Willie Dwayne Francois III

Without White people qualitatively and quantitively transforming anything real

From “Silencing White Noise: Six Practices to Overcome Our Inaction on Race” by Willie Dwayne Francois III  Due to white noise, many of us undertake reconciliation without first interrogating the meaning, assumptions, histories, and privileges of Whiteness. Reconciliation does not cost the powerful and privileged anything that alters the ways they show up in the …

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“This is a message those other White people need to hear.”

In fall of 2015 I was part of a panel forum exploring the history and future of progressive faith communities at the intersections of gender, mass incarceration, and sexuality. During the question-and-answer time, a White attendee approached the microphone: “Rev. Francois, thank you for your talk. You rightly identified the insanity of racism in our …

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Reparative Intercession

Reparative intercession reverberates as a counternarrative to the white noise that identifies the present world with ideas of societal fairness, racial progress, meritocracy, and colorblindness. Anti-racist educator Derald Wing Sue writes, “The counter-narratives of race talk are extremely threatening to Whites and to our society because they may unmask the secrets of power and privilege, …

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Honest, consistent, collective speech

The one who practices racial truth-telling affects others by sharing “as directly as possible what he actually believes.” Racial truth-telling assumes the speaking person owns their words and intends for those words to re-create the worlds we inhabit. Without a readiness to own the consequences of our words, truth-telling bounces across space and time absent …

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The idea of going through the day with little to no consideration of one’s skin color remains foreign to non-White people

Silence serves White privilege and threatens non-White survival. I will later argue that White privilege benefits White people. But the idea of going through the day with little to no consideration of one’s skin color remains foreign to non-White people. Regarding one’s self outside racial identifiers is a privilege the majority of White people enjoy. …

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