By Benjamin Perry

This summer, Dr. Jennifer Harvey’s newest book, hits shelves. I sat down with Garrett-Evangelical’s Professor of Christian Ethics to ask about the book. “Partly, I wrote this in response to the ongoing crisis of white nationalism,” she tells me. “I feel clear that most white Americans are opposed to white Christian nationalism, but few know how to prioritize antiracism, or how to enact that priority.” The book, she says, offers concrete steps all of us can take in our daily lives, “even if you’re not a capital-A activist.” But she also identifies shame as one of the forces inhibiting movement work. It’s a unique and pressing concern left unaddressed in most antiracist literature, so I asked her to expand on that theme. You can read a condensed and edited version of our conversation below.

Benjamin Perry (BP): “Refusing shame,” is right in the title for your book. Why did you feel like this was such an essential part of moving more white people toward antiracism?

Jennifer Harvey (JH): I’ve noticed a trend in the past 5-10 years, as the visibility of white antiracism has risen. I’ve worked in these movement spaces for more than 25 years, but more recently I’ve seen an increasing temptation to use shame against other white folks, to throw away people who don’t yet know what they should be doing. This book is an attempt to tell a broader culture of white antiracism that we must stop weaponizing shame. We have to tap into grief and love and stay in relationship with other white people, instead of giving into the tendency to discard folks who aren’t where we want them to be. That part of the book feels scary, but I decided to write it anyway because I think it’s true.

BP: What does that impulse to shame other white people reveal about some white folks’ insecurities?

JH: I think the impulse to shame other white folks is typically a sign that one’s own self is also full of shame. If part of me feels like I am essentially bad, essentially unworthy—and someone with whom I am proximate says something problematic—then I fear that they put me at risk of being exposed as bad. It’s a purity test: I’m gonna shame them because it shows that I’m actually pure, which is nonsense. None of us are pure, not even people of color, because we are all living in a death dealing system. There’s no pure ground.

In the book, I write about the impulse to shame as a form of fundamentalism. I grew up in fundamentalism, I know its logic. It treats impurity as contagious and uses tests to enforce the boundaries around doctrinal purity. Some forms of shame-based white antiracism look exactly like that: You don’t know the right words. You don’t know the right concepts. And it protects me from being tainted if I shame you. When, in reality, there’s actually part of me that is wallowing and drowning in shame.

BP: How does that shame develop in white racial formation?

JH: In Learning to Be White, Thandeka describes how shame is instilled when we are in a developmental state. When we are growing up, especially as young kids, we are highly vulnerable because we are dependent on the adults in our communities. You can’t just go out into the world as a 6-year-old and survive. So, we’re very vulnerable to what those communities tell us about ourselves. We get racialized as white as part of that process. In many families, when a child shows predispositions towards equity or solidarity with someone from a different racial group, white families will shut down that part of them to teach them whiteness. That’s a shame inducing phenomena: What you learn as a child is, “my parents’ love for me is conditional. They’ll throw me away if I don’t align with whiteness.” That’s horrible!

The other part is modeling. If we come from families where we are taught equity and justice, it creates shame when we watch our elders not stand up against racism, which most of our parents don’t. It’s like, we’re going to tell you that everybody’s equal, but then at the extended family dinner table when Grandma Sue says something racist, no one will say anything. That shame gets internalized, because you recognize your family is not actually who they say they are. If you’re 7, it’s not your fault that all of this is happening to you. But what we do with that shame as adults is a different matter.

BP: So how can we help people unlearn that shame?

JH: Part of how you interrupt any kind of shame is you expose the thing to sunlight. Those of us who now feel less shame can give love to other folks when they’re experiencing shame, to hold up a mirror and say you are worthy despite whatever things you’re complicit in, despite what you’ve done—despite what I’ve also done. I’m also worthy because we all are necessary to this work and we all deserve wholeness. We need to make it clear: I’m not going to throw you away even if you make a very racist mistake. I am gonna hold you accountable, but I’m going to love you through the process of accountability.

I have some stories in the book where people of color held me accountable with anger and with love. When I did the process of accountability, as I was asked to do and which I did owe, I also learned, “Oh, I get to return to relationship.” That’s what white folks have to give to one another, and that’s one of the ways we must change white antiracist culture.

