Trouble I've Seen Quotes

“Colorblind ideology is the twenty-first-century continuation of white Christian silence to racism.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“The whole church desperately needs to renounce all forms of lording over others and all forms of centralizing white normativity. We need to make sure that the whole church can be seated around the table of God together as equals, where only Jesus is centralized and Lord over all.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“He wouldn’t be identified as Messiah because of some royal procession; he wouldn’t be identified as Christ for being born in a palace; he wouldn’t be identified as God’s Son because of a royal announcement given from Rome. No. Instead, he would be recognized for being born in some little town out in the country, lying in a humble feeding trough. None of this divine activity was accidental. The very location and circumstance of Christ’s birth was a symbol and sign of God’s solidarity with the socially oppressed and outcast.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“Black life as despised humanity runs parallel to the life of Christ, who entered into socially rejected and scandalized life. The question about this poor Jew from Nazareth living under Roman oppression—“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46)—demonstrates the extent to which Jesus was seen as an insignificant and punishable body. His body was one that could be grabbed at night without recourse and then run through an unjust judicial process. Like the thousands of black bodies that hung from trees, having been executed by the hands of white mobs, Jesus’ body was hung on that old rugged tree as a public spectacle of Rome. It was a death reserved for bandits and revolutionaries. That Jesus identified so intimately with “the wretched of the earth,” even to the point of death, should result in God’s church daring to see humanity from the perspective of God. To follow Jesus every day demands that we also must dare to interpret vulnerable and outcast bodies through the lens of the crucified Christ, through whom God’s wisdom and power is revealed.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“Portions of the African American community, like most ethnic minority groups in America, still espouse a doctrine of respectability. Today, when we discuss issues around mass incarceration and police brutality, too often the conversation turns toward how black people should act: pulling up pants, taking out earrings, and speaking “properly,” as if such behavior merits being treated as less than human. In the early twenty–first century, Bill Cosby went on tour to critique black people for not living up to the standards of white dominant culture. While some of his points were about personal responsibility, much of it was about dominant cultural respectability. He even at times made fun of African Americans’ names. As we’ve seen, this mind–set, as deeply colonized as it was, has a long history.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“Jesus does not make lording over others an option for his disciples. Unfortunately, most churchgoers today don’t appear to know that. People have found a way to call themselves Christian, which means to be Jesus–shaped, and still chase after power without thinking twice about it. We disregard Jesus’ teaching on power and how we ought not to use it to dominate others. Our practice, though, doesn’t change the fact: Jesus says that it must not be so!”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“Merely focusing on obeying the law is an intentionally shortsighted and irresponsible posture for disciples of Jesus. With that logic, a Christian who lived in 1850 would have had to fully endorse slavery. I believe that Augustine was right when he said, more than fifteen hundred years ago, that “an unjust law is no law at all.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“Jesus’ own experience of being arrested at night, put through an unfair trial, and then given a state-sanctioned execution should be the interpretive key for Christians in understanding the inability of empires to dispense true justice.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“Subdominant groups need not depend merely on stereotypes created from a distance about “the other” when they are able to share personal stories and experiences within their communities that, when collected, reveal troubling widespread realities. Altogether, the oppressed have an epistemological advantage that allows them to see things more clearly than those whose vision is blocked by denial and distorted by faulty claims of objectivity.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“What we imagine a God could and should do—the God of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with all that.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“Taking for granted that God is with them, most people grow up always presuming what God is like. Many intuitively believe that God blesses America and thinks of it as a divine vehicle in the world. God’s America is (or was) mostly an innocent Christian nation. We can throw out clichés like “God is sovereign,” “God is all-knowing,” “God is [fill in the blank]” because we have God in our doctrinal box. Unfortunately, dominant cultural reflections on God rarely adhere with the revelation of Jesus as specifically attested to in Scripture.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“The kingdom of God has become visible right under the surveillance of those who claim supremacy over others through control and domination. These contrasting ways of life offer different promises, different ways of life, and different end goals. The old order is passing away, and the kingdom of God is the future that God has for us that has been ushered into the present. The kingdom of God is already being experienced, in part, right now, for those who are willing to follow and cling to the delivering presence of the living Jesus.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“Jesus may be our answer, but our projections of Jesus may also be our problem.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“The disproportionate policing, stop-and-frisk encounters, arrests, and incarceration of racial minorities ought to awaken the church, because Jesus himself called for us to visit the imprisoned (Matthew 25:34-46) and to bring release to the captives (Luke 4:18-19).”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“An appropriate response to the complicated situation in society will not come from detached, objective analysis, cost–benefit calculations, efficiency quotients, and cultural arguments. The decisions that are made and courses of action that are recommended should be commensurate with the life of Jesus—his actions, his teaching, his cross.”
