On Saturday, May 14, 2022 a young man entered a grocery store in predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York and opened fire.

By the time he surrendered a short time later, he had shot a total of 13 people, most of them Black, and left 10 of them dead. They were senior citizens, retired law enforcement, churchgoers, grandparents, brothers, and sisters.

Prior to the crime, the shooter wrote a 180-page manifesto and posted it online. He left no doubt that he intended to target Black people and that his murderous act was a hate crime. He even painted the word n***er on the assault rifle he used.

Commentators rightly identified this perpetrator as a white supremacist. He wrote in his manifesto about the “great replacement” theory—”the false idea that a cabal is attempting to replace white Americans with nonwhite people through immigration, interracial marriage and, eventually, violence.”

But heed this word of caution as the phrase “white supremacist” becomes the topic of national conversation once again.

To identify someone who targets, plans, and homicidally attacks Black people and other religious and ethnic groups as a white supremacist, while accurate, can obscure the ways many others are complicit with white supremacy.

In my first book, The Color of Compromise, I spoke of the “complicity” of white Christians in the racism that has plagued the United States for centuries.

It is convenient to point to slave traders, plantation owners, and Klan members as the “real racists.” We tend to think that only the most severe examples of prejudice constitute racism. But even if only a small number of people actually commit acts of violence in the name of racism, the ideas that lead to such acts are often co-signed by the masses.

As I wrote in the book,

“The most egregious acts of racism…occur within a context of compromise. The failure of many Christians in the South and across the nation to decisively oppose the racism in their families, communities, and even in their own churches provided fertile soil for the seeds of hatred to grow.”

What was true in the past is true in the present—the most horrific violence done in the name of white supremacy happens within a context of compromise and complicity.

Major news media outlets such as Fox News have favorably cited the great replacement theory on their programs. Right-wing activists are waging a crusade against what they label “Critical Race Theory” in an effort to prevent education about racism and white supremacy. Many churches and Christian institutions are actively suppressing efforts to promote racial progress in the name of opposing CRT and promoting “the gospel.”

If we look at shooters like the one in Buffalo as the only type of people to whom the phrase “white supremacist” applies, then we miss all the daily and common ways that countless others endorse the same ideas that undergirded his murderous actions.

SIGN: RED LETTER CHRISTIAN PLEDGE 

Passivity in the face of white supremacist diatribes—whether on social media, in person, or even in the pulpit—permits the spread of these evil ideas.

Tuning in to podcasters, YouTubers, pastors, pundits and others who play on racist fears to get clicks and build a platform allows white supremacy to remain an influential narrative in this land.

We can look in horror at the actions of a white supremacist terrorist in Buffalo. But he is simply the extreme version and the logical end of what many other people believe and support in other ways.

You don’t have to pull the trigger on an assault rifle to support white supremacy. All you have to do is nothing at all.

As I put it in The Color of Compromise…

“The refusal to act in the midst of injustice is itself an act of injustice. Indifference to oppression perpetuates oppression.”

This article originally appeared in Footnotes by Jemar Tisby. 

It could be said that much of what white people have historically ascribed to black people is projection. That is, what we do not understand, do not like, or are ashamed of in ourselves become the racialized generalizations we make against black and brown people. In the earliest days of this country, when Africans were brought here and sold as property, the language from European intellectuals—especially Christians—revolved around evangelizing and civilizing the so-called African “savage.” The irony, of course, is that the Europeans who migrated to the Americas came from cultures that had engaged in tribal warfare and organized systems of violence. Christianity did (and still does) little to quell a penchant for violence; rather, followers of Jesus have worn crosses into battle. Today tourists wander the Tower of London, home to horrifying medieval torture in the place that fancied itself the world’s primary exporter of culture and intellectualism. Heretics were burned at the stake in England until the early 1600s (the first Africans arrived in America in 1619). Resmaa Menakeem writes that it is not difficult to understand why humans felt the need to flee England: “Many of the English who colonized America had been brutalized or had witnessed great brutality first-hand. Others were the children and grandchildren of people who had experienced such savagery in England. “Europeans transported African men, women and children in the cargo holds of slave ships, packing bodies together in such inhuman and unsafe conditions such that an untold number of human beings created in the image of God died and were unceremoniously buried in the Atlantic. White slaveowners raped and beat black women but portrayed the black male as the one whose sexual urges could not be controlled. White southerners—little more than 100 years ago—took picnics to and sent postcards from lynchings. Who, here, are the savages? Who is in need of the gospel, of being evangelized?

