It was a recurring image in my mind in those days of heightened religious zeal, and adulthood never stole the dream from me. I remained convinced that the teachings of the Christian faith held the greatest promise for overcoming racism.
This is a common desire among Christians of all political stripes. I grew up in a conservative evangelical culture, and many right-wing Republicans I knew believed that Christianity had the potential to tear down the walls of racial division, and they hoped it would happen.
But like many whites, I thought of racism and reconciliation in terms of individual relationships rather than in terms of laws, systems and institutions. The true scope of what justice might mean had not occurred to me.
And then in the age of Trump, things fell apart. They had been unraveling for years, ever since America elected its first black president, setting off a slow motion backlash among some whites. In President Obama’s second term there came a staggering rush of video footage filmed on cellphones showing an established pattern of police brutality against African-Americans.
And there was a growing popular awareness that America’s history had been literally whitewashed in the popular imagination, glossing over the dark decades of Jim Crow. For me it took the form of movies like “13th,” which traces the roots of mass incarceration, and from hearing, for the first time, about the Tulsa race riots of 1921 and the destruction of the business district once known as the “Black Wall Street.” As I read more about this episode and others like it, I asked friends and acquaintances if they too knew about these things. They did not.
But new calls for racial justice and talk of systemic white supremacy — a system set up during Jim Crow with continuing consequences today — mostly fell on deaf ears. Many white conservatives were sick of hearing about racism, believing that Democrats had cynically played the race card for black votes for decades.
It hasn’t just been some whites who have been on a journey of discovery regarding the ways in which white supremacy was institutionalized, with effects that continue today.
Jemar Tisby, a 36-year old PhD student at the University of Mississippi, was just a few years ago a rising star in the majority-white branch of American evangelical Christianity known as the Reformed movement.