― Drew G. I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“The centrality of a Western, wealthy, powerful white body was so great that Jesus’ image and meaning had to go through necessary conversions. Yes, Jesus, in the hands of Western society, had to be refashioned into a white male figure, and the image remains on the walls of churches and homes even today. Clearly the poor Jewish Messiah living under Roman domination wasn’t sufficient to be Lord over all creation. For four hundred years in this land, white elite men have been lord. Many poor whites have played along, though rarely did they receive much from the social arrangement other than making dark bodies into scapegoats and receiving a slight psychological satisfaction that they weren’t at the very bottom of the social ladder. The myth of the superior white male figure stands at the center of our society, and it does for most of the American church as well.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“Despite all the Christian rhetoric, our society in America has never been configured around the way of Jesus Christ. The centralized figure in our culture has not been the crucified and risen Lord. The one our lives revolve around is not the image of the Son. The body to which everyone else has had to align and conform has been the white, wealthy, Western male image. Assumed to be balanced, objective, measured, and well–reasoned, this elite white male image has been sitting at the top of the social hierarchy, and it has organized life for all of us. White men themselves do not even live up to the myth, but the constructed image nonetheless has justified white men’s superiority to other people groups and women for centuries.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“(This is the case even while some people simultaneously complain about the unfairness of affirmative action—which, in truth, has mostly benefited white women rather than black people.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“Typically, many white people search for the one black person who holds the same positions and perspectives as they do, and then prop that person up as verification of their own beliefs.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“We must get familiar with the entire dec-k first before we turn back to making sense of an individual card.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“Interpreting a racially divisive situation without knowing the history and current social patterns and without hearing a wide range of stories throughout the community is like trying to compete on NBC’s show The Voice while only playing an air guitar.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“With a sociological framework, we can begin to see that the average white person lives a highly racialized life, though he or she is often unaware of it.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“In fact, the only time that American dominant culture accepts accusations of racism is in cases of so-called reverse discrimination.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“And while human prejudice between competing people groups is ancient in practice, race and racism are not.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“For too long, the church has gone about its business as though nothing were wrong. Meanwhile, it has been a racialized organism, not only fractured relationally but actually practicing, perpetuating, or remaining silent to the racial oppression of others. And yet Jesus, in his birth, life, teachings, death, and resurrection, has been the answer available to us all along. According to our sacred Scripture, Jesus lived a life that nonviolently subverted the powers and confronted the establishment. The wisdom and power of God, of a different sort from earthly wisdom and power, is something we are invited to participate in as God’s church. We are the called-out ones—not from the world, but from being patterned by the wisdom and power of this world through our sinful practices and mind-sets.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“My point is that Christ’s actual crucifixion was not the only time that Jesus’ life was in danger. What is clear from these few examples is that the life of Jesus was so subversive and radical that he repeatedly undermined and clashed with the status quo establishment. These clashes inevitably and repeatedly resulted in people wanting Jesus dead. Jesus did not affirm the existing social order. And there is no doubt that today Jesus also identifies with black men and women experiencing the daily threat of police brutality—especially those who, like Jesus, have courageously resisted the establishment upholding the racialized status quo.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“It bears witness to Paul’s claim that “God chose what is low and despised in the world, what is regarded as nothing, to set aside what is regarded as something” (1 Corinthians 1:28). This is the precise way God chose to reveal God’s self to the world, demonstrating a deep identification with the majority of the world who struggle with dehumanizing poverty and oppression under dominating forces.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“White American Christians in our society must do something seemingly absurd and unnatural, yet very Christian in orientation: they must move decisively toward a counterintuitive solidarity with those on the margins. They must allow the eyes of the violated of the land to lead and guide them, seeking to have renewed minds no longer conformed to the patterns of our world.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“Judicial complicity in the dominance of our social hierarchy, especially in light of the system’s history, must leave us deeply skeptical about any government’s ability to truly let justice roll down like waters.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“Míguez Bonino asserts, “A social location determines a perspective. It conceals some things and reveals others. We have sometimes referred to this in terms of ‘the epistemological privilege of the poor.’ The poor are not morally or spiritually superior to others, but they do see reality from a different angle” than those in power do.2 Therefore, I am suggesting that people on the bottom are better situated to know what is real, and that what they know to be reality is closer to the real thing than the perceptions of those in a dominant social position.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism