On Being Changed By The Other

June 22, 2018 ~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

I’ve watched with some astonishment as people defend the separation of children from their families. I’m not talking about the people trying to shift blame or deflect attention. Those efforts to defend Trump are asinine, but they reveal people’s moral discomfort with the policy. There’s another set of more extreme arguments on my facebook feed: these parents are law breakers, they’re getting what they deserve, they’re bad parents.

When people make these arguments, my impulse is not to fire back with a counterargument. Instead I simply want to say, “What happened to you?” Or perhaps better, “What hasn’t happened to you?” Let me explain.

Entering deeply into the pain and experience of people who are not like us is among the most life-changing things that can happen to human beings. And when it happens, it doesn’t just change our understanding of that particular group of people. It colors our whole moral sense and the way we see people to whom we have no connection. It rocks us back on our heels, it disrupts our certainties. It moves us. Try as we might to get back to our comfortable starting place, the effect turns out to be enduring. We find ourselves permanently decentered. The needs and perspectives of others are not so easily dismissed.

I’m very worried that our churches are full of people who have never experienced this at all. This is what hasn’t happened to them. We are formed by media that teaches us to fear others, by a culture that tells us things are more important than people, by a church that preaches a narcissistic gospel.

We approach the other as a matter of Christian duty, with an episodic and paternalistic sense of free agency. I will be happy to help you. But I will not be changed by you.

I grant that this question of entering into the pain and experience of people unlike ourselves is not an all or nothing proposition. My failure to do this much more than I have is probably my greatest sin. And yet the hint of it that I’ve tasted is the most transforming thing I’ve known.

I’m concerned that many Christians have not even glimpsed this. Which, by the way, would be deeply ironic. The message of salvation we claim to believe in is all about this. Jesus entered into the pain and experience of human beings, emptying himself of that to which he was entitled. When Jesus does it, it’s more than an example. It’s salvific. We can’t do that. But it tells us something about the way God has ordered the world. The fact that rescues us is the same principle God uses to make us a little less monstrous and a little more caring. When we encounter the other in a deep way we become a little more like what we were meant to be.

In this age of Christian callousness, I sometimes fear that the old advice to “read your Bible and pray every day” has become an exercise in self-absorption. Without neglecting those spiritual disciplines, we must add to them an openness to seeing God in unexpected places, like in the faces of strangers.

You Can’t Talk About American Poverty Without Talking About Race and Housing

April 4, 2018 ~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

The view from my childhood home. Photo Credit: Jonathan Curtis

Americans like to talk about poverty without talking about race. It’s more comfortable to talk about the generic poor. But the reality is that Americans experience poverty in very different ways, and race is one of the key variables. Even though there are more poor white Americans than poor black or Hispanic Americans, white poverty tends to be more dispersed. Black poverty tends to be more concentrated.

This matters because scholars have found that when it comes to life outcomes, the important thing is not just how poor you are, but how poor your neighbors are. Poor kids in low poverty communities do better than poor kids in high poverty communities. Partly because banks, real estate companies, and the federal government created separate housing markets—a discriminatory one for blacks and a subsidized one for whites—poor African American kids are much more likely to grow up surrounded by poverty than are poor white kids.

Alvin Chang has a good overview of this today, drawing in part of Patrick Sharkey’s important book. As I was reading about how different white and black poverty are, it occurred to me that my own travels illustrate the difference quite well.

I grew up in a white community that was fairly poor. Its unemployment levels were consistently higher than the national average and its income rates were consistently lower. Now I live in a black community that is fairly poor. In fact, according the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey* the per capita income of my childhood neighborhood and my current neighborhood are very similar. But dig a little beneath the surface and you’ll see big differences.

Most obviously, my hometown was a rural area and my current community is an urban one:

This makes the experience of poverty different and indicates that the headline per capita income similarity is misleading because the cost of living is significantly higher in Philadelphia than in my hometown.

It gets more interesting. Consider the chart below. Despite similar incomes, my childhood neighborhood and my current neighborhood are actually dramatically different:

Data	Where I grew up	Where I live now
Per Capita Income	$23,611	$23,435
Poverty Rate	13.4%	30.2%
Owner occupied housing units	73%	33%
Median value of owner occupied units	$175,600	$64,600

As you can see, these two communities illustrate the racially distinct poverty dynamic described above. Poverty in my current community is concentrated. Most residents cannot afford to own homes. And there isn’t much value in those homes anyway. In contrast, where I grew up, even though incomes are relatively low, poverty is not particularly high, and most people own their homes and have significant wealth in them.

