We act like whiteness doesn’t hurt or change us. Perhaps, whiteness, white blindness, white supremacy hurts “others” but we like to believe that it doesn’t damage our faith. We’re wrong, of course. We are blinded to so much by the socialization of whiteness, by the heavy curtain of culturally required assumptions to peacefully in white-dominated society. We aren’t even allowed to see what’s right in front of us, printed on the page no less.

Maybe you know the lesson of the Ethiopian Eunuch. Maybe there is so much more…

Do we even know what history is in the room? Can we feel the weight of hundreds of years of Western-centered world-view highlighting Phillip’s “salvific” actions, shifting our focus, shaping our mental image? Our learned presumptions of whiteness are so thick, so deep that only that which fits exactly our Western paradigm, only that which confirms our white notions of faithfulness, only that which affirms our narrow interpretations gets through.

What passes for faithfulness in our white world? What constitutes discipline and discipleship in following white Jesus? Who do we see and claim to be acting and acted upon – it’s all there in Black and white. Phillip is assumed to be acting faithfully, in part, because in most of our minds he’s a white, straight, cisgender, heterosexual man acting on the will of God to bring salvation to “the ends of the earth.” Anything that doesn’t quite fit that paradigm is lost to us. We can’t even, won’t even see details and evidence of God doing something different than what we’ve ordained to be true.

We miss so much. We miss out on so much. White blindness limits our world and warps the boundaries we place on faith. Who can do the will of God? Who can serve our Lord? We decide who can incarnate Christ and work to bring saving faith to a broken and needy people, because we’re not the needy people, right?

Watch, listen, and explore all of this and more…

There is so much more to say and much more to discuss – come to the Racial Heresy group to be a part of the conversation.

If you’re not already a member of our Racial Heresy Facebook group, click the banner below.

We’ve been White Too Long for way too long. Our white church, our white faith, and our white identities are way too Fragile. What will it take to change the church? Robin DiAngelo, PhD, returns and joins Robert P. Jones, PhD, and the Racial Heresy Team to explore what it will take to move the needle and get white Christians to work against systemic racism in our institutions.

“White Fragility” and “White Too Long” have captured the imaginations of white Christians across denominations and geography – and still we have no stamina for the work of undoing the white supremacy that undergirds our faith! When will we listen? How can we face the reality of our own internalized white superiority and change the church?

White supremacy is pervasive. White fragility compels us to compartmentalize. We are working on race, though, right? We have lots of things we have to do but we also do racial justice work, so that’s good enough? But it’s not. What will it take for the white church to see and act on racial justice and ending white supremacy as the fundamental issue which influences everything?

We have been unwilling to change in order to save Black life. We’ve been unwilling to change for the sake of justice. We have been unwilling to change in obedience to our Lord, Jesus Christ, and his commands of love. What will it take, then, to move us to repent? White self-interest is one strategy for advancing the work of racial justice but can it be trusted? Is it the right path? What alternative do we have to change the church?

We want to act. We want to do. We want to make it better but we can’t be effective advocates for change until we encounter the depths of our reality. We are fragile people who have used our power to create the strongest possible bulwark of systemic injustice. Our faith perpetuates the very sin we decry. We are not only complicit in violence, trauma, and death, the structures of our lives depend on it. We have to sit with that.

Watch, listen, and sit with us as we explore all of this and more… (some audio & video is broken but the content is worth it!)

There is so much more to say and much more to discuss – come to the Racial Heresy group to be a part of the conversation.

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Racial Heresy engages with Dr. Robert P. Jones, author of “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,” to explore beyond the damning statistics to the future of our faith, trying to find a way to extricate white supremacy from our faith.

White Christian America can, to paraphrase Jones, pass onto our children either the faith of our fathers or a salvific hope for the future but not both. Can white faith be saved? Can white people be saved? Perhaps not in the white church or by white faith. We have been white too long.

