Granted.

Adriana and I are beginning our grant work on anti-oppression ministry in the church, specifically anti-racist ministry. The past week has been like Christmas with brown packages of books arriving on our doorstep and phone chats and coffee dates with an incredible woman whose been part of the resistance to white supremacy since SNCC.

This is work that stabs into my heart. This summer while working at Peace Camp in SE Baltimore one of my campers and I were walking to the park when he said, "I know what God looks like, I saw him in a movie. He's your color." I was startled to hear a five-year old Black child tell me that God was white like I am. As I attempted to explain to him that movies chose actors but that Jesus was most likely his color, I recognized how Christian media and his church experience had already entrenched the idea of a white God.

Just this week in Baltimore there was a hate crime-- vandalizing the anti-confederate statue that had been installed at Wyman Park (and removed by the city 22hrs later). The womb of this statue was kicked in and it was spray painted with the word "nigger."  At the same time in Harford County the KKK burned crosses on private property so in their exercise of free speech the neighborhood was terrorized and there was no legal ramifications. These are overt expressions yet the systemic and subtle persistent white supremacy, structural, institutional, and systemic racism of the U.S. remains too often ignored.

As I continue my reading and this grant work I'll be reflecting here.  Today's thought from Perkinson connects to the idea that ally and anti-racist are not nouns but verbs/adjectives describing actions... "In my estimation, only a lifetime of unrelenting struggle against the ideology of white superiority and the materiality of white control (struggle "for," i.e., redistribution of the power, property, and privilege that white skin has assembled for itself historically in this modern world) could ever qualify one for embrace as an ally. I have not yet proved worthy."