The leader of this determined group was Robert Hickman, who was attempting to free himself, along with his family and neighbors, from enslavement on a plantation in Boone County, Missouri. Hick- man, a preacher who could both read and write, had seen newspaper accounts of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation four months earlier. Although the proclamation did not apply to Missouri because it was under Union control, this news nonetheless inspired him to begin making plans to escape north. The Hickman party aimed to reach free soil by way of the river, which was by then safely patrolled by the Union army. They embarked under cover of darkness on the moonless night of May 3, but because their makeshift craft was not equipped with sails or oars, they drifted for a day in the wrong direction before encountering the Northerner.

Seeing the floundering party with so many children aboard, Captain Woods asked if they needed assistance. Sympathetic to their plight and knowing that the strains of the Civil War had left Minnesota with a labor shortage, Woods ordered the raft to be securely tied to the steamboat and offered to take them as far as his final destination.

Neither Woods nor Hickman anticipated the vitriol that awaited them. On May 5, the Northerner approached the levee in Lowertown, on the outskirts of St. Paul. As local dock workers, mostly Irish, caught sight of the self-emancipated African Americans (commonly referred to as “contraband” by whites) on the trailing raft, they became increasingly agitated, seeing them as competition for jobs. As word spread, a threatening crowd gathered on the levee. The commotion was so great that St. Paul police arrived on the scene. But after assessing the situation, they sided with the mob and threatened to arrest not the Irish rabble-rousers but the Black asylum seekers, should they disembark.

Captain Woods ordered the boat with its trailing raft to steam on to Fort Snelling. There, Hickman and his party came ashore without incident on May 5, but they were met with an unexpected sight: hundreds of disheveled Native Americans were huddled together, forcibly assembled near the docks.

The desperate and anxious crowd they encountered were part of an original group numbering more than 1,600, mostly women, children, and elderly Dakota people who had been held under armed guard all winter, following the Dakota War of the year before, in a miserable encampment in a lowland area below Fort Snelling. Unbeknownst to them, Minnesota government officials and military leaders were awaiting the spring thaw that would allow for their mass deportation downriver from their ancestral homelands to a bleak reservation in the Nebraska Territory. By the time the ice finally melted and river levels rose, hundreds had died. A group of 770 Dakota people had been shipped off the day before on another steamer, the Davenport.

Having set the Hickman party safely ashore and unloaded the wagons and supplies for the military fort, Captain Woods ordered preparations to receive his next “cargo”: 547 Dakota people, whom he was transporting for the fee of $25 per head plus 10 cents a day for sustenance. Soldiers from Fort Snelling herded the ragtag remnant aboard the Northerner “like so many cattle,” as one observer put it. As they pulled away, a local minister’s wife remarked, “May God have mercy on them, for they can expect none from man.”

Neither Hickman and his companions, nor the Dakota people, would have had the perspective to realize they were witnessing the momentous final chapter of both chattel slavery in the US and “Indian removal” in Minnesota. They would not have grasped the paradox the two groups represented that afternoon on the banks of the Mississippi River: that the end of bondage for Hickman’s band also marked the last vestige of sovereignty for the Dakota people. And they would certainly have been unaware that, in the closing weeks of 1862, just five months earlier, President Lincoln was simultaneously considering two documents that would dramatically change the fates of each group: a warrant for the mass execution of thirty-eight Dakota men and the Emancipation Proclamation.

This encounter on May 5, 1863, contains multiple narrative streams, each of which tells a different story about America. The question is, which do we follow? Do we tell the story of Fort Snelling, the military outpost established to protect the westward expansion of settler colonialism? Do we embark back down the Mississippi River to Missouri and the story of enslaved Africans in the South? Do we push upriver from St. Paul to its headwaters and stories of Indigenous peoples populating this land for millennia? Or do we portage east and cross the larger waters connected to the homelands of Europeans who first set foot on these shores just a few hundred years ago? Each narrative pushes back to a different beginning.

Excerpted from The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future by Robert P. Jones. Published by Simon & Schuster. Reprinted with permission. Copyright © 2023 by Robert P. Jones, Ph.D.

