been.
Without realizing it, I had equated abolishing slavery with abolishing racism.
But Jemar says that slavery is only the beginning.
Jemar: This is not just about race-based chattel slavery. Many unions excluded black people from membership in the early part of the 20th century so they couldn't be part of organizing for better pay or working conditions. The New Deal excluded two categories of workers at the behest of Southern lawmakers: agricultural workers (sharecroppers, who were predominantly Black) and domestic workers (the help, if you will, which were predominantly Black). You can move forward to the GI bill, where even though they had served their country in a war, Black people, were often denied benefits like loans for home mortgages and college tuition scholarships, and that meant they did not have access to the middle class as it was being built in the mid 20th century. You carry that forward to a place like where I'm in, in the Delta; 41% of people in my town live below the poverty line. The town is 75% black. Now we see this enormous racial wealth gap between the median Black household and the median white household. And I say, what explains that? You can either say, “well, black people are just lazy and bad with money,” or you can say “there's something wrong with the system.”
I think it's fundamentally an issue of narrative, the stories we tell ourselves--especially the origin story of the United States. What if the true origins of this nation were in 1619 and rooted in race-based chattel slavery rather than 1776 and this triumphalistic rebellion against an oppressive British government?
The 1619 Project put together by Nikole Hannah-Jones was released in 2019, the 400 year anniversary of when enslaved Africans first made contact with British colonies in Virginia, and that completely changes the narrative of who this nation is and what it represents. When folks feel aggrieved, I think what they're coming up against is a different narrative of what this nation is about, one that--if it's true, that racism has been there since the foundation and is part and parcel of not only our political landscape, but the economic and the social and the cultural landscape of society--then what role do they play in that story? And it's probably not one they would like to play, even if it's true.
Laura: This past year, Nikole Hannah-Jones won the Pulitzer Prize for her work on the 1619 Project. The 1619 Project has been key in my own journey, and I’ll include a link in the show notes for today.
Understanding our country’s origins doesn’t just give us a different starting point; it changes the whole paradigm. The wrongs of the past weren’t just unfortunate events; they were bitter seeds that grew into brambles that have become entangled with nearly every part of life as we know it today. But that process of seeing the weeds isn’t easy.
Jemar: I've come to learn that it's not really a question of data, facts, or information. I can marshal all kinds of evidence that racism works itself out systematically. We can look at things like the racial wealth gap, which is not only large, but growing. We can look at things like sentencing disparities. One of the examples I use in my book comes from Michelle Alexander's landmark work, The New Jim Crow, where she talks about the mandatory minimums for cocaine possession. There was a five-year mandatory minimum that was triggered if you had five grams of crack cocaine, which is the rock form--but that mandatory minimum didn't kick in unless you had 500 grams of the powder form. Now, why is that racist? Because the rock form of cocaine is cheaper to make. Poor people use it. Poor people are disproportionately Black folks and people of color. And the powder cocaine is more expensive to make, more of a designer drug, Hollywood, more affluent, which is disproportionately white in this country. And so you get these disparities in sentences and incarceration, but you never have to use the words “Black” or “white.”
I have the opportunity to help teach classes in penitentiaries in Mississippi, and the conditions are just horrendous, and the way we treat people as disposable once we label them as criminal. On their uniforms it simply says on the back, “inmate,” stripped of all personality, individuality, dignity. As Brian Stevenson said, should we have the right to execute people, knowing what we know about how flawed and broken the system is? And the answer should be absolutely not. The way that has been abused and the way it has disproportionately affected Black people, people of color and the poor, we should not be entrusted with the death penalty.
Another issue is simply the way the criminal justice--or injustice--system works. It's things like reforming the bail bond system, making sure that people actually have the right to a speedy trial. One other thing: district attorneys; these folks wield enormous power in the criminal justice system. They're the prosecutors basically. It's an elected office, and so oftentimes they're running on their conviction rates. And so they'll go to someone accused of a crime--oftentimes poor and in a desperate situation--and they'll say, “hey, listen, you can stand trial. So if you get convicted by a jury, you could face 10 years in prison. Or you can take this plea deal, pay a fine, get probation--but you are considered guilty of this crime.” That counts as a conviction for the district attorney, and they have an incentive to do that. And so one of the things that we can do is vote in those elections and make sure we're getting folks in there who are going to be fair and treat people with dignity.
I try to unpack that information, but many times that's unconvincing, because it goes much deeper for people.
There's a commitment to turning a blind eye to the systemic manifestations of racism, because the system tends to work for you, because if that's true, then you're implicated in an unjust system. It goes to issues of identity of belonging.
