The resistance to critical race theory is connected to a long standing history of anti-literacies laws that expanded white supremacy and devalue Black humanity and liberation. Controlling and criminalizing curriculum has always been a device to protect white power.
At the heart is white people’s long standing fear that an educated and empowered Black person is a dangerous Black person. Don’t be fooled, just as anti-black practices and policies were happening back then, they are happening right now. It is about one thing: white power.
If they could have their way, reading, writing, and teaching for freedom would be illegal and suppressed (as they are trying to make it today). White resistance to Black education and liberation is not an aberration. It is the American norm.
This is why we don’t need less liberative education, honest history, critical engagement with literature, organizing, and protest. We need more. Literacy and liberation go hand-in-hand. The world we desire to live in is connected to the worlds we have the ability to explore.
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Christian faith would be so much healthier if we didn’t see our faith as a war to be won or people as enemies but as worlds to be explored and people to be loved.
I can’t stop thinking about this Toni Cade Bambara quote: “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?..Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.”
What if we saw our faith as joining Jesus in healing and liberating the world and not controlling it and condemning it?
I went home today, South Carolina. The country. My grandma and I talked about old church services, and how she can’t eat salt, and hospital bills. She also talked about my granddaddy, and dementia, how 61 years of marriage never prepared her for these last few years of hell.
The rain came and the rain went as we talked. “I want to keep him as long as I can,” she said, as she told me about conversations she be having about her home and putting him in a home and how home just don’t feel like home and hearts are broken and not there. “Yeah,” I say.
My grandad comes and turns the locked knob, me seeing him, him seeing me, through their old glass window which you can barely see through. “How many years y’all been living her grandma?” I ask. She pauses, fixing her dress. “I think since the 60s”, she says. “Yeah, the 60s.”
The Afropessimist are right about this country: “What they share is a largely unconscious consensus that Blackness is a locus of abjection to be instrumentalized on a whim.” Its sad we live in a country that still sees us as things to be controlled and not people to be loved.
Until we do the necessary “unearthing and exposing,” as Frank Wilderson writes, of the ways Blackness is disrespected, devalued, and destroyed we, the collective people we imagine ourselves to be, will never be free. If this is by design, then we can make it over again.
I am reminded of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and her writing of Baby Suggs preaching in the Clearing: we are "to love what you have been taught not to love." It is love that embraces our Black humanity. It is love that will right the wrongs. It is love that we protect us.
I was doing my gospel reading recently. I read where Jesus said, “you have heard it was said...but I say to you.” It is as if Jesus is saying that there are areas in our faith that might be “biblical” but they need to be expanded and changed for the better.
He is showing that oftentimes we are convinced we are “right” but actually have bad interpretations, toxic theologies, and unloving practices that need to be rethought and reimagined. We can think our faith is “holy” but it is actually harmful.
It hit me: It is okay if those who are decolonizing and deconstructing their faith don’t have the answers yet. It’s okay if they haven’t healed yet. It is okay if they are enraged. The Bible and history is full of such journeys. Anger, confusion, and change are pathways to faith.
I was reading in the gospels this morning. “Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks,” Luke writes, “he broke it and gave it to them..” It hit me: this is the life of faith—we take what we have, what we’ve been given, bless it, and give it to others.
The context of this text is Jesus’s final moments with his friends. Even when he faced the worst, he still was loving enough to be generous. I imagine one of our struggles in our faith is not our fear but our struggles with generosity—embracing others and sharing life with them.
I wonder what our faith would look like if we didn’t see others with disrespect, as enemies to be destroyed, or problems to be solved but as people to be loved.
I am reading in Acts this morning. The religious and political leaders are angry and afraid that teaching is happening that is threatening both their power and position. The apostles are preaching a gospel of liberation. The text says the leaders, "was overcome with jealousy."
They were not just jealous because someone was teaching a message and telling a story different than theirs. They were jealous because the apostles were, as theorist say, present a "counter-narrative". Their stories saw and loved the people and not just served the powerful.
There is something to be said about what happens when the powerful want to hold on to it and come up with all types of ways to silence and suppress others. These leaders built powerful allies, used mechanism of incarceration, and created public propaganda to protect their place.