BP: So this book principally addresses white people, and there’s been pushback against antiracism books that focus on the white experience. Why did you think it was important for you to write this way?

JH: I’m so glad you asked this question because it’s really important. I would never have written this book if lots of my story wasn’t in it, because for me this is not abstract intellectual work. And it’s born out of relationship with the people of color in my life, who have not only vetted it but have invested in me, telling me over and over: “Jen, you’ve got to write this.” Those of us who are white and have moved into a long, sustained, nuanced, made-mistakes, been-accountable journey in antiracism—we have experiences because we are white and connected to other white people. If we don’t have something conceptually to add, then I avoid (or we should avoid) speaking and centering white voice.

But I think other white folks need to hear from those of us who have in messy, imperfect
ways walked this walk if we’re bringing something unique to the table. My writing brings something that people of color can’t write about from their own experience. It must be accountable and cautious and so freaking humble. But white folks need to hear from other white folks : “Oh, this is what it looks like when your brother-in-law starts threatening you over text. This is what it’s gonna look like when you feel like your parents will never show up for your graduations again.” And this is how you move through that, staying in relationship to push those people to change, and staying in the work. And I can write about that because that’s what happened to me.

BP: So how do white people move away from shame toward solidarity?

JH: We have to begin to repair that soul wreckage that comes from living in death-dealing systems. And that demands making antiracism a daily practice. And the part that uproots shame is formational work of returning to who the Creator created us to be. I believe the divine created us to be in fundamental oneness with one another, and that white supremacy and all systems of violence instill alienation while also killing people. Antiracism must be beyond an intellectual or emotional response. It’s about our existential identity as creatures. And thinking of antiracism as a daily practice signals that formative nature—the return, return, and return again—which is also why it makes total sense in the context of Christianity, because we know ritual matters. We know returning multiple times a week, putting ourselves in postures of prayer—all of these things we do with our bodies help us live a life of faith. Antiracism needs to be the same way: It’s an embodied practice. And that embodiment is part of what uproots and displaces the shame we inherited.

will be released on July 16, 2024.

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A book review of Let My People Live: An Africana Reading of Exodus, by Kenneth N. Ngwa, recently named Professor of Hebrew Bible and African Biblical Hermeneutics

By Aaron Dorsey

A commitment to life precedes, directs, and extends beyond efforts towards liberation. This is at the core of Kenneth N. Ngwa’s argument in Let My People Live: An Africana Reading of Exodus.  Ngwa demonstrates how the book of Exodus responds to the triple consciousness—the consciousness formed by imperial violence and domination both in the biblical text and in contemporary imperial projects. Imperial violence produces consciousness of erasure/death through necropolitics, alienation through displacement, and singularization in the process of squashing multiplicity.

Ngwa does not believe that Exodus simply describes this triple consciousness. Rather, he examines how Exodus as a story, and the many exodus motifs that peoples throughout history have developed, move oppressed people through the triple consciousness onto reinstituted communal life. Exodus is a guide for the kind of communal storytelling that is required to move through the triple-consciousness without erasing the history of oppression. Ngwa invites the reader to see how the midwives, Jochebed, Miriam, and the Egyptian princess respond to erasure and policies of death in Egypt, how in the Wilderness the Israelites must respond to displacement by creating renewed relationships with the earth, and how at the Mountain Moses is confronted with the temptation of singularity in the form of becoming the strongman or the single father of the people. Each of these liberative responses to triple consciousness are not products of struggle for Ngwa, but rather they flow from commitments to human and non-human life and community that exist prior to struggle and are expressed anew within struggle. Ngwa writes, “The urgent depiction of exodus as departure from an oppressive nation-state house and machinery is formulated and encapsulated in Moses’ divinely inspired clarion call: ‘let my people go.’ But that call is more than an episodic manifestation of negotiation between Yahweh and Pharaoh. The call signifies an equally perennial and persistent call, ushered through voices from below, a call better represented by the words, ‘let my people live.’”

Ngwa’s commitments to Africana life, both on the continent and in diaspora, guide his reading throughout Let My People Live. Particularly helpful are Ngwa’s observations on how the challenges that anti-colonial wars and efforts faced have transitioned into the challenges now confronting postcolonial African nations. Though Ngwa does not cite Frantz Fanon, many of his concerns match those expressed Wretched of the Earth. Both realize that there is a possibility, which has become reality, that the postcolony can push out the colonizer while maintaining the structure of colonization. Fanon, for example, refers to the petit bourgeois, the native elite who are able to take the places of the white colonizer without changing the colonial system at all.

