Dear White Christians by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

“This powerful book displays the subversive possibilities of confession and calls the church beyond good intentions in the work of racial justice. A truly original work.” — Brian Bantum author of The Death of Race: Building a New Christianity in a Racial World “A gospel for white people, this book calls for nothing less than laying down the trump card of reconciliation for the sake of true repentance and conversion. Jennifer Harvey is proclaiming truth. Listen to her.” — Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove author of Revolution of Values: Reclaiming Public Faith for the Common Good “One of the most valuable contributions to the work of antiracism in recent years. Harvey demonstrates with compelling accuracy and clarity why popular Christian dialogue about racial reconciliation does not work but in fact only serves to reinscribe historic, systemic problems.” — Reggie L. Williams author of Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance “A timely and indispensable contribution to the field of Christian social ethics. Harvey offers a reparations paradigm as the first step toward racial healing in the church. . . . An essential read for those who love the body of Christ and yearn for justice.” — Eboni Marshall Turman author of Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation “A provocative analysis of the current state of race relations. . . . For those who are willing to look deeply into our history—to remember, to repent and to repair—this book is a most valuable resource.” — The Presbyterian Outlook “Jennifer Harvey approaches faith-based work against racism with passion and clarity.” — Anglican Theological Review

Prophetic Christianity Series Editors Malinda Elizabeth Berry Peter Goodwin Heltzel The Prophetic Christianity series explores the complex relationship between Christian doctrine and contemporary life. Deeply rooted in the Christian tradition yet taking postmodern and postcolonial perspectives seriously, series authors navigate difference and dialogue constructively about divisive and urgent issues of the early twenty-first century. The books in the series are sensitive to historical contexts, marked by philosophical precision, and relevant to contemporary problems. Embracing shalom justice, series authors seek to bear witness to God’s gracious activity of building beloved community.

Published Bruce Ellis Benson, Malinda Elizabeth Berry, and Peter Goodwin Heltzel, eds., Prophetic Evangelicals: Envisioning a Just and Peaceable Kingdom (2012) Jennifer Harvey, Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation, 2nd ed. (2020) Peter Goodwin Heltzel, Resurrection City: A Theology of Improvisation (2012) Johnny Bernard Hill, Prophetic Rage: A Postcolonial Theology of Liberation (2013) Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Embracing the Other: The Transformative Spirit of Love (2015) Liz Theoharis, Always with Us? What Jesus Really Said about the Poor (2017) Chanequa Walker-Barnes, I Bring the Voices of My People: A Womanist Vision for Racial Reconciliation (2019) Randy S. Woodley, Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision (2012)

Dear White Christians For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation

Second Edition

Jennifer Harvey

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Grand Rapids, Michigan

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546 www.eerdmans.com © 2014, 2020 Jennifer Harvey All rights reserved First edition 2014 Second edition 2020 Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20

3 4 5 6 7

ISBN 978-0-8028-7791-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Harvey, Jennifer, 1971— author. Title: Dear white Christians : for those still longing for racial reconciliation / Jennifer Harvey. Description: Second edition. | Grand Rapids, Michigan : William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020. | Series: Prophetic christianity | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The second edition of a book on American racial justice issues from a Christian perspective, advocating a reparations paradigm rather than an approach based on reconciliation”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020010244 | ISBN 9780802877918 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Racism—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Race relations—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Reconciliation—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Racism—United States. | Race relations—United States. | Reconciliation—United States. Classification: LCC BT734.2 .H275 2020 | DDC 277.3/083089—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020010244 Substantial portions of chapters 4 and 5 were previously published as “White Protestants and Black Christians: The Absence and Presence of Whiteness in the Face of the Black Manifesto” in Journal of Religious Ethics 39:1 (2011): 131–46. JRE is published by Wiley. Portions of chapter 6 were previously published and are excerpted from Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry, copyright © Herald Press, 2013, Waterloo, Ontario. Used with permission. Substantial portions of chapter 7 were previously published as “Which Way to Justice?: Reconciliation, Reparations, and the Problem of Whiteness in US Protestantism,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 31:1 (Spring/Summer 2011):57–77, DOI: 10.5840/jsce201131130.

Contents

Foreword by Traci D. Blackmon

Preface

Acknowledgments

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Introduction

PART ONE RECONCILIATION? WHERE WE ARE AND WHY

A Reconciliation Paradigm

The Perceived Problem, the Perceived Solution

Historical and Theological Precedents for Reconciliation

Conclusion 38

There Is No Racial Parallel

Race as a Social Construction

Race “Connects Our Faces to Our Souls”

A Universal Ethic versus a Particular One

Conclusion 59

Contents

Reconciliation Is Not the Answer

Reconciliation Today as a “White” Vision

Inadequate but Not Irrelevant

Moving toward a Reparations Paradigm

Conclusion 94

PART TWO REPARATIONS! GOING BACKWARD BEFORE GOING FORWARD

The Black Manifesto

Setting the Context

102

From Civil Rights to Black Power

104

The Black Manifesto

112

A Reparations Paradigm

121

Conclusion 123

5 The Particular Problem of Whiteness

125

White Moral Agency

129

The Moral Logic of Reparations

136

Implications and Invitation for Today

142

Conclusion 146

A Reparations Paradigm

151

The Scaffolding of a Reparations Paradigm

153

Making It Real: The Environmental Crisis and Creation Care

165

Making It Real: Battles over Immigration

169

Making It Real: Mass Incarceration

175

Conclusion 179

Contents

PART THREE STIRRINGS OF HOPE, PATHWAYS OF TRANSFORMATION

181

We Are Called to Remember Our Entire History

183

Toward Reparations: Presbyterian and Episcopal Churches

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Rethinking the Reconciliation Paradigm

189

A Theology of History

193

The Visibility of Whiteness

198

Conclusion 204

Becoming “Repairers of the Breach”

207

“Every Parish Must, in Some Way, Participate”

210

Insights and Experiences

217

Challenges and Limitations

228

Conclusion 234

Conclusion

237

Appendix: Now What?

241

Notes

255

Index

277

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Foreword

I count it an honor to write a foreword for the new edition of Dear White Christians. I became acquainted with Dr. Jennifer Harvey’s racial justice work with the church a few years ago through this book. A needed voice in progressive circles that are often prone to confuse open dialogue about the presence of racial inequity with the intimate work of dismantling racial injustice, Dr. Harvey moves beyond a critique of what is to a vision of what can become. It is particularly poignant that I write this foreword while the world suffers in the midst of a global pandemic. I write this to followers of Jesus whom I very much see as “essential workers” of hope and care in a world reeling not only from the ravaging impact of the novel coronavirus, but also from the disproportionate number of African Americans dying of a virus that exposes the health disparities, fueled by racism and poverty, in this country. I write as the number of COVID-19–related deaths exceeds one hundred thousand globally and twenty thousand nationally in less than two months. I write at a time when not only the ravaging effects of this novel coronavirus are being exposed, but also its disproportionate impact on Black communities, whose predisposition to generationally perpetuated racism has left us most vulnerable to this global crisis. In the face of such horror, Dr. Jennifer Harvey’s prophetic challenge to white Christians is to move beyond the failed aspirations of racial reconciliation. She compassionately offers this challenge not as a critique of religious Christian progressives, but rather as an accompaniment in the pursuit of the ix