This, by the way, is part of what people are talking about when they use the word privilege. They’re not trolling you, dear white reader, or telling you you’re a bad person or that you don’t work hard. They’re just telling you facts of life that you didn’t set up or ask for. But you do have a choice to try to keep it this way or work against it.

* The Census data at the tract level comes with a high margin of error. Consider all these numbers rough estimates. They tell us a story in broad outlines but are not suitable for making fine-grained distinctions.

Martin Luther King 50 Years Later

April 4, 2018 ~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

King at the front of a march that descended into violence. Memphis, March 28, 1968

In his last Sunday sermon before he died, Dr. King said this:

It is an unhappy truth that racism is a way of life for the vast majority of white Americans, spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and denied, subtle and sometimes not so subtle—the disease of racism permeates and poisons a whole body politic. And I can see nothing more urgent than for America to work passionately and unrelentingly—to get rid of the disease of racism.

In the final months of his life, Dr. King wasn’t beating around the bush. White Americans, he said, embraced racism as a way of life. One way to honor him half a century after his death is to speak in similarly blunt terms. Racism is not just acceptable among white Americans in 2018, it is often honored. Racism is honored every time someone proudly tells you they support the President.

This reversal of norms against public racism is a tragedy. It’s a tragedy when the President of the United States speaks in proto-genocidal language and the American people don’t even realize it. It’s a double-tragedy because it is harmful all by itself while also inflicting wounds by distraction. Many of us (myself very much included) have withdrawn our attention from the ongoing crises of poverty, segregation, incarceration and police brutality. Instead, we focus on the lowest of low-hanging fruit: critiquing the racism of Donald Trump and his supporters.

It’s as if Martin Luther King had spent a lot of time and mental energy trying to convince white people that, actually, George Wallace really was racist. You almost laugh out loud at the thought of it. Of course he didn’t bother with that. King kept his focus on the bigger picture.

50 years after his death, we’re reluctant to face the man who appeared in the Spring of 1968 as a despised and declining figure. Heckled by black power advocates and hated by white conservatives, King struggled to stay relevant in a society that seemed to be coming apart at the seams. The left increasingly saw his program of militant nonviolent activism as irrelevant, while the right looked on it as a profoundly cynical method of extortion.

We honor him now, but 50 years ago most Americans just wanted him to admit defeat and go away. When he died, some white evangelical leaders implied he had only reaped what he sowed.

In our time, American across the political spectrum find their way toward admiration of Dr. King by erasing key parts of his theology and agenda. Much of the left doesn’t want to learn from King about the moral and strategic imperative of nonviolence. To them, King’s Christian activism reeks of respectability politics. The right doesn’t want to learn from King’s radical challenge to the American economy and way of life.

Plenty of people are happy to think of King as a Christian or as a radical. It is harder for us to grasp that there was no or for Dr. King. He was both. Switch the order of the words and you get slightly different connotations—radical Christian, Christian radical—but both connotations work for King.

King’s Christian activism has much to teach us. Among the lessons are these:

The ends don’t justify the means. Your goals don’t make you righteous. Your actions do.

Love is not a sentimental abstraction. It is what enables oppressed people to pursue justice without the struggle devolving into zero-sum score settling.

Formal equality is hollow without economic empowerment.

The purpose of economic empowerment of the poor is not to expand the debt-addled money-worshiping middle class. It is to promote the dignity and worth of every human being. Economic justice for the poor is not possible without a spiritual assault on the lies of materialism. People are more important than things. And people will not have their deepest needs satisfied by things. A materialistic society can try to buy off the poor with charity, but it cannot do justice to the poor because materialism causes us to treat human beings as disposable.

Nonviolence is not merely a tactic. It is a way of life that rebukes everything from the violence of American policing to our obsession with guns to our militaristic foreign policy around the world.

Nonviolence does not mean acceptance of double-standards or treating all violence as equal. King rejected violence, but refused to put all violence in the same category. With black neighborhoods engaged in a series of deadly uprisings in the 1960s, King refused to provide the condemnation the white media craved. The violent selfishness of the oppressor is of a different kind and magnitude than the violent groans of the oppressed. King kept the focus where it belonged and rebuked the real purveyors of violence.