Ngwa reads this phenomenon through the story of Moses, who is adopted into the elite culture of the Egyptians, but whose authority on the basis of his Egyptian enculturation is rejected by the Hebrews. Ngwa argues further that Moses is a model of an anticolonial leader who resists the option to become a strongman—rather than accepting the ability to father the nation after the Israelites worship the golden calf, Moses pleads for the continuation of Israelite multiplicity. Fanon, recognizing that colonial administrations developed African colonies for the purpose of extracting resources and not for producing conditions for life, argues that a critical task of the postcolony is to reengage the natural environment. After retelling the story of Wangari Maathai and other Africana women involved in Afroecology, Ngwa offers an analysis of Miriam as the prophetess who listens to nature, who gives voice to the water, and who endeavors to make the Wilderness hospitable for the people. In this way, Miriam demonstrates how a commitment to the earth can resist alienation that (neo)colonial systems produce between the earth and human communities. By reading Miriam along with contemporary efforts, Ngwa demonstrates that Africana women are indeed already engaged in restoring relationship between humans and the environment.

What Ngwa brings adds to Fanon’s anticolonial analysis, and to de/postcolonial discourse, is a suggestion for how to move beyond these diagnoses. Ngwa hopes to offer Exodus as a story upon which people can model their own exodus motifs, stories that will be necessary to imagine a liberation that is more than an escape from an oppressive power. Rather, liberation, as Ngwa repeatedly states, will not be achieved until systems based on erasure, alienation, and singularization are replaced with ways of living that foster connection and community between humans, between humans and non-humans, and between creatures and the earth itself.

Aaron Dorsey is a Garrett-Evangelical Ph.D. Student studying the Hebrew Bible, and the recipient of a 2022 doctoral fellowship grant from the Forum for Theological Exploration.

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Professor Andrew Wymer is Garrett-Evangelical’s recently promoted and tenured associate professor of preaching and worship. To celebrate his appointment, I sat down with him to talk about the book he co-edited: , now available to pre-order in paperback. He shared how he’s excited to see his scholarship “align with community advocacy work and tangible efforts to pursue equity in Evanston and beyond.” One initiative for which he’s particularly excited is research with Reverend Dr. Michael Woolf, senior minister at Lake Street Church in Evanston. They are investigating the role of faith communities in reparations efforts. “By better understanding the role of faith,” he explains, “hopefully we can bolster other municipal efforts for reparations and eventual statewide or national reparations.” That same focus on disrupting unjust systems sits at the heart of his book.

Benjamin Perry (BP):

In your book Unmasking White Preaching, you describe how whiteness sets the norm for how we evaluate homiletics. How is what we consider “good preaching” racialized?

Andrew Wymer (AW):

We all have so many implicit assumptions about preaching that we don’t think about critically. They’re always operating. We trust our thinking, “Oh, we’ll recognize good preaching when we see it.” But the reality is, our evaluations of both others and us are formed by centuries-old systems of power. The book invites us to look anew and ask: “How do we move forward now recognizing this? How do we start to disrupt it in the preaching moment and throughout our communities?”

BP: So, what are some ways that whiteness shapes our normativities?

AW: One of the first things I ask some of my introductory preaching classes to do is: Close your eyes and imagine the voice of God. God is speaking to you. Who just spoke? What voice did they use? Too frequently, it’s a male, very deep voice of European descent. So, instantly we know that our perceptions of God are often formed along lines of patriarchy and race, and the assumptions we have about who God is are too often shaped by whiteness.

The book collects many different perspectives and insights from people from different social locations and invites us to consider a number of ways that whiteness has restricted our awareness of how we can interact with God in preaching and liturgical moments, as well as strategies to begin to disrupt that.

BP: When those forces aren’t checked, how does this affect non-white people who enter the pulpit?

AW: It starts with who gets to go in the pulpit. There’s significant racially minoritized scholarship naming how whiteness and maleness limit and shape access to the pulpit itself. That’s literal and metaphorical—it can include access to ordination and to non-pulpit preaching spaces. Who is and who is not given a church? Who has to do pulpit supply to be able to live out their preaching vocation? Who has to preach outside of the pulpit because the pulpit itself is restricted by gender, sexuality, and race?

