From “Silencing White Noise: Six Practices to Overcome Our Inaction on Race” by Willie Dwayne Francois III – Brazos Press
Diversity remains an ideal in Christian communities of various ideological shapes and racial compositions. But for numerous houses of worship, this amounts to a short-sighted, shallow goal that gratifies personal preferences instead of forming authentic strategy to undo the racism that corrodes public life beyond our sanctuaries. Racial reconciliation prioritizes the abstract notion of “human oneness” without addressing the social messes spawned by White terrorism – a terrorism regularly baptized by Christian doctrine and practice – which creates the need for reconciliation in the first place. This inexpedient collective call for reconciliation allows us to focus on racial and ethnic differences without accessing how historical, material, and structural conditions give meaning to those distinctions. Through reconciliation, we further cling to our illusions of innocence.