Short Description: The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future, by Robert P. Jones

Taking the story of white supremacy in America back to 1493, and examining contemporary communities in Mississippi, Minnesota, and Oklahoma for models of racial repair, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy helps chart a new course toward a genuinely pluralistic democracy.

Robert P. Jones returns to the fateful year when the Christian “Doctrine of Discovery”—the idea that God designated America as a new promised land—shaped how five centuries of Europeans would understand the “new” world and the people who populated it. As he brings this story forward, Jones shows us the connections between Emmett Till and the Spanish conquistador Hernando De Soto in the Mississippi Delta, between the lynching of three Black circus workers in Duluth and the mass execution of thirty-eight Dakota men in Mankato, and between the murder of 300 African Americans during the destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa and the Trail of Tears.

From this vantage point, Jones shows how the enslavement of Africans was not America’s original sin but, rather, the continuation of acts of genocide and dispossession flowing from the first European contact with Native Americans. This reframing of American origins explains how the United States could build the philosophical framework for a democratic society on a foundation of mass racial violence—and why this paradox survives today in the form of white Christian nationalism. Through stories of people navigating these contradictions in three communities, Jones illuminates the possibility of a new American future in which we finally fulfill the promise of a pluralistic democracy.

Excerpted from The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future by Robert P. Jones. Published by Simon & Schuster. Reprinted with permission. Copyright © 2023 by Robert P. Jones, Ph.D.

Preferred online book order links:

Amazon: https://amzn.to/3DWr3Wn 

Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/a/56272/9781668009512

Robert P. Jones, Ph.D., is a New York Times bestselling author and the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). He frequently appears on MSNBC, NPR, and other media outlets, and his writing on religion, culture, and politics has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, TIME, and Religion News Service. He is the award-winning author of White Too Long and The End of White Christian America. He writes a weekly Substack newsletter at robertpjones.substack.com.

I was learning more about how central demographic and cultural replacement has been to white supremacy in this country—plainly evident in the systematic genocide and removal of Native Americans from their historic lands by white European settlers, backed by our nation’s military and government. You can see the violent logic of white replacement in the soil itself and in the competing names that have been assigned to that hill, a 350-foot-high bluff overlooking the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers.

In documented history back to the early 1800s and in oral Native American traditions reaching much farther, this land was known as Oheyawahi (“the place much visited”). It served as a sacred burial and ceremonial space for the Dakota people. Early French fur traders acknowledged it as La Butte des Morts (“hill of the dead”). As white settlers increased in Minnesota in the mid-1800s, the place became known in English as Pilot Knob, because its geographic distinctiveness allowed riverboat captains, with their cargoes of goods and guns, to safely mark their position on their missions supporting white proliferation along the great rivers.

In 1925, most of the hill was purchased by the Masons and christened “Acacia Cemetery,” after a sprig used in Masonic funeral ceremonies. Early advertisements declared that the land was to be “dedicated to the exclusive and perpetual use of Masons and their families.” An extensive landscaping and monument construction plan removed more than 20 vertical feet from the top of the hill, a process that conveniently cleansed the land of most Native American remains. Some bones, most of which likely belonged to Dakota people, were collected haphazardly in a vault at the periphery of the property when they marred the landscaping plan or trespassed on a purchased white burial plot.

After the tour concluded, I left Mendota Heights for a different kind of sacred space, George Floyd Square in Minneapolis.

I had learned, serendipitously (Providentially?), that my visit would coincide with an outdoor performance of “Beyoncé Mass,” a womanist worship service—curated by Rev. Yolanda Norton, the H. Eugene Farlough Chair of Black Church Studies at San Francisco Theological Seminary—that uses the music and life of Beyoncé to foster an empowering conversation about Black women.

After getting over my self-consciousness as a white man in this space lifting up and honoring Black women, I fell into the worship experience. I hadn’t heard the horrific news about Buffalo yet. But Rev. Dr. Norton’s sermon, and the experience of passing the peace and taking communion among that gathering of 80 or so people from all walks of life, sustained me when I finally heard that yet another act of racial violence had been committed by a person who looks like me.

