Ten years ago, a priest at an inner-city Episcopal church in Delaware (Saints Andrew and Matthew in Wilmington) invited me to lead a Lenten retreat on race and film for his congregants.
His parish, he told me, was made up of two congregations, a disappearing white church and a thriving Black church. David, the priest, told me, “We worship together, we work together, but we haven’t talked together. Yet. I’m thinking that maybe if you lead us in some conversation around some films, we might get there. We might be able to step over some walls.”
We watched three films together that weekend: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Do the Right Thing, and Crash.
Greg Garrett
Our conversations after were amazing. Transformative. People of all sorts stepped outside their comfort zones, told their truths, shared their histories.
And in the process, we also identified some of the racial myths and stereotypes expressed in these films.
I emailed my editor at Oxford University Press after the first night conversation on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: “I’ve found my next book.” That project became A Long Long Way: Hollywood’s Unfinished Journey from Racism to Redemption, a work I discussed with dozens of congregations on Zoom after the murder of George Floyd.
Following that weekend in Delaware, I sent the first of a bunch of unanswered emails to Washington National Cathedral, encouraging the Cathedral — our nation’s House of Prayer, where I served as a Fellow in their Cathedral College — to consider a high-visibility weekend film festival on race, religion and justice.
At last — it’s a long story, people — the Cathedral’s Canon Theologian Kelly Brown Douglas, America’s most important Black liberation theologian, conceded I might be a useful partner in this work. I hope I was. We programmed several major film festivals during Black History Months, including a showing of Jordan Peele’s Get Out to a packed cathedral nave during a snowstorm.
In the process, we talked about racial myths — what Hollywood thought about Black and white people, what they got wrong, what they kind of got right.
Kelly would say onstage: “What do we celebrate? What do we lament?”
It changed the trajectory of my work in the church, and it changed the trajectory of my work as a cultural theologian.
Every time I teach film at Baylor University, I open the semester with one of the most acclaimed and most horrifying films in American history, D.W. Griffith’s silent feature The Birth of a Nation.
Scene from “Birth of a Nation.”
It is simultaneously, as James Baldwin noted, a cinematic masterpiece and a call to genocide.
It is also, in a significant way, a repository of history, absolute proof that in 1915, racist myths were central to American life.
The movie speaks about Black inferiority and worries about Black sexuality, says Black Americans never should be entrusted with the vote, and encourages white Americans to believe the Confederacy was a period of beauty and grace and the proper balance of the races, the Lost Cause myth that rolls down until this moment.
It’s a convocation of the myths I write about in my new book White Lies, my fourth lead trade title from Oxford University Press, the best publisher in the whole world.
I’m grateful to share an excerpt of White Lies with you, since you folks at BNG have walked with me through this long process. I have written here about racism, racial myths and the need for white Christians to grow beyond this division, and I’ve interviewed historians, pastors, theologians and politicians here about these issues.
I look forward to your engagement with this new book. Let’s start good trouble.
From my Introduction:
On January 6, 2021, Donald Trump addressed thousands of supporters outside the White House, promoted the myth of the stolen 2020 election, and told them he never would concede. His personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, called for “trial by combat.” His son Donald Jr. warned members of Congress who didn’t support his father’s bid to overturn the election results, “We’re coming for you.”
Afterward, Trump followers stormed the Capitol; assaulted the Capitol police with baseball bats, lead pipes, pepper spray and the American flag; overran the Senate and House chambers; broke into legislators’ offices; and even occupied the chairs normally used by the speaker of the House and the president of the Senate.
A supporter of President Donald Trump carries a Confederate battle flag on the second floor of the U.S. Capitol near the entrance to the Senate after breaching security defenses, in Washington, D.C., Jan. 6, 2021. A portrait of abolitionist senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, who was savagely beaten on the Senate floor after delivering a speech criticizing slavery in 1856, hangs above the couch. (REUTERS/Mike Theiler)
The images from January 6 that haunt me most are those of Confederate battle flags. They were everywhere: flown by the white supremacist mob outside, carried into the Capitol itself, waved outside the Senate chamber.
The results of the myth of the Lost Cause (symbolized by the Confederate battle flag) and the myth of voter fraud (traditionally a dog whistle about the voting rights of people of color) were made manifest on the steps of our nation’s Capitol by the violent insurrectionists who fought their way inside it.
Michele L. Norris called the January 6 attack a riot fueled by “white grievance,” describing how “the United States’ yawning cultural, political and racial divides were there for all to see … in the composition of the crowd, in the way they were accommodated by police and in the ideology that fueled their rage.”
The insurrection at the Capitol allowed us all to visualize grave evils on the largest stage. As awful as those images might be, they at least temporarily sparked some understanding about how our racial mythologies are connected to economic and political power.
Once we are aware of these myths, what should we do? Atlantic Monthly Editor Vann Newkirk II told my Baylor University students in March 2025 a primary task of journalists today must be to tell the stories and elevate the voices of those locked out of economic and political power.
A statue of Thomas Jefferson standing next to a stack of bricks marked with the names of people he enslaved sits under the words of the Declaration of Independence at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. (Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
One of the most potent forces for countering white racist mythologies and for promoting marginalized Black voices is the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture on the Mall in Washington, D.C. The museum offers a record not just of the harmful racial myths that have shaped America for centuries but of the countermyths that could lead us to the Promised Land.
Take, for example, a display in the lowest level of the museum, centered on a statue of Thomas Jefferson. As Annette Gordon-Reed points out, “Jefferson’s vision of equality was not all-inclusive. Neither the enslaved nor women were part of it.” The museum highlights this tension by placing a stack of 609 boxes behind the statue of Jefferson, each box representing one of the human beings Jefferson owned at Monticello.
