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too many Americans remain willing spectators to horrifying acts of extreme punishment, as long as they are assured that it is in the interest of maintaining order.
Like generations before, we must struggle for an end to bigotry. We must fight to repair the damage created by centuries of racial injustice. We must commit to a new era of truth and justice, one in which we honestly confront our past so that we can understand what remedies are needed to achieve healthy communities and justice for people who have been unfairly excluded and targeted.
gap.24 Receiving an inheritance boosts the median wealth of white families by $104,000, but for Black families it’s just $4,000.25
April 2020, as the pandemic surged, researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health conducted a study that linked long-term exposure to dirty air to higher risk of death from the virus.
African Americans shoulder a disproportionate burden of exposure to the nation’s polluted environments.
racial health inequality transcends class,
“weathering” to explain how high-effort coping in the face of continuous racial insults exacts a physical price on the bodies of Black Americans.
at every stage of life Black Americans have poorer health outcomes than white Americans and even, in most cases, than other ethnic groups.
Black liberation theology, a concept developed in the 1960s by James H. Cone, who had been a mentor to Wright. Cone argued that the plight of Black Americans must be a central concern of the church.
Black preaching by historical necessity used the jeremiad, a rhetorical mode of denunciation or chastisement about the corruption of people, events, or nations that stretches back to the prophets of the Hebrew Bible.
For many decades it was one of the few places Black people could gather for educational purposes, to arrange mutual aid groups, or to form political organizations.
Wright’s theology, his understanding of the gospel as fundamentally about justice and standing with the oppressed, represented to many white Americans the threat that the Black church has historically posed to the nation’s status quo.
The First Great Awakening saw the rise of religious fervor not only among white Americans but also in both free and enslaved Black
the 1790s, a Second Great Awakening swept through the country, spreading the gospel even farther. By
If I am not permitted to occupy a seat here, for the purpose of representing my constituents, I want to know how white men can be permitted to do so. How can a white man represent a colored constituency, if a colored man cannot do it? The great argument is: “Oh, we have inherited” this, that and the other. Now, I want gentlemen to come down to cool, common sense.
The white “Redeemers” who overturned Reconstruction claimed they were driven by divine right to bring God’s order back to the South.
“Disparate movements and agendas simultaneously sought redemption from violence and also through violence.”29
During this period, the church continued to serve as a structure that protected Black Americans, supported them, and shielded them from the wrath of white people who refused to see them as equals.
the church was the home base of the civil rights movement in the 1950s.
We must meet hate with love. Remember, if I am stopped, this movement will not stop, because God is with the movement. Go home with this glowing faith and this radiant assurance.
The term “Black Power” was first used in the context of political activism by Stokely Carmichael, a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
“It is a call for Black people in this country to unite,” Carmichael explained, “to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for Black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations.”
“When you talk of Black Power,” Carmichael said, “you talk of building a movement that will smash everything Western civilization has created.”
Black Theology and Black Power, published in 1969,
And unless the empirical denominational church makes a determined effort to recapture the man Jesus through a total identification with the suffering poor as expressed in Black Power, that church will become exactly what Christ is not.”
Warnock was arrested in the U.S. Capitol building in 2017 for leading a prayer in the rotunda protesting the healthcare cuts in then-president Trump’s budget.
His election to the U.S. Senate in 2020 made him the first African American senator from Georgia,
Warnock won a special election to the U.S. Senate on January 5, 2021, the day before the failed Capitol insurrection.
“America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ ” The Black church, pastors and members alike, is still demanding to cash the check of true democracy and freedom.
in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a pasteurized jazz suited America’s tastes. Pass the culture; hold the people.
They bounced and lilted in defiance of the violence Black Americans faced, the heaviness so many of them carried. Those songs and the way the company’s stars performed them were declarations of war against the insults of the past and the present.
His company confirmed what African Americans had always known about Black culture: that it was American culture, indeed.
African Americans make up 13 percent of the population yet account for an incalculable amount of what moves us, and how we move.
Black people weren’t creating spirituals for wide appeal, either. These songs weren’t meant to be “consumed.”
A white person could deem Black musicians lowly, subhuman, beyond redemption, while still
By the 1840s, minstrel acts were taking over concert halls, doing long residencies at some of the largest theaters in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.
minstrelsy’s grotesquerie deluded white audiences into feeling better about themselves. It induced a bearable cognitive dissonance that outlasted enslavement. The caricatures of Black people as extravagantly lazy, licentious, vulgar, disheveled, and abject always drew a comforting contrast with a white person’s sense of honor and civility, with a white person’s simply being white. No matter how bad things might be for us, at least we’re not them.
Oration served as absolute anti-minstrelsy—Black people summoning galvanic vocal performances in their own skin for a cause.
The demand for equality necessitates the appearance of seeming equal and, therefore, worthy of respect. This, in part, is how a century’s worth of gains were achieved: through the refulgent, relentless, strategic display of worthiness. But there’s respectability that empowers and respectability that imprisons.
Americans have made a political investment in a myth of racial separateness, the idea that art forms can be either “white” or “Black”
Something about white America’s desire for Blackness warps and perverts its source, lampoons and cheapens it even in adoration. Loving Black culture has never demanded a corresponding love of Black people. And loving Black culture has tended to result in loving the life out of it.
“American entertainment, whatever the state of American society, has always been integrated, if only by theft and parody.”
there has always been something in Black music that’s viscerally attractive yet distinctly elusive, a depth of feeling that the field songs and spirituals instilled, perhaps eternally.
jazz, rock ’n’ roll, funk, hip-hop—have been about progress, about the future, about getting as far away from nostalgia as time will allow, music that’s thought deeply about the allure of outer space and robotics, music whose promise and possibility, whose rawness, humor, and carnality call out to everybody:
