Last October I traveled down to Wheaton College to hear Jemar Tisby deliver a lecture, “What is the Color of Compromise?”, as part of a series hosted by the Center for Applied Christian Ethics. Tisby is the author of The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism and one of the primary catalysts behind The Witness, a black Christian collective that engages issues of religion, race, justice, and culture from a biblical perspective. I share my notes and some other resources immediately after I was there, but it seemed like this was a good time to repost that material.
If you have not read The Color of Compromise, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is one of the clearest presentations of the historical account of how the Christian church, no matter the geographical location, contributed to the racialized narrative in the USA. It is not an easy read, but if we want to understand the tensions within our nation around race and move toward biblical justice, such difficult work is required.
While Tisby’s lecture was not uploaded as far as I can tell, I’m including my own notes from the lecture below. Tisby also delivered the a message, “Do Not Despise the Prophetic Voice of the Black Experience,” in Wheaton’s chapel earlier that same day, and you can watch that message at the very end of this post as well.
The Color of Compromise is:
- Green – for the greed that sustains racism
- White – for white supremacy within the church
- Red – for the blood that accompanies that greed and white supremacy
Green
- “The being of slavery, its soul and its body, lives and moves in the chattel principle, the property principle, the bill of sale principle: the cart whip, starvation, and nakedness are its inevitable consequences.” – J. W. C. Pennington
- commodification of the person as property to be bought and sold; reducing the image of God and the value of human life
- “Some people say slavery was America’s original sin. I would suggest something else. Slavery was America’s original symptom. America’s original sin was greed.”
- Olaudah Equiano‘s story about being pulled from his sister in his work, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African.
- Politics and economic gain set the direction in the country, not faith
- The discussion of reparations has caused a lot of consternation
- “You cannot have a serious conversation about racial justice without talking about economic justice.”
White
- White supremacy is built upon a narrative of racial difference
- Racism never goes away, it just adapts; the movement from overt racism in slavery through segregation/Jim Crow era to covert racism in the civil rights era up to the present
- This is not really about the amount of melanin in one’s skin, but about the creation of system of racial difference with idealized “whiteness” at the top and “blackness” on the bottom; everyone else is in-between
- Whiteness in this sense obscures ethnicity (even for white people), creates “blackness,” and maintains power through violence
- The Second Coming of the Ku Klux Klan (1915) [Tisby talks about three iterations of the KKK in his book] – spurred by D. W. Griffith’s epic film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), it led to a rebirth of the KKK specifically linked with white Christian nationalism by William Joseph Simmons
Red
- The greed of racism linked with white nationalism was enforced through violence upon the body
- “But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.” – Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me
- The story of the lynching of Luther and Mary Holbert and the history of lynching in America
- The story of Recy Taylor, gang raped by a group of white men
What Do We Do?: “The Fierce Urgency of Now”
- Clip from Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s “I Have a Dream,” speech with the line “the fierce urgency of now…now is time”
- The ARC of racial justice: awareness (head) / relationship (hands) / commitment (heart)
- Awareness:
- Read “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King, Jr.
- Read “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Explore “The 1619 Project”
- Read Divided by Faith by Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith
- Watch 13th or When They See Us
- Am I willing to be a learner?
- However, awareness alone is not enough
- Relationship:
- Have relationships with people who are different than us
- Incarnation of being together
- However, relationships alone will not change systems of injustice
- Commitment:
- Find out who your local District Attorney is; find out their platform; and push for reforms in the realm of justice
- Find out about voters rights and promote the vote
- Look at your own institutions – schools, workplaces, churches, organizations – and see how you can be a voice for racial justice
- We don’t have a “can do” problem but a “want to” problem
Renovate 