BP: Once folks get into the pulpit, how do normativities of whiteness limit non-white preachers?

AW: To give one example: There’s an array of Black homileticians over the past decades who name how Black students desiring a theological degree have often had to go to historically white institutions where they learn from professors who likely have had no formation in and little critical awareness of Black preaching traditions. So, there’s a double consciousness that is necessary to survive. To succeed, they must learn to preach white, but to be who they are with integrity and to go back to their faith community and preach in their own tradition, they must cultivate authenticity. That double consciousness is in itself an expression of violence.

BP: What parts of working on the book still resonate in your mind?

AW: The process of putting the book together is something I’m still sitting with. In its own way, the book required a process of contesting, navigating, addressing the very ways in which the editors and the contributors are located within racial systems and other intersecting forms of oppression. The white contributors and editor, in particular, brought that bias with us and had to navigate disrupting that inside of ourselves as well as in our field alongside our colleagues of color who already carried the burden of working from racially minoritized social locations to this task of disrupting it in our discipline.

BP: What are some of the things that you hope people who read the book will take away?

AW: I hope people first critically attend to white racial formations and identities and recognize how those are operative in our world—particularly for those of us who are formed into white racial identities and privileges. But I hope people also realize that there’s so much in homiletics that’s more interesting and captivating than whiteness. People should take whiteness seriously but move beyond a focus on whiteness to the brilliance and possibility that’s brought to us through non-dominant perspectives—the brilliant scholars in this book who invite us into a different way of thinking about preaching and being in the world.

BP: Thank you for saying that because it struck me that even centering conversation around deconstructing whiteness is still, in some ways, a function of centering whiteness. What are some of the more pressing questions in your mind when it as it relates to preaching?

AW: One of the pressing questions that emerges for me is how to attend to racism and race in ways that grapple with the diversity and fluidity with which these things change. Racialization is so complex, and it’s easy to slip into binaries. Not just a Black/white binary that’s exclusive of others, but it’s also easy to slip into a focus that doesn’t account for the variety of racialization beyond the United States.

Another question interrogates the form and structure of preaching—one manifestation of which is in sermon styles. A lot of our traditions are profoundly shaped by European, dominant, theological, and ecclesial traditions. Are the accompanying homiletic forms themselves corrupted because they emerge out of a tradition that was complicit in colonialism? Can those structures, in any way, be retrieved and reapplied in liberative ways? And am I willing to learn new structures, to experiment in ways that my culture and theological traditions have shaped me to be uncomfortable with?

BP: I love that you name comfort here as a salient factor. What is the relationship between discomfort and faith formation?

AW: For those of us from privileged social locations, the systems that shape our society are situated to try and make us more comfortable–not just comfortable in an emotional sense, but comfortable economically, politically, and culturally. The pathway to equity and to justice is going to require discomfort on the part of the privileged. A liberating faith is going to be a faith that constantly requires us folk of privilege to navigate discomfort.

For people called to be ministers, there’s a level of savviness needed to help people and communities of privilege navigate discomfort, leading them on a liberating path that will disrupt these very selectively applied social comforts that have caused sustained violence to racially minoritized persons and communities for centuries.

BP: Last question: To normalize white preaching circumscribes God inside of a small, particular place. If we can disrupt that, what does the diversity ways that people talk about God in the preaching moment say about God?

AW: I’m very deeply impacted by liberation theology, by images of a non-dominant God who is present with marginalized communities and persons. The artwork on the front of the book is actually a deeply troubling image emerging from a liberation perspective. It is a Black Christ being choked by a white hand. This book seeks to disrupt that violence and to recognize God’s presence in and preferential care for racially minoritized persons and communities. The book considers how preachers can disrupt that violence in a number of different ways. Even the use of sermon structures from a different context can help us see more of God’s fullness. The authors in this book try to help us reckon with ways of preaching that invite the possibility of a God who is beyond our knowing and control. Ultimately, white Jesus is idolatrous and demonic—an attempt to capture and elevate a very particular image of Christ that reflects and supports a brutal system of power. I believe in a God who can’t be accurately captured in one image and who can be encountered at the margins of society. Hopefully, this book will help create space to encounter that God.

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