Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation

By Jennifer Harvey and Traci D. Blackmon

“If reconciliation is the takeaway point for the civil rights story we usually tell, then the takeaway point for the more complex, more truthful civil rights story contained in Dear White Christians is reparations.” — from the preface to the second edition

With the troubling and painful events of the last several years—from the killing of numerous unarmed Black men and women at the hands of police to the rallying of white supremacists in Charlottesville—it is clearer than ever that the reconciliation paradigm, long favored by white Christians, has failed to heal the deep racial wounds in the church and American society. In this provocative book, originally published in 2014, Jennifer Harvey argues for a radical shift away from the well-meaning but feeble longing for reconciliation toward a robustly biblical call for reparations.

 Now in its second edition—with a new preface addressing the explosive changes in American culture and politics since 2014, as well as an appendix that explores what a reparations paradigm can actually look like—Dear White Christians calls justice-committed Christians to do the gospel-inspired work of opposing racist social structures around them. Harvey’s message is historically and scripturally rooted, making it ideal for facilitating the difficult but important discussions about race that are so desperately needed in churches and faith-centered classrooms across the country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Jul 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781467459617

Jennifer Harvey

The Rev. Dr. Jennifer Harvey is a New York Times bestselling and award-winning author, educator and public speaker. Her work focuses on ethics and race, gender, sexuality, activism, spirituality and politics—with particular attention to how religion shows up in these dimensions of our shared social life. Her greatest passion and longtime work, however, persistently and pointedly return to racial justice and white anti-racism. Jen speaks and publishes with numerous academic and public outlets. Her essay Are We Raising Racists? spent nearly a week on the New York Times “ten most read pieces” list. She has written for and appeared on Good Morning America, CNN, NPR, Sojourners on-line, The Conversation and other national media outlets. Visit the author online at www.jenniferharvey.org.

Book preview

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, Second Edition, 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

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

ISBN 978-0-8028-7791-8

eISBN 978-1-4674-5961-7

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

Introduction

PART ONE

RECONCILIATION?

WHERE WE ARE AND WHY

1A Reconciliation Paradigm

The Perceived Problem, the Perceived Solution

Historical and Theological Precedents for Reconciliation

Conclusion

2There Is No Racial Parallel

Race as a Social Construction

Race Connects Our Faces to Our Souls

A Universal Ethic versus a Particular One

Conclusion

3Reconciliation Is Not the Answer

Reconciliation Today as a White Vision

Inadequate but Not Irrelevant

Moving toward a Reparations Paradigm

Conclusion

PART TWO

REPARATIONS!

GOING BACKWARD BEFORE GOING FORWARD

4The Black Manifesto

Setting the Context

From Civil Rights to Black Power

The Black Manifesto

A Reparations Paradigm

Conclusion

5The Particular Problem of Whiteness

White Moral Agency

The Moral Logic of Reparations

Implications and Invitation for Today

Conclusion

6A Reparations Paradigm

The Scaffolding of a Reparations Paradigm

Making It Real: The Environmental Crisis and Creation Care

Making It Real: Battles over Immigration

Making It Real: Mass Incarceration

Conclusion

PART THREE

STIRRINGS OF HOPE, PATHWAYS OF TRANSFORMATION

7We Are Called to Remember Our Entire History

Toward Reparations: Presbyterian and Episcopal Churches

Rethinking the Reconciliation Paradigm

A Theology of History

The Visibility of Whiteness

Conclusion

8Becoming Repairers of the Breach

Every Parish Must, in Some Way, Participate

Insights and Experiences

Challenges and Limitations

Conclusion

Conclusion

Appendix: Now What?

Notes

Index

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 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.

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 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 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, Second Edition 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 Protestant 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 networks 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. 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 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, 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?

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 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