Wait—Is This Racist?

A Guide to Becoming an Anti-racist Church

Kerry Connelly, Bryana Clover, Josh Riddick

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780664267506
• eBook ISBN: 9781646982417
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Christian Church
• Index: Social Sciences

A "Be-It-Yourself" Guide to Anti-racism for Churches and Church Leaders Whether you have been an ally for years or just recently opened your eyes to racial injustice, guiding your predominantly white church toward anti-racism is a daunting task. Where do you even begin? White churches especially feel an urgency to respond but at the same time suffer a sense of overwhelmingness and futility, as if no one action, sermon series, or service project will solve the problem of racism in America. And they're right. Instead, we must begin to look deeply at our organizations—our traditions, our ministries, our leadership, our ways of making decisions, our ways of interacting with the world beyond the church—to identify and address implicit biases and to discover how white pseudo-supremacy has been encoded into our way of "doing church."

Wait—Is This Racist? is here to guide you and your church through this challenging and uncomfortable work. Intentionally interactive, practical, and biblically based, Wait—Is This Racist? guides church leaders and staff through an examination of all aspects of church life, including leadership, preaching and liturgy, music, small groups, buildings and grounds, and more, to help churches create an action plan that will take them toward not only becoming anti-racist but also actually doing anti-racist work. Offering educational tips, powerful stories, and insightful questions, anti-racism consultants Kerry, Bryana, and Josh will accompany you through this necessary work so that your church can truly become a justice-oriented organization that leans more fully into the kin-dom of God. Features:

• A clear audit of church operations and reasons why this work is so important
• Workbook-style questions at the end of each chapter
• A workable action plan for churches to implement what they have learned
• Tips, encouragement, and questions for BIPOC leaders in primarily white churches
• Helpful glossary of terms to aid general understanding
  

1

Leadership

Ron was tall and rabidly funny, and on the day I first met him, he had his salt-and-pepper hair pulled into a short ponytail, a black beret with a matching turtleneck, and, of course, his trademark handlebar mustache, which he’d twirl with his fingers when he laughed, which was most of the time. He was my favorite boss ever for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the plethora of Yiddish proverbs he taught me, which I will forever and ever only hear in his voice. The one relevant to this chapter is this: The fish stinks from the head. Ron would say this often, with a shrug of the shoulders and his palms held up in supplication—a gesture that said, You know what you know.

It’s one of the truest statements I’ve ever heard, and the good news is that good leadership can have just as much impact as its more olfactorily challenged counterpart. But when it comes to White people in positions of leadership over anti-racist spaces, things can get dicey, because our best of intentions can often do significant harm. A lot of times, that’s because of plain old White hubris, encouraged by the belief that somewhere along the line, someone told White people we’re the saviors of the world and we know how to fix everything.

We don’t.

Let me tell you a story about White hubris and anti-racism. My friend Susan (not her real name) was a retail manager at a well-known food service chain that had a widely publicized incident in which police were called on some men who were, well, being Black. The response was swift and public outcry rightfully harsh, so the chain closed its doors all over the country for some well-meaning anti-racism training. Susan told me a little about what actually happened at those training sessions. At twenty-two years old, and quite White herself, Susan was handed a manual and some brochures and was told to teach the material to employees who were mandated to be there. She never received any training in the material before she had to teach it. She felt ill-equipped to engage the material, much less instruct and lead others in the work, and she is fully aware that the “students” left the training unchanged.

But that’s not all. The chain’s leadership—and I know you’ll be shocked to know it’s mostly rich old White guys—thought it would be awesome to have its employees put little “race together” stickers on its products to, you know, encourage dialogue. With total strangers. About race.

Because that always goes well.

By ten o’clock that first morning, Susan had already encountered so many angry and abusive responses that she shoved the stickers under the counter and forgot the whole, really bad idea. (On a more entertaining note, however, Twitter did not disappoint with the ensuing hashtag amusement.) What happened to Susan was unfortunate—she was merely a pawn in a poorly thought-out leadership scheme, and the abuse she endured just for doing what she was told was unfair and really harmful. It was a long time before she was willing to even broach the topic again as a White person, which does nothing to help move the world toward anti-racism. But I’m also thinking of how many BIPOC were placed in horribly uncomfortable positions—whether they worked there or received a cup with the invitation to discuss their own oppression with the total stranger handing them their morning latte or breakfast wrap. It is the epitome of obtuse, White insensitivity, this idea that because racism doesn’t cause us pain, the BIPOC community must love talking about it with us whenever we decide we’re in the mood.

This was an obvious case of uninformed White leadership rushing to make well-intentioned but also really stupid gestures toward a “quick fix,” without ever once considering impact. It is a perfect example of what “doing” anti-racism looks like without actually “being” anti-racist at your core. It represents a common phenomenon that occurs in White-led spaces: first, a dearth of proactive anti-racism results in a racist event, followed by knee-jerk and performative reactions by White leaders that don’t really fix the problem, but make White people feel as though we’ve done something about the problem we caused in the first place. The result is more real harm—and this is why it’s important that leaders do a deep dive into their own psyches to begin their own anti-racism work before they even start to think about leading others on this journey, whether individually or corporately.

This is not to say that as White leaders you won’t make mistakes in your anti-racism work. You absolutely will. There will be messy moments, filled with complexity and nuance, and times when you feel doomed if you do and doomed if you don’t. That all comes with the territory. Our goal, though, is to do as little harm as possible, and that can only happen if we are being existentially anti-racist. That means that every decision you make from now on gets considered through an anti-racist lens, first and foremost. As you begin to interrogate your work with anti-racism as a priority, you’ll start noticing more of your potential mistakes before you make them, and more importantly, before you do harm. You can notice your inclinations and practice agency over them—and you might be surprised by where and when they show up.

