Adam Shields
Summary: An anthropologist studies what factors white advocates of racial justice are in common among those who continue in racial justice work.
As someone who has been in racial justice circles for more than 30 years now, I can tell you that one of the most clear realities is that generally, white people often do not stick around for the long term. As is described here, one of the real problems with racial justice in the American church, is a problem with white people being continually at introductory levels of discussing and living out racial justice.
As a personal example, at my previous church I, and many others, spent years trying to get the church to pay attention to racial issues in and outside of the church. Finally around 2018, the church had a mid week series of classes over a couple of months. And then in 2020, they supported the creation of Be the Bridge groups and then small group book discussions around Jemar Tisby's Color of Compromise book. At each of those steps, there was reluctance to do anything else as a follow-up. The orientation was to get more people to do be introduced to racial justice as a necessary topic, but to actually oppose more exploration of the depth beyond the introductory levels.
There is a role for introduction level work, but real change doesn't happen with introductions, change happens as a result of depth. I was in a group that went rogue and went more into depth around racial justice. That core group has been together for about six years now, but only because it kept meeting outside of the institutional authority of the church. (The final person in the group that continued to attend the church is in process of moving out of state. So every member from that original group eventually gave up on that local church and left. Most attended the church from 10 to 15 years before leaving.)
Christine Jeske lays out a good description of this problem, and then through in-depth interviews she explores what is in common about white people who have continued on in racial justice work over the long haul. She is an anthropologist by training and she limited her exploration to a single geography (Madison, Wisconsin) so that she could use referrals to find those who were known for their work over time, not just those who wanted to self-refer. I think this method is important. In 2022, Jeske started with long form interviews with 30 people of color who led churches or organizations that had racial justice as a major focus. As part of those interviews (which were mostly about what those leaders thought mattered to long-term engagement with racial justice issues, she asked for examples of local white Christians who were examples of healthy long-term engagement. The second part of the study was interviews with 40 of the recommended white Christians who had been involved in racial justice over a long period of time. And then to counter the single geography, the third phase of the study included interview in different geographies with different demographic characteristics (a predominately Black urban area and a rural southern area and an area in South Africa where the author had previously worked.)
Early in the book Jeske lays out racial justice as a category and how white people tend to get introduced to it. Generally, there is a "collision" where a person runs into a reality that is different from their prior experience. Part of the discussion about collisions is a discussion of how the concept of social imaginaries work to give structure to how we perceive the world. The point of the collisions is that our social imaginary is challenged, and either we can reject the challenge and retain our previous social imaginary or we question the social imaginary. These sections about collision and the questioning are filled with stories from the interviews as well as background social science that gives structure and research backing.
Collisions can have multiple results that cause a person to investigate. One possibility is that a person will have an approximating experience that allows the person to use their different, but still somewhat similar experience to build empathy to cause a person to explore the injustice more fully. In my experience, the people who most commonly have continued on in racial justice, are women who have experienced and named sexism, or others who have a significant interracial relationship, especially a romantic relationship or cross-racial adoptive relationship. Moving toward a healthy long term response requires a level of choice and agency. White people have the choice to walk away, so those who continue to ask questions and learn and build relationships, have used their agency to choose to go deeper.
As part of this exploration of agency, Jeske explores the importance of learning. Gaining intellectual understanding, history and personal stories that challenge the social imaginary is an important step, but those who continued on also moved toward a type of embodied response. There was something that they did that changed as a result of what they learned. Those embodied responses could be quite varied, moving to a new community, or changing jobs, churches, schools, etc. The difficulty is that with an embodied response, complexity increased. Simple lists of "do this, but not that" were no longer good enough to ensure that the white Christians did the right thing. It is not necessarily described as discernment, but because I have made a study of discernment my special interest the past couple of years, I read this exploration of complexity through the lens of discernment. What Jeske is pointing out is that there is no simple solution and there has to be some level of responsibility for both not having to have everything right all the time time, but also knowing that solutions to the very large social problems of the world were also not going to have magic bullets. Based on what I heard from people who had grappled with these contradictions for years and decades, I believe that rather than translating into nothing, these contradictions point to a typical, run-of-the-mill, big problem. The nature of big problems is this: They demand careful contextualization and more why questions. Instead of writing off a seeming contradiction as an excuse to give up, a contextualized approach asks, “In what situations is one side of this contradiction appropriate and in what situations is the other?”