White supremacy is supported, maintained, and sustained by mainline Christian churches across the political, denomination, geographic, and racial spectrum. If you are white and Christian you are nearly twice as likely to hold racist views than non-Christian white Americans – TWICE as likely!

We had Moses and the prophets and we haven’t listened. We had MLK and Malcolm X and we haven’t listened. We had Ida B. Wells and Billie Holiday and we haven’t listened. Now we have quantitative sociological research to prove what generations of BIPOC have been saying since the church landed on this rock – white supremacy is our religion. Now, will we listen?

White people must accept that we are not in right relationship with God. We can’t be. We can’t love God whom we cannot see while hating our siblings, sisters, and brothers whom we can see. If we won’t stop our violence for the sake of Black Life, will we finally submit in humility to the Justice of Jesus Christ for the sake of our own souls?

Watch and find out.

There is so much more to say and much more to discuss – come to the Racial Heresy group to be a part of the conversation.

If you’re not already a member of our Racial Heresy Facebook group, click the banner below.

We recorded this episode on the MORNING of Jan 6th, 2021, before an armed mob of angry white folks stormed the United States Capital. So now what?

Does the white Church have a role in these violent times beyond comforting white people? Can the white Church exercise any authority when we’ve remained unrepentant, continuing to prop-up the white supremacy status quo?

You tell us.

There is so much more to say and much more to discuss – come to the Racial Heresy group to be a part of the conversation.

If you’re not already a member of our Racial Heresy Facebook group, click the banner below.

Are you dreaming of a white Christmas?

Yeah, us neither. But we hope you enjoy this Christmas mini-album!

There is so much more to say and much more to discuss – come to the Racial Heresy group to be a part of the conversation.

If you’re not already a member of our Racial Heresy Facebook group, click the banner below.

I never meant to do this episode, so I don’t have a prepared post or a well-worded blurb. Yes, the Spirt spoke (mostly to Fr. Jabriel and Pr. Jimmie), so I tried to catch up. I hope you’ll do better than me and listen.

It’s rare we let our white selves be in places where we are on the same footing as our Black and Brown siblings, sisters, and brothers. It’s even more rare to let our white selves be in places where we are the minority, subject to Black authority, and beholden to Black hospitality and welcome.

Yet that is where I found myself this morning, invited to be part of the Blacks with Power podcast. I was invited to talk live with Pastor Jimmie and Father Jabriel, to see what laughter and irreverent discussion about race and dynamics we could share across the color.

It was a gift. They are a gift. And we share that gift with you now! Merry Christmas.

There is so much more to say and much more to discuss – come to the Racial Heresy group to be a part of the conversation.

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(portions of this post were, in the best traditions of whiteness, “borrowed” from a Black man who wrote them first and better: https://blackswithpower.com/gifts-across-the-color-line-to-make-the-word-flesh-in-our-midsts/ )

Black identity is under attack, once again, in the Georgia runoff. White allies are tired from the “hard work” of getting Trump out of office. We’re ready to return to normal. Will the white church find the courage to advocate for the right of Black leaders like the Rev. Raphael Warnock to retain their faith?

Or will we join the calls to white wash the prophetic voice of the Black Church?

We continue to deny the full expression of humanity made in the image of God when we refuse to accept identity, call, and vocation in the life of Black women and men. We deny God’s authority to incarnate prophetic witness in anything other than a white body, white culture, or white-ness.

How can we claim to believe the very incarnation of Jesus – a life of prophetic witness lived in a brown body?

Advent is a time to prepare for Incarnation. More than 2,000 years ago, Incarnation came in the most unlikely of people, in the most unlikely of places – an unwed teenage mother. Where will the incarnation of white advocacy for Black identity come from today?

There is so much more to say and much more to discuss – come to the Racial Heresy group to be a part of the conversation.

If you’re not already a member of our Racial Heresy Facebook group, click the banner below.

St. Paul admonishes us to be on our guard and warns us about savage wolves that will come to pull away the faithful. The book of Jude (yup, it’s in the Bible, keep looking…) warns us of the dangers of false teachers, but what do we do with heresy?

