I Bring the Voices of My People: A Womanist Vision for Racial Reconciliation (Prophetic Christianity)

by Chanequa Walker-Barnes

The victims of racism within the United States have lacked any meaningful opportunity or resources for voice, validation, or vindication. Even within the racial reconciliation movement, there have been no large-scale attempts to provide people of color with space to tell their truths without worrying about the impact that such truth-telling will have upon the feelings of White people. And when people of color have tried to create this space for themselves, it is often met with resistance and accusations of being separatist and counter to reconciliation—a far cry from the validation necessary for moral repair. There is even less attention to the work of healing that needs to be done for people of color. Any reconciliation that does not liberate and heal the oppressed from the consequences of oppression is not reconciliation at all. At best, it is cheap grace, an easy balm that offers forgiveness for the sin of White supremacy without seeking to correct the harm that it has inflicted.36 At worst, it is an affirmation of White supremacy in that it prioritizes the needs of White people to feel better about their relationships with people of color over the needs of people of color to recover from the psychological and material impact of oppression.

I think this is right. But I do wish the phrase “Tell their truth” was nuanced differently. People are telling their perspectives on their experience. That is a truth. But given the problems of nuanced language around truth claims I would like to avoid personalizing truth claims and instead describe giving perspectives and experience. Minor objection and this is I think the only place that phrase come up