Myths and countermyths. In that display with Jefferson’s statue there also stands a statue of the poet Phillis Wheatley, one of America’s first great literary lights, and of Elizabeth Freeman, who successfully sued for her freedom from slavery in the state of Massachusetts. Nearby one can read a learned sermon on deliverance from captivity offered in 1808 by Absalom Jones at Philadelphia’s African Episcopal Church of Saint Thomas, and the well-thumbed hymnbook of Harriet Tubman, who brought 70 of her people out of slavery.
“Jefferson did not live up to the words he wrote about equality and opportunity.”
Jefferson did not live up to the words he wrote about equality and opportunity. But Black men and women like these seized their opportunities and proclaimed their humanity all the same.
Despite these damaging and damning racial mythologies, despite the promises made and not kept by our Founders, American history may be seen as a record of inching forward toward justice, of the racial pendulum swinging to and fro across the centuries.
Gordon-Reed writes that, although Jefferson didn’t include Black people in his Declaration of Independence, “many people, enslaved and free, Black and white, believed those words; believed they expressed their long-held intuitions and condemned the wrongness of the oppression they suffered. They were moved to act.”
The leaders of slave rebellions and of great racial justice movements have called for freedom.
Jonathan Eig, in his Pulitzer-winning biography King: A Life, writes that Martin Luther King Jr. taught us “the promises contained in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution had been hollow. King and the other leaders of the 20th-century Civil Rights Movement, along with millions of ordinary protesters, demanded that America live up to its stated ideals.”
King’s words and witness changed those who heard him. We, too, can be moved to act by speeches and sermons, by great novels, poems, films and music, by damning statistics, and by our recognition and rejection of damaging stereotypes.
I’ve been teaching Ernest Gaines’ novel A Lesson before Dying for 30 years now. Many of my students are transformed by this powerful story. At the end of the novel, teacher Grant Wiggins is trying to break into the closed heart of Death Row inmate Jefferson, trying to help him walk to the electric chair with dignity and courage. Grant talks to Jefferson about myths, because he knows mythology is how we make meaning:
“Do you know what a myth is, Jefferson?” I asked him. “A myth is an old lie that people believe in. White people believe that they’re better than anyone else on earth — and that’s a myth. The last thing they ever want is to see a Black man stand, and think, and show that common humanity that is in us all. It would destroy their myth. They would no longer have justification of having made us slaves and keeping us in the condition we are in. As long as none of us stand, they’re safe. They’re safe with me. They’re safe with Reverend Ambrose. I don’t want them to feel safe with you anymore.”
Grant understands that the twinned myths of Black subservience and white superiority hold us all in bondage, and he begs Jefferson to recognize that by walking to his execution with dignity, he will give something to everyone in their community, will “chip away at that myth.”
This is what all people of good conscience should want to do: to chip away at damaging social constructs that separate us. To move into a world where the color of our skin truly matters less than the content of our character (that phrase often quoted by politicians as though we have reached that world, although Dr. King spoke those words in 1963 as an aspirational goal). To live in a nation where people who look like me can identify, acknowledge and repent of myths that have elevated us to the very great detriment of everyone else.
In this book, we will look at a series of dangerous and demonstrably false myths and their effects. Our goal here will be to understand how these stories, images and ideas could lead to a policeman kneeling on the neck of George Floyd, to Confederate battle flags unfurled in the halls of the U.S. Capitol, to Donald Trump firing Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the highly decorated chair of the Joint Chiefs, under the pretext that he was a “diversity hire.”
“Stories do not have to be avenues toward power for the few.”
Ultimately, we want to know what stories we should embrace. Stories do not have to be avenues toward power for the few. How can the Bible, our Constitution, Hollywood films, statues and monuments, the work of grassroots organizers and preachers and novelists direct us to myths that might lead toward the Promised Land? President Barack Obama, in a memoir called A Promised Land, acknowledged the reality of all this painful history, all the negative myths. He, too, acknowledged that America has not achieved Jefferson’s founding promises:
But the idea of America, the promise of America: this I clung to with a stubbornness that surprised even me. “We hold these truths to be self- evident, that all men are created equal” — that was my America. The America (Alexis de) Tocqueville wrote about, the countryside of Whitman and Thoreau, with no person my inferior or my better; the America of pioneers headed west in search of a better life or immigrants landing on Ellis Island, propelled by a yearning for freedom.
It was the America of Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers, making dreams take flight, and Jackie Robinson stealing home. It was Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday at the Village Vanguard and Johnny Cash at Folsom State Prison — all those misfits who took the scraps that others overlooked or discarded and made beauty no one had ever seen before.
By exploring white racial mythologies, we will confront some of the worst impulses in American history, hundreds of years of attempts to enthrone white people at the expense of all others. Chapter after chapter will lay out painful and pernicious myths that white Christian men have created. But we also will liberate these beautiful stories of the best of us.
Greg Garrett is an award-winning professor at Baylor University, where he is the Carole McDaniel Hanks Professor of Literature and Culture. One of America’s leading voices on religion and culture, he is the author of 30 books, most recently the novel Bastille Day and The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity. He is currently administering a major research grant on racism from the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation and finishing a book on racist mythologies for Oxford University Press. Greg is a seminary-trained lay preacher in the Episcopal Church and Honorary Canon Theologian at the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris. He lives in Austin with his wife, Jeanie, and their two daughters.