Nonviolence does not mean passivity or accepting the premises of your opponent. King bluntly called most white Americans “racist” and “sick.” They saw this as deeply unfair and mean-spirited. But if you limit yourself to discourse within the boundaries of the oppressor’s epistemology you can’t be truthful.

With these lessons in mind we can begin to see why at the end of his life King was talking about the need to fight the interrelated problems of racism, materialism, and militarism. All three are dehumanizing forces. All three are alive and well today. 50 years after Dr. King’s death, we have so much work to do.

In Social Movements, Shame Is A Powerful Weapon

March 25, 2018 ~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

main_900 — The March for Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C.

How does social change happen? In idealized stories of earlier reform movements—abolition, women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement—we like to tell ourselves that in certain critical moments the public can experience a moral awakening. In the civil rights era, police brutality mediated through the new technology of television supposedly shocked the conscience of the nation and led to reform. Is this really true?

The question matters because the answer shapes the strategies we believe contemporary social movements ought to pursue. Does a movement win when it has persuaded a majority of people of the righteousness of its cause? Do appeals to a shared moral sense drive change? Or do more aggressive tactics work better? Should a movement try very hard not to offend opponents? Or should it heighten the contrast between two sides?

Without discounting the grain of truth in narratives of moral awakening, I think we need to be more clear-eyed about how change often occurs. It is true that becoming a society that no longer countenanced slavery was a massive moral shift. But that shift in imagination was measured in generations, not months or years. It is true that the civil rights movement moved the moral conscience, but in the short term it looked less like an awakening and more like a grudging acceptance of change.

As much as we’d like to believe in moral awakenings, Americans didn’t suddenly repent of the horror of racism when they saw John Lewis getting his head bashed in. Instead, politicians, celebrities, employers and pastors began to tell people that it was no longer socially acceptable to be racist. Wanting to be considered good people, and wanting to see themselves as good people, white Americans decided racism was bad. The Trump era shows how paper-thin that judgment remains even half a century after the height of the civil rights movement.

But that doesn’t mean the movement’s gains weren’t significant. Moving the boundaries of social acceptability and implementing concrete policy changes are huge victories. Even as the Black Lives Matter movement has receded from the headlines, it has shifted boundaries and is driving policy changes in local police departments and DA offices. Such shifts don’t just follow moral change; they often precede it.

We may now be seeing the standards of social acceptability moving on the related issue of guns. To win, social movements need to have more than a compelling moral case. They need to be able and willing to raise the costs of inaction. (This doesn’t mean resorting to violence. There’s good political science evidence showing that violence in the civil rights era was counterproductive.) You raise costs by making politicians fear for their jobs, businesses for their profits, and people for their reputations.

We’re seeing movement on all three of those fronts. Republican politicians in suburban districts are making noises about the need for action. The Trump Administration at least wants to appear to be doing something. Many major businesses are not even trying to straddle the issue anymore and are instead taking actions that align them squarely on the side of the gun control activists. And the NRA is becoming more unpopular as its spokespeople and supporters reveal themselves as heartless extremists. A new poll out this morning shows that more Americans strongly disapprove of the NRA than strongly approve.

That strong disapproval number is important. In my ideal world, activists could simply present their righteous cause, lay out the evidence, and lovingly appeal to the moral intuition we all share. In the real world, while we should try to do all those things, we must also rely on the power of shame. The gun control activists will win, in part, by making people feel that it is disreputable and shameful to be associated with the NRA. They will win by making people feel that this is something that “good people” simply don’t do.

Activists can win by shifting the boundaries of what is socially acceptable. Sometimes one generation’s embarrassment can become the seeds of a future generation’s convictions. Yet recognizing the power of shame does not mean we must be cynics about the power of love. People on the opposing side need to have a way to back down without feeling like they’re losing everything. This need not be zero sum. Without love, activists can become nothing more than would-be oppressors, lacking only the power to crush their opposition. With love, activists can gladly welcome every convert, however late to the game they may be. We cannot afford to be complacent about our own condition. We are flawed people seeking positive change. The problem of evil is the problem of me. I do not have the vision, the wisdom, the love, to see clearly all that can or should be done. That’s always important to remember.

What’s Going On In Philly’s Foster Care System?