Foreword vision of Jesus: that we may all be one ( John 17:21). Such radical manifestation requires a shift from the widely held notion that reconciliation is possible without the deeper work of repentance and repair. Dr. Harvey is undaunted by resistance to this paradigm shift among Christian progressives, and she outlines a faithful path forward in this living out of the gospel. Equipped with both empirical and anecdotal data, Dr. Jennifer Harvey engages in white Christians’ work with white Christians. Every identity group has work to do with others and work they must do with themselves. The work of dismantling racism and establishing racial equity is white people’s work. Jennifer does not do so from the position of an observant outsider but rather as a member of the whole. Her work is referenced and recommended in the racial justice work of the national setting of the United Church of Christ as a call to the gospel’s “essential workers,” also known as followers of Jesus, to the deeper work of repentance and repair. As you engage the principles outlined in this book, allow yourselves to dream of a better world and be moved to change. Rev. Traci D. Blackmon Associate General Minister Justice & Local Church Ministries United Church of Christ

Preface

In 1971 Rosa Parks was asked about the fires that had burned in Detroit four years before. What was her view of city residents engaging in such acts of “violence”? White journalists always wanted to know. Parks responded with clarity, “Regardless of whether or not any one person may know what to do about segregation and oppression, it’s better to protest than to accept injustice.”1 In years prior, Parks reflected at various points on the complexities of nonviolent resistance as a strategy. She reiterated her longstanding belief in the right to self-defense, for example, a belief she never relinquished. She expressed frustration with the languishing pace of real change and the audacity of white moderates who called for Black people to be restrained. In an interview in 1964 she said, “I’m in favor of any move to show we are dissatisfied.”2 The Rosa Parks who made these statements was not the one-dimensional figure we’ve long held in our national memory, frozen, still sitting on a bus. It may be that in recent decades more of us have learned that Parks’s stand against segregation wasn’t an accident. We may know that the winter of 1955 wasn’t the first time she sat when the law said she must stand. We surely know she didn’t sit down that day just because she was tired (though I have to believe she was often exhausted). Parks was a decades-long and seasoned activist. She’d been a leader in local organizing with the NAACP for more than ten years and a member for another decade before that. She knew what she was doing that day in Montgomery. xi

Preface Still, even with our expanding knowledge, we tend to remember Parks in an overly simplified way. We’ve lionized her as the female icon of nonviolent resistance in the United States. She seems the very embodiment of “turn the other cheek.” So Rosa Parks’s 1971 and 1964 statements might cause a double take. The right to self-defense? Support for Detroit citizens breaking glass and setting buildings on fire? The answer is yes. Among so many things rarely remembered about Parks is the complexity of her take on nonviolence. On this question Parks was probably closer to Malcolm X than she was to Martin Luther King Jr. Parks felt despair about Detroit when it burned in 1967. But her despair came from the reality that the fires were more harmful to Black neighborhoods than they were successful in reining in white violence. Even in that case, however, she remained clear. If white supremacy’s chokehold was so tight that riots and fires were all a community had, then so be it. That kind of rebellion was better than living quietly with injustice.3 “Any move to show we are dissatisfied.”

Stunned in the Post-Ferguson United States In August 2014, US-Americans woke up to images that have since become seared into our collective memory. Ferguson, Missouri—a place most of us had never heard of—was on fire. A young person named Michael Brown had been killed by a police officer named Darren Wilson, and an eruption followed. In the days and weeks after police left Brown’s body to lie uncovered in the street for more than four hours, the nation watched. We were riveted by the sheer outrage and physical response of the people of Ferguson and by the brutal, militarized response of the police force. Horrific images became all too familiar: tanks in the streets of this US city, children being teargassed, police locked arm in arm in full riot gear, assault rifles aimed at unarmed young Black people who were protesting nonviolently. Most eerie, perhaps, was how similar these images seemed to others from our recent past. Except for the fact they were in color, the pictures that came out of Ferguson in 2014 could have just as easily come out of Rochester in 1964, Selma in 1965, or Detroit in 1967. In the months and years surrounding the killing of Michael Brown, the names of so many other people and places have come to echo their devastation xii

Preface in our public discourse. Cleveland and Tamir Rice. Charleston and Mother Emanuel AME Church. Waller County and Sandra Bland. Tulsa, Charlotte, Minneapolis, Baltimore, Baton Rouge. Freddie Gray Jr., Philando Castile, Keith Lamont Scott, Tamisha Anderson, Terence Crutcher. So many more names deserve to be lifted up and mourned; but there are so many more I can’t list them all here. It’s in this context that we desperately need the more complete and complex story of Rosa Parks. Indeed, we are living in days in which we need to learn and relearn, remember and re-remember, more truthful, multifaceted accounts from the entire era of civil rights. For, in the wake of Ferguson and all that has since transpired, so many Americans—including many Christians— have seemed stunned. My fellow white people have seemed stunned from deep shock and surprise. We were unprepared. Our utterances have dripped with a coating of disbelief. We’ve asked questions like this: “What?” “We are still this racially alienated?” “We still live in worlds this different from each other?” “What do we do with this?” These questions have swirled in places where white US-Americans gather to worship, teach and learn, work, play, engage in acts of charity. They’ve been on the hearts and minds of white Christians no less than white US-Americans more generally. And such questions have not been a passing blip on the radar. Yes, they swirled for many months following Ferguson. But their intensity only increased after November 8, 2016. For somehow, on that day, a man who called Mexicans rapists, started white supremacist myths about President Obama, and held campaign rallies so frenzied with racial animosity that Black and Brown attendees were in jeopardy of being expelled or targeted for violence was elected to the most powerful office in the land by a majority of white US-American voters. So the questions from white Christians have continued: “How did this happen?” “Who did this?” “Now what?” My siblings of color have been stunned since the fall of 2014 too. But their expressions have been qualitatively different than those of my white siblings. Theirs are absent of shock or surprise and have been characterized by deep outrage. These cries have been inflected with a tired but fierce and resolute despair. They have sounded more like this: “Enough!” “¡Basta!” “Black lives matter!”4 “No human is illegal!” And since November 2016, the responses uttered by Christians of color

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Preface have come to haunt a church that has claimed for a long time now to long for reconciliation. Lament, pain, and anger have come to sound more like an indictment: “What do you mean, ‘Who did this?’ Read the voting demographics. We have been trying to tell you this for so very long!”