JOIN: POOR PEOPLE’S CAMPAIGN MORAL MARCH ON WASHINGTON 

White supremacy is a verdict in search of evidence. Why is that evidence so important? Historian Nell Irvin Painter brings forward a helpful conclusion from sociologist Max Weber. Wealthy, privileged people want to believe that what they have comes from “underived, ultimate, and qualitatively, distinctive being. . . the fortunate man is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate. Beyond this, he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune. He wants to be convinced that he ‘deserves’ it, and above all, that he deserves it in comparison with others . . . Good fortune thus wants to be ‘legitimate fortune.” White people want to look around at the advantages that are overwhelmingly theirs, in all areas–poor whites to poor blacks, white women to indigenous women, non-binary white people to non-binary Asian-Americans—and believe that these advantages can somehow be justified. Otherwise, it is clear we have not earned what we have, and in a capitalist society that prizes hard work and acquisition, that is a statement on our value as human beings. We need these myths in order to live in denial about how much of what we have should not, in a just, peaceable world, be ours in the first place.

White Christians will pray on Sunday morning about the God of grace; they will speak openly about the unmerited love of Jesus that is born out on the cross, and acknowledge that our lives do not often honor such a sacrifice. However, at the mere suggestion that perhaps the color of their skin has helped them in their career, there is immediate reticence. Perhaps our language about our inadequacy in light of God’s unconditional love is just that, talk; or perhaps we have internalized it, believe we are unworthy, and are out to prove that worth in other ways. The truth of the gospel is that God first loves us, first offers us grace without any assurance that we will have somehow be found “worthy.” We are worthy only because God has made it so. The irony is, nothing puts just how unlove-able we can be in starker relief than when we soothe our own insecurities by doing physical, economic, emotional and spiritual violence to our siblings of color.

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. 

By the time he surrendered a short time later, he had shot a total of 13 people, most of them Black, and left 10 of them dead. They were senior citizens, retired law enforcement, churchgoers, grandparents, brothers, and sisters.

Prior to the crime, the shooter wrote a 180-page manifesto and posted it online. He left no doubt that he intended to target Black people and that his murderous act was a hate crime. He even painted the word n***er on the assault rifle he used.

Commentators rightly identified this perpetrator as a white supremacist. He wrote in his manifesto about the “great replacement” theory—”the false idea that a cabal is attempting to replace white Americans with nonwhite people through immigration, interracial marriage and, eventually, violence.”

But heed this word of caution as the phrase “white supremacist” becomes the topic of national conversation once again.

To identify someone who targets, plans, and homicidally attacks Black people and other religious and ethnic groups as a white supremacist, while accurate, can obscure the ways many others are complicit with white supremacy.

In my first book, The Color of Compromise, I spoke of the “complicity” of white Christians in the racism that has plagued the United States for centuries.

It is convenient to point to slave traders, plantation owners, and Klan members as the “real racists.” We tend to think that only the most severe examples of prejudice constitute racism. But even if only a small number of people actually commit acts of violence in the name of racism, the ideas that lead to such acts are often co-signed by the masses.

As I wrote in the book,

“The most egregious acts of racism…occur within a context of compromise. The failure of many Christians in the South and across the nation to decisively oppose the racism in their families, communities, and even in their own churches provided fertile soil for the seeds of hatred to grow.”

What was true in the past is true in the present—the most horrific violence done in the name of white supremacy happens within a context of compromise and complicity.

Major news media outlets such as Fox News have favorably cited the great replacement theory on their programs. Right-wing activists are waging a crusade against what they label “Critical Race Theory” in an effort to prevent education about racism and white supremacy. Many churches and Christian institutions are actively suppressing efforts to promote racial progress in the name of opposing CRT and promoting “the gospel.”

If we look at shooters like the one in Buffalo as the only type of people to whom the phrase “white supremacist” applies, then we miss all the daily and common ways that countless others endorse the same ideas that undergirded his murderous actions.

SIGN: RED LETTER CHRISTIAN PLEDGE 

Passivity in the face of white supremacist diatribes—whether on social media, in person, or even in the pulpit—permits the spread of these evil ideas.

