thought exercise on Racism

The original sin of racism in America began with a deeply flawed and demonic notion that shaped this nations development. Bad science claimed that black bodies were biologically deficient, then extrap...

Christians in America must come to terms with how institutional racism has infected us. Few white persons in twenty-first-century America see themselves as racist. (Even fewer Asian, Latino, or Africa...

While I was born much too late to be the legal property of a person in America, I have been the recipient of racism. When a classmate called me a racial epithet in my first year of college, I was deva...

Years ago I was watching a daytime talk show which focused on interracial romantic relationships. On this show, the father of a white woman did not approve of his daughter’s engagement to a black man....

The ways that social structures and institutions systematically work against the interest of people of color is called institutional racism. Institutional racism and historic racism are not unrelated ...

The etymology of the word race, as used with regard to people, can be traced only to the sixteenth century. Around 1500 the English word race carried the sense of a group with a common occupation; by ...

Split second decisions can reveal prejudices that we aren't aware of ourselves. This is particularly important in split-second decisions with life-or-death consequences, such as police officers ha...

Frederick Douglass describes how the evils of slavery and racism acts as a sap on the integrity of both our country and our faith in a God where there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free: Fello...

When did the topic of justice become important to you?” Gideon Strauss posed that question to two dozen people crammed into our living room one fall evening in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Some of us wer...

In 1970 John Perkins, an African American pastor and community organizer who lived on “the black side” of rural Mendenhall, Mississippi, was nearly beaten to death by white state police officers. The ...

“The Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii erupted on May 17, 2018, at 4:17 a.m., spewing lava more than a thousand feet in the air. Homes and other structures in the wake of the lava flow and the eruption’s rela...

I was driving in Columbus, Ohio, when I came upon a hitchhiker who alternated between holding his thumb out and clasping his hands together as if he were praying. I picked him up. His name was Mike, a...

Contact Theory proposes that if diverse groups spend extended time together, their intergroup conflict and the negative effects of racism and ethnocentrism will gradually decrease and possibly even di...

“If there’s just one kind of folks, why can’t they get along with each other? If they’re all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other?”

While I was sitting at a stoplight a few blocks from my [Emerson’s] home in Minneapolis, reflecting on the recent rash of drive-by shootings in the area, three African-American teens clad in the urban...

In order to justify colonialism, an idea like white supremacy was needed. The concept that whites were chosen by God and superior to people of color, who were less intelligent, less deserving, and sav...

One of the gravest dangers to the Christian faith is its wholesale appropriation of the larger culture. When this happens, the citizens of those places cannot recognize the difference between their cu...

When I went to seminary to prepare for the ministry, I met an African-American student, Elward Ellis, who befriended both my future wife, Kathy Kristy, and me. He gave us gracious but bare-knuckled me...

The concept of humanity’s being divisible into different races has no scientific validity. This has always been the case, even before the advent of rapid global travel enabled the further mixing of pe...

Did you know that apartheid in South Africa was based in large part on theological doctrines that were formed at Stellenbosch University in the 1930s and 1940s? Isn’t that chilling? Many of the intell...

In this excerpt by Bryan Stevenson, the civil rights attorney and author of Just Mercy, explains the origins of racial identity and difference, necessitated by a slave-based (American Christian) socie...

Desegregation was one of the big goals of the civil rights movement. “Separate but equal” in the South became “separate and unequal.” The disparities were in things as small as water fountains and as ...

The Latin root of curiosity means “cure,” which makes me wonder if it isn’t a way to heal some of our oldest sicknesses. Like, perhaps, the “amnesia of affluence” that theologians point out in the Bib...

In the 1940s, two black psychologists who were married to each other, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, were instrumental in the civil rights movement, conducting important research about the effects of race a...

One day while drinking coffee, laughing, and sharing stories with one of my best friends, who is white, an unexpected question about race came up. It just popped up out of nowhere as we were talking a...

In his seminal work, the Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois describes the unique challenge to identity one faces being both Black and American. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-conscious...

Lamin Sanneh, the African theologian who would be pivotal in the development of missional theology, was raised in an orthodox Muslim household in Gambia. He found himself drawn to Christianity after e...

I know most Americans today do not worship Baal, but when I look at the church in America, I fear that we have our own Baals that demand our worship. I see so many people bowing down before prosperity...

In the wake of slavery and the Civil War, there was so much ugliness in black life that one would have had to be blind not to see it. And nothing, absolutely nothing, was uglier than lynching in all o...

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that I have heard a sermon on the meaning of religion, of Christianity, to the man who stands with his back against the wall. It is urgent th...