Going Deeper Into the Meaning of Racism

(St Joseph, Michigan)

Years of teaching at a black theological seminary have taught me more than I have taught. (For my select bibliography of resources that instruct me, see here.)

I am still learning.

I am halfway through Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. I am spoken to. Saddened. Paused.

This book puts my ideas on racism on pause.

I am learning some things that feel important to me.

You can forget about toppling statues, and focus on toppling selfies, deleting them upon understanding what's going on in DiAngelo's book. (BTW - she is white.)

A spoiler - the worst racist offenders, according to DiAngelo, are white liberal progressives, precisely those who think, when it comes to racial issues, they have arrived. "White progressives cause the most daily trouble to people of color." (DiAngelo exposes the commonly accepted binary understanding of racism as actually empowering racism, and calmly and thoroughly reveals the deep, socially constructed, invisible [hence, more insidious] racism active in humanity, to include white culture.)

Even though DiAngelo is not a follower of Jesus, her analysis of racism as a virus that infects everyone, producing a blindness to it, and an unconscious justification of it, runs close to the biblical idea that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Let all who are without sin be the first to topple the statue.