The Color of Compromise Quotes

“Christian complicity with racism in the twenty-first century looks different than complicity with racism in the past. It looks like Christians responding to 'black lives matter' with the phrase 'all lives matter.' It looks like Christians consistently supporting a president whose racism has been on display for decades. It looks like Christians telling black people and their allies that their attempts to bring up racial concerns are 'divisive.' It looks conversations on race that focus on individual relationships and are unwilling to discuss systemic solutions. Perhaps Christian complicity in racism has not changed after all. Although the characters and the specifics are new, many of the same rationalizations for racism remain.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“The failure of many Christians in the South and across the nation to decisively oppose the racism in their families, communities, and even in their own churches provided fertile soil for the seeds of hatred to grow. The refusal to act in the midst of injustice is itself an act of injustice. Indifference to oppression perpetuates oppression.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“Jumping ahead to the victories means skipping the hard but necessary work of examining what went wrong with race and the church.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“History demonstrates that racism never goes away; it just adapts.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“Being complicit only requires a muted response in the face of injustice or uncritical support of the status quo.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“Historically speaking, when faced with the choice between racism and equality, the American church has tended to practice a complicit Christianity rather than a courageous Christianity. They chose comfort over constructive conflict and in so doing created and maintained a status quo of injustice.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“Christians deliberately chose complicity with racism in the past, but the choice to confront racism remains a possibility today.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“History and Scripture teaches us that there can be no reconciliation without repentance. There can be no repentance without confession. And there can be no confession without truth. The Color of Compromise is about telling the truth so that reconciliation—robust, consistent, honest reconciliation—might occur across racial lines.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“The failure of many Christians in the South and across the nation to decisively oppose the racism in their families, communities, and even in their own churches provided fertile soil for the seeds of hatred to grow. The refusal to act in the midst of injustice is itself an act of injustice. Indifference to oppression perpetuates oppression. History and Scripture teaches us that there can be no reconciliation without repentance. There can be no repentance without confession. And there can be no confession without truth.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“Throughout the course of US history, when Christians had the opportunity to decisively oppose the racism in their midst, all too often, they chose silence. They chose passivity. The refusal to act in the midst of injustice is itself an act of injustice. Indifference to oppression perpetuates oppression.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“Complicit Christianity forfeits its moral authority by devaluing the image of God in people of color. Like a ship that has a cracked hull and is taking on water, Christianity has run aground on the rocks of racism and threatens to capsize—it has lost its integrity. By contrast, courageous Christianity embraces racial and ethnic diversity. It stands against any person, policy, or practice that would dim the glory of God reflected in the life of human beings from every tribe and tongue.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“Christians need to pay attention to how their educational choices for their own children reinforce racial and economic segregation in schools.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“The decades after the Civil War proved that racism never goes away, it just adapts. Although the Union had won the military victory, the ideology of the Confederate South battled on. Attorney Bryan Stevenson put it this way: “The North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war.”43”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“The Klan capitalized on white fears of just about anyone they defined as nonwhite, non-American, and non-Protestant. For example, Klan members successfully lobbied for the Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, which limited immigration from select countries.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“The KKK interspersed Christianity with racism to create a nationalistic form of religion that excluded all but American-born, Protestant white men and women.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“Martin Luther King Jr. once said, 'I think we've got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.' By contrast, in a sermon entitled 'Rioting or Righteousness,' Billy Graham stated, 'There is no doubt that the rioting, looting, and crime in America have reached a point of anarchy.' ... The differing responses of King and Graham to these riots further shows how Christian activists interpreted the civil rights movement differently from Christian moderates.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church's Complicity in Racism, Study Guide

“Every person makes choices and is accountable for the consequences. At the same time, injustice imposes limits on the opportunities and choices people have.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church's Complicity in Racism, Study Guide

“the most egregious acts of racism, like a church bombing, occur within a context of compromise.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“It’s not that members of every white church participated in lynching, but the practice could not have endured without the relative silence, if not outright support, of one of the most significant institutions in America—the Christian church.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“Reflecting on the events he said, “ ‘Who did it? Who threw that bomb? Was it a Negro or a white?’ The answer should be, ‘We all did it.’ Every last one of us is condemned for that crime and the bombing before it and a decade ago. We all did it.”5”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“there would be no black church without racism in the white church.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“In response to government efforts to desegregate, moderate Christians, organized to oppose racial integration of neighborhoods, started segregation academies to keep their white children separate from black kids in schools, and continued to approve of church leaders who espoused prejudiced remarks and actions.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“I cannot imagine how knowing one’s history would not urge one to be an activist.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“The HOLC created color-coded maps of every metropolitan area in the nation, with the safest neighborhoods colored green and the riskiest colored red.”41 Neighborhoods with any black people, even if the residents had stable middle-class incomes, were coded red, and lenders were unlikely to give loans in these areas. This practice became known as redlining. The HOLC policy was a form of government-sponsored racism.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“Through a series of rules and customs, government employees and real estate agents have actively engineered neighborhoods and communities to maintain racial segregation.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“Many white Christians failed to unequivocally condemn lynching and other acts of racial terror. Doing so poisoned the American legal system and made Christian churches complicit in racism for generations. While some Christians spoke out and denounced these lynchings (just as some Christians called for abolition), the majority stance of the American church was avoidance, turning a blind eye to the practice.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“It must be noted, however, that Europeans did not introduce Christianity to Africans. Christianity had arrived in Africa through Egypt and Ethiopia in the third and fourth centuries. Christian luminaries like Augustine, Tertullian, and Athanasius helped develop Trinitarian theology and defended the deity of Christ long before Western Europeans presumed to “take” Christianity to Africans.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“History and Scripture teaches us that there can be no reconciliation without repentance. There can be no repentance without confession. And there can be no confession without truth. The Color of Compromise is about telling the truth so that reconciliation—robust, consistent, honest reconciliation—might occur across racial lines. Yet all too often, Christians, and Americans in general, try to circumvent the truth-telling process in their haste to arrive at reconciliation.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“Even today, the Lost Cause mythology functions as an alternative history that frequently leads to public disputes over monuments, flags, and the memory surrounding the Civil War, the Confederacy, and slavery.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“In opposing the use of government power to protect civil rights, Johnson voiced many themes that opponents of the political reforms that empower black people continue to invoke to this day.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism