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Learning to Hope Differently: Racial Justice for the Long Haul (Christine Jeske) · Thinking Christian: Bible, Theology, and Culture

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Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm
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Speaker 1: doctor James Spencer and I'm joined today by doctor Christine Jeski.
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Speaker 1: She is the Associate professor of anthropology at Wheaton College
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Speaker 1: and Wheaton, Illinois, and she's written a book called Racial
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Speaker 1: Justice for the Long Haul, How White Christian Advocates Persevere
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Speaker 1: and Why, and so we're going to be talking about
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Speaker 1: the book and some of her research today on the podcast.
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Speaker 1: Welcome Christine, how are you doing?
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Speaker 2: Yeah?
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Speaker 1: Well, I thought, first maybe what would be helpful is
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Speaker 1: to understand how anthropological research works and what specifically you
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Speaker 1: did as the baseline research for this work. So I
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Speaker 1: kind of want to start there, but maybe before we
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Speaker 1: get there, it'd be good to hear a little bit
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Speaker 1: about your history and why this topic even was of
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Speaker 1: interest to you.
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Speaker 3: Perfect community development work, and during that time I got
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Speaker 3: interested in writing. I wrote for a number of different magazines.
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Speaker 3: It actually kind of started because I got asked to
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Speaker 3: write a tiny little column for a small newspaper in Wisconsin,
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Speaker 3: and I was writing like these, like one hundred word
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Speaker 3: I mean, I just felt ridiculously small little pieces to
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Speaker 3: this newspaper about life in South Africa, which was super cool,
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Speaker 3: But I had all these stories that were so much
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Speaker 3: bigger than what I could in a newspaper, and I
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Speaker 3: got hooked on this process of interviewing people and telling
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Speaker 3: their stories. And after I had been in South America,
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Speaker 3: basically I was working with a seminary that closed, and
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Speaker 3: I went back to the US and I was like,
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Speaker 3: now what do I do? Like, what do I actually
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Speaker 3: want to be when I grow up? And my husband
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Speaker 3: had a job in the United States, and I was like, Okay,
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Speaker 3: I gotta settle here for some time and do something.
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Speaker 3: What's I going to be? And I realized what ran
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Speaker 3: through so much of my life was I love teaching,
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Speaker 3: and I was like, what can I teach? How do
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Speaker 3: I teach adults? Well, I could get a PhD in something,
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Speaker 3: and what on earth would it be? And discovered that
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Speaker 3: anthropology really pulled together international work thinking about culture. But
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Speaker 3: then also the research methods for anthropology really depend on
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Speaker 3: interviewing people and spending time with ordinary people in their
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Speaker 3: ordinary life. So that's kind of what I had been
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Speaker 3: doing already for some previous books that I wrote, and
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Speaker 3: then I realized I could I could do that in
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Speaker 3: a more professional and academic way. And I love it.
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Speaker 3: It gives me a lot of life.
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Speaker 2: Very cool.
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Speaker 1: So talk a little bit about because this or this
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Speaker 1: book has a lot of interviews with people, you use
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Speaker 1: stories from people all over the place, But you did
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Speaker 1: have an interesting hierarchy to the way you perform the research.
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Speaker 3: Yes. Yeah, So I had written this previous book in
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Speaker 3: South Africa about racism, and I felt like one of
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Speaker 3: the unanswered questions in that book was what do white
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Speaker 3: people actually do about it? Like a lot of studies
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Speaker 3: of race focus on the felt hurt of racism and
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Speaker 3: the history behind it, which is really important, but because
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Speaker 3: those books have been written, there's this this question that
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Speaker 3: is like okay, so what now what do people do
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Speaker 3: about it? And so I was like, I want to
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Speaker 3: research white people who are doing something about racism? But
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Speaker 3: how do you How do you find those people? Like
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Speaker 3: do you just ask them like, hey, are you a
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Speaker 3: white person who's really good at telling racism? And they
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Speaker 3: volunteer right, or you to like have a survey they
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Speaker 3: fill out as like you know, a test to check
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Speaker 3: about all the right answers. None of those really felt
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Speaker 3: like the right answer, and I realized what I needed
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Speaker 3: was for people in their life to know them well
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Speaker 3: enough to say that they are doing something and they're
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Speaker 3: not just doing it for a short term thing. And
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Speaker 3: specifically people of color, right, because that's you know, who's
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Speaker 3: who's feeling the effects of racism. So I started with
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Speaker 3: interviewing thirty people of color who were faith leaders, typically
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Speaker 3: leaders of churches or nonprofit organizations working with racism in
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Speaker 3: some way, and talk to them, usually at least an
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Speaker 3: hour long interview, talking about like what does racism look like,
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Speaker 3: what does it look like to deal with racism, how
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Speaker 3: do you end it? And what does justice look like?