Tuning in to podcasters, YouTubers, pastors, pundits and others who play on racist fears to get clicks and build a platform allows white supremacy to remain an influential narrative in this land.

We can look in horror at the actions of a white supremacist terrorist in Buffalo. But he is simply the extreme version and the logical end of what many other people believe and support in other ways.

You don’t have to pull the trigger on an assault rifle to support white supremacy. All you have to do is nothing at all.

As I put it in The Color of Compromise…

“The refusal to act in the midst of injustice is itself an act of injustice. Indifference to oppression perpetuates oppression.”

This article originally appeared in Footnotes by Jemar Tisby. 

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. 

One of the most perplexing realities of January 6th for me as a Christian minister was that many protestors proudly identified as followers of Jesus Christ. When I read about the life and teachings of Jesus in the New Testament, I learn of a radical, renegade Rabbi who resisted corruption not through violent insurrection but through grassroots organizing, through empowering individuals and communities to create a more just world through subversive acts of justice in their own daily lives. The Jesus I sought to follow was fundamentally different from whatever Jesus the insurrectionists had pledged their allegiance to. 

As I reflected on the insurrection and the entire Trump Presidency, it became clear that what was driving this violent behavior by white Christians was a deep-seated fear of losing their place of power and privilege in our country. As the national conversation around racial justice has progressed, as the disease of white supremacy continues to be exposed, and as the population of white people is surpassed by the multi-cultural array of diverse peoples that make up modern America, many white Christians are seeing the “promise” of a “Christian nation,” which really means a white, conservative, Christian nation vaporize before their eyes. 

READ: “Nothing New Under the Sun”: Opposing Racism Today

And yet, as a white Christian pastor myself, I have a strange feeling that losing privilege and power may be precisely what is required to save the souls of white Christians. After all, one of the central images of Jesus in the New Testament describes Christ as “emptying himself” of his own status and power to bring about redemption to the world. (Philippians 2:7) In Christian theology, Jesus rejects using his divine power for his own self-interest but leverages it only for the good of those around him. Following this example, the early Christians believed that only through following Jesus’ example could they experience the redemption of their souls and the world at large. 

The heart of Jesus’ message in the Gospels is to “love our neighbor as ourselves.” Yet, white Christians have far too often been known for how we marginalize our neighbors of different religions, cultures, and sexualities. Jesus leveraged his power for the good of even those perceived as his “enemies,” and yet white Christians are known for spending millions to get proximity to power and secure our own self-interests. In short, white Christianity has far too often chosen to worship the idol of our own privilege and power than the one who gave it all up for the salvation of the world and calls us to do the same. 

REGISTER: Join us on February 27th at 7pm EST for a special “Race in America” event with Michael W. Waters

What white Christians have failed to see is that losing privilege and power isn’t actually a loss- instead, it means that our society will begin to function more equitably for everyone. It means that people’s ability to get ahead will not be based on the color of their skin or the religion they belong to but on their merit. It means that the Christian worldview will not be the assumed worldview in various settings throughout our pluralistic nation, but that doesn’t mean that the Christian worldview will somehow become suppressed. As the Prophet Isaiah writes, when the “valleys are exalted, and the mountains made low,” then “the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all people will see it together.” (Isaiah 40:4-5) In other words, only when the playing field is leveled will the world experience the love and light of God together. 

The fact is that white Christian privilege will continue to be exposed and lost as our society continues to strain towards justice- this, I am confident, is the reality of our nation. The question is whether white Christians will give it up willingly, following the example of their Savior, or whether they will continue to resist and fight to preserve a world that gives them a leg up at the marginalization and oppression of everyone else. 

This is a moment of reckoning. White Christians have but two options set before us: to walk the narrow road with Jesus in the path of repentance of our exploitation of whiteness and Christian supremacy to ensure our diverse neighbors have a fair shot, or to continue walking on the broad road that exploits our privilege for our own benefit, where everyone not like us is viewed as an enemy to be marginalized so we can flourish. If we continue buy in to that lie, like the so-called Christian insurrectionists of January 6th, we can scarcely claim to be authentic followers of Jesus, and we’re sure to bring about much more destruction, indeed.  