As with other steps along this process, those who learn to grapple with the contextualization and complexity continue on, but there are those who have difficulty with complexity. Again, it is not discussed, but theologically, I would like to ask a question about what correlations there are with faith and personality and those who continue on at this point. Faith that hasn't been explored to accept complexity, will not be part of a helpful toolkit in dealing with long term grappling of racial justice. It is also at this point that Jeske also brings in fear, shame, guilt and other similar emotional responses.
I have already written too much for most people and they will have stopped reading, but I haven't really talked about the main thread of the book. The book has a lot of discussion about hope. Early in the book the idea of hope was introduced, and why much of the discussion of hope in the Christian church around racial justice is a type of distorted "delusional hope." And then that discussion of hope becomes the main thread of the later parts of the book. I am wary of Christian discussions of hope around racial justice because of the ways that hope and grace and forgiveness get misused. In the case of this Racial Justice for the Long Haul, I had more tolerance for the discussion because of the earlier discussion of distorted hope.
In my church experience, I thought there was too much emphasis on grace and forgiveness by Black Christians toward white Christians without nuance and time. My church showed a documentary about forgiveness after the Charleston Nine and Dylan Roof and as much as I appreciated the documentary abstractly, it felt like it was manipulative in context of the actual work in the church. Jeske understands that tension and misuse of grace and speaks about it well in this long quote: Grace goes wrong. A lot. So let’s review. Grace can flow to and from people of all social locations. Everybody needs it. Grace is not a warm feeling. Grace is not a charitable handout from wealthy to poor. Grace is not the sole duty of those harmed by injustice. It must not be squeezed from them as a condition of survival. Grace is not a politician’s benevolent declaration over the heads of those harmed. Grace, in its ideal form, is given with free agency, though it is impossible to trace all the influential factors leading to any individual’s actions. Grace expands the freedom of the giver. Rather than fueling compassion fatigue, it lessens the fatigue of having no power over repeated offenses. Grace is not the only way people of color respond to racism, nor is it everything White people need to become advocates for justice. The struggle against racism is long and multifaceted. The history of racism produces a prior condition of indebtedness for White people. Many White people do not see their indebtedness. Others, upon seeing it, do not care. Learning the history of racism brings that indebtedness to light. This prior indebtedness is a setup for grace. People of color do give grace in that context of racial indebtedness, frequently and freely. Christians of color see God as their source for such grace, and teachings on grace and race abound in many predominantly non-White churches. Grace does not deny wrongs—it begins with a clear naming of wrongs. Grace is not a one-sided clause of a contract. It anticipates response. Responses might include gratitude, restitution, reparations, repentance, future relationship, or paying forward. Grace givers cannot demand response, and grace does not expire when it doesn’t elicit a certain response within a limited timeline. But grace does set in motion anticipation for more to happen. The fact that grace goes wrong doesn’t mean it can’t go right. People in this research often explicitly named differences between fake grace and a kind of real grace that works for long-term racial justice. They knew grace at an experiential level. They could point to moments in their own lives when they’d seen it happen, and they understood it as a principle that mattered in the wider context of justice and injustice. And because grace opens relationships, rather than closing off relationships, it becomes central to long-term perseverance and irrepressible hope.
I really do think that the naming of the ways that things go wrong is important to helping to see how they can go right. Jeske talks well about how she wasn't intending to write a book about hope but how the interviews kept moving toward hope as an essential part of long term racial justice work. But as in the quote above, the problem with hope and grace and the complexity of all of the interlocking parts of injustice in the world is that you can't build a simple class to take people through all the steps in an institutionalizes sense. This is why I personally have become a spiritual director because while that isn't what everyone needs, it is one tool to help people grapple with complexity in faith and living out their faith that I think will empower Christians to sustain work around justice in the long term.
As you might expect, there are no silver bullets here. But there are lots of stories and I can see how rightly grappling with how different people process the world differently can help to give space to healthy long term engagement with justice work and with faith. I thought Racial Justice for the Long Haul was helpful and I am going to suggest it for my book group to discuss in the future.
I was provided a copy of a PDF in advance to read, but I have purchased my own copy as well as buying another copy for a friend who works in a racial justice organization.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/racial-justice-for-...
Originally posted at bookwi.se.