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Speaker 3: And then who do you see who is a white
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Speaker 3: Christian who's been dealing with that for a long time
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Speaker 3: And I usually say a few years or decades or
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Speaker 3: more for somebody that you would recommend as kind of
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Speaker 3: a mentor to other people. So yeah, it's based on
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Speaker 3: those interviews, and then I interviewed forty more white people
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Speaker 3: who are recommended for the study, and also spent one
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Speaker 3: hundred or more hours in places where they hang out,
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Speaker 3: so churches and trainings for dealing with racism and organizations
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Speaker 3: like that, to just see how people interact with each other.
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Speaker 1: And you've found one of the big sections in your
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Speaker 1: book is on hope, and so this different sort of
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Speaker 1: hope that can be cultivated when you're hanging around with
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Speaker 1: communities that are dealing with offering or inequities and those
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Speaker 1: kind of things.
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Speaker 2: Can you just describe that difference that.
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Speaker 1: You found and kind of help give people a clean
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Speaker 1: grid for what that hope looks like.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, So I can go back to a story from
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Speaker 3: my own life. This is long before I wrote this book,
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Speaker 3: but when I was living in South Africa, this seminary
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Speaker 3: like mansion was running out of money and there was
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Speaker 3: a strong, strong evidence that it was going to need
5:27
Speaker 3: to close. And there's a particular day when the students
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Speaker 3: at this seminary called a day of prayer. And I
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Speaker 3: was in this room in like a hundred year old
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Speaker 3: building in South Africa, packed with people shoulder to shoulder,
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Speaker 3: and everybody is praying, and in South Africa, what that
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Speaker 3: means is like shouting and simultaneously. That's how we prayed together.
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Speaker 3: And I knew things were dire, like we had done
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Speaker 3: everything we could to raise money. And these are people
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Speaker 3: from all over the African continent, many of whom had
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Speaker 3: like planned for years or decades to try to get
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Speaker 3: this kind of training and set aside two years of
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Speaker 3: their life. They had scholarships to be there. They had
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Speaker 3: just been told that their scholarships were just continued, so
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Speaker 3: if they could afford any college at all, they didn't
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Speaker 3: know if it would continue, right, And we're praying, and
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Speaker 3: I am like doing the thing I'm supposed to do
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Speaker 3: of like you know, saying God, you are just you know, majestic,
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Speaker 3: you're powerful, You're wonderful, like God save us, kind of
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Speaker 3: like words. And I hit this point where I was
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Speaker 3: just like I'm out of words, and I just went silent,
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Speaker 3: and and it was like I could I could feel
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Speaker 3: what it's like to run out of hope, Like I
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Speaker 3: just didn't expect God to do anything anymore in that situation.
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Speaker 3: And I could sort of see, like this is so big.
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Speaker 3: It's not just that our seminary is running out of
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Speaker 3: money for scholarships. It's like I knew part of why
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Speaker 3: the seminary was ending was that they had hired their
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Speaker 3: first lack president, and some of the donors so that
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Speaker 3: seminary had decided they no longer wanted to support the
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Speaker 3: seminary now they had a black president instead of this
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Speaker 3: white president. Before that I knew that there was a
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Speaker 3: global financial crisis. This is two thousand and eight, and
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Speaker 3: so like our donors didn't have money, and it's like
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Speaker 3: this is deep. This is like the whole history of
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Speaker 3: colonialism and global capitalism and racism and just like everyday life,
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Speaker 3: all of it here, and so I go silent, and
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Speaker 3: in that moment, I just listen, and I am hearing
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Speaker 3: this woman on my left who's like come out of
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Speaker 3: the genocide in Rwanda, and she's there and you know,
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Speaker 3: she's lost relatives who have died in a genocide. And
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Speaker 3: then on my right there's like a man from Zambia
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Speaker 3: who has survived a heart attack where there's no health care,
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Speaker 3: and there's you know, people who have come out of
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Speaker 3: the war and deer Congo, and they're all around me
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Speaker 3: and they're praying and they just keep going. And I realized, like,
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Speaker 3: this is hope that I have not grown up with,
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Speaker 3: and I want to know how to hope let that.