How will your community react if you begin to accept some of these ideas? What would that say about you as a person--you as a Christian?
Laura: I think Jemar is right. Changing my narrative about our country’s origins has been a crucial part of my journey since that first conversation with Becky--but it doesn’t let me off the hook. If I am willing to acknowledge systemic racism--those weeds that have choked out so much good and claimed so many lives--then I also have to also be honest about my own history. Are there times when I’ve looked away instead of pulling up the weeds because it was easier to ignore them? How long can I claim ignorance before my faith and civic duty pushes me to do something? Jemar has spent a lot of time grappling with these questions not just in his writing, but in life.
Jemar: I grew up in a family that wasn't that religious. We weren't anti-religious, but I really became serious about my own faith in high school. I started going to a white evangelical youth group, and the church that was attached to that youth group, which was almost entirely white. So already very early in my faith journey, there's these issues of race and religion intertwined.
From the early ‘90s up until the early 2010s, the emphasis within Christian circles--and particularly evangelical circles--was on getting everybody together, bringing especially Black and white people together for events in churches. We can remember things like the Promise Keepers movement. And what we very quickly found--and what a lot of Black people already knew--was that's not it when it comes to fighting racism. It's not primarily about getting people sitting next to each other in the pews. It's about something much deeper than that.
And so my language and understanding around that shifted from the language of racial reconciliation to racial justice, and saying, “we have to look at structures and laws and policies.” That was bracing for a lot of Christians, and a lot of white Christians in particular.
Laura: I think this reaction is something like what I was feeling with Becky. It’s one thing to identify racism in the distant past, but once we start questioning our government and even churches, it becomes personal, because whether or not we were aware of it, we’ve had a hand in allowing racism to continue.
Jemar: So it was through all of that that I'm asking questions of my faith and my theology and coming up against lots of racism as I try to articulate and talk about this stuff. When I first began speaking about racial justice publicly--and mainly in Christian circles--this was around 2011, 2012, right when we're learning about Trayvon Martin. There was just a lot of pushback. This was in the phase of racial awareness in the church that I would call the racial reconciliation phase. I think 2014 and the killing of Mike Brown in August of that year, the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement that was just prior to Donald Trump announcing his presidency in June 2015--so all of these things kind of came to a head. We had all of these cell phone videos showing unarmed Black people being killed. I think that made it sort of unignorable, like it was conspicuous if you were silent at that point. And I remember even on social media, much of the conversation was about, “hey, white Christians, white evangelicals, are you going to say anything?”
The first book I wrote was a historical survey about the many ways that the church--primarily the white church--missed it when it came to race. And I begin the book with the tragic terrorist bombing of the 16th Street Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, and the murder of four young black girls between the ages of 11 and 14. And then I talk about a speech that a young white lawyer named Charles Morgan Jr. gave in the wake of that tragedy. And he said to this group of all white businessmen in Birmingham, he asked them, “Who did it? Who threw that bomb?” And he said, “The answer should be, ‘we all did it.’” And then he went through this litany of ways that white people in Birmingham had been complicit with this terrorist act, whether telling racist jokes, laughing at them, excluding them from their churches and memberships there. And he's making the point about complicity, that the most egregious acts of racism can only happen within a context of compromise.
That's the burden I have for racial justice, is helping people to see that
it is your silence it is your apathy, it is your inaction that permits the most heinous acts of racism that we would all condemn.
Understanding that we have a role to play in determining the boundaries of what is acceptable or unacceptable in our communities and our congregations--a real commitment to action, and not just in reaction to some current event or a headline, but a disposition and an outlook and orientation for institutions, for churches, for individuals to really get on and stay on this journey toward racial justice.
Laura: Ultimately I think this is what Becky was trying to get me to understand that night: I needed to decide if I was going to orient myself toward what was comfortable for me--or toward racial justice. I needed to be willing to learn from the truth-telling souls in the Land of the Dead to make any progress in the land of the living. And while I had no problem with the idea of orienting myself toward racial justice, actually setting my life on that course was a bit more complicated.
Jemar: One of the conversations that is furiously raging right now is about Christian Nationalism. We know of course that Jesus promised to build the church. Jesus didn't promise that he would build the United States. Nevertheless in Christian Nationalism those two get conflated. And so it looks like American flags in the pulpit. It's slogans like “God and country and guns.” It’s an almost one-to-one identification of Christian with the Republican party.
Laura: As a kid, I learned the Lord’s Prayer alongside the Pledge of Allegiance. The Bible and the flag were both sacred. I don’t disparage my upbringing, or the idea that both my God and my country deserve respect. But I can see now that there was a more subtle indoctrination that was at play, an unspoken belief that since our founding fathers were Christians and “In God We Trust” was right there on the dollar bill, that must mean Jesus had put his stamp of approval on our nation. It seemed obvious to me that he was a Republican.
