Jesus is in the Streets
“You do have a choice. You don’t have to be a part of the world of the lynchers. You can join the other America.” -Anne Braden
Four words.
What can I do?
I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked this question in the last five years by white Christians from diverse parts of the theological eco-system. The way I hear the question varies tremendously, depending on my mood; more responsive to the news cycle than I like to publicly admit. Now, as the nation reckons with news that the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor will not be charged in her death, I’m bracing to hear it again.
On my best days, I hear it as genuine: “I’m newly waking up to the catastrophe of white supremacy in our land, and I don’t know where to begin.” As someone also raised in the belly of the beast of whiteness, I feel compassion when I hear the question this way. I remember my own confusion and disorientation. I recall the sense of being truly lost when, as a student at Union Theological Seminary, Black, Native, and Latinx Christians demanded I open my eyes and engage the gospel in a different way. For so long, I didn’t even know what I was seeing when I looked in the mirror of my own racial history, and the histories and contemporary habits of the white institutions — including the church — that had formed me. I surely didn’t know what I was supposed to do. Those days were lonely and difficult.
But other times I hear the question differently.
It can sound like an attempt to put one’s “good concerned white person” credentials on display. As if the asking, in and of itself, contributes to justice somehow. And I can feel in my gut that it doesn’t matter what I offer back because the asker doesn’t plan to take me up on it.
Sometimes, especially of late, I hear despair. Those of us who are white are so used to having the systems in which our white lives unfold simply respond when we make demands of them. More of us have stepped into the racial justice struggle since young people rose up in Ferguson, the same place from and of which a group of clergy and theologians wrote a year after Michael Brown was killed: “We found the church in the streets among people whom many of us did not recognize and the voice of God called us to join it.”
It’s a new experience for white people to discover systems that don’t just magically give way to us. Our question thus exposes a truth: we’re not ready.
We’ve not prepared to be in this long-haul journey Black people have been walking generation after generation.
However I hear it, I’ve always tried to take the question seriously as part of my own slow, imperfect commitment to living anti-racism as a white Christian. To give a helpful answer: we must do our own work to understand how whiteness and white supremacy is shaping us every day. We need to plug in hard with people of color-led organizations; support them with time, energy, and resources. We have to recognize we have power in predominantly white organizations, workplaces, and institutions, and get loud, courageous, and savvy, interrupting and challenging the many ways these institutions — including the church — are harming Black people and other people of color.
But I’m finding I can’t take it seriously anymore. As Black grief and outrage passes the tipping point, that question has increasingly sounded like an obscenity; a noisy gong, a clanging cymbal. I went to bed Wednesday night after praying for Breonna Taylor’s family, Black Lives Matter leaders and protestors in Louisville, Black and Latinx students enrolled where I teach, Black clergy across our denominations and woke up determined to start responding with four words of my own.
Stop asking that question.
Stop asking that question: What can I do?
It’s passive. It’s individualistic. It centers the presumed needs of white people; needs we presume but which are not actually real, because for generations and with increasing visibility, clarity, volume, and desperation Black people have told us and told us and told us.
The question reveals the sinful malformation white Christianity has perpetuated and produced. And we are close to the point past which repentance will be too late.
To be sure, there is much we need to do to become the siblings, comrades, and co-conspirators that people of color in this nation desperately need and have always deserved. In the predominantly and historically white church, this includes reckoning with white U.S.-American Christianity’s institutional embeddedness in legacies of white supremacy and colonial-settler capitalism and understanding that, short of such reckoning, the same institutions so embedded simply cannot morally and spiritual form us the way we must be if we are to hear and respond to the voice of God calling us to join the church in the streets.
This is bitter dross.
Given the moral and political capital and, yes, the financial wealth of white U.S.-American Christians — yes, denominations are shrinking but collectively white Christians are rich — a meaningful break with white supremacy towards and in radical support of Black communities would have already meant the full birthing of that other America of which Anne Braden speaks.
Instead, after collectively enabling the demonic to be unleashed in this land, even justice-inclined white Christians who are horrified, have institutionally equivocated while children have been wrenched from their mother’s arms at the border. We’ve allocated to committees the work of crafting careful statements that may result in a BLM banner draped on our church building but failed to determine to completely and utterly participate in shutting this nightmare down; this nightmare we are watching and that Black, Native, and Latinx people are living.
We’ve continued weekly worship inside our sanctuaries — or, now, on screens — while, all this time, Jesus has been dying in the streets.
Dear white Christians, there are no more questions to be asked right now. Not by us.
There are only questions being asked of us.
What will you/I do (white Christian)?
What will we do (white church)?
In response, there can no longer be any equivocation. Only one answer reflects the gospel in this year of 2020; a year when Black women are killed while sleeping in their own beds and Black men are found burning in ditches.
Four more words; the only words I/we dare utter as prayer, confession, commitment and promise while we move our bodies out of our sanctuaries and into the places where the church is tending to the body of Christ:
“Join the other America.”