I’m sure Rev. Dr. Norton had not heard the news either, but her words were prophetic. Or perhaps that’s not even the right word. In our current context, this is simply a description of lived reality.

There is always a Pharaoh who will arise over Egypt. Everywhere I look I see Pharaohs arising. People committed to death dealing and who are not life giving. There are people who have decided that if you are not part of their tribe there is nothing valuable about you. Everywhere I look I see Pharaohs arising. People committed to the death of Black people.… Everywhere I look I see Pharaoh.

But over the opening notes of Beyoncé’s “Halo,” which preceded communion, Rev. Dr. Norton also offered these words of hope:

Repentance is not a one-time thing, but a developmental process, a journey that requires a confrontational truth-telling. The liberation and healing of the oppressed. Repentance and conversion of the oppressor. The building of the beloved community.

After the immediate shock of the shootings abated, those words came back to me: repentance and conversion, the healing of both the oppressed and the oppressor. The building of the beloved community.

We white Christians have learned these words. I mean, we know them. And we love to quote them in Januaries. But we must, once and for all, get clear about the stakes before we again utter mere lip service to Rev. Dr. King’s vision.

The beloved community is the repudiation of the violent theology of replacement germinating in white supremacy. We white Christians must figure out how to drag ourselves and our peers to kneel at the altar of repentance. We must confess our complicity in the heretical and only half-unconscious belief that God has ordained whites to replace—that is to say, to kill and displace—others, and that, once accomplished, white dominance is to be perpetually preserved as the divinely approved state of affairs.

Here’s a simple test to assess our communities. If our pastors and Sunday School leaders did not talk this Sunday about the 10 human beings killed by white supremacy and justified by a depraved vision of European Christendom, we are responsible. If even our confrontations with our congregations about our complicit silence are met with a collective shrug, white supremacy is being blessed by our apathy.

The last words I heard while sitting on Oheyawahi with a group of white evangelicals came from Rev. Jim Bear Jacobs, a member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation and the director of racial justice for the Minnesota Council of Churches:

I don’t need white Christians to be smarter. I need them to be better.

Through local activism, 125 acres of that sacred hill—including the land on which I sat Saturday—have been protected from additional desecration and development by being placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Under the watch of a local nonprofit, the land is being restored to an oak savannah, slowly healing from the wounds of the past.

The belief that America is a kind of promised land for European white Christians (a view held, by the way, by 52% of white evangelical Protestants and by more than one third of white mainline Protestants and white Catholics) cannot coexist with the beloved community. We have to make a choice between these incompatible visions of America: one that replaces, one that shares; one that kills, one that heals.

This article was originally published on Jones’ Substack #White Too Long. 

For more from Robert P. Jones, watch RLC’s Faith Forum on White Discomfort on YouTube. 

One of the most common questions I get — once people have moved past denial — is, “What do we do now?”

Often this question is understandably accompanied by a great amount of anguish, stress and a sense of being overwhelmed — feelings I myself encountered while researching and writing the book.

The recognition of the longevity and enormity of the problem in white Christianity can often lead to a kind of paralysis that inhibits meaningful action.

In “White Too Long,” I shared a powerful exchange that occurred in a meeting between the two First Baptist Churches in Macon, Georgia — one predominately white and one predominately Black — who had begun a journey together to talk openly about racism for the first time in their shared histories:

If we get past denial, if we get past the magical thinking that time will settle our moral obligations for us, the next challenge for white Christians today is to deal with the paralyzing notion that the weight of this history is so enormous that meaningful action is impossible.

At one early meeting between the white and black members of the two First Baptist Churches in Macon, a white member confessed that she was simply overwhelmed and didn’t know what to do. After a painful pause, an African American woman responded calmly, “Of course you are.” This reply was a palpable moment of compassion and accountability. While giving the white woman permission to feel overwhelmed, the African American woman’s response also gently affirmed that this discomfort was not an excuse for inaction.