We Should Not Have Been Surprised I finished writing the first edition of Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation many months before Michael Brown was killed, but it came out late that fall, while Ferguson was still on fire. In the wake of its release, I found myself invited over and over to come talk to Christian communities reeling in their attempts to understand what was happening. I found myself in congregations wrestling with how to respond to the crisis of “now what?” I had written Dear White Christians in an attempt to answer two questions: Why does the church remain so racially unreconciled? What does our unreconciled state tell us about what we, especially white Christians like myself, must do differently going forward? These questions remain urgent for the church still as the second edition of this book is published. But it was only as I engaged communities in the wake of Ferguson and on through all that has come since that I realized I had attempted to answer those two questions by telling the church a story about itself. The story told in Dear White Christians was and remains a true story. It’s a story from our own, recent church history. But it was and remains a story that has been undertold, forgotten, and in a real way actively suppressed. I was a child of the church always. But it wasn’t until I was a doctoral student in seminary that I learned of the organized calls for reparations that Black activists lodged from within the heart of Protestantism in the 1960s. When I share the histories contained in the pages of this book with my own students— including those also born and raised in many varieties of US Christianity—they can’t believe such electrifying, riveting, ground-shaking, and recent events have been completely unknown to them. I assure them they are not alone. Dear White Christians tells a story of a multiracial and shared civil rights–era church history that has been rendered invisible in the collective memory of predominantly and historically white Christian congregations and denominations. The erasure of this history has had serious consequences. For decades now we’ve worked on racial reconciliation in the church. Mainline Protesxiv

Preface tant denominations have produced volumes of Christian educational material calling for sacred dialogue across lines of racial difference. Prophetic evangelicals have made reconciliation a central tenet in their approaches to building community. We’ve spent countless hours worrying about how to achieve inclusive, welcoming churches, how to embody beloved community. All this work has sacred theological and historical precedents that come straight out of the civil rights movement. These precedents are described and honored in these pages. But beneath these sacred precedents lies a painful and difficult truth. The way the white church has told our story of race and civil rights—of what it meant and should mean to us as Christians—rests on a “whitewashed” version of our national and church story. Indeed, an ongoing investment in a whitewashed version of our own church history is fundamental to the reason we remain so racially unreconciled in the church despite our efforts in recent decades. It’s also, I believe, what makes the release of this second edition of Dear White Christians so germane to this national racial moment. We are living in times in which we see in the United States Muslims being banned, Latino/a families being terrorized, Black children being brutalized, and migrant children sleeping on concrete floors and in their own filth at the behest of the US government. We are living in times when a creeping but bold white nationalism is taking up increasing political bandwidth and being sanctioned by powerful elected public officials. The pervasive presence of white supremacy in this nation has only become more evident, even as it has been increasingly emboldened, since the first edition of Dear White Christians was published. However our various local and federal elections turn out in the coming years, this nation as a whole—and organizations, institutions, and communities within it—will have to contend with the repercussions of this social and political era for many years to come. But meanwhile, amid this crisis, we are also witnessing diverse movements growing across the land. Hundreds of thousands of people, including lots of white people who have never done so before, are getting into the streets. Jewish communities are shutting down Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations. The Poor People’s Campaign is bringing together a multiracial and interreligious coalition to challenge white supremacy, economic injustice, and all the parts of our shared social life where these forms of structural violence intersect. Faith leaders and practitioners are traveling to the southern border to bear prophetic witness. Congregations are creating sanctuary net-

Preface works and hanging “Black Lives Matter” banners on their buildings. We’ve even watched as the raucous struggle over racism and how to best challenge it spills over into the arena of one our most nationally sanctified pastimes: the National Football League. But amid all these diverse and powerful mobilizations sits an open question. Can we turn all this momentum and resistance into sustained anti–white supremacy, pro–Black, Brown, Native, and Asian American lives movements (ones that include, of course, the Muslim and Jewish lives that are also increasingly under threat these days)? The future of this US democracy, and fundamental questions about who is able to flourish within it, may very well depend on how we answer that question. It’s for precisely this reason we must learn (or relearn), claim, and begin to loudly share a more truthful and complex story about the history of civil rights and the church right now—and Dear White Christians helps us do that. Building and emboldening a justice-filled “yes” in response to the question of sustaining multiracial, multireligious movements that work for a vision in which all of us can flourish depends on getting the “race” part of our work together correct. More to the point, it depends utterly on getting the “white” part of the race part correct, something that has yet to be successfully accomplished in a widespread way in justice movements over many decades in the United States. And there is so much in our own church story that advises us on precisely that difficult and urgent matter. That story begins with those fires Rosa Parks was talking about in 1971. If we want to tell a civil rights story in which work for reconciliation (or welcome, inclusion, dialogue, integration, or beloved community—all iterations of our reconciliation paradigm) is the takeaway point, we have to be willing to say the civil rights movement ended by about 1964. That’s so much earlier than most of us would be willing to say it ended. But by the mid-1960s the Black Power movements had begun to express disappointments with civil rights. As early as 1964 fires consumed Rochester, New York, triggered by the same kind of police violence against Black lives that led to the rebellions in Ferguson. And organizers in Rochester were clear that integration didn’t solve the crisis of racism. Black communities needed jobs. By the time fires consumed Detroit in 1967, Black Power had thoroughly critiqued civil rights’ analysis of our actual national racial situation, as well as many civil rights solutions for it. Black Power activists were very clear that our primary problem wasn’t segregation and the fix surely wasn’t interracial togetherness.

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Preface In other words, the primary issue wasn’t the fact that Sunday morning was our most segregated hour, and the fix wasn’t programming to somehow create reconciliation. The problem was power and systemic exploitation. By the mid-1960s Black Power had shown up in Christian contexts as Black Christians explained and demonstrated and organized—repeatedly—in efforts to make clear to their fellow white Protestants that a focus on reconciliation was not enough. The white church needed to commit first to reparative action, to repair of racial harm. Reparations were consistent with the gospel, such Christians said. As you will read in these pages, the transformation many Black Christians were calling for by the mid-1960s and on through the early 1970s was not to be. The white church overwhelmingly marginalized and even repudiated calls for a redistribution of power and concrete repair of the quantifiable harms exacted by racism and white supremacy. We ultimately chose not to engage in the meaningful and justice-based structural adjustments Black Christians insisted were the only real antidotes for injustices that, in fact, ail all of us (though in radically different ways) and mediate our interracial relationships in ways that make reconciliation impossible. Instead, as Dear White Christians lays bare, we in the white church carried forward reconciliation as the primary focus of our work on race. We did so despite such a focus having been unequivocally demonstrated to be inadequate by our siblings of color. And we’ve continued to do so today. We’ve held on to a reconciliation paradigm with a tight grip as if those critiques levied by our siblings of color never happened at all. Remembering and honoring this part of our church story of racial harm and alienation is important in its own right. If we want to move forward and create interracial relationships characterized by justice, truth, and mutuality in the church, there is a repentance that we must first pursue. Amends must be made for the ways those of us who are white ignored, and have continued to ignore, our siblings of color. As you read this second edition of Dear White Christians, I am confident the palpable pain that pervades this story will make clear how urgent it is that we white Christians find ways to take responsibility today. But there is another, equally profound reason this story matters so much right now. Namely, the critiques Black Power movements made more than fifty years ago—from both inside and outside the walls of Protestant Christianity— were proven deadly accurate by the urban rebellions marked by those fires that burned across the US in the latter period of the civil rights movement. And, at

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Preface the end of the day, the analysis of those same power movements remained and remains terrifyingly predictive of the events we’ve seen unfold in this nation since the fall of 2014—from Ferguson to the massacre at Mother Emanuel (2015), to a racism-infused presidential election (2016), to neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville (2017), to the rise of white nationalism (2018 to the present), and on and on and so much more. We should not have been surprised by any of this. There are good reasons those images that came out of Ferguson in 2014 looked so much like the images that came out of Selma in 1965. Yes, the white church worked to help bring the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to fruition (see chapter 4). But if the Civil Rights Act was the national response to incredible civil rights organizing, the response to urban rebellions and the incandescent clarity of Black Power was silence, repudiation, and denial. To the extent the analyses proffered by Black Power have never gotten a serious public hearing or meaningfully informed our economic, social, political, or religious initiatives, we, in fact, remain caught in the same racial realities we were caught in in the late 1960s. To the extent that we have not made white power and exploitation the starting point for how we understand, talk about, and, most importantly, challenge racism, it is we as a nation—and as congregations and communities within it—who are actually captive, frozen in one dimension, still sitting on a bus.

