Dear Nice White People

What are you afraid of?

As someone who pursues racial justice as a speaker and writer, I am regularly faced with questions- immediate, emotional questions. Sometimes they are questions folks have been sitting on for awhile- especially when the question is situational. But for the most part, I hear the questions before there is a filter, before they’ve been completely thought through. So if you have heard me live or virtually, you know I do not give short answers to questions. And I dont want to. I give loooong answers because I want to offer folks not just a quick response, but a framework, examples, context, metaphors…. anything I can do to deepen our learning together. But in doing this, I sometimes run the risk of accepting the premise of a question that should be challenged.

For example, before the pandemic I gave a lot of lectures at Christian colleges. And almost without fail, a student would ask, “Can you make the connection for me between the Gospel + race + justice.” Because this is an extraordinaril…