This is an amazing pair of tweets so I'm going to talk about them, & I'll do so in a way that's authentic to me but that may turn some followers off. So if this isn't your jam then I totally get it. I don't often speak this way but I'll do so, here. https://twitter.com/EmilyKager/status/1346526049983631360

I've lived my life in a group that believes we are "redeemed... out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation." We have a fairly sophisticated view of humanity as being fundamentally w/ out race, sex, or class, & of the relation of those external markers to...

...to the interior self. We've also spent a lot of time navigating what it means to view these markers as purely external/temporal while also participating in a society that maintains hierarchies around them. My specific corner of this movement - American pentecostalism -- is...

& has been very much concerned w/ these binaries since its inception in the 1900's. One half of the early movement (Azuza St.) took the erasing of racial boundaries as a sign of the infilling of the Spirit & as a prophetic/millennial sign.
My own denomination has had battles...

...over so-called "gender distinctives" & the relationship between outer sex/gender markers & power (espc. around women's roles) both w/in the community & in the world.

This was a lot of throat-clearing to get to this point: I am not "anti-racist" & feel no obligation to be so.

To be clear, I'm a fifth-generation pentecostal who comes out a large tradition w/ a practice that has been at the project of dismantling racial boundaries for over 100 years, but we are not "anti-racist" in the modern Ibrahim X Kendi sense of the term. That's not our tradition.

I don't speak for Jeff Dean. I don't know that guy. But speaking for me, if you presume to lecture me based on the assumption that I take "anti-racism" as defined by Kendi to be a goal, you're mistaken. If you speak to me under the assumption that I don't do enough "work"...

on my own internal biases & prejudices, then again you're confused. I have a spiritual practice that foregrounds these issues in its own way, some of which you'd agree with, & some of which you would not.

So when, you, Emily Kager, undertake to lecture me about my interiority, my (and my multiracial, multiethnic) community's spiritual practices, or my non-adherence to your particular brand of NYT Bestseller religion, maybe take a beat.

I am a sinner, saved by grace. A hot mess. Really screwed up. Not worthy of a single blessing that I enjoy. Blessed beyond measure & wholly undeserving. I work out my salvation in fear & trembling, & I do /not/ work it out by your canon or your rules and categories.

This, tho, is basically how I feel when I'm in a professional context & someone undertakes to lecture me about my interior life & what kind of morals I should & shouldn't have. It's how I feel when a twitter purveyor of "tech tips" tries to give me a Sunday School lesson.

We can talk all day about what types of behaviors are & aren't appropriate, but when we get into telling people how they should be on the inside, & what kinds of morals they should have, & how they should relate to the world, then... well, I already get that somewhere else thnx.