A Story for the Church Today Rosa Parks did not, of course, stay seated on that bus. Parks lost her job after she sat down. She was unemployed for years—no one would hire her because of that costly and courageous stand against white supremacy. She was sidelined in complex ways by many of the iconic male leaders of the movement. She spent years thereafter living in such poverty that she was food insecure and suffered poor health. Her health conditions were exacerbated by life lived under the daily stress of white racial terror and endless death threats: ulcers, insomnia, and a serious heart condition.5 Yet Parks continued to work endlessly after the Montgomery bus boycott, as she had before it. She worked with young people, poor and working-class people, and even with people accused of communism. And Parks ardently admired Black Power. She showed up in support of Black nationalist movements in the late 1960s and continued to do so on through the 1970s. “Honest to God,” xviii

Preface Detroit-based Black nationalist organizer Ed Vaughn recalled of Parks, “almost every meeting I went to, she was always there. . . . She was so regular.”6 Rosa Parks kept showing up for the same movements we have whitewashed out of our own church’s story. This matters profoundly today. It tells us something both morally significant and pragmatically urgent about our approach to race in the church in post-Ferguson US-American life. Namely this: Black Power movements were part of our history. And including them in our self- understanding as church—as we must if we are to be truthful—fundamentally changes our approach to race, particularly our approach as the white church. To put it simply: if reconciliation is the takeaway from the civil rights story we usually tell, then the takeaway from the more complex, more truthful civil rights story contained in Dear White Christians is reparations. Black Christians weren’t asking white Christians to sit down and reconcile by the late 1960s. They were insisting white Christians respond to their structural and social location in a society organized so hierarchically and violently that reconciliation talk had come to sound more like resounding gongs or clanging cymbals. They were demanding white Christians repent and repair. They were calling us to take seriously the kind of material relationships that racial identity put white Christians in relative to people of color. They were offering, in place of a reconciliation paradigm that had failed, a paradigm that more accurately and effectively addressed the problem of “whiteness” in the context of race—one that might have the power to finally transform the church. They still are! And this all brings us back to the fuller story we need so desperately in these difficult days we are living in. It is time to begin (in some cases, again) the work of reparations as our fundamental and formative approach to the multiracial work of pursuing racial justice both within and beyond the church. On its face, it might seem counterintuitive to raise the visibility of a demand for reparations right now, given the entrenchment of white supremacy in this moment. The ongoing political turmoil and trauma that has transpired since Ferguson may make the arguments of this book seem even more untenable than they seemed in 2014. Indeed, the increasing boldness of white supremacy might tempt us to default to even more gradual forms of the gradualism we’ve long been tempted by. It would seem that scaling back the audacity of our moral vision would be the most pragmatically sound thing to do right now. How could a vision as radical as reparations possibly get a hearing in times such as these?

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Preface But I am beyond convinced that a genuine engagement with recent US- American church history should compel us to precisely the opposite conclusion. I am convinced that, if anything, all that has transpired since 2014 has only been further evidence of the soundness of the arguments made in the original edition of Dear White Christians. It has only added greater urgency to the calls. Given the prescience of Black Power’s diagnoses and insistence that things will not get better in this land without fundamental restructuring and repair- based responses to racism—responses that include the redistribution of unjustly distributed resources—we have to suspect we’d be in a radically different situation today had we collectively listened and responded back then. And with that query we cannot but take seriously the possibility that the historical through lines connecting today’s crises with yesterday’s failure to take heed makes the story for reparations precisely the story the church needs to claim and proclaim today. The times we are living in must compel us to an approach that’s radically different from all we have tried up to this point. And the resilient power and beauty of the difficult story contained in the pages of Dear White Christians means we do not have to begin from scratch. What a relief. The clarity we need has already been, and continues to be, offered in, by, and through communities of color—including from within our very own church histories. We merely need, this time, to listen and respond.

So, Dear White Christians: Let’s Get the “White” Part Correct! There is a final reason the release of this second edition of Dear White Christians is deeply appropriate in the current social and political moment. That reason draws us back to the diverse mobilizations and movements that have emerged in response to the national racial crisis of the last several years. The more complex story that unfolds when we recognize Black Power as part of our civil rights story is by no means just a Black-and-white story. The call to reparative justice extends to white relationships with other communities as well. There exist many histories and historical through lines from the past to the present that we also need today. Just as Black Power shifted the conversation from integration to power and resources, so did power movements among Native peoples, Latino/a communities, and Asian American organizers throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Diverse communities of color xx

Preface articulated and mobilized in ways that made clear that justice-infused responses to realities of race and racism require concrete reparations. And they still do. Chicano Power movements, for example, linked the situation of Chicanos in the United States to the 1848 US land grab, in which the United States absconded with a majority of Mexico’s resource-rich lands by provoking an illegal war.7 When they did so, Chicanos weren’t asking white US-Americans to sit down and talk. They were demanding redress of a legacy of colonial-settler occupation—as in “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.”8 They were insisting then that we understand something that we still need to understand today: that questions about immigration should be engaged through the historically informed lens of repair. The church has developed values-based approaches to the crisis of immigration, such as insisting we are called to “welcome the stranger” and lifting up biblical proclamations that we show “hospitality.” These messages are certainly improvements over the noxious and deadly language and policies the federal government has pursued since 2017. But taking seriously our actual, complex history makes clear even still that such framing isn’t adequate. “We,” in fact, are the ones who owe something. The United States is the entity in moral debt. This understanding must inform the ways we challenge violent border practices and policies. When we challenge US elected officials’ mind-boggling and deadly efforts to deny climate change and erase the existence of our climate crisis, we must do so in ways that make deep connections with and center Native relationships with the land. Indigenous peoples are the first peoples of this land base. It wasn’t and isn’t “our” land. Moreover, the environmental crisis we face right now is of a piece with histories of colonial-settler occupation and violence that have devastated both peoples and the earth. Thus, when the predominantly and historically white church works on environmental justice, it must connect with, support, and amplify the ongoing struggles being waged by Native communities for sovereignty and land rights. It must take seriously that white US-Americans are a colonial-settler people. A reparations paradigm enables us to do that. The US government essentially ignored Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican people in the wake of Hurricane Maria in 2017—going so far as to lie about how many people died and to use that moment of devastation, instead, to publicly insist that Puerto Rico was in debt to the United States. When this transpired,