I recently wrote that the first step toward recovery from the distortions of white supremacy is “to separate being white from being Christian.” This is the heart of the matter. But given how long the assumption that white lives matter more than others has been with us, and how deeply it is embedded in our architecture, histories, liturgy, hymnody and theology, this is no simple task.

Faced with this formidable past, I’m convinced that the most important thing white Christians can do is to simply start somewhere. And to start somewhere local. The following suggestions are intended to be prompts to generate thinking. There is no boilerplate 10-step program or magic formula, just the courageous work to begin where we are, to see what we have been unable to see and to change what we have been unwilling to change.

WATCH the Faith Forum on White Discomfort

Here are seven places to start.

1. Take a walk around the church building and grounds. In what ways does the physical embodiment of your church communicate whiteness? If you have stained-glass windows, do they depict a white Jesus or other biblical characters who are presented as white? During Advent and Christmas celebrations that include a nativity scene, are Mary, Joseph and Jesus white? What about the paintings and bulletin boards that adorn the walls — are the images of people all white? And who uses the church facilities during the week? If only predominately white groups meet there, why is that?
2. Examine the church website and social media sites. These days, potential new members are as likely to see the digital footprint of the church long before they encounter the sign out in the front lawn. On shoestring budgets, it’s easy to grab unreflectively stock images featuring white people for landing pages and events. Do these images reflect the body of Christ? And is there anything communicating a commitment to be in solidarity with Black and Brown congregations and people in your community?
3. Review the children’s educational materials. One reader recently wrote to me that she was appalled to find how many 1950s-era materials that depicted only white people were still on the preschool library and classroom shelves. And what about those pictorial children’s Bibles, with all the characters depicted as white?
   One way not to pass along white supremacist assumptions (and to communicate a more accurate history of what characters from the Middle East and Africa would look like!) is to correct the materials we use to teach the next generation about our faith.
4. Tell a truer history of ourselves. Most churches that have been around for more than a generation have commissioned an official history that tells the story of the founding and early growth of the church. But these glossy accounts sitting in the church library or on tables in the foyer are typically incomplete at best. They, by design, are like a resume, usually written with a commitment to telling the most flattering, impressive story of the congregation.
   Here’s one practical proposal. Pull together a group to write a more honest church history that begins with this simple question: Why is our church physically located where it is? Why is it in this part of our community and not another one? In nearly all cases this question will quickly lead to issues of racially segregated neighborhoods, white flight from cities to suburbs and land grabs from Native Americans, to name just a few. And other questions will flow from this beginning: Has the church ever had a policy or practice of prohibiting non-white members? Where was the voice of the church during past and present movements for civil rights? How different would a history of your church be if it were written by non-white members of your community?
5. Evaluate the hymns and other songs being sung in worship. The imagery — associated whiteness with purity and goodness and blackness with sin and evil — performs powerful moral and theology work, often below the level of consciousness. Are we still unreflectively singing 19th-century hymns with lyrics like, “Whiter than snow, yes, whiter than snow/Now wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow”? Or the militant, Crusade-invoking “Onward, Christian Soldiers, Marching as to War”?
6. Assess what’s being addressed from the pulpit and other church-wide educational events. To give just one example from the Roman Catholic context: After 25 years of regular proclamations from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on the importance of addressing racial justice, a 2004 survey found that 64% of Catholics had not heard a single sermon on racism or racial justice during the entire three-year cycle of the lectionary. Even in the midst of the effervescence last fall, following months of nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, a recent Pew study found that only 40% of congregations heard sermons that even mentioned race or racism. Was this widespread silence from the pulpit the witness of your church? Historically, white pastors have heard a loud cacophony of voices warning them from speaking out against white supremacy. Does your pastor know there are congregants longing for leadership on issues of racial justice?
7. Read your church budget as a document expressing its moral and spiritual priorities. This one is straightforward but vital if white congregations are going to move authentically from confession and truth-telling to the work of repentance and repair. We have it on good authority that “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Given the history and complicity of white Christian churches with white supremacy, every white Christian church should make a commitment to support a predominately non-white church or nonprofit that primarily serves non-white people in their community, with three stipulations: a) The support should be significant, an expression of confession and repair; b) The support should not just consist of a one-time offering but be incorporated as a multi-year commitment reflected in a regular line in the church budget; and c) The support should be in the form of “no strings attached” general operating funds rather than to a specific project. Relinquishing control is an important spiritual practice for white Christians.