Are we listening?

Really, “heresy”? Hasn’t the white church surrendered ANY and ALL legitimacy around heresy? When we weaponized that word to justify murder, patriarchy, anti-semitism, genocide, and more, we lost our authority to engage with heresy. We need to just put the “heresy” label down and step back a few paces.

But we don’t. We don’t step back and get some distance or perspective on our actions, our history, our choices. We don’t see our wrongs and so don’t see our need for repentance. Perhaps we’ll try reconciliation, but repentance would mean changing…

We’ve manipulated theology to justify heinous violence. We might even admit we erred or strayed and that we need to understand our faith a little bit better. Even then, we won’t repent of our heretical position, reexamine our theology, doctrine, and discipline. We won’t undo the heresy of white supremacy because we would have to surrender our power to do it.

Repentance means changing our power structures. Repentance means less money, privilege, and influence. We’d rather hold onto our status and control than right the deep wrongs of our systems.

The church moved from supporting slavery to segregated balconies, from segregated balconies to hiring black staff just not clergy, from hiring clergy but not listening to their guidance nor following their leadership. We might change our behavior but we don’t undo the heresy. We just find a new way to express it.

Is our faith really all and only about grace? Does God really not care about our repentance?

In the face of our continuing monopoly of power and resources, of our refusal to repent, of our unwillingness to undo the foundations of white supremacy that sustain us, what do you do with heresy?

There is so much more to say and much more to discuss – come to the Racial Heresy group to be a part of the conversation.

If you’re not already a member of our Racial Heresy Facebook group, click the banner below.

On the morning of November 4th, 2020, Racial Heresy went LIVE! For the first time ever, events were so pressing, the pressure so great, and the Spirit was moving so that we finally took to Facebook Live to process the results of the election (such as they were in that moment).

Listen as we explore lament, courage, history, lethargy, guilt, shame, faith, hope, and Christ as part of our reactions to the presidential election as of 11:00am, 2020.

There is so much more to say and much more to discuss – come to the Racial Heresy group to be a part of the conversation.

If you’re not already a member of our Racial Heresy Facebook group, click the banner below.

When will we start listening to God and when will we start listening to Black experience?

If white people are serious about reconciliation, then we should one day find ourselves reconciling with white supremacists. If white people really listen to Black leaders, thinkers, friends, family members, clergy, organizers, writers, poets, musicians, theologians, historians, authors, and speakers, then our work will take us beyond ourselves and into the lives of others.

Maybe you’ve been listening already. Maybe you’ve listened and read and listened some more. I have.

I’ve listened to all manner of incredible preachers, professors, and mentors but if you looked at my life could you really tell? What impact have I allowed them to have? If I haven’t changed, have I really been listening?

We say we want Black leadership in the Church. We say we want to appoint and elect Black clergy and lay leaders to our boards. We say we want to have “diversity” that represents all of our church in all that we do. But are we willing to work for it? Are we willing to do the work that would make us safe to work with? Will we do the work that can move us beyond tokenism and trophies?

Or will we reenact what centuries of systematized power has taught us and gravitate to those we judge to be safe?

Just like we do with God.

How long do we expect someone to stay in an abusive relationship? We never require someone to stay with a partner or parent or family member who harms them. When will we start listening to Black experience and believing Black people?

How long will we expect Black people to stay in relationship with White America as we continue to do violence and show no sign of repentance?

It’s a better question, in many ways, than “why are Black people still here?” Why are we still here? What is keeping us at the communion table with our siblings, sisters, and brothers whom we continue to hurt?

What do we believe about God that lets us continue to approach the Altar of the Lord as if our siblings have nothing against us? How can we behave as if we’re doing the best we can – when we’re not. When will we start listening to God and to our neighbors?

There is so much more to say and much more to discuss – come to the Racial Heresy group to be a part of the conversation.

If you’re not already a member of our Racial Heresy Facebook group, click the banner below.