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Preface we were seeing the interconnections between colonial-settler logics of domination, white supremacist–informed notions of belonging, and the crisis of climate change as experienced in extreme weather. Our work for racial justice—if it is to be sustainable and truthful—must hold such interconnections in full view. Sovereignty and land rights struggles; battles over immigration, borders, and belonging; poison being released into water for profit, whether that be lead making its way into the bodies of poor Black and Brown people in Flint, Michigan, or oil threatening the lives of the Standing Rock Sioux—all these conflicts embody historical, violent, and material relationships. None of these are any more new than is the reality of police violence against Black communities. None of these are any less urgent. All are interrelated. Because the crises that threaten to cause death are interrelated, so too must be the efforts to come together to create life. Our collective ability to create a justice-filled and liberative vision for the future, to realize a future in which we can all flourish, depends on recognizing these interrelationships. We must find ways to come together across many kinds of difference to resist injustice and violence, and to proclaim and live for justice and flourishing for all right now. The stakes are so high. Persisting in the work of justice has been ever more difficult and overwhelming in these last few years. As such, it may be risky to close my reflections on this release of the second edition of Dear White Christians by linking all these tough issues—police violence, immigration, land rights, climate change. The temptation to despair in the face of that which seems so overwhelming is great. But I make the link, despite the risk, for one simple reason. The flip side of the urgency and enormity of the now and of what is needed is this: many of us are imperiled in different ways by these various, interconnected forms of injustice (indeed, when we include climate change, the truth is we are all imperiled), so if we can and do get the interrelationships correct between all these issues that are, indeed, utterly interconnected, then “we” can win. For “we” are the majority. To that end, it’s perhaps never been more important that we get the race part of things correct, by dealing with whiteness head on. Because amid the various ways these diverse justice issues are interrelated, there is at least one constant: the challenge and the reality of white supremacy means that those of us who are white—including we white Christians—have a particular role to play. White Christians can and must take responsibility for and respond to the

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Preface specific, concrete, and unique ways we are located within white supremacy relative to our diverse siblings of color. Doing so is a non-negotiable requirement to successfully building our capacity to work in, with, and through the truly robust, diverse, multiracial coalitions that are critical to this nation’s future, coalitions that must be built and sustained in order to secure the justice and the flourishing of us all. And, simply put, the reparations paradigm offered in this book—a paradigm that came and continues to come out of long histories of organization and analysis by communities of color—is necessary for us to do that. So these are the most basic terms in which I see the release of the second edition of Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Reconciliation. This book is one contribution in an act of defiant hope and a belief in the viability of our collective future. It contributes to the attempt to get the “white” part right so that the predominantly and historically white church can come closer to getting the “race” part right. It takes up lessons from recent history to show that and why reparations offers us the most potent possibility not only for changing the conditions of our collective lives in the future but also for radically transforming them today. This second edition of Dear White Christians offers just one story—though perhaps it will inspire us to seek out, claim, understand, and proclaim many more. In the story it reclaims, and in so many others that remain undertold, there is an unequivocal demand that our organizations, institutions, communities, congregations, and denominations move. We need to move right now from a reconciliation paradigm to a reparations paradigm. In contrast to the confusion a reconciliation paradigm has so often created, a reparations paradigm enables the multiracial project of justice. It offers incredibly clarifying ways to understand the meaning of our racial and colonial settler identities. It helps us assess more accurately the nature of our interracial relationships. In contrast to the ambiguous work of reconciliation, reparations helps us identify the necessary pathways for responding to our actual racial situation. These pathways are far more productive, truth-full, and life-giving than any that reconciliation has been able to open up so far. They are precisely what we need in a time when the viability of our collective future may be on the line. And finally, perhaps most importantly for the church, a reparations paradigm is biblical. Those of us who believe the biblical witness has staying power have no reason to succumb to despair as we hear the difficult truths in this

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Preface book or face the frightening realities our national crisis presents. For we know from the biblical witness that when we confess the reality of sin in our lives and engage in the activity of repair as part of that repentance, we are offered the possibility of new life. The predominantly and historically white church shouldn’t fear reparations talk. Not if we remember Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus came down from that tree despite his fear and trembling. When he met Jesus he immediately repented of his sin. He declared that he would give half of the wealth he had accrued through complicity in an unjust and violent system to the poor, and fourfold back in reparations to those from whom he had stolen. And with that, I believe, Zacchaeus was liberated. Zacchaeus got to go home with Jesus. Reparations and repair, modeled in the biblical witness, offer us a different vision than the one we’ve long been working with in the church. Perhaps this vision might, ultimately and eventually, enable interracial togetherness. But if it does, it will be only after those of us who are white come alongside communities of color in the work of justice, taking up the specific work that is rightfully ours. White Christians still long for racial reconciliation. And we now do so in a social and political landscape that has changed more rapidly in the six-year period between this book’s two editions than any of us might have predicted. But the complex, truthful story of our own church history—one undergirded by the biblical witness—still calls to us with this invitation. Let us stop making reconciliation itself the work. Instead, let us listen to and respond to the stories of our own interracial legacies—stories in which communities of color have said to white communities for such a long time now, “If you want to be our allies, you must repent and repair.” Repentance and repair isn’t easy work. It doesn’t immediately unfold into obvious solutions. It is uncertain work. It’s difficult work. But it’s sacred work. And now is the moment for us to remember and learn a new but very old story, so that we can begin to write a new but very old vision on the wall for this entire nation to see. Now is the moment for us to take the next steps down a different pathway, even if we don’t know exactly what the outcome might be. We can. We must. To quote the amazing, rebellious, and relentless Rosa Parks: it’s time to make “any move to show we are dissatisfied.”

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Preface

A Brief Word on Changes to the Second Edition In the years since Dear White Christians was first published, I have become more attuned to the difficult work of writing in ways that are more accessible to readers’ ears. I am grateful, then, that Eerdmans allowed me the opportunity to revise the prose for this second edition. My hope is that readers will find the writing to be clearer and more inviting, even as the basic structure and arguments of the book have not changed. Please note that I have not added any updates to the case studies in part 3, so they leave off at the same place as in the first edition. This second edition also includes new material in the back matter. In response to the countless questions I’ve received from engaged, eager, justice-committed Christians, I have added an appendix that addresses the question “What does a reparations paradigm look like?” I hope you will find that it stirs your moral vision and tenacity in moving forward, with others, wherever you live, work, and play, in the work of repair.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been a long time coming, and my first thanks go to the many communities—most of them Christian—who have engaged with me on race and racial injustice over the past years in ways that have provoked and challenged my thinking. It was insights and passions shared in a variety of such engagements that led me to clarity about the need for this book and to the primary argument within it. The communities of which I speak are too numerous to name, but two deserve special mention. Thanks to the Urbandale United Church of Christ and First Unitarian Universalist Church of Des Moines for having provided me two of the most substantive contexts in which to think about these matters aloud and “try them out” with real live people in Iowa. I also acknowledge with gratitude colleagues and administrators at Drake University, where I teach. The Drake University Center for the Humanities, ably led by Craig Owens during the initial period in which I was granted funding (and by Leah Kalmanson during the second edition), provided critical resources for travel, recording equipment, and the final stages of the manuscript. I appreciate, too, the faculty research programs supported by the College of Arts and Sciences dean, which allowed me to purchase books and hire an assistant for the initial research and to do interview transcription. Nora Sullivan and Alexandra Hilgart, both students at Drake, deserve recognition for having served in these latter capacities. Given its well-deserved reputation for delivering on its commitment to teaching excellence (a commitment in line xxvii