March 25, 2018 ~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

Last month, Philadelphia’s Department of Human Services launched a new advertising and recruitment campaign for new foster families. Local media widely reported the “urgent” need for hundreds of new foster parents in the city.

In Philadelphia, DHS partners with private organizations that receive a mixture of public and private funds and do the hard work of licensing foster parents and actually placing children in safe homes. The foster care system is a patchwork of public and private actors that would collapse without the time, money, and effort of public-spirited citizens. Your tax dollars don’t take care of everything.

One of the news articles profiled a family licensed through Bethany Christian Services. Bethany is one of the agencies the city sends foster care referrals to. It licenses foster parents and places kids in homes. A feel good story. But a few days later reports emerged that last fall Bethany had refused to license a same sex couple for foster care. In response, the city suspended foster care placements at Bethany and Catholic Social Services, which also refuses to license same sex couples.

Ok, you’re caught up on the basic story. I have a few thoughts.

–This is deeply personal for us. We are licensed through Bethany Christian Services. Workers from Catholic Social Services and Bethany have been in our home literally dozens of times. They made Gabe’s adoption possible.

–I am embarrassed to say that I not only didn’t know about Bethany’s policy toward same sex families; I hadn’t even thought about it. I strongly disagree with Bethany’s discriminatory policy. Yet, I did not bother to proactively research this question, nor have I been working for change from the inside. I am complicit.

–The city’s response to this is cowardly. Some reports said that DHS has “discovered” that two of its contracting agencies discriminate. This is simply not true. The only thing that’s changed is that the public now knows about it. So the city has suspended long-running partnerships in an effort to be on the right side of an explosive political issue.

–What about the kids? No one looks good in this fight. The ACLU, the agencies, the city—all talk about what’s best for the children. Bethany cares for LGBT youth, but what message is Bethany sending when it won’t entrust them to LGBT adults? It is discriminatory and pernicious. But for the city, this is all politics. If this was a move with the best interests of kids in mind, DHS would move as quickly as possible to non-discriminatory partnerships without reducing the number of foster homes available to Philadelphia children. Instead, after making an “urgent” call for more foster parents, the city has suddenly drastically reduced the number of foster placements available.

–Let me give you a personal window into how chaotic this decision is. We’re licensed by Bethany. Our renewal is coming up in May. I have no idea if we should renew with Bethany. I have no idea if we can renew with another agency. Would we, instead, have to start back at square one and do the whole months-long process from the beginning with a new agency? I have no idea if or when Bethany may start taking referrals again. Does DHS have plans in place to make up for the lost capacity? Does DHS have any guidance for foster families licensed by Bethany and CSS who are ready to receive children? What am I supposed to do? Hello DHS?

–If you don’t want conservative Christian organizations to be involved in the provision of public goods, you had better get off the sidelines. Give your money away. Give your time. Build new institutions. I don’t want these conservative Christian organizations to discriminate. But I also don’t know if you understand the dystopia we’d be living in if they stopped all their work tomorrow.

–I’m sure I’m not seeing the whole picture, but from where I sit the idea that DHS is prioritizing the well-being of Philadelphia’s most vulnerable children doesn’t even pass the laugh test. In this time of rapid social change (Remember when Obama campaigned as an opponent of gay marriage?) we need a generous pluralism. The cause of gay rights is winning and will win. In a battle over foster care, the children are the very last people who should be caught in the crossfire.

Searching for a Christian Sense of the Common Good

December 7, 2017 ~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

I was seventeen years old when I started my sociology 101 class at my little community college in Garrett County, Maryland. I hated it, and I couldn’t quite figure out why. In fact, it took several years to become clear. The discipline of sociology studies groups, a category that I barely recognized. I couldn’t completely articulate it at the time, but what I knew in my bones was this: the world is made up of autonomous individuals making choices. What happens to those individuals depends on the choices they make. Hurrah for the individual! Hurrah for the market that judges justly!

Had my imagination been formed more by the Bible than by the fragmenting individualism of the late twentieth century United States, I would have had many intuitive connections to sociology 101. But I had managed to read the Bible cover to cover more than once and missed the point every time. What I didn’t realize is that the Bible is less a story about people than it is a story about a people.

The arc of the Christian scriptures doesn’t follow the journey of righteous individuals. It tells of God’s faithfulness to a group, culminating in the creation of a new kind of human community, the kingdom of God on earth. Throughout the story, the people of God are called to weave their lives together in patterns of mutual dependence.

