racism – How to Heal Our Divides

Repentance will require people of European descent to face this truth

When the image of God was crushed, broken, twisted, distorted, covered, or erased, the ancient Hebrews originally hearing this text would have understood these acts against humanity to be acts of war against God. European conquest of land and people throughout the Enlightenment period was actually a period of European wrestling against God for control […]

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Like moving to Taiwan

Idelette McVicker / Brian Allain

Leaving whiteness and entering an anti-racist world were, for me, like moving to Taiwan. I didn’t know the lay of the land. I didn’t know how to get around. I didn’t know the language. I was a newcomer. This is exactly where recovery from our internalized racism happens. Squamish author and designer Ta7taliya Nahanee created

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The Native American slave trade

Lisa Sharon Harper / Brian Allain

But Black oblivion is not the only kind of oblivion within American colonial slavocracy. Mystery compounds mystery with the southeastern states’ prolific investment in the Native American slave trade. Long before the first enslaved Angolans landed in Virginia in 1619, southeastern indigenous nations were pitted against one another and encouraged to sell their tribal enemies

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Black rage is suppressed

Andre Henry / Brian Allain

Virginia legislator James H. Gholson said in an 1831 speech “Our slave population is not a happy one, but it is a contented, peaceful and harmless one.” And because ideas don’t die easily, some white Americans have been repeating some version of that lie ever since. Around the time of the Civil War, Southern slaveholders

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White Christians stand out in their negative attitudes about racial, ethnic, and religious minorities

Robert P. Jones / Brian Allain

To be sure, most white denominations, and most white Christians, have today taken pains to distance themselves from slavery, the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation, and overtly racist attitudes openly espoused in the past. But in survey after survey, white Christians stand out in their negative attitudes about racial, ethnic, and religious minorities

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Sit, listen, and share

Justin Phillips / Brian Allain

One such example of choosing who I would dialogue with came from joining a student group devoted to racial reconciliation at Duke Divinity School. That group helped me consider this tension – between my privileges and my interaction with the world – within a trusted community. Each week we gathered to hear one another’s stories.

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The stubborn belief that needs to shift

Heather McGhee / Brian Allain

So what is the stubborn belief that needs to shift now for us to make progress against inequality? I found my first clues in a series of psychology studies. Psychologists Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson presented white Americans with news articles about people of color becoming the majority of the population by 2042. The study

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Indigenous nations sue North Dakota over ‘sickening’ gerrymandering

Uncategorized / Brian Allain

The suit charges that diluting Indigenous power violates their voting rights and will handicap tribe members who run for office https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/21/native-american-tribes-sue-north-dakota-gerrymandering

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Black deaths were not recorded, except as property loss

Lisa Sharon Harper / Brian Allain

Sin is passed down from generation to generation. As it goes, it snowballs. At some point, within five generations of Ballards in Camden, South Carolina, someone bought or was gifted Lea or her mother Hannah Reynolds. It is never mentioned that Lea certainly experienced the dreaded separation from her mother that came like clockwork to

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Claiming “color blindness”

Ibram X. Kendi / Brian Allain

THE COMMON IDEA of claiming “color blindness” is akin to the notion of being “ not racist” – as with the “not racist,” the color-blind individual, by ostensibly failing to see race, fails to see racism and falls into racist passivity. The language of color blindness – like the language of “not racist” – is

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The earliest phase of the Christian Right movement didn’t bridge the Protestant-Catholic divide

Robert P. Jones / Brian Allain

The earliest phase of the Christian Right movement didn’t bridge the Protestant-Catholic divide. But when Protestant Christian Right leaders such as Jerry Falwell Sr. followed the advice of Catholic political activist Paul Weyrich to include opposition to abortion as a leading issue for the nascent movement in the late 1970s – as white Protestants were

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In many instances unwilling to abide by it

Susan K Smith / Brian Allain

Our beloved Bible gave us the Great Commandment, found in the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It is significant that these words are found in all three of the Synoptics, which indicates that they are the heart and soul of the Christian faith. In all three Gospels, Jesus the Christ is asked, “What

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The Creation of Blackness

Uncategorized / Brian Allain

To understand Whiteness we must begin with Blackness. In the emergence of Blackness, Whiteness finds its origin and its meaning. Though the African story traces back to the deepest reaches of history, the uniquely African American story begins in the fifteenth century. Driven together by the early Enlightenment currents of religion, economics, politics, and science.

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Today our schools are nearly as segregated as they were before

Heather McGhee / Brian Allain

In my gut, I’ve always known that laws are merely expressions of a society’s dominant beliefs. It’s the beliefs that must shift in order for outcomes to change. When policies change in advance of the underlying beliefs, we are often surprised to find the problem still with us. America ended the policy of enforced school

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Whites tend to live as if we are unmarked racially

Justin Phillips / Brian Allain

I hated coming to the realization of what people of color potentially faced every day: I was a body; I experienced the world as a body now. In turn, others experienced me, first, as a body – a failing body – not as a soul, an intellect, or a conscience. My illness thrust me into

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The Sacred Work of White Discomfort

Robert P. Jones / Brian Allain

by Robert P. Jones https://robertpjones.substack.com/p/the-sacred-work-of-white-discomfort

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Why Removing Racist Symbols and Monuments Matters

Jemar Tisby / Brian Allain

by Jemar Tisby https://jemartisby.substack.com/p/why-removing-racist-symbols-and-monuments

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How then does one begin?

Catherine Meeks / Brian Allain

For many years I believed and hoped that altering psychological processes like changing the master status, making people aware of their projections and how they “other” people, would solve the problem with racism. With a growing awareness of how racism operates, for example, Amy Irving suggests in Waking Up White to try to trick the

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Affirmative action

Heather McGhee / Brian Allain

The idea of affirmative action looms large in the white imagination and has been a passion among conservative activists. Some white people even believe that Black people get to go to college for free – when the reality is, Black students on average wind up paying more for college through interest-bearing student loans over their

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Dueling consciousness

Ibram X. Kendi / Brian Allain

White people have their own dueling consciousness, between the segregationist and the assimilationist: the slave trader and the missionary, the proslavery exploiter and the antislavery civilizer, the eugenicist and the melting pot-ter, the mass incarcerator and the mass developer, the Blue Lives Matter and the All Lives Matter, the not-racist nationalist and the not-racist American.

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The zero sum is a story by wealthy interests for their own profit

Heather McGhee / Brian Allain

In decade after decade, threats of job competition – between men and women, immigrants and native born. Black and white – have perennially revived the fear of loss at another’s gain. The people setting up the competition and spreading these fears were never the needy job seekers, but the elite. (Consider the New York Herald’s

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