Acknowledgments with my own), Drake and those who are part of it certainly do a mighty fine job supporting faculty like myself in our research and writing. Malinda Elizabeth Berry first saw value in this project and encouraged me to see it through with Eerdmans. She also spent the last weekend before it was complete sitting close to her computer and providing me with supportive and critical feedback. Peter Goodwin Heltzel and Bruce Ellis Benson, editors of this series at that time, along with Malinda, did the same. I am grateful to all three of them for seeing in this project a set of ideas worth sharing with others and for their willingness to include it in their important and timely Prophetic Christianity series. Most heartfelt thanks go to the faithful Christians who allowed me to interview them for this book. I was utterly inspired and challenged by my time with Episcopalians in Baltimore and New York. Not only did I leave those conversations reenergized and hopeful about the future, but I cannot say enough how much I appreciated the risk these groups took in speaking to me with candor, humility, and passion. In particular, I am grateful to the Reverend Canon Angela Shepherd, canon for mission for the diocese of Maryland (at the time of the initial research), who invited me to Baltimore, set up the interviews, hosted me graciously, and otherwise made it possible for me to engage reparations beyond the theoretical level. In New York, I owe thanks to the Reverend Dr. Mary Foulke, who similarly arranged for my time with the Reparations Committee there and started me on this journey into antiracism back when we were both students at Union Theological Seminary. Mary was the first white person I knew who not only was willing to insist that justice-seeking white people could learn to do our own work and do it well, but who also created environments in which we did learn to do it. Thanks as well to Nell Braxton Gibson for her leadership in New York and her generous provision of key materials to me after my visit. The Reverend Dr. Melanie Harris has long been a heart friend and soul sister. But she supported me, and this book, every single day in the last months. I only hope I faithfully show up for her in the ways she has shown up for me. As I sit completing this manuscript, my children are sleeping soundly in their beds and my beloved partner is resting after having supported our family in a million extra ways while I worked toward this deadline in what has proven to be a grueling final month. Words always fail when I attempt to describe my gratitude for the family who supports so much of what I do and who I am in the world. The presence of Harper and Emery in my life deepens my resolve

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Acknowledgments to keep working for a world more just than the one that was bequeathed to me. It also puts me in daily touch with an experience of profound joy, even while living in a world desperately needing transformation. The presence of Chris Patterson in my life, quite simply, continues to be a gift and surprise. I never knew such an experience of home could exist, let alone that it could exist in Iowa. Now that I do, I cannot fathom what it was like to have lived without it. Thank you.

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Introduction

I am a white Christian (and parent, partner, teacher, and feminist) who still longs for racial reconciliation. This book emerges from some of the deepest yearnings of my spirit and, directly, the antiracism work these yearnings have led me to for more than two decades. It is written from a place of empathy with Christians who feel frustration, outrage, and sometimes despair over the extent to which racial brokenness and interracial alienation continue to characterize not just our civic communities and nation but also, more painfully, our faith communities. I identify with such Christians, and this book is written to those faith communities. I begin by emphasizing my identification with other justice-minded Christians because, in many ways, this book is very critical. It directly questions the adequacy of what I see as the prominent way liberal, progressive, and prophetic Christian communities respond to race—both communities that are predominantly white, as well as many of those we might describe as multi racial. It tries to be specific and carefully show why our responses to race and racism are so inadequate. We shouldn’t actually be surprised that so many decades past the point at which some white Christians finally acknowledged racism as a problem, we remain so inefficacious at realizing justice and a racially transformed church, and this book tries to explain why. This may be a hard word for some to hear. But I am convinced that framing responses to race through a vision of reconciliation, as we do in most justice- seeking Christian contexts, has proven to be a fundamentally flawed approach. 1

Introduction As long as we persist in that flawed approach, reconciliation itself will remain out of reach. In this way, then, even though this book is critical, it is also—or tries to be—constructive. I committed at the outset of this project to helping readers imagine possibilities and to providing concrete examples that model the kinds of responses to race that I argue for in these pages. Rather than simply point out what it is we are doing inadequately, I have sought to give clear direction about what it is we should be doing instead and how we might envision steps in that direction. The most important way in which this book is constructive, however, has to do with the spirit in which it is written. I write from a place of shared commitment with those who have spent so much energy earnestly thinking about, talking about, and working for racial reconciliation. Even at the most deconstructive moments of my critique, I write from a place of passionately longing for us—for me—to do better; radically better.

Reconciliation Has Failed In the many years I have spent teaching, dialoguing, and otherwise engaging in antiracist work within Christian faith communities, over and over again I have encountered the powerful hold that “reconciliation” has on the white Christian imagination. Rooted in our understanding of the beloved community vision that emerged during the civil rights movement and in our efforts to embrace and value the racial differences that divide us, we speak about robust and just interracial togetherness as what we must journey toward in our efforts to realize a racially transformed church. When I speak to justice-minded Christians, I almost always ask them, “How many of you believe we are to be about the work of reconciliation? How many of you believe we should be creating an inclusive church?” Almost every hand goes up. “Reconciliation” fundamentally frames the ways that many justice-minded Christian communities, but especially predominantly white ones, conceptualize our work on race. The basic critique of this book, then, is that this reconciliation paradigm (a notion I will explain in chapter 1) has failed us. The fact that we have been working for just, interracial, multiracial, diverse, and reconciled faith communities for some time, but have yet to see almost any sustained movement toward realizing such communities, is a powerful indictment of the adequacy 2

Introduction of reconciliation. Our failure to have realized these communities should command our attention and lead us to the insight that something different is required (this argument is explored in chapters 2 and 3). More powerful still is the reality that by clinging to a reconciliation paradigm for understanding race, we have basically ignored what actually transpired in this nation, as well as within the church, in the final years of the civil rights movement. We rightly find historical and theological precedent for today’s visions of reconciliation in the civil rights movement. But by the end of the 1960s, many, many Christians of color (and, given the focus of this work, I should say many Black Christians specifically) were insistent and clear that integrationist visions of reconciled beloved communities were inadequate. Yet when Black Power offered its analysis, firing the imagination and conviction of many Black Christians, white Christians’ response was to not respond. Instead we fled. The final years of the civil rights movement were anything but peaceable between Black and white people who had been allies in the movement prior to that point. In fact, racial alienation actually deepened in this period. It deepened because the Black Power movement’s claim that the civil rights movement had missed critical pieces in the racial puzzle was regarded as fundamentally correct by many Black Christians. But white Christians would have none of it. When we continue in our reconciliation visions today, then, we refuse to remember this history. We ignore the betrayal and devastation Black Christians felt when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. We erase the fact that even King had begun questioning whether he had misjudged and been overly optimistic about the state of the white soul. We miss that the Black anger and white denial characterizing the end of the civil rights movement remain powerful in our relationships today because white Christians have not collectively gone back, reengaged, and apologized for our recalcitrance. In the wake of failed reconciliation, white Christians have yet to ask, “Wait a minute, what was that analysis and diagnosis Black Christians insisted on in the late 1960s? If, fifty years later, we are still struggling to realize reconciliation, might it be possible that what Black Christians were saying then (and have continued to say ever since) is something we white Christians still need to hear today?” My answer to that question in this book is a resounding “yes.” And thus enters the constructive argument.