When the prophet Isaiah declared, “pour yourself out for the hungry” (Isaiah 58), it was a demand placed on the community, not a suggestion for charitably-minded individuals. Yahweh called his people to repentance for their failure to take collective action. All of this was lost on me to such a degree that I literally didn’t know systemic injustice was a major biblical theme. I made that shocking discovery in 2005. Before that time, all that mattered was my salvation, my faith, my piety, my charity.

So I sat in my sociology 101 class, chafing against liberal academia and its efforts to divide people into groups and deny them their personal responsibility. I raged against politically correct talk of “disparities” and “inequality” and “systemic racism.” Individuals make their choices and have to live with them, I knew.

My radical individualism not only contradicted the communal emphasis of the scriptures, its practical effect was to eviscerate any notion of Christian public action or Christian concern for the collective good. In my zealous pursuit of personal piety, I declared vast domains of human life and flourishing no-go zones.

Do you see a social problem? Let me check my ledger. I’m sorry, that problem falls on the “individual responsibility” side of my ledger; Christianity has nothing to say about it.

Having made that claim, it doesn’t mean I don’t act in those public spheres. I simply do whatever I want, basically. In these spaces where my imagination and habits and heart ought to be captured by the values and practices of the Kingdom of God, there is instead a vacuous selfishness filled by the gods of capitalism, individualism, safety, comfort, race, nation.

Do my politics endanger you? I’m sorry, my Christianity lets me have whatever politics I want as long as I’m charitable in my personal life.

This is one of the dark sides of a certain radical evangelical tradition that has thrown off every hierarchy, every structure, every tradition. What remains is the individual alone before God, free to choose pleasing artifacts of the Christian past to enliven spiritual life, but not be governed by any of it.

At the core of this ungoverned Christian is the Bible and the feelings it provides. When alone before God with Bible open, he speaks to us. Don’t worry about your social location. Don’t fret about your bias. You came by that insight honestly, in fervent prayer. It’s good as gold.

So if in the privacy of your prayer closet God told you he’s a white nationalist, don’t let anybody tell you different. If God told you to support despicable leaders because it’s actually all part of his plan, stand firm! If God told you Roy Moore is a good man, don’t you dare hold his words and actions against him!

Unfortunately, this isn’t even satirical. For Trumpist evangelicals, the judgment and wisdom of Christians most affected by Trump’s cruelty count for nothing. Listening to the global church and Christians of color in the United States is absurd. After all, if God has told me to support Trump, who are they to tell me otherwise?

This kind of radical individualism twists Christianity into a bizarre inversion of itself. The message that Jesus saves is an invitation into a community. Instead, we’ve turned it into a cry of self-absorption.

Have You Ever Feared the State Will Take Your Children?

August 23, 2017 ~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

carlisle indian industrial school — The Carlisle Indian Industrial School, circa 1900.

Are you a parent? Have you ever feared that the state will take your children from you? How often do you have this fear? The answer might depend on your racial identity and how much money you make, not your parenting skills.

In the New York Times, Emma Ketteringham draws attention to the under-discussed class and race dynamics of child removal:

There is a misconception that the child-protection system is broken because child services fails to protect children from dangerous homes. That’s because the media exhaustively covers child deaths, but not the everyday tragedy of unnecessary child removals.

The problem is not that child services fails to remove enough children. It’s that the agency has not been equipped to address the daily manifestations of economic and racial inequality. Instead, it is designed to treat structural failings as the personal flaws of low-income parents.

In that framework, the answer is not affordable housing or transportation, meaningful employment, health care or access to healthy foods, as it should be. Why is the focus always on removing children to foster care and imposing parenting classes? This never-ending cycle traps generations of low-income families in a punitive system of state surveillance and foster care. Worse, it makes parents fear contacting child services when they need help caring for their children.

“Neglect” cases are often not what they look like on paper. Our clients are trying to raise their kids under tremendous economic and psychological pressures. Often they have faced significant challenges, like homelessness or incarceration. They love their children and cherish their identity as parents. But in court, they face the loss of what is most precious to them: their children.

Ketteringham is writing specifically about New York City’s system but I’m guessing her critique is more broadly applicable. I don’t know much about the foster care system but I hope you’ll indulge a few anecdotal thoughts from my own experiences in church, community, and foster care in recent years.

