When middle-class Americans silence the voices of poor black and brown people who know from daily experience that race and history still matter, our hardness of heart betrays a spiritual sickness that Jesus detected in the Pharisees of his own day. We, like them, have turned the gift of God’s law against itself. Splitting the good news in two, we refashion it as both a shield against God’s grace and a sword to wield against our neighbors. We turn God’s good news into our bad news.