Introduction

We Need a New Paradigm The Black Power movement offered a different paradigm for understanding race. Instead of emphasizing reconciliation, Black Power insisted clearly and without apology that redistribution (of resources and power) and repair were not only necessary, but were the only appropriate way to think about racial relations in the United States given the actual state of things. In this book, I call this analysis the “reparations paradigm” (a notion I explore in chapters 4, 5, and 6). Drawing on this history, my argument is straightforward: a reparations paradigm continues to be the necessary and appropriate way for Christians, especially white Christians, to understand and respond to race in the United States generally and in our faith communities specifically. In making this argument I draw on what happened when James Forman, backed by many African American clergy, placed the Black Manifesto before the eyes of the white church in 1969. The Black Manifesto made a simple, evidence-based demand: white Christians were complicit in Black oppression and thus reparations were due. From that point I demonstrate the ways in which reparations themselves— namely, reparations for the enslavement of African people—but also a paradigm of reparations insist we understand race. Our understanding must center on history, the degree to which racial identities emerge from that history, and the structural dimensions of our relationships across lines of difference. A reparations paradigm, I argue, offers a much more adequate understanding of race and a process for envisioning responses to it if justice is what we truly seek. A reparations paradigm can be brought to bear on interracial relationships relative to any community. It’s relevant not only between whites and African Americans, and it goes well beyond reparations for enslavement. In chapter 6 I describe the scaffolding intrinsic to a reparations paradigm that allows us to better respond to race regardless of which particular racial groups are involved. I then give three examples of how a reparations paradigm might shape our work for racial justice in regard to the environmental crisis, immigration, and mass incarceration. At the same time, I believe strongly that a powerful and formative moral, social, and political debt continues to inhere in white and Black relations relative to the history of enslavement. For that reason the final two chapters of this book look specifically at reparations for slavery. In these chapters I consider movements for reparations that have been pursued overtly, beginning in the early 2000s, in two Protestant denominations, honing in on work in the Episcopal Church (chapters 7 and 8). 4

Introduction I exercise great care to make a persuasive case for a reparations paradigm and explain precisely what it is and might mean. I don’t presume the reader should already understand what I mean by such a term. Still, let me say here just a general word about what a reparations paradigm would do if it came to frame our work on race in the church. A reparations paradigm slows us down. It requires that we not move so quickly to presume that interracial relationships and beloved community are even possible. This is more than appropriate given the actual situation in which race locates us right now. We are living still today with legacies of unaddressed violence, oppression, subjugation, and devastation for which those of us who have benefited have yet to apologize, let alone make meaningful repair. A reparations paradigm requires us to take seriously a question that seems unthinkable to many white Christians: namely, without repentance and repair having come prior, why would we assume interracial relations to be desirable or beneficial to Christians of color? A reparations paradigm presumes that if we continue to live with an unacknowledged history of white hostility to and violence against communities of color, then speaking of reconciliation may do more harm than good. It may cover up more than it discloses. Deployed in Christian contexts, a reparations paradigm insists that repentance and repair must come first. And for them to come first, we must also know and name carefully what the harm has been and how it continues in the present. We must have a sense of what it is we propose to stop, and move to meaningfully redress the damage done. Living into a reparations paradigm is difficult. It requires dwelling in painful truths. But it is honest and truthful in ways that, I am convinced, are potentially liberating and transformative for all of us.

A Few Notes on Audience, Focus, and Language Before turning to the work, a few explanations are warranted in regard to questions that might arise about the way I pursue the case herein.

1. Audience First, the primary communities I engage as I describe the reconciliation paradigm are the same communities to whom I write. I plead here for those we might describe (or, better, who have self-described) as prophetic evangelicals,1 as well as those who practice their faith within self-consciously 5

Introduction progressive pockets of mainline Protestantism (the Episcopal Church, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, some Baptists, and the United Church of Christ, for example), to engage a reparations paradigm. In many ways these two cohorts of Christians are rather different. Their histories, especially in terms of race, diverge significantly. When prophetic evangelicals take up matters of justice, they are more likely (though not exclusively) to think in terms more consistent with piety traditions. Individual transformation and radical commitment are key. Meanwhile, their mainline siblings tend to be more likely (though not exclusively) to think in terms of structures and resolutions to be implemented. Changing institutions is prioritized. Both approaches have deep merits and both have weaknesses. My discussion of both mainline Protestants and prophetic evangelicals throughout this book is not intended to overstate or create a fixed boundary distinguishing them. The distinctions I draw merely serve to lift up the resolutions and curriculum mainline Protestants have produced in their work on race and the radical commitments to justice that prophetic evangelicals pursue, specifically those living in intentional communities.2 In terms of institutional differences, the National Council of Churches (NCC) is the relevant umbrella organization for mainline Protestants, whereas for prophetic evangelicals it is the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). The NCC has a longer history of engaging race and racial justice overtly than does the NAE. This is why Protestant denominations get attention in the discussion of the Black Manifesto and prophetic evangelicals do not. But I have no interest in making any claim here about either of these communities engaging race more adequately than the other. And again, I presume there is overlap between the groups. This book, then, is not an analysis of these groups of Christians themselves. I write about them because they both—albeit with nuances to which I do give attention—have articulated a sustained commitment to racial reconciliation. Readers looking for a detailed analysis of white prophetic evangelicals’ increased involvement in racial justice work (which is happening right now) or an in-depth discussion of all the programs mainline Protestants have constructed and pursued over the past several decades will find this book a disappointment. But never fear: there is other outstanding scholarship available on such matters. This book makes a case for a paradigm shift in communities that use reconciliation as the primary way of talking about their racial vision. Both prophetic evangelicals and mainline Protestants do this to a significant degree. It is thus 6

Introduction devoted to explaining and emphasizing the need for that shift, not to a detailed scholarly treatment of the groups. My clarification that this book is neither an analysis nor a comprehensive account of all that prophetic evangelicals or mainline Protestants have done on race is also a way of saying that it’s possible this book may at points use language to describe these groups that is less precise than what a detailed scholarly analysis of them might demand—or that there may be dimensions of their work or groups active within their ranks that are not given attention. Saying so is not an excuse designed to preempt legitimate critiques readers might raise about either matter. And, of course, I have attempted to write in such a way that these communities will recognize themselves—if they don’t, the book is appropriately critiqued for its inadequacy. But the point remains that the emphasis here is not the groups themselves, the differences or similarities between them, or the strengths and weaknesses they manifest rendering either more or less likely to engage a reparations paradigm in a real and meaningful way. (That would, however, be an interesting book.) The argument here is simply and urgently for the appropriateness and efficacy of a reparations paradigm for engaging race and responding to our longings for justice. White Christians need to take the counterintuitive risk of actually letting go (at least for now) of the reconciliation paradigm to which we are so deeply wedded, even if the state of being reconciled continues to be our vision of what just and transformed racial communities look like. Meanwhile, even while I do not write primarily about prophetic evangelical or progressive mainline Protestant communities, I do write directly to them because I believe their longing for justice and reconciliation is sincere. If any white Christians are likely to take up the challenge laid out in this work, they are the ones. I also write to these communities because in many ways I recognize them as “my people.” I was nurtured in evangelical faith communities and attribute the liberationist, feminist Christian convictions I hold today to the fervor of and commitment to my own search for piety and radical transformation. I found Black liberation theology because of my evangelical worldview. The sincerity and all-encompassing nature of that faith, so characteristic of and nurtured by evangelicalism, shaped my walk in this world in ways that ultimately led me beyond the evangelical theological world. I left evangelicalism because I sought theological responses to questions about my own identity and developing political commitments that I could not answer within it. But,

Introduction even as I joined the ranks of mainline Protestantism—officially when I was ordained as pastor in the American Baptist Churches USA—I attributed my arrival there to what I had come to know first about God and the world in the Conservative Baptist community of which I was an active part for the first twenty years of my life. It was through dwelling long in the white evangelical world that I eventually arrived at a place of believing fervently in justice and knowing a relentless call to embody justice-commitment in every way possible in my life. I am committed to justice because first I believed that truly God so loved this broken, aching world.

