Dear White Peacemakers by Osheta Moore

Author:Osheta Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MennoMedia
Published: 2020-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

13

Who Told You You Had to Do This Alone?

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

—MATTHEW 5:5

Dear White Peacemakers,

I know you. You hear Black leaders like me say things like “Do the work” and “This work isn’t about you,” and in the back of your mind you wonder, “What does that look like for me? I mean . . . where do I begin? I want to learn. I want to engage. But this is all so very new to me. I want to look like Jesus and overturn the tables of racial oppression, but I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing . . . I mean . . . I’m just a White person?”

You love Jesus with your whole heart but when you think about his ministry of reconciliation, you feel overwhelmed. I get that! I’m a Black woman, married to a White man, raising biracial children. I’ve gone to workshops and trainings on multiculturalism. We chose to live in the city for the diversity and we intentionally build relationships with people from different social locations. I’m someone who loves Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, and John Perkins, and I still wonder about the logistics of dismantling white supremacy culture. Just literally the other day, I was wondering if I had committed a microaggression against a Chinese American friend. This is not for the faint of heart, Beloved. And still, I believe in you. I know how you feel sometimes. The calls for action are varied and sometimes opposing:

Do your work, White people

Pray for unity, people of God

Defund the Police

Black Lives Matter

Blue Lives Matter

All Lives Matter to God

Show up

Stop centering yourself

Silence is complicity

Speaking up is exerting your privilege

If your pastor isn’t preaching about race, then you should leave

If your church isn’t talking about race, then stay and use your voice

Use this hashtag

Stop using that hashtag

If there is one question I get with some regularity, it is, “What the heck am I supposed to do?”

Sometimes it’s asked with a passive shrug of the shoulders and a small voice.

Sometimes it’s asked with great enthusiasm and manic energy.

I want you to know I get it. All of these calls to action are so frustrating and oftentimes seemingly in conflict with each other. Because anti-racism educators bring their personalities, their theologies, and their histories to this work, you need to step back from all the calls to action for a moment. Quiet yourself to help you discern what to do next, work through your confusion in community, and then reject white supremacy’s pull toward inaction or, even worse, transferring that anxious energy into a defensive tactic of comparing two teachers’ pedagogies against each other.

Let me caution you, though—white supremacy is not an easy problem to fix. It has influenced everything that makes up Western life: media, education, housing, nonprofit organizations, finances, churches, history books, healthcare, city planning, even food. There is not one thing in our society that has not been tainted by white supremacy. It’s going to take a long-haul, sustainable strategy of undoing and rebuilding.

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