Jemar: I think the tough part is people are so used to Christian Nationalism that they're not aware of it. To name it is to tell a fish about water. The response is essentially, “what are you talking about? That's just Christianity.”
One of the things that we need to do within congregations is decouple Christianity from Americanism. To name it, to identify it, to distinguish it and delineate it and say, “the two are not identical.” That you can be Christian and not be from this country and also have a variety of political beliefs and convictions--and still be within the household of God.
Laura: I’ve had some good teachers in my life who have helped me dismantle this theology--some of them in my own church---but it’s the Bible itself that has done the most to change my thinking. The Bible is full of mandates to care for the poor and the oppressed, the widow, the orphan, the immigrant. Some of Jesus’ harshest words are about the wealthy. It’s a hard pill to swallow. The American version of Christianity is easier to take.
Jemar: There's the haunting image of a man carrying this giant Confederate flag within the halls of Congress. And it turns out he was from Delaware. Bigotry has no boundaries. Much of what we're seeing is highlighted in places like the South, but it is certainly present nationwide.
Laura: The image Jemar is referring to is one that was taken when Trump supporters stormed the capitol earlier this month. Jemar’s second book came out the day before the insurrection. He said that the attack shocked him, but it didn’t surprise him.
Language creates the context for action. From 2016 to now, we've heard this inflammatory rhetoric, and of course there are going to be people who act on it.
That it was incited by the actual president is still very bracing. But this kind of response in general is in continuity with a lot of what we've seen historically.
There is a tradition in U.S. history of whenever Black folks and other people of color start to gain more civil rights--more access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--there's always a pushback. What we saw on January 6th, 2021 was very much connected to and related to the fact that huge numbers of Black folks, Latinx folks, and others turning out and turning the tide of elections . . . and a sense among a certain group of white people that they were “losing their country, their status, their power,” and that's a big motivator for what we saw at the Capitol.
Laura: Whatever your politics, I think it’s worth pausing to reflect on this idea that language creates the context for action. The slogan “make America great again” tapped into the fear that what people had was being taken from them.
As uncomfortable as it is to admit, I think this sense of losing my country as I knew it is why my conversation with Becky was so hard. Changing a system that benefited me means that I might lose some of the power I had before, which doesn’t feel fair. And it’s not fair. It hasn’t been fair for Black people in this country for centuries.
But what if we could aim for something better than fair? What if we could imagine a world where systemic racism wasn’t a given? What if future generations could look back at this time and say that it was the beginning not just of fairness, but of healing? In his book How to Fight Racism, Jemar calls this kind of thinking “prophetic imagination.”
Jemar: I would be ecstatic if in reading this book people get a vibrant, colorful vision of what their community, their congregation, their country might look like if we weren't so beholden to racism and white supremacy--and that is an exercise in prophetic imagination.
Laura: In his book, Jemar outlines what he calls the arc of racial justice. The acronym--a, r, c--stands for awareness, relationships, and commitment.
Jemar: We need to think about having a holistic approach to racial justice.
What am I doing to raise my awareness about race racism, white supremacy, and racial justice?
What am I doing to build relationships, especially with people who are different from me?
And how am I committing to anti-racist practices that go beyond just the individual and interpersonal and get into laws, policies, and practices?
Awareness: I think people are doing it. It's listening to podcasts like this. It's watching the documentaries.
The relational aspect is tricky because I don't want to say that racism is purely a problem with relationships--but I also don't want to bypass relationships.
There's a fundamentally human element to racial justice, and I don't in our rush to change systems and policies want to forget that this involves people.
How can I cultivate relationships that are going to continue to stretch me and honor the image of God and other people?
But beyond that, we are not having a serious conversation about racial justice unless we're talking about economic justice. We should be pushing for some sort of political redress, because so much of this inequality was inscribed into laws and policies passed by legislators and lawmakers. One of the things that anyone wanting to work toward racial justice should get behind is voting rights. So much of what we've seen is a backlash against traditionally disenfranchised people--especially black people--exercising their voting rights. It shouldn't be controversial to exercise democracy in a democratic nation. It shouldn't be controversial that we work to make voting easier, not harder. And that's not partisan. It's simply saying that this is the way we have chosen to peacefully transition power and it's okay if everybody gets a say. That's in fact how it's supposed to work.
Laura: Awareness, relationships, commitment. Looking back, I can see that Becky launched me into this arc of racial justice. I’m still on it now.