Summary: An anthropologist studies what factors white advocates of racial justice are in common among those who continue in racial justice work.
As someone who has been in racial justice circles for more than 30 years now, I can tell you that one of the most clear realities is that generally, white people often do not stick around for the long term. As is described here, one of the real problems with racial justice in the American church, is a problem with white people being continually at introductory levels of discussing and living out racial justice.
As a personal example, at my previous church I, and many others, spent years trying to get the church to pay attention to racial issues in and outside of the church. Finally around 2018, the church had a mid week series of classes over a couple of months. And then in 2020, they supported the creation of Be the Bridge groups and then small group book discussions around Jemar Tisby's Color of Compromise book. At each of those steps, there was reluctance to do anything else as a follow-up. The orientation was to get more people to do be introduced to racial justice as a necessary topic, but to actually oppose more exploration of the depth beyond the introductory levels.
There is a role for introduction level work, but real change doesn't happen with introductions, change happens as a result of depth. I was in a group that went rogue and went more into depth around racial justice. That core group has been together for about six years now, but only because it kept meeting outside of the institutional authority of the church. (The final person in the group that continued to attend the church is in process of moving out of state. So every member from that original group eventually gave up on that local church and left. Most attended the church from 10 to 15 years before leaving.)
Christine Jeske lays out a good description of this problem, and then through in-depth interviews she explores what is in common about white people who have continued on in racial justice work over the long haul. She is an anthropologist by training and she limited her exploration to a single geography (Madison, Wisconsin) so that she could use referrals to find those who were known for their work over time, not just those who wanted to self-refer. I think this method is important. In 2022, Jeske started with long form interviews with 30 people of color who led churches or organizations that had racial justice as a major focus. As part of those interviews (which were mostly about what those leaders thought mattered to long-term engagement with racial justice issues, she asked for examples of local white Christians who were examples of healthy long-term engagement. The second part of the study was interviews with 40 of the recommended white Christians who had been involved in racial justice over a long period of time. And then to counter the single geography, the third phase of the study included interview in different geographies with different demographic characteristics (a predominately Black urban area and a rural southern area and an area in South Africa where the author had previously worked.)
Early in the book Jeske lays out racial justice as a category and how white people tend to get introduced to it. Generally, there is a "collision" where a person runs into a reality that is different from their prior experience. Part of the discussion about collisions is a discussion of how the concept of social imaginaries work to give structure to how we perceive the world. The point of the collisions is that our social imaginary is challenged, and either we can reject the challenge and retain our previous social imaginary or we question the social imaginary. These sections about collision and the questioning are filled with stories from the interviews as well as background social science that gives structure and research backing.
Collisions can have multiple results that cause a person to investigate. One possibility is that a person will have an approximating experience that allows the person to use their different, but still somewhat similar experience to build empathy to cause a person to explore the injustice more fully. In my experience, the people who most commonly have continued on in racial justice, are women who have experienced and named sexism, or others who have a significant interracial relationship, especially a romantic relationship or cross-racial adoptive relationship. Moving toward a healthy long term response requires a level of choice and agency. White people have the choice to walk away, so those who continue to ask questions and learn and build relationships, have used their agency to choose to go deeper.
As part of this exploration of agency, Jeske explores the importance of learning. Gaining intellectual understanding, history and personal stories that challenge the social imaginary is an important step, but those who continued on also moved toward a type of embodied response. There was something that they did that changed as a result of what they learned. Those embodied responses could be quite varied, moving to a new community, or changing jobs, churches, schools, etc. The difficulty is that with an embodied response, complexity increased. Simple lists of "do this, but not that" were no longer good enough to ensure that the white Christians did the right thing. It is not necessarily described as discernment, but because I have made a study of discernment my special interest the past couple of years, I read this exploration of complexity through the lens of discernment. What Jeske is pointing out is that there is no simple solution and there has to be some level of responsibility for both not having to have everything right all the time time, but also knowing that solutions to the very large social problems of the world were also not going to have magic bullets. Based on what I heard from people who had grappled with these contradictions for years and decades, I believe that rather than translating into nothing, these contradictions point to a typical, run-of-the-mill, big problem. The nature of big problems is this: They demand careful contextualization and more why questions. Instead of writing off a seeming contradiction as an excuse to give up, a contextualized approach asks, “In what situations is one side of this contradiction appropriate and in what situations is the other?”