READ: The Sacred Work of White Discomfort

Starting somewhere and starting local will mean you may perhaps be the first person to voice these issues in your congregation, but you are likely not the only person on this spiritual and moral journey of transformation. And there are other churches engaged in this work who have found it enlivening and life-giving.

One sure sign of the continued presence of white supremacy is the outright resistance you will inevitably encounter from some and the protests of discomfort from others. But this is also evidence of the importance of the work.

This piece first appeared at Religion News Services.

For more from Robert P. Jones, watch RLC’s Faith Forum on White Discomfort on YouTube. 

The bill purports to “protect individual freedoms and prevent discrimination in the workplace and in public schools.” But it then proceeds to define “individual freedoms” and “discrimination” in ways that are unrecognizable to the plain, historic meaning of those words.

Here’s a quick tour. The bill notes that the State Board of Education (SBE) “requires that instruction on the required topics must be factual and objective, and may not suppress or distort significant historical events, such as the Holocaust, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and the contributions of women, African American and Hispanic people to our country.” So far so good.

But here are the next two sentences:

Examples of theories that distort historical events and are inconsistent with SBE-approved standards include the denial or minimization of the Holocaust, and the teaching of Critical Race Theory, meaning the theory that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons. Instruction may not utilize material from the 1619 Project and may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.

The magnitude of the contradictions here, separated only by a comma, is jarring. The minimization or denial of the Holocaust is prohibited, but the minimization and denial of America’s treatment of Native Americans and African Americans is mandated.

A critical reading of history has lessons for the Germans, but not, evidently, for Floridians. The systematic oppression and murder of Jews overseas holds lessons for today, but the bigotry and violence toward Native Americans and African Americans at home does not.

Never mind that Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime studied America’s treatment of Native Americans and African Americans in their search for models for subjugating and exterminating European Jews. Never mind that the Declaration of Independence’s “universal principles” include a description of Native Americans as “merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions.”

The most pernicious part of the bill is its bizarre definition of “individual freedom,” consisting of eight principles plainly written to protect white people. The final one is the most sweeping: “An individual should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” The bill then proceeds to define “discrimination” under Florida state law as a violation of “individual freedom.”

This provision effectively gives any single white person veto power over the content of history curriculum in schools or trainings in the workplace. White discomfort governs historical truth.

As I noted in October (“Shutting Down the Manufactured Critical Race Theory ‘Debate’”), this bill shares a common purpose with the raft of other CRT bills emerging in state legislatures across the country. These bills are political theatre and campaign tools dressed up in the guise of legislation. There simply is no evidence that the problem these bills purport to address—a widespread use of CRT in primary and secondary education settings—exists.

It’s easy to dismiss all of this. But the conjuring of discomfort avoidance as a mark of individual freedom and thereby the grounds of a novel conception of discrimination is revealing.

First, we should answer the question, “Why are we seeing this strategy emerge now?” According to a study by The Brookings Institution, as of November 2021, 9 states had passed, and 20 states had introduced bills that are being promoted as banning CRT.

Part of the answer lies in the unique cultural moment we are inhabiting as a country. As I argued in my 2016 book, The End of White Christian America, the visceral nature of today’s white conservative politics is driven by its desperate need for new mechanisms for ensuring white supremacy amid America’s changing demographics, particularly the loss of a white Christian majority over the last decade. As recently as 2008, white Christians comprised 54% of the population, but that number is 44% today.

More immediately, this legislation lifts language directly from former President Trump’s executive order targeting CRT, which banned the use of so-called “divisive concepts” and introduced the white “discomfort” criteria. Biden repealed this executive order on his first day in office. The Florida bill, like the other bills, are part of a coordinated Frankenstein-style strategy for exhuming and resurrecting Trump’s defunct executive order.