WHITE DECISIONS

As White people, one of the important things we need to remember is that every thought, every perception, every decision we make is filtered through the lens of our Whiteness. This is not our fault, and we can’t necessarily stop it from happening, but we can practice awareness and agency over it. Whiteness tends to both make assumptions and miss important information during the decision-making process. The story about Susan and the anti-bias training she was expected to implement is a perfect example of White leadership thinking they have enough information to handle a racial crisis. For example, leadership didn’t think it was necessary to have trained personnel implement racial education for their staffs, nor did they consider the implications of having their retail employees handing out stickers encouraging racial dialogue with strangers. It’s a perfect example of how Whiteness tends to leap before looking when it comes to race relations, rather than considering all the things it doesn’t know—and should probably learn about—before taking action.

Key indicators that Whiteness is at play in your decision making might include aspects of individualism (rather than the collective), productivity and perfectionism (versus rest), peacekeeping and the status quo (instead of holy disruption for the sake of justice), and the prioritization of resources (especially financial) for the sake of the organization rather than the uplift of the marginalized. Another key indicator is an insistence on hierarchy and the hoarding of power. Shared power is a decidedly non-White form of leadership, and we tell ourselves a lot of myths about how it just can’t work. It can, and it can work beautifully.

As we make decisions within our organization, it’s important that we ask ourselves hard questions about the ways we might be perpetuating some of these aspects of Whiteness, because they don’t just harm BIPOC—they harm all of us. For example, many of the churches I’ve worked with have staffs who are exhausted, overworked, and in some cases terrorized by leaders who insist they need to “work hard for God.” This is a product of a misguided ethic that tells us our worth comes from our productivity rather than our inherent worth as human beings, and it harms White people and BIPOC alike. Still, the harm is exponential for Black and Brown folks because within White systems, marginalized communities such as BIPOC and women are often required to work even harder, be even better, have more letters after our names, and be even more perfect in order to survive the environments in which we work and live. If we instead become leaders who cultivate and prioritize rest for ourselves and our staffs, we are both resisting Whiteness and caring for our employees, and—call me crazy—that tends to yield pretty amazing results.

MITIGATING HARMFUL LEADERSHIP

(Bryana)

I was fresh out of the corporate world, ready and excited about this next chapter of life: helping organizations interrogate the ways in which they perpetuate racism within and beyond their walls. I wanted to bring a fresh perspective to race equity work by focusing most of my attention on the importance of understanding our racial history and encouraging individuals and organizations to invest in the “inner work” first. You know—the part many of us wish we could sneak past so we can get straight to the “doing.” We seem to have this innate desire to “do” rather than to “be” because “being” would mean unlearning some hard pseudotruths about ourselves, our family, our friends, our country, our world, and our faith.

One of my first opportunities was to work with an organization that I formerly had been employed with, early in my career. They were holding their second annual Multicultural Summit, and they had asked one of my business partners to be a guest speaker. Given the increasing racial tension going on in the country, they, like many other organizations, were feeling overwhelmed, and they figured if they were hosting a summit with a multicultural theme, they better have someone talk about race. My business partner was White, and fairly new to her own “inner racial work.” Her expertise was in gender equity and mentorship. So, naturally, they considered bringing me in as a cospeaker to address the race equity topic.

Then, just a few weeks before the summit, the organization decided they didn’t want to invest in another speaker at the last minute, so they asked my White business partner to include some slides about race in her talk. No external speakers of color were paid to be on the panel. The one Black woman speaker was a current employee and, of course, she was not compensated for her time—the extra workload was assumed to be a “favor” since she was employed by the organization. To add insult to injury, they shared information on social media about my business partner, describing her as a “race equity expert” and highlighting the work she did under our shared business name.

This happens all the time. Well-meaning White people want to do something, and in their desperation, cause more harm to Black people than good. I had spent the majority of my career at this company and sat through hundreds of meetings in which I was the only Black person in the room. It was a company that did not have the race consciousness to recognize the potential risks of moving a young Black woman to rural parts of the country, where I called on primarily White customers who often verbally expressed their racist ideologies. Instead of choosing a speaker who had intimately experienced what it’s like to be a Black person working there, they chose an ill-equipped White woman to present on race as if she were an expert. The topic of race was minimized to a sprinkle of slides, as an afterthought. I lost both an opportunity for income and a voice. The business name I shared with this speaker was used, with no compensation or attribution to me.

The unfortunate truth is that there likely wasn’t a single White person involved who recognized the harmful impact this had, including my business partner. They carried on with their summit, chalked it up as a huge success, and moved on with their comfortable lives, feeling good about their efforts. I do not mean to imply that everything about this summit was harmful. I am confident there was a lot of great impact on certain individuals who were there, but the question I often ask myself is this: “If this work toward ‘wokeness’ involves harming BIPOC, is it really kin-dom work?”

YOUR TURN: DISCOVER YOUR RACIAL GENEALOGY (BRYANA)

How do White people gain the race consciousness needed to recognize when harm is being inflicted, even in the midst of good intentions? I want to share one concrete example of what this “inner work” can look like—what it looks like to “be” and not just “do.”

This project is called “critical family history.” It’s not like the traditional genealogy projects with a focus on distant individual family members and their experiences (these projects are inherently easier for those of European descen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Leadership
• 2. Preaching and Liturgy
• 3. Music
• 4. Small Groups
• 5. Buildings and Grounds
• 6. Communications
• 7. Missions and Service
• 8. Children and Youth
• 9. Pastoral Care
• 10. Modeling Interracial Dialogue
• Conclusion: Your Plan of Action
• Glossary
• Notes
• Excerpt from Good White Racist?, by Kerry Connelly