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

by Chanequa Walker-Barnes

Thus, as James Cone argued in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, the failure to grapple with White supremacy, including its past and contemporary expressions, is at the heart of the failure of White Christianity. Christian seminaries continue to replicate this failure through their teaching. The idea that “Whites could claim a Christian identity without feeling the need to oppose slavery, segregation, and lynching as a contradiction of the gospel for America” ought to astound modern Christians and send them running back to the drawing board to rethink White theology.20 But White Christians have not, in large measure, grappled with the ways in which slavery has shaped the identity and cultures of White people in ways that continue to present themselves today. They have not wrestled with the moral injuriousness of slavery.