So, I didn't say anything about the White Evangelical making an extremely bad argument that we should call it a white "blessing" instead of a white privilege yesterday but I'd like to now.

In the best of lights, Giglio was trying to reframe "privilege" outside of what tends to be the reaction of most to the term: outside of "class" privilege. Most whites, when they hear the term, do respond with "Well, I'm not privileged."

So he was trying, VERY CLUMSILY AND VERY POORLY, to head off that response by talking about how slavery set a basis for white power and control even up until now.

But the word he chose instead? I'm having trouble understanding THAT.

Blessing is an unaccountably good thing, especially in Scripture and in evangelicalism. God's BLESSING is God's approval. Calling it white blessing instead of white privilege actually contributes to the idea that whites are SUPPOSED to be in power.

Because Giglio is so deeply unqualified to have this discussion, he doesn't think any of this through and blurts out something incredibly insensitive, highlighting his position of white privilege.

And part of the thing is that Louie cut his teeth in leadership at Baylor University, a university where, in 2009, in response to the proposition that Cisneros' work is primarily for Mexican-Americans and not white people, a prof responded, "Yeah but do they read?"

Giglio has been so SOAKED in the whiteness of the evangelical church that framing racial privilege as "blessing" - approved, ordained, God-given! - is something that would occur to him without second thought, even as he fumbles through bad attempts at "racial reconciliation."

I say this all to remind people that the project of dismantling white supremacy within the evangelical church is extremely hard because honest conversations, even about how white people have privilege, tend to get stopped short at examining the white power structure of the church

Lecrae himself - who was there when Giglio said this - told the WaPo that in previous attempts to challenge whiteness in the church were met with hostility. He had to unlearn whiteness in his own faith.

And this is the problem we are always going to run into with white men in power, especially in the church: POC do all the work and nothing changes.

And a major part of this is white evangelicals' complete inability to decenter themselves, to see just how WHITE the Jesus they've created is. It is so ingrained into evangelicalism that "blessing" instead of "privilege" actually makes sense - b/c their whiteness is a blessing.

And this moment just demonstrates a bigger rot: that white evangelicals are unwilling to have the conversation unless they can be the center, unless they can package it as a learning experience, unless they can keep benefiting from their whiteness.

The white evangelical church will never truly become anti-racist until it is willing to unpack the very theology of whiteness that made them who they are.

And I am very pessimistic about that ever happening.