You can hear more about Brandan’s book for youth in the RLC Book Club Children and Youth Edition.

It should come as no surprise that the announcement of Biden’s decision to right-size the court also generated criticism among right-wing Republicans. Sen. Ted Cruz made the jaw-dropping statement that Biden’s decision to nominate a Black woman was insulting and offensive to Black women. His claims are as loud as they are wrong. But they also reveal an entitlement that is closely connected to the belief that white is supreme. Resistance is also embedded in the notion that only a white person could be qualified to serve on the Supreme Court. 

REGISTER: Race in America: A Conversation with Michael W. Waters on February 27th at 7pm EST

For context, just two Black men and five women have served on the Supreme Court. Of 115 individuals appointed to the Supreme Court, 108 have been white men. Unsurprisingly, Cruz never claimed the appointment of white and conservative males was insulting or inappropriate. He never opposed President Donald Trump’s assertion that he would nominate a woman to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The shock and awe centers around gender and race. 

Additionally, white people have always seen themselves in positions of power, so much so that there is an expectation that they belong in powerful positions. 

But Black women represent a bench of untapped talent. Election cycle after election cycle, Black women have propelled Democrats to office at all levels of the government. We are a reliable voting bloc, yet there has never been a Black woman governor. There has never been a Black woman nominated or appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. There has never been a Black woman to serve as White House chief of staff. In fact, in all of history, there have only been 23 Black women appointed to cabinet-level positions. The lack of appointments of Black women is about one thing: the intersection of gender and race. It is not about competency or qualifications. 

READ: An Excerpt From Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World – And How to Repair It All

This appointment would prove that the administration sees Black women not just as workhouses but as serious minds capable of grappling with the tough issues that will come before court. Not only should Biden move forward with his plan to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court; he should stand by his nominee and refuse to rest until she is confirmed. 

To be clear, this appointment does not obliterate the president of his broader responsibility to the Black community. He still needs to raise the minimum wage and address housing insecurity, the climate crisis, student loan debt and voting rights. But the courts have been stacked with conservative white men for far too long. The pillars of power are calling out for progress, and this is one tangible thing the administration can do to advance justice and democracy. 

Fortune’s father was enslaved, but she stood in that Somerset County courtroom to face the prospect of indenture precisely because she was not enslaved upon birth. She likely had been able to live free until she was eighteen years old. Why? Because of White privilege.

Lord Baltimore Charles Calvert, grandson of the first Lord Baltimore, brought sixteen-year-old Eleanor Butler with him from England to Maryland in 1681—six years before Fortune was born. Butler fell in love with and married an enslaved man, identified in court records as “Negro Charles.” She appealed to her friend Lord Baltimore to repeal the 1664 law, which required Eleanor’s immediate enslavement and the enslavement of all her children for life, in perpetuity. Calvert immediately moved to repeal the original 1664 race law. It was rescinded and replaced with the 1681 race law, which acknowledged an unscrupulous practice that had developed since passage of the original law. Masters were forcing their White indentured servant women to marry the masters’ enslaved African men. This practice reaped exponential increases in planters’ free labor force over generations. Maryland’s legislature limited the scope of the law to forced marriages between Black men and White women and dropped the requirement that their children be enslaved. The result? As of 1681, all newborn mixed- race children would be born free.

According to Maryland State Park historian Ross M. Kimmel, Butler benefited only marginally from Lord Baltimore’s efforts. She was still enslaved because her marriage took place before the 1681 law was passed. But as a White woman, she was afforded liberties not usually afforded to enslaved people. Still, her children and descendants were born after the 1681 repeal. They should have been born free. The 1681 law provided the children free status regardless of which parent was White. Butler’s grandchildren were enslaved. They appealed to the courts in 1710. Around the time of the Revolutionary War, they finally won.

Fortune’s fate should have been equally clear. She stood before the judge in 1705. The eighteen-year-old girl listed as a “mulatto” in court documents should have been subject to Lord Baltimore’s 1681 law. But in the interim, the Maryland General Assembly soured on Lord Baltimore and replaced his law with a harsher, more comprehensive, racialized legal structure in 1692—five years after Fortune’s birth.

