The title of this blog post is also the title of a five-week class/discussion I’ll be leading for my church, Resurrection Episcopal Church of Plano. I will be using Carol Anderson’s White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide to anchor the conversation. Every Tuesday, beginning on June 16, I will post a pre-recorded “talk” touching on various aspects of one of Anderson’s chapters, and every Thursday at 1:00 pm I will host a Zoom meeting / discussion group for those who have signed up for the class.
The Zoom meetings will not be posted online because I want people to speak and ask questions with candor. If you’re talking about and thinking about anti-Black racism for the first time in your life, you will need some critical but compassionate space to figure things out. And yes, that’s a concession that those who are victims of anti-Black racism never receive from our society – a space apart, a space that does not come under scrutiny. But that’s how I try to support all my classes, no matter the subject, so that’s how I’ll try to support this class.
I’ve been an Episcopalian since 1991, I have a seminary education, and I am an ordained Baptist minister (very long story; but honestly, who among you is surprised?), but I will be leading this class as not only a layperson but also as a professional secular historian. No providential explanatory schemes, no talk from me about how God works through history or the Holy Spirit moves people’s hearts to change or whatever. Maybe that’s good theology, but it’s bad history, and I don’t do bad history, not even for Jesus. When I teach, I practice what I call “epistemic kenosis” – setting aside anything that can be “known” via any other means than what is available to all observers alike. Faith belongs to some; the archives are open to all.*
So I’m going to do the best I can to present, in a much abbreviated form, a survey of the systemic and toxic white hostility to Black aspirations and Black existence that has led up to this particular moment of crisis and this moment in which, perhaps, we might choose to bring change. But we have to know what we’re choosing and what we must turn away from in order to make that choice – hence, this class, which will, I hope, make visible what people have hidden or what we hide from because we don’t want to see ourselves reflected in it.
Now, I’ve signed on to do this, and I’m happy to do all the teaching and I will lead every discussion. But if any of you are interested in contributing – either recording a brief lecturette about some aspect of the history of anti-Black racism from Reconstruction to the present, or popping into our Zoom discussion to answer questions – please let me know. If you have short supplemental reading recommendations that would be accessible via the web, please feel free to make suggestions! You can leave a message in the comments or drop me an email (see my USIH profile under the “Meet Our Bloggers” tab for my email address).
If you’re a person of faith, you can pray that this discussion class goes well and brings about a greater willingnesss among people of faith to do the hard work of rooting out entrenched injustice in our society, in our institutions, and in our own lives. If you’re not into prayer, I would appreciate your good wishes and encouragement for this course.
Historians are not great at predicting the future, and I honestly don’t think we’re all that edifying, but we can at least provide some needed perspective on how we arrived at this moment, this time for choosing.
This time around, and for all time to come, may we choose wisely and act justly.
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*I realize that not all archives are open to all people. I’m using the term generically here to refer to “empirical evidence.” As to “epistemic kenosis,” that pairing is my own coinage (though someone else may have coined it first) — the “kenosis” part is a shoutout to the Christ hymn of Philippians 2, where that’s the verb used for Christ “emptying himself” or “setting aside” all the perks and powers of omnipotence and omniscience to enter into human life. And that’s your Bible lesson for the day. 😉
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You wrote: “Maybe that’s good theology, but it’s bad history, and I don’t do bad history, not even for Jesus.” …Ha! Love it.
Good luck! I love all my own Church friends, but they can occasionally use a dose of ambivalence, or at least the future unknown, that history provides. The ambivalence is a form of needed realism (or as you say, epistemic kenosis). – TL
I made an intro/preview video to orient my fellow church members to how we’ll approach the class. It’s not perfect, and I would re-word some things differently, but I think it’s all right given the target audience for the course. I could no more write out what I’m going to say beforehand when teaching than I could fly to the moon.
I really dislike “teaching” to a camera, but we are all doing our best out here in Covidland.
Here’s a link to the video — 30 minutes, which is 20 minutes too long.
https://youtu.be/fjBVe9k13bE