2. Focus Second, I anticipate that some readers may ask why—with the brief exception of chapter 6—I focus primarily on Black and white Christians. This is a legitimate question. To the degree it is asked as a critique, it is a critique that has traction. Many scholars have emphasized the artificiality and inadequacy of the Black-white binary in which so much thinking about and work on race in the United States continues to take place. Many scholars have accurately emphasized how often it is that scholarship focusing on relationships between white Americans and African Americans perpetuates US-Americans’ inabilities to think in terms more adequate for the pluralistic society that we’ve not only increasingly become, but in many ways have always been. An important dimension of this critique is that overemphasizing Black and white relations can serve to render racial and ethnic communities whose experiences fall outside the Black-white binary invisible. This further subjugates such communities who also have compelling justice claims and rich cultural and political heritages that deserve attention. If pluralism is our racial reality in the United States, scholars have an obligation to theorize in ways that better enable us all to think in pluralistic terms and seek forms of justice that honor pluralism. I am convinced by each of these critiques and yet have still chosen to focus here primarily on white and Black US-American relationships. This conscious decision stems from my sense that there remain persuasive and important reasons to continue to work on that set of relationships. Doing so does not in and of itself mean ignoring the veracity of the concern about needing more theorizing for pluralism. 8

Introduction In addition, sometimes critiques of the Black-white binary fall prey to the insinuation that somehow we have moved beyond the importance of such work. That case cannot be made unless one is prepared to assert that we have actually and meaningfully transformed relationships between Black and white people. Another insinuation that hovers in the binary charge is that the Black experience takes up more space than it should relative to other racial groups. Such an insinuation has its own problems. On top of all this, the important call for better theoretical work on racial pluralism has been too often taken up—from my perspective—by white US- Americans who find it easier to talk about difference and engage race regarding issues other than those relating to African Americans. (For example, my white colleagues are much more eager to talk about programming and practices that increase all kinds of diversity in our teaching institution than they are about relating to the African American communities in our own city of Des Moines, Iowa.) I am suspicious of this for obvious reasons. The degree to which both African and Native American history and experience represent a foundational “interracial” encounter on this land base (European/African/Native)—one we have yet to collectively contend with and that continues to form the basis of US economic prosperity (for some)— merits ongoing work on these relations. Saying so is not a case against seeking and constructing theories and models that allow us to engage the complexities and intersections of pluralism. Nor is it a trope in one of those dead-end conversations about any oppression being “worse” and thus more “worthy” of attention than any other. It is simply a case for continuing direct work on these particular matters and histories as deeply and attentively as any others in our rapidly changing demographics. There are other specific reasons I chose to focus on white and Black Christian relationships. I have long been deeply interested in and passionate about the United States’ “original sins” of genocide and enslavement.3 I wanted to engage movements for repair actually taking place, and it so happens that reparations are being given attention in a substantive way in some Christian communities. In addition, I believe that the era of Black Power had a profound impact on Black-white Christian relationships within the church and remains underrepresented in the self-understanding of white Christians today. Finally, the reader will note that I attend to reparations for the enslavement of African people without taking up reparative responses to Native nations—despite my deep interest in those matters as well. This is because, though the United

Introduction States’ “original sins” are thoroughly interrelated, responses to the distinct histories and legacies of Native-white relations merit their own lengthy treatment (as would be true in relation to the experiences of any other racial communities). I have given some such treatment elsewhere,4 but here the focus is on reparations to African American communities. Having said all that, a reparations paradigm is potentially applicable to the experiences of any racial community that has had meaningful encounters with white US-American communities. In chapter 6 I provide three short explanations, then, of how a reparations paradigm might shape justice responses to race beyond reparations to people of African descent for histories of enslavement. It is my hope that doing so will inspire and invite Christians longing for reconciliation to deploy a reparations paradigm for whatever racial justice work is most befitting and salient in their own contexts.

3. Language Third and finally, please note that I use the language of “whiteness” extensively throughout this work. While the language of white privilege and, with it, the particular relationships of white people to histories and contemporary structures of white supremacy have been given increasing attention by justice-seeking white Christians in recent years, this term may still feel strange to some readers. I hope the analysis I provide makes clear why this language is important. I have tried to make a solid case for why honing in on the particular problem of whiteness is critical in racial justice work. In fact, what I have described elsewhere as the “moral crisis of being white”5 is a primary phenomenon around which the need for a reparations paradigm turns. Despite decades of calls from Black activists, scholars, and theologians, white Christians’ attempts to address racism have largely failed to acknowledge the problem of whiteness. In fact, a reconciliation paradigm makes it almost impossible to do so—even as a reparations paradigm makes it almost impossible not to. The term “whiteness” in this book signals not only white people but, more broadly, the phenomenon of white perpetration and complicity. It points to the deep and formative relationship that exists between white people and white supremacy. The concept of whiteness assumes that human body-selves that happen to be of lighter skin tones become socially recognizable and categorized as “white” even as those same body-selves encounter and interact with the struc10

Introduction tures and systems that maintain racial hierarchy. In other words, people who are “white” are not white in some essential way. Rather, we are racially formed and shaped by way of the very same systems that enable white supremacy and as we respond to those systems. As I argue beginning in chapter 2, racial identities are always formed (positively and negatively) in relation to systems of injustice. It goes without saying that African Americans’ historical experiences of racial oppression and their struggles against it are of first importance when considering matters of race and racial justice. But, by and large, the perpetrators of racial oppression have been people categorized as “white,” as have the beneficiaries of the wealth generated through the appropriation of indigenous peoples’ lands and the enslavement of people of African descent. These historical realities are formative in US history, and Christian churches are deeply implicated in them. So, the problem of whiteness is critical when responding to race. If whiteness is the central reality in the existence of racial injustice, then being able to name, analyze, and deconstruct it is necessary. Yet very few of our antiracist efforts in Christian contexts have been devoted to such work. Nor has the phenomenon of whiteness even been named a problem in a central way. As a Christian ethicist working in the liberationist tradition, I subscribe to the conviction that a norm of “justice” is at the heart of Christian practice and identity. I understand “just” in the tradition of ethicist Beverly Harrison, who described it as “rightly related community.”6 As such, justice is a state of relations that must be actively pursued. It is also the terrain on which the caliber of our racial relationships is to be assessed.7 When whiteness is absented from our analysis of the problem of racial injustice, racism becomes conceived as a problem pertaining primarily to Black people or other people of color. This is a huge problem even among those who would agree there are theological and moral imperatives for ending oppression. Without a direct acknowledgment of white behavior and the active participation of white people in our racial relationships, without the choice to take full ownership of and responsibility for white agency, without work to understand what it is about whiteness that makes it difficult for white people to do so, it is impossible for us to get to the root of racial brokenness. For all these reasons, making whiteness visible and challenging it directly is urgent. This is something a reparations paradigm not only makes possible but actually demands.

Introduction Having laid out the arguments, clarified the choices, and described the ethos and sensibilities that inform the pages that follow, I invite the reader now to simply engage. This book makes no pretense of having answers to all the challenging questions that a reparations paradigm raises. Still, I hope that the work contained here at least successfully secures a real hearing for it. Let us, therefore, begin.