Over the years in my conversations about racism in my faith community, the discussion often lands on forgiveness. But Jemar says that we tend to rush to forgiveness too fast, without really understanding the implications.
Jemar: I wonder if folks remember the murder of Bothem Shem Jean in Texas. He was in his apartment, a white police officer just gotten off duty, went to the wrong floor, thought it was her apartment, knocked, a black man opens the door, and she shoots and kills him. In the trial, Bothem Shem Jean's brother, who was a Christian and Black, said he forgave his brother's killer.
There was this picture that went viral on the internet of them embracing. And I remember wincing when I saw that, not because his brother forgave, but because oftentimes the idea of forgiveness is weaponized against Black people. We can see this time and time again in the case I just mentioned, but also in the Emanuel nine slaying, where a white supremacist terrorists killed nine Black Christians at a Bible study. The nation was sort of celebrating the prerogative of family members and friends to say they forgave the killer--but almost insisting that Black people do that in each and every case.
First of all, it's up to the person it's up to the community to decide whether to forgive and what that looks like. Secondly, forgiving us more about the victim and the injured party and being able to find peace with yourself. It's not a question of forgetting or sweeping under the rug. I find it very frustrating that in the face of so much historic and ongoing racism, the response of so many people is to just say, “Let's not talk about it. Let's say the past is the past and move on,” without ever seriously acknowledging the injury and the harm that is done. And when you do that, it's a way of weaponizing a virtue--a Christian virtue--of forgiveness against the people who have been victimized by injustice and sin. That's not a position we should ever take, and especially in a nation that is notoriously bad at acknowledging the truth of the wrongs done in the name of racism and white supremacy.
Laura: As I’ve traveled on this journey, I’ve often heard fellow travelers say that Obama’s presidency is proof that racism doesn’t exist today. That we have had a Black president is a wonderful landmark in history; that it took us this long to get there should remind us of how far we still have to go.
I’ve been ending each episode with an invitation, and so today I want to extend Jemar’s invitation to you: embrace the arc of racial justice. Read Jemar’s book, How to Fight Racism, and study it in community. If you’re a person of faith, invite your faith community to join you. Make a commitment to orient your life toward racial justice. We can also support black-led organizations like The Witness Inc., the organization that Jemar started in 2011. What began as one man and a Facebook page has grown into a thriving organization with multiple divisions, including a faith-based multimedia company called the Black Christian Collective, and The Witness Foundation, a philanthropic division supporting the work of Black Christian leaders.
Jemar: We want to ask the question, “what if black Christian leaders actually had the resources they need to make their God-given vision a reality?” We're about to launch our first cohort, and we train and fund these fellows to the tune of $50,000 a piece for two years, and so we want to act as an accelerator to that vision for justice.
Laura: I’ll include in the shownotes a link to thewitnessinc.com, where you can make a donation to The Witness Foundation, and also learn more about the Black Christian Collective and Pass the Mic, the podcast Jemar co-hosts.
Jemar: We labor very diligently to make it truly Black-centered. We want to say that the Black experience and the Black Christian experience is not valid simply in relation or reaction to white people and whiteness, but that we have our own culture, ideas, problems, and priorities and that's what we want to put on center stage. I think now is a prime opportunity for the nation as a whole--and the church in particular--to learn from the black church tradition. If we're talking about racial justice, if we're talking about prophetic imagination, Black Christians have been doing this for a long time. We've had to learn the faith in the face of oppression, injustice, white supremacy. We know what it means to lament, but also to have joy in the face of an imperfect world. As we decolonize our faith, as we respond to the current moment, let's learn from the voices that have been traditionally marginalized.
Tell the truth about your experience. I think a lot of us, especially within Christianity are awakening to the ways that our faith and our faith communities have been complicit in the problem of racism. We kind of distance ourselves quietly from it. I understand that. I've done it myself. It's out of respect for the church, for the people that we know, but consider telling your story. It's your testimony, really, because when you tell your story, you give other people permission to tell their stories, too. Talking about it and naming it, it's going to prevent people perhaps from going down the same path you did, but it'll also give people the courage and vision that they too can move beyond harmful ideas and embrace more helpful ideas and a truer vision of the way of Jesus.
Laura: As an American, I do feel a sense of responsibility in righting the wrongs of the past. But it’s my faith--not my citizenship--that holds me to a higher standard. If I’m committed to actually following the way of Jesus, then I’m called to care for the poor and oppressed--not somewhere else, but right here in my own country. I’m called to put others before myself--even if that means giving up some of the comfort and power I’ve enjoyed at their expense. I’m called not only to justice, but to prophetic imagination.