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And yet, I had no desire to be the Black spokesperson. It felt too risky. I wasn’t sure that my classmates had earned the right to know, to understand, to be given access to such a vulnerable place in my experience. For me, this was more than an educational exercise. This is how we survive.
It’s amazing how white supremacy even invades programs aimed at seeking racial reconciliation.
How could I possibly explain that the unity he desired always came at my expense?
organization wanted our racial diversity without our diversity of thought and culture.
Whiteness wants enough Blackness to affirm the goodness of whiteness, the progressiveness of whiteness, the openheartedness of whiteness.
I am responsible for the feelings of white people, and my boss will not defend me from these accusations.
I need white approval and interpretation before my idea will be considered good.
This is partly what makes the fragility of whiteness so damn dangerous. It ignores the personhood of people of color and instead makes the feelings of whiteness the most important thing.
White fragility protects whiteness and forces Black people to fend for themselves.
is that it obligates me to be nice in return, rather than truthful.
But rather than confess and seek transformation, the person defends their “goodness” by appealing to the relationships of those who “know” them.
I was expected to offer absolution.
But I am not a priest for the white soul.
She could decide the significance of her own confession and determine what it would take to fulfill her own reflection on the moment.
But whiteness was not prepared to sober up from the drunkenness of power over another people group.
And when we talk about race today, with all the pain packed into that conversation, the Holy Spirit remains in the room.
We can survive honest discussions about slavery,
In the mind of whiteness, half-baked efforts at diversity are enough, because the status quo is fine.
It’s hard to be calm in a world made for whiteness.
I wonder if they are innocent.
I wonder how often this happens to them, and I wonder if they need help.
When feminism is limited to the needs of whiteness, or when Blackness is used for profit without acknowledging the brilliance of the creators.
Even more frustrating, there are so few acceptable occasions for my rage to be expressed.
Reminiscent of Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a woman too?”
And so my anger would boil, below the surface.
It was hard at first, trusting my voice of anger.
my anger undergirded my calling, my vocation. It gave me the courage to say hard things and to write like Black lives are on the line.
in so doing creates space for the most marginalized to come in:
Creating room at the Lord’s Table
his anger led to freedom—the
the freedom of belonging, the freedom of healing, and the freedom of participating as full members in God’s house.
I feel no need to pat America on its back for these “achievements.” This is how it always should have been.
praiseworthy that only within the last generation did America reach the baseline for human decency.
For all their talk about being persecuted, white Christian Americans don’t know this kind of terror. Generations of Black Americans have known nothing but this kind of terror.
i shd be immune
this poem puts words to my relationship with America.
We would not let our generations of worship be halted by terror.
I was baptized again into the tradition of Black love—love
love for self and love for one another when the world deems us unworthy of life itself.
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.
reconciliation possesses the impossible power of the lion lying down with the lamb;
The white Church considers power its birthright rather than its curse.
But dialogue is productive toward reconciliation only when it leads to action—when
Tone policing takes priority over listening to the pain inflicted on people of color.
It’s about diverting power and attention to the oppressed, toward the powerless.
Reconciliation is what Jesus does.
He became sin who knew no sin. 2 Cor 5:21
And all it has ever taken was the transformed—the people of color confronting past and present to imagine a new future, and the handful of white people willing to release indifference and join the struggle.
A love that can no longer be concerned with tone because it is concerned with life.
But talking about race in America is not usually a hopeful experience if you’re Black. It brings no pleasure to speak of the hatred inflicted on our souls,