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Speaker 3: And what also struck me is the irony or sort
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Speaker 3: of the naive ignorance of so many Christian organizations from
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Speaker 3: North America that come to places like South Africa. There
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Speaker 3: was literally one that had come down the street to
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Speaker 3: another organization very near where we were that was called
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Speaker 3: something like New Hope, Bringing Hope, you know, Global Hope.
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Speaker 3: We have the hope, right, Americans, we got it for you.
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Speaker 3: We're going to teach you how to hope. And I'm like,
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Speaker 3: what are we doing? How ignorant? And and so I
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Speaker 3: you know, that was in my background of thinking about
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Speaker 3: hope and what does it mean to hope. I did
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Speaker 3: not go into this project again I'm going to research hope.
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Speaker 3: But very early on, as I started asking people questions
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Speaker 3: about like how has your life changed in addressing racism
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Speaker 3: or decades or more, people would be like, I don't hope.
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Speaker 3: How I used to hope? And I'd be like, what
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Speaker 3: does that mean? And often the first response was like,
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Speaker 3: no one's asked me that before, and so purt it
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Speaker 3: ended up being like trying to figure out how do
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Speaker 3: you describe hope? You know? Often I think when we
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Speaker 3: think hope, we just talk about like get more of it.
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Speaker 3: You just like it's like a scale from less to more,
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Speaker 3: and everybody just like try to get more of it,
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Speaker 3: because if you have lots of it, you'll be great.
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Speaker 3: But what I realized is like it's not just more
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Speaker 3: it's a different kind of hope. So specifically, I talk
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Speaker 3: about like a delusional hope that I think a lot
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Speaker 3: of people at privilege are trained into through their lifetimes,
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Speaker 3: which is based on an idea of like, well, life
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Speaker 3: has always gone pretty well for me, and as long
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Speaker 3: as it keeps going pretty well, I can hope that
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Speaker 3: the future will go pretty well. But that's really fragile.
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Speaker 3: Like what happens when life doesn't go pretty well for
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Speaker 3: you or you meet somebody who's never had that storyline
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Speaker 3: to their life? Do you give up? And I've seen
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Speaker 3: so many people who start dealing with injustice with that
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Speaker 3: kind of hope and it ends right you give up
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Speaker 3: and there's not a perseverance in it. So so part
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Speaker 3: of what I'm tracing in this book is how people
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Speaker 3: learn to have a resilient hope and what that looks
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Speaker 3: like in practice.
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Speaker 1: Would you say when you say people sort of just
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Speaker 1: give up? In other words, there's because there isn't this
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Speaker 1: persistent hope, a hope that is forged and suffering. I
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Speaker 1: think you talk about in the book as like sort
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Speaker 1: of a cruciform hope at some level is that the
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Speaker 1: hope is so overly and this is a word to
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Speaker 1: use optimistic that when that optimism isn't realized in the
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Speaker 1: short term, people are just saying, well, this is now,
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Speaker 1: this is a feudal situation. Nothing's going to be fixed,
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Speaker 1: and I don't know, maybe push it off to the esketon, right,
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Speaker 1: and so you just kind of say, well, I can't
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Speaker 1: fix this, I'm going to go live my life elsewhere.
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Speaker 1: Is that sort of what happens when they give up?
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Speaker 1: Or is that just you know, one one too narrow
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Speaker 1: instance of how they give up.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there's a lot of pieces to how
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Speaker 3: people give up, but I think that's one thread that
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Speaker 3: runs through so much of it. When I talk about optimism,
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Speaker 3: the definition that I've been using for it is it's
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Speaker 3: psychologically distancing oneself from the bad. So it's saying, I'm
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Speaker 3: going to look to the future, to this the future
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Speaker 3: that I cannot understand and I cannot predict, and I'm
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Speaker 3: going to choose to do that by denying what could
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Speaker 3: go wrong, for ignoring what has gone wrong in the past.
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Speaker 3: And and you know that again, it's a fragile thing,
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Speaker 3: right when you when you encounter what is bad, it
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Speaker 3: breaks that kind of a hope. It also like the
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Speaker 3: practices that come out of that I think are often
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Speaker 3: physically distancing yourself from the bad. I had a person
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Speaker 3: tell me a story about how their family had moved.