LISTEN: Lisa Sharon Harper on the RLC Podcast discussing her new book, Fortune

The new law protected White women and their children from slavery by removing the financial impetus for their enslavement. They would be indentured to the local parish, not enslaved by the master. The parishes were ordered to transact the sales of enslaved Black men and indentured White and mixed-race servants to White families. The proceeds of those sales assisted poor Whites in the parish.

In essence, at the turn of the eighteenth century, the church itself became the primary auction block in Maryland. The grotesque nature of this arrangement cannot be overstated. The church joined the banks, insurance companies, shipping companies, iron works, and other institutions in crushing the image of God on this land. The church was the principle protector and manager of White supremacy through the trade of enslaved and indentured human beings in America’s second colony.

According to the 1692 law, a child of a White mother could not be enslaved. Period. The race of the mother became the determining factor of slave or free status. But intolerance of interracial relationships hardened in this law. White women and their children could still be indentured as penalty for miscegenation—married or not. A penalty of seven years indenture was given to the woman and twenty-one years indenture to the child if the parents were married—or thirty-one years indenture for the child if the parents were not married.

Standing before the court, eighteen-year-old Fortune was born free and should have remained free according to Lord Baltimore’s 1681 legal turnabout. But of course the application of law is different from the law itself. Fortune’s fate was largely dependent on the judge, especially in this formative period of colonial race law. Would the judge see and honor the legislative merits of Fortune’s fight to stay free? Or would his sensibilities align more with the racialized hardening of the times?

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I imagine Fortune, awaiting the judge’s decision, looking out a window to her left, just behind the prosecutor offering his closing argument for Fortune’s indenture. Her heartbeat races. Beads of sweat form on her forehead as she wipes sweaty palms on her dress. She clasps her high yellow hands—the only thing she has to hold on to in this moment is herself. I imagine Fortune thinking of the woman who birthed her, Maudlin.

We know so little of Maudlin other than the fact that she was an indentured Ulster Scots woman married to an Ulster Scot, George Magee, with whom she bore three children. Maudlin’s first child was John Magee, born one year before Fortune. The year after Fortune’s birth, Maudlin and George brought Peter Magee into the world and three years after that she gave birth to Samual. Historian Paul Heinegg cites the judicial record of this court proceeding, as well as land tax records indicating that Maudlin was alive and living with her husband George as late as 1705—the year of this trial. Yet, there is no record of her presence.

With possible moments left in her free life, I imagine Fortune’s thoughts turning to her father, Sambo. He, too, was born free. He, too, was bound and sold as a teen. He, too, lived on the other side of Whiteness, daily surviving the branding iron of legal Blackness. Enslaved to Constable Peter Douty, Sambo and his wife were willed free and given land upon Douty’s death, five years after Fortune’s trial. We know that he and Fortune were close. She would take his surname and later live with him on that land. Evidence suggests Sambo may have been a healer. His son, Harry, was a practicing doctor in 1750. He credited his knowledge to an “old experienced Guinea doctor”—likely Sambo, who was from a region that intersected Senegal, Guinea, and Mali, before national boundaries were drawn. Sambo was a learned man who passed down what he knew to the next generation. It makes me wonder what he passed down to Fortune that was in turn passed down to us.

Fortune stood at the precipice of bondage with only the memories of her freedom and her family to give her comfort. Indenture was just as brutal as slavery. Indentured servants were whipped and maimed as punishment. Fortune did not know what was in store for her, and she had no control over it—perhaps that combination is the essence of the terror of bondage, whether enslaved or indentured. She held within her both this unknowing and a complete lack of control over her own body, life, and family.

When I imagine eighteen-year-old Fortune in that courtroom, I find my own breath shortening in anticipation of the ruling. With short breaths, Fortune likely listened as the judge asked her if she understood her sentence. She was hereby ordered to retroactive indentured service to Mrs. Mary Day until the age of thirty-one years old.

Twenties gone. 

Freedom gone.

Safety for herself and her daughters? Gone, gone.

Content taken from Fortune by Lisa Sharon Harper, ©2022. Used by permission of Baker Publishing.

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The books definitely were not intended for readers as young as I. Every book had at least three hundred pages and occasionally they dipped into adult themes. But I used context clues and grit to figure out the vocabulary and story elements I didn’t understand. 

There were more than 30 books in the series. I read every single one. 

I would spend hours in my room reading chapter after chapter. It became a ritual for my mom to take me to the bookstore to grab the next book in the series. 

