A call to racial justice took center stage during the opening session of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s first-ever virtual General Assembly June 25.
Transforming a multi-issue culture requires us to be multi-issue people
Intersectionality helps us see that the problem is systemic. We live in a social system with institutions – including the church – built to ensure the maintenance of white supremacy and patriarchy. Our solutions, then, also have to be systemic.
I should have said, ‘Tengo un problema’ (I have a problem)
For far, far too long, white people in the United States have pretended to understand more than we understand, pretended that the problem is not as bad as it is, and pretended that it is not about us. Now we are lost and do not even know the language to get home.
‘Southern pride’ or racism? White Christians are compelled to discern the difference. And confess.
As commonly used, the term “Southern pride” is shorthand for a stubborn refusal to admit that the South, as a concept, is hopelessly enmeshed in the canons of white supremacy.
‘A shelter for conscience’ in a sea of racism: Black Churches Matter, too
We white Christians still have a lot to learn and a reprehensible past to lament. After 400 years, we’d better pray that black churches are still willing to teach us. And that we’ve got conscience enough to act on what we learn.
White churches must repent for racism, minister says, and worship services are a good place to start
White churches must use worship services to repent for the sin of racism in part by acknowledging complicity – active or passive, said Natasha Nedrick, associate minister at Greenforest Community Baptist Church in Atlanta.
Juneteenth should remind us of all the things we don’t know
The more we learn about someone else’s story, the more understanding we gain about their perspectives.
Beyond ‘contact without fellowship’: How can white people move toward black people?
While white people in America will never fully imagine what black people endure, this does not excuse the sin of racial ignorance or the empathy deficit that black pastor and theologian Howard Thurman called “contact without fellowship.”
Baldwin’s ‘The Fire Next Time’ has arrived, and it burns inexorably toward liberation
As people rise up to declare that they will not endure or be complicit in racist, white supremacist oppression, let’s call their actions what they are: protest, freedom struggle and revolution, not rioting, looting or “disobedience” to the authorities.