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Why I stopped talking about racism in general and started talking about white supremacy and anti-blackness.
A thread/
A thread/
I’ll never forget having a conversation with a white pastor some time ago and me asking him a simple question: tell me about your journey with race in your life and the life of others?
He paused. Almost looking confused. He then told me, “I don’t think I have a journey...”
He paused. Almost looking confused. He then told me, “I don’t think I have a journey...”
This kind of shocked me (in some sense) because this pastor said that he wanted to move his predominately white church to be “diverse” and “multiethnic”. Though I think he was sincere, sincerity in conversations on race just don’t cut it. We need more.
I was confused because I knew of members who I would consider hella racist who attacked me in my DMs and in person (I got receipts!) but in his mind, he doesn’t have a journey. He had agreed that we have a race problem but had not read anything on race nor did self-reflection.
I started to realize that his and others understanding of race and racism was super limited—it was open public acts of bigotry and discrimination, a thing of the past that got fixed with laws and a black president. He didn’t agree that racism was in his church.
What was ironic is that this pastor made these admissions while paradoxically speaking definitively on race and racism. He didn’t even realize it. This is when I knew I needed to start talking differently. White people don’t have a problem talking about racism.
What I’ve found is that most have a problem talking about white supremacy and anti-blackness. To talk about both is to move beyond “relationship” thinking and to move to a deeper analysis in which power is configured, identity is lived, and oppression is experienced.
Because many just simply see race as an accident and not a fundamentally defining, dehumanizing, destructive, and even deadly reality in the structure of our society, in its policies, practices, values, and outcomes, conversations center white comfort rather white complicity.
Therefore the conversations of the 90s continue to happen because the framework of racism is to do the minimum possible to be seen as “not-racist” and to call for diversity that does not call into question the given system of injustice, violence, marginalization, and disrespect.
Not only so but failure to talk about white supremacy and anti-blackness fails to center the black freedom struggle and it’s long resistance and resilience in the face of brutality. It fails to take seriously black dignity, power, and agency in American public life.
It forces us into a continual cycle of violent oppression, white acknowledgement of “racism”, minimum change, conversations, so on and so on. This does absolutely nothing to make this world more loving and just. Absolutely nothing.
Because of this, I stopped centering white comfort and progress and started talking about white supremacy and anti-blackness because it is the particular struggle in America (and in churches) and until we deal with both seriously, there will be no change.
Yes, there will be hand claps, marketing, social media likes, but it will not make a dent in our given system of injustice, second-class citizenship, exploitation, and disrespect.
This is the movement we need to make.
Black people have been doing it for years.
This is the movement we need to make.
Black people have been doing it for years.
I often wonder if that pastor actually took into account what I said, I’ll never know. But what I do know is that you can’t say you want black people to experience liberation and believe the old ways of talking, thinking, and doing will work.
We need better.
We need better.
Better means engaging better literature. Better means working for better social and political arrangements. Better means better theological reflection on racial and economic justice. Better means better engagement with honest history. Better means finally loving.