However absurd the premise, the language merits further interrogation.

READ: Unlearning the Gospel of Whiteness

What does it mean to say that the avoidance of discomfort, particularly by those who represent the country’s historically dominant race and religion, is constitutive of individual liberty? And what does it reveal about the health and mindset of white Christians today?1

Let me start with an easy analogy.

What if this bill included the avoidance of individual discomfort not just to Florida’s teachers but to Florida’s athletic coaches? Florida, like most southern states, is obsessed with football. But what kind of football teams would Florida schools produce if players could argue that they were being discriminated against if they were made to feel uncomfortable?

When I was younger, I had dreams of playing soccer at the highest levels. I participated in the Junior Olympic development program, made the high school all-star team for my state, and played Division III NCAA soccer for my Baptist college. Essential to my development as an athlete were coaches who were willing to address both mental and physical conditioning. At the end of a hard practice, One of my most demanding coaches would say, “It’s time to run.” If anyone dared to ask, “How many laps?” or “How long?” his regular response was, “Until I get tired.” Those practices often meant painfully pushing through a wall of fatigue with no end in sight.

My best coaches also relentlessly pointed out my individual shortcomings: tactical mistakes, sloppy play, insufficient leadership, and inadequate strategic compensation for my slight 5’6” 130-pound frame. These criticisms often angered me and certainly made me feel uncomfortable or embarrassed in front of my teammates. But they were necessary for motivating me to be a better athlete.

Spurred by the pandemic, I’ve taken up cycling. As I’ve been inducted into cycling culture, I’ve been surprised to find that the word “suffering” is common parlance. You hear it from amateurs in training and from commentators at the Tour de France. One of the most popular indoor training apps until recently went by the enticing name, “SufferFest.” The accepted wisdom is simple: Victory often goes to the competitors who have befriended suffering, those who can keep the cranks turning even when their quadriceps burn and their lungs feel as if they are about to explode.

At the elite level of sports, where everyone has talent, the winning edge is often the willingness to endure to the far edge of tolerable pain—because discomfort, even extreme discomfort, builds resilience and strength and prepares one for achievement when it matters.

Here’s another analogy, closer to the mark.

What if this metric were applied not just to teachers we entrust with educating our children but to parents? What kind of children would we have if we never wanted them to feel discomfort? Every parent wants to protect their children from pain. But we intuitively know that some forms of discomfort, such as feeling bad about ourselves when we’ve done something wrong, helps us assume responsibility for our mistakes and spurs us to make things right. Sitting with, owning this kind of discomfort is an essential part of forming a strong moral core and becoming a mature adult. Without that unpleasant psychological experience, a person becomes a sociopath, someone who has an inability to care about the feelings or needs of others—someone who lacks a sense of moral conscience.

Discomfort and moral responsibility are also linked in the work we face as descendants. Some of us find ourselves the beneficiaries of intact, generally functioning families that go back generations. But many of us find it necessary to reckon with disfunction, abuse, addiction, bigotry, and other unpleasant family inheritances. There are parts of our heritage we do not want to pass on. In those cases, only by facing these uncomfortable truths do we find the courage to declare, as my parents thankfully did with racial prejudice, that those destructive legacies stop with us.

Finally, what about the role of discomfort in Christian theology? This topic is particularly important, since most of those supporting these anti-CRT bills also wear their conservative brand of Christianity on their sleeves.

Particularly in white evangelical circles, discomfort is central to both salvation and discipleship. In traditional revival meetings, the experience of discomfort was even institutionalized, represented by the “mourner’s bench”—also tellingly called the “anxious bench”—where those wrestling with a newfound conviction of their sins would visibly struggle in prayer, often crying out or wailing as the reality came crashing into their consciousness.

The beloved hymn, “Amazing Grace,” captures this dynamic. In the very first stanza, a Christian singing that hymn identifies as “a wretch” in need of salvation. The familiar refrains—“I once was lost, but now I’m found/Was blind but now I see”—begin with lament and confession. Grace is amazing precisely because God accepts us despite our own shortcomings. But we don’t come to salvation, nor do we grow in discipleship, without honesty and this experience of exquisite discomfort.