As with other steps along this process, those who learn to grapple with the contextualization and complexity continue on, but there are those who have difficulty with complexity. Again, it is not discussed, but theologically, I would like to ask a question about what correlations there are with faith and personality and those who continue on at this point. Faith that hasn't been explored to accept complexity, will not be part of a helpful toolkit in dealing with long term grappling of racial justice. It is also at this point that Jeske also brings in fear, shame, guilt and other similar emotional responses.
I have already written too much for most people and they will have stopped reading, but I haven't really talked about the main thread of the book. The book has a lot of discussion about hope. Early in the book the idea of hope was introduced, and why much of the discussion of hope in the Christian church around racial justice is a type of distorted "delusional hope." And then that discussion of hope becomes the main thread of the later parts of the book. I am wary of Christian discussions of hope around racial justice because of the ways that hope and grace and forgiveness get misused. In the case of this Racial Justice for the Long Haul, I had more tolerance for the discussion because of the earlier discussion of distorted hope.
In my church experience, I thought there was too much emphasis on grace and forgiveness by Black Christians toward white Christians without nuance and time. My church showed a documentary about forgiveness after the Charleston Nine and Dylan Roof and as much as I appreciated the documentary abstractly, it felt like it was manipulative in context of the actual work in the church. Jeske understands that tension and misuse of grace and speaks about it well in this long quote: Grace goes wrong. A lot. So let’s review. Grace can flow to and from people of all social locations. Everybody needs it. Grace is not a warm feeling. Grace is not a charitable handout from wealthy to poor. Grace is not the sole duty of those harmed by injustice. It must not be squeezed from them as a condition of survival. Grace is not a politician’s benevolent declaration over the heads of those harmed. Grace, in its ideal form, is given with free agency, though it is impossible to trace all the influential factors leading to any individual’s actions. Grace expands the freedom of the giver. Rather than fueling compassion fatigue, it lessens the fatigue of having no power over repeated offenses. Grace is not the only way people of color respond to racism, nor is it everything White people need to become advocates for justice. The struggle against racism is long and multifaceted. The history of racism produces a prior condition of indebtedness for White people. Many White people do not see their indebtedness. Others, upon seeing it, do not care. Learning the history of racism brings that indebtedness to light. This prior indebtedness is a setup for grace. People of color do give grace in that context of racial indebtedness, frequently and freely. Christians of color see God as their source for such grace, and teachings on grace and race abound in many predominantly non-White churches. Grace does not deny wrongs—it begins with a clear naming of wrongs. Grace is not a one-sided clause of a contract. It anticipates response. Responses might include gratitude, restitution, reparations, repentance, future relationship, or paying forward. Grace givers cannot demand response, and grace does not expire when it doesn’t elicit a certain response within a limited timeline. But grace does set in motion anticipation for more to happen. The fact that grace goes wrong doesn’t mean it can’t go right. People in this research often explicitly named differences between fake grace and a kind of real grace that works for long-term racial justice. They knew grace at an experiential level. They could point to moments in their own lives when they’d seen it happen, and they understood it as a principle that mattered in the wider context of justice and injustice. And because grace opens relationships, rather than closing off relationships, it becomes central to long-term perseverance and irrepressible hope.
I really do think that the naming of the ways that things go wrong is important to helping to see how they can go right. Jeske talks well about how she wasn't intending to write a book about hope but how the interviews kept moving toward hope as an essential part of long term racial justice work. But as in the quote above, the problem with hope and grace and the complexity of all of the interlocking parts of injustice in the world is that you can't build a simple class to take people through all the steps in an institutionalizes sense. This is why I personally have become a spiritual director because while that isn't what everyone needs, it is one tool to help people grapple with complexity in faith and living out their faith that I think will empower Christians to sustain work around justice in the long term.
As you might expect, there are no silver bullets here. But there are lots of stories and I can see how rightly grappling with how different people process the world differently can help to give space to healthy long term engagement with justice work and with faith. I thought Racial Justice for the Long Haul was helpful and I am going to suggest it for my book group to discuss in the future.
I was provided a copy of a PDF in advance to read, but I have purchased my own copy as well as buying another copy for a friend who works in a racial justice organization.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/racial-justice-for-...
Originally posted at bookwi.se.