It is because I was a reader at a very young age that I became a writer as an adult.

But reading was more than that. I was very shy during elementary and middle school, and I didn’t have many friends. Oftentimes, books would be my only company and comfort in my loneliness. The written word absorbed me into a strange and exciting world where everything else that troubled me temporarily fell away.

Honestly, I don’t know what I would have done as a kid if it wasn’t for books.

For many of us books are not mere assemblages of pages and words, they represent limitless realities into which we have flown, escaped, found solace.

Books contain knowledge that humanizes and horrifies us. Good books—even if we can’t remember every character’s name or every twist and turn of the plot—change us. They become our friends, our conversation partners, our company when we feel isolated and misunderstood.

The power of books to create a new reality for the reader means there’s something particularly heinous about banning them.

Banning Books

Right now, the regressive forces in our land are coming up with lists of books that should be banned from our schools because of the ways they talk about racism and white supremacy. 

In one of the most well-publicized instances, Republican state representative Matt Krause, disseminated a list of 850 books he thought needed to be removed from school library shelves.

These lists indiscriminately sweep up literary classics to be tossed on the pile marked “forbidden.” A notorious example includes proposing a ban on Toni Morrison’s Beloved. 

The book speaks in explicit terms about race and sex. But Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize-winning author. She is a legend of literature. Whatever she has written is worth a read. 

On the scale of absurdity, banning students from reading a book by Toni Morrison is off the charts.

I suspect the real purpose of these lists is to get a particular politician or individual in the news. They are meant to spark a reaction, either in support or opposition to their view. It doesn’t matter. In these political games, all news is good news.

The common thread among the books on these lists, aside from the clawing for attention, is they all contain books that talk or teach about race.

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How absurd the notion that people in the United States should learn less about race and not more. As if the problem is that we know too much about the subject and not too little.

We should invite more books about race, racism, and white supremacy. We should celebrate educators who can effectively explain the confounding reality of race—its development, its perniciousness, and its ongoing effects—to their students.

Instead, legislators and talking heads pull publicity stunts to draw attention to themselves in hopes of winning an election or raising more funds. They hide their minds from the painful reality of this nation’s love affair with racial prejudice and pretend as if all is past. Then they seek to replicate their ignorance among our schoolchildren.

This Book Will Be Banned

If this trend continues, then one day my book, How to Fight Racism, Young Reader’s Edition, may land on one of these banned book lists.

Geared toward children ages 8-12 years old, I talk about concepts such as racism, white supremacy, race-based chattel slavery, segregation, and Black Lives Matter. 

Almost a quarter of the book is devoted to unpacking the history of racism in the United States in order to help kids understand how we got where we are and ignite in them the desire to do something about it.

Chapter titles include: Confronting Racism Where it Lives; How to Explore Your Racial Identity; and Fighting Systemic Racism.

I encourage kids, to embrace their personal agency and their ability to effect change. I tell them that racial justice is an imperative for a well-functioning society and that even, perhaps especially, as young people they should be involved in the fight against racism.

I tell them, 

“This fight isn’t just for grown-ups. Some of the greatest advances in the fight against racism have happened because kids fight too.”

My hope is that How to Fight Racism, Young Readers Edition inspires a new generation of young people to antiracist action starting right now.

The forces of regression panic when the most disempowered in our society learn to embrace their power. Some will do everything they can to suppress the impulse toward independence. They imprison activists, they burn churches, they make it harder to vote. They ban books.

The way to battle the ban is to lean into love. Lean into that timeless, irrepressible love of books. Lean into the feeling of being transported by an engrossing story. Lean in into the satisfaction of feeding our famished brains with new knowledge. Lean into our notorious affair with the written word.

If one day my book lands on one of those lists of banned books, I’m not worried. You can’t ban people from appreciating words, skillfully assembled, soulfully combined. Even if they write lists of banned books as long as a library’s shelves. it won’t douse the fire, and the will, we have to read words.

This article originally appeared on Footnotes by Jemar Tisby. 

For more information on Jemar’s book for young readers and other resources for teaching kids about Jesus and justice, you can watch the RLC Book Club Children and Youth Edition. You can also listen to the RLC Book Club from January 20221 with Jemar on the podcast or YouTube channel.