Moreover, the sacred role of discomfort is not limited to sin in individual hearts. The Bible is replete with language about the sins of one generation being visited down three or four generations (Exodus 20; Numbers 14; Deuteronomy 5; Jeremiah 32). This transmission is not mystical but is both genetic and cultural. Just as abuse begets abuse and addiction begets addiction, prejudice begets prejudice.

In the New Testament, Paul talks about the need to reckon not just with sinful individual nature but with “principalities and powers,” a theological way of describing the impersonal, menacing aspects of cultural and institutional power.

In White Too Long, I summarized some remarkable research demonstrating these effects playing out among southern whites by political scientists Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen:2

Whites residing in areas that had the highest levels of slavery in 1860 demonstrate significantly different attitudes today than whites who reside in areas that had lower historical levels of slavery: 1) they are more politically conservative and Republican leaning; 2) they are more opposed to affirmative action; and 3) they score higher on questions measuring racial resentment. After accounting for a range of other explanations and possible intervening variables, Acharya and his colleagues conclude that “present-day regional differences, then, are the direct, downstream consequences of the slaveholding history of these areas.”

In my own family’s history, I’ve seen these dynamics play out, particularly in two moments of revelation. The first was realizing that my extended family’s Christian denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, was explicitly founded in 1845 as a place where the gospel of Jesus Christ could coexist with the practice of race-based chattel slavery.

The second came just five years ago. While doing research for White Too Long, I discovered the estate settlement records of my sixth great uncle and the namesake of my fifth great grandfather, Pleasant Moon, whose 1815 Bible rests on my bookshelf.

Inventory of the Goods and Chattles of Pleasant Moon Deceased (1815). From state of Georgia digitized archives.

Through the marvels of digital technology, this page moved from a leather bound book in the Twiggs County, Georgia, archives, to the printer in my living room. And then it was in my unsteady hands—an accounting ledger in which four human beings are intermixed with material objects such as a feather bed, a spinning wheel for cotton, and a cow. I ran my finger over these lines, first touching the name, then the monetary value assigned to the person:

1 negro woman name Naomi @ $800

1 named Susan @ $450

1 named Eliza @ $275

1 named Bird, a boy @ $150

I knew my family had been given land the U.S. government had forcibly taken from Native Americans, and I knew there were enslavers in the family tree. I knew that “my people,” even up through my parents’ generation, had benefited from Jim Crow segregation in Macon—with schools, libraries, parks, pools, theaters, jobs, and entire neighborhoods marked “for whites only.”

Still, holding this page in my hands alongside the old family Bible was disorienting. They seemed to hold equal weight. The straightforward pride and connection I had felt to the lineage of people inscribed in the births/marriages/deaths pages of our heirloom Bible became mixed with feelings of shock and shame. How could the same people in my family be reflected in both of these documents?

“Discomfort” is an impotent word to describe the strong emotions these dueling histories have generated in me. But wrestling with the truth of this difficult history has not been debilitating. It has been a source of personal and spiritual growth. And it has freed me from from the delusional fantasy of “goodness” we white Christians feel compelled to defend in every narrative about ourselves and our country.

Most importantly, holding a more truthful understanding of the history of my family, my faith, and my country has given me more agency, not less. The assertion in these anti-CRT bills that white people should not be made to feel uncomfortable because of their race presupposes that unpleasant truths are always debilitating. It also assumes that the inevitable result is that white people will simply feel bad for being white.

But these desperate measures fail to imagine the transforming alternative I discovered along this journey, and the only alternative that will allow us to live into the promise of a multiracial democracy. The discomfort didn’t make me feel bad for being white; it gave me the critical distance that enabled me to continue freeing myself from the power that whiteness has held over my family for generations.

If we white Christians can muster the courage to walk in its company, discomfort with our racial history can be a sacred and saving gift.

This article was originally published on Jones’ Substack #White Too Long.