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February 13 - February 13, 2019
her sense of goodness—of being a “good white person,” the kind who notices when we are in a restaurant with no people of color. In my experience, white people who believe they are safe often prove dangerous when that identity is challenged.
much too nice to be racists. I don’t know where this belief comes from, but I do know it has consequences.
Niceness doesnt disallow racism
if most white people are good, innocent, lovely folks who are just angry or scared or ignorant, it naturally follows that whenever racial tension arises, I must be the problem.
Lie that the nice people can't be the source of racial tension
don’t always feel like teaching white people through my pain,
the Relational Defense. It happens in the media all the time. A government official, teacher, pastor, or principal is caught on tape saying something that is clearly racist. But rather than confess and seek transformation, the person defends their “goodness” by appealing to the relationships of those who “know” them.
Defense for racism = changing the subject to how nice they are
But the volunteer isn’t racist. I know her—she has Black friends, just not poor Black friends.
This is why the word racist offends “nice white people” so deeply.
challenges their self-identification as good people.
We know them; we know they are racist.
oftentimes people of color don’t have the time, energy, or willpower to teach the white person enough to turn the conversation into a real debate. To do so would be a ton of work.
Unsolicited confessions inspired by a sense of guilt are often poured over Black bodies in search of their own relief.
White guilt is selfish.
Black women were bearing the brunt of these stories as white attenders sought relief from guilt
my body had become the stand-in for the actual people who had been harmed in those situations.
Instead of making amends, found someone else to soothe and receive their guilt.
question lifts the weight off my shoulders and forces the person to move forward, resisting the easy comfort of having spoken the confession.
It was all on purpose. Every bit of it was on purpose. Racial injustices, like slavery and our system of mass incarceration, were purposeful inventions, but instead of seeking to understand how we got here, the national narrative remains filled with comforting myths,
Its all on purpose.
We have not confessed that the end of slavery was so bitterly resented, the rise of Jim Crow became inevitable—and with it, a belief in Black inferiority that lives on in hearts and minds today.
Jim Crow meant paying taxes for services one could not fully enjoy; working for meager wages; and owning nothing that couldn’t be snatched away. For many black families, it meant never building wealth and never having legal recourse for injustice.
We like to pretend that all those white faces who carried protest signs and batons, who turned on their sprinklers and their fire hoses, who wrote against the demonstrations and preached against the changes, just disappeared. We like to pretend that they were won over, transformed,
We pretend that those who enacted Jim Crow disappear - theyre the ancestors or current white people. Of me.
telling an ordered history of this nation would mean finally naming America’s commitment to violent, abusive, exploitative, immoral white supremacy, which seeks the absolute control of Black bodies. It would mean doing something about it.
Why America refuses to tell its history
only chance at dismantling racial injustice is being more curious about its origins than we are worried about our comfort.
Be more curious aboit racisms origins than we are concerned for our own comfort
when we talk about race today, with all the pain packed into that conversation, the Holy Spirit remains in the room. This doesn’t mean the conversations aren’t painful, aren’t personal, aren’t charged with emotion. But it does mean we can survive.
We can lament and mourn. We can be livid and enraged. We can be honest. We can tell the truth. We can trust that the Holy Spirit is here. We must.
is to be in a rage almost all the time. So that the first problem is how to control that rage so that it won’t destroy you.
What more could Black people possibly ask than this—to not be overtly subject to the white will? “Is there more?” white innocence asks before bursting into tears at the possibility that we would dare question its sincerity.
What more could black leople ask than that theyre not exicitky subject to white people?...why expect POC tocbe grateful or appreciate progress?
When we win the award, I feel something. When we get the promotion, I feel something. When we break barriers, I feel something. But I also feel something when we are dying in the streets.
Because I am a Black person, my anger is considered dangerous, explosive, and unwarranted.
wanted to be the Black girl who white people are afraid of making angry. But that Black girl wasn’t me. I longed for the immediate release of rage, but my mild-mannered nature would not allow me this luxury.
“The Uses of Anger.” She writes that anger is not a shortcoming to be denied, but a creative force that tells us when something is wrong.
Sister Outsider - Lorde
anger is a creative force
My anger can be a force for good. My anger can be creative and imaginative, seeing a better world that doesn’t yet exist.
led to creativity, to connections with others who were angry, too. My anger didn’t destroy me. It did not leave me alone and desolate. On the contrary, my anger undergirded my calling,
serve a God who experienced and expressed anger.
those without power would’ve said that his anger led to freedom—the freedom of belonging, the freedom of healing, and the freedom of participating as full members in God’s house.
Those without power woukd say that Jesus' anger led to freedom.
you are a whole person, not a mule to carry the racial sins of the organization.
You are a creative being who is capable of making change. But it is not your responsibility to transform an entire organization.
the desire not quite for revenge but for the righting of a wrong. A desire to rearrange the world and go back to being in control, being safe, being in charge of what happened that night.
Rearranging The eorld to be incontrol again
know they think Tommie and I do this because we are inseparable, or because he is demanding. For
They will spit out the words drug dealer, just as they spit out the word criminal.
It doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day, Blackness is always the true offense. Whiteness needs just a hint of a reason to maintain its own goodness, assuring itself that there’s no reason to worry, because the victim had it coming.
Maintain white innocence with some sort of excuse
We don’t even talk about white murderers this way. Somehow,
We dont even talkabout white murderers this way.
What I didn’t see coming was Ferguson. Like that moment in the lynching museum years earlier, the gap between history and present closed once again, this time on my living room TV.
watching Black residents being treated like enemies of the state, it seemed to me that racism hadn’t evolved at
White people often want me to be grateful for America’s so-called racial progress.
As comedian Chris Rock says, I suppose these things were progress for white people, but damn.
felt as if my own home church had been violated. The goal of terror attacks, after all, is to inspire fearfulness beyond the
It hurt to know America could still hurt me.
the Spirit delighted in who we are: in our praise, in our proclamation, in our prayers—but also in our person.
the many assumptions people will have of you simply because God kissed your glorious skin and it blushed at the attention.
We would rather wonder about your humanity than ruminate on the ways the world will try to take that away from you.
as your baby fat disappears and your height comes to match ours, they will start to see you as dangerous—but we will be here to refute
Racial reconciliation has become something of a buzzword in Christian circles.