Alicia and I have known Christians who are fostering, Christians who are trying to get their kids back from the foster care system, and Christians who lost their kids, got them back, and are now on the other side of that awful ordeal. We also know parents who have never had their kids taken from them, but for whom the threat of it is daily background noise.

It came as a great shock to me when I realized that parents I respect live in fear of their kids being taken from them. What made it more surreal was the realization that this is normal for them. “Be careful, the state might take your kids,” is not an unimaginable foreboding; it’s a present possibility. I have lived my life as a parent without this possibility on my horizon. And it’s not because I’m a great parent.

Beyond anecdote, something I do know a little more about is the long history of child removal among Native American children as part of the United States’ settler colonial policies of cultural genocide. See Margaret Jacobs’ great book.

Most of us want to live in a society that seeks to protect children, even to the point of involuntary removal. Yet we must be aware of the dreadful history—and present—of unjust removal. When Alicia and I became foster parents, it didn’t feel heroic. It felt more like we were implicating ourselves in something messy and morally gray. We would do our best to care for a child, but we wouldn’t know—couldn’t know—whether that child should even be with us.

On Taking Action for Black Lives

June 17, 2017 ~ Jesse Curtis ~ Leave a comment

anthony soufle star tribune — Protestors react after the killer of Philando Castile is found not guilty. Startribune.com

david joles — Protestors block I-94. startribune.com

This post is not for people who wish to argue about Philando Castile’s death. It’s not for people who are scandalized by the radical notion that black people matter. It’s not for people who consistently impugn and insult black Christians so they can stay on the good side of white conservatives. This post is for white people who want to do the right thing, who want to be useful in the struggle for racial justice and human rights.

After the verdict, a black Christian woman challenged nonblack Christians with this question:

What are you doing (simply talking about it and having the conversation doesn’t count in the context of this question) to correct the systemic injustice and racism/white supremacy that allowed Philando Castile to be murdered in broad daylight and his murderer to be acquitted and freed?

I am challenged and convicted by this question.

In a way, Alicia and I have built our lives around providing an answer to a question similar to this. And yet…In all that we do there is a nagging sense that it is really more useful for us than for oppressed people. You don’t get points for living in a black neighborhood. You don’t get points for good intentions. Our usefulness is measured not by our self-image, but by oppressed people themselves. And by that measure, I wonder if I am failing. In itself, that’s a matter of little public interest. But it matters a great deal if we—the collective us, white people who want to be useful—are failing.

The scale, depth, and intractability of racial injustice in this country call for action on all fronts. White Christians of the left, we dare not call for redistribution in public policy without practicing redistribution in our personal lives. White Christians of the right, we dare not call for redistribution in our personal lives without demanding it of our public policies. If we are one-dimensional we are part of the problem.

If you’re not financially supporting organizations run by people of color, why not?

If you’re not a member of a black activist organization, why not?

If you don’t support reparations, why not?

If you’re not an advocate of life-giving policing policies, why not?

If you aren’t making a ruckus in your church, or starting a reading group, why not?

If you’re not deliberately supporting black businesses, why not?

If you live in a community zoned to keep out the poor, are you working to change the zoning laws? If not, why not?

I need to make this absolutely clear: some of these questions hit me in the gut. I am a convicted fellow traveler.

Are all your relationships with white people comfortable? I don’t believe that is possible if you resist white supremacy. Challenging white supremacy challenges white self-interest. People will protect their interests—including, above all, their self-image—at all costs. If all the white people in your life are comfortable with your views, you need to go back to the drawing board. You’re swimming in sewage and thinking it’s fresh water. Tune in to people of color. Listen, learn, and repent.

If your church, your neighborhood, your kids’ school—or all three—are white, stop pretending you haven’t used the wages whiteness gives you. Take responsibility for your racial decisions. It may be that you should stay in all those white places! Ignorant white people need you. But they certainly don’t need semi-woke white people more preoccupied with claiming innocence than taking responsibility.

And nobody needs guilty white people. Nobody needs White Christians who are suddenly anti-gospel when racism enters the conversation: “I don’t have a racist bone in my body!” It’s hard to top that as a statement of anti-Christian pride. Scripture tells us different:

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

We don’t need guilty white Christians. We need committed white Christians who have enough confidence in the gospel to take responsibility for the sin in and around them.