racism

Repentance will require people of European descent to face this truth

Lisa Sharon Harper / By

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

Robert P. Jones / By

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 / By

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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Black deaths were not recorded, except as property loss

Lisa Sharon Harper / By

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

Robert P. Jones / By

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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The Creation of Blackness

Uncategorized / By

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 / By

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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Affirmative action

Heather McGhee / By

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 / By

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 / By

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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