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Speaker 3: This is a white family that had moved into an
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Speaker 3: under resource, predominantly black neighborhood, and their son was coming
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Speaker 3: back from a family gathering where they've been in sort
11:45
Speaker 3: of a wealthier suburb or family gathering. They came back
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Speaker 3: to their neighborhood and they came back and the son
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Speaker 3: looks around the neighborhood and goes to mom, is there
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Speaker 3: are there robbers here? And this kid is like looking
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Speaker 3: aroun sort of noticing the physical space that I am
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Speaker 3: in is somehow different from this other physical space and
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Speaker 3: maybe there's danger here. And you know, these parents are like,
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Speaker 3: where did our son get that idea? But it was
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Speaker 3: like this moment of noticing. We are so seeped in
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Speaker 3: these narratives about what is safe and what is good
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Speaker 3: and what is right, and when we encounter things that
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Speaker 3: we think of as like bad, whether it's a bad
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Speaker 3: space or a bad story, we need to figure out, like,
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Speaker 3: what is our hope going to do in that moment?
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Speaker 3: Is it going to say this is exactly the moment,
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Speaker 3: the place, the time where God shows up, because God
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Speaker 3: is a God who interrupts and shows up in the bad.
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Speaker 3: Or are we going to rely on this narrative that's like,
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Speaker 3: well it's bad, and so I should get out of
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Speaker 3: here and get somewhere is good again, right, like find
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Speaker 3: God in the safe good places. And obviously we know
12:55
Speaker 3: as Christians like God is a God who interrupts, who
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Speaker 3: shows up within the bad, who doesn't psychologically distance get
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Speaker 3: self from the bad.
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Speaker 2: The other aspect of hope.
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Speaker 1: So that's really helpful with optimism, I think you know
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Speaker 1: you can be it's almost like a mental escapism. You
13:13
Speaker 1: don't want to think about the bad things that could happen.
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Speaker 1: You only think about the good things, and then when
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Speaker 1: the bad things come, you're almost not prepared for them.
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Speaker 1: You just don't ever think they're going to happen, and
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Speaker 1: maybe you distance yourself, like you said, physically from them
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Speaker 1: and just avoid them altogether. But I think the other aspect,
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Speaker 1: and this was one that I when I read through it,
13:31
Speaker 1: I was kind of struggling with it a little bit,
13:33
Speaker 1: the incrementalism, and so the way I understood the incrementalism
13:39
Speaker 1: and you can correct me if I'm wrong. There's almost
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Speaker 1: like a combined incrementalism that says these incremental steps are
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Speaker 1: the best we can do, or there's an optimism around
13:51
Speaker 1: the incrementalism.
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Speaker 2: Right. These two almost form like a two headed monster,
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Speaker 2: right versus.
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Speaker 1: We've made progress that is necessary but insufficient, and so
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Speaker 1: we still feel the frictions and the tensions and recognize
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Speaker 1: the suffering. We're not viewing these as something that is
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Speaker 1: completely finished. I almost think of it as like when
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Speaker 1: you know, Ezra and Nehmiah come back from the exile
14:18
Speaker 1: and they rebuild some of the temple walls and some
14:21
Speaker 1: people there's actually a line in Ezra says and the
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Speaker 1: people some people were crying, weeping, some people were cheering,
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Speaker 1: and when you stood back, you couldn't distinguish who was
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Speaker 1: crying and who was cheering. Right, It's this like deep
14:33
Speaker 1: tension of this is great, this is horrible, all mixed
14:38
Speaker 1: up in one bag. So there is an incrementalism, but
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Speaker 1: it's not an optimistic incrementalism. It's a very realistic, like
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Speaker 1: we've done something good here, but that good is nowhere
14:48
Speaker 1: near what we need to be.
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Speaker 2: Is that a fair way of understanding it.
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Speaker 3: I love that. Yeah, I had never thought about that
14:54
Speaker 3: passage of the idea of like weeping and crying being
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Speaker 3: totally intertwined. Yeah, it reminds me. Actually, I want to
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Speaker 3: just reaview a quote from a woman in this book
15:06
Speaker 3: and she said, you mind it. This is a pastor.
15:11
Speaker 3: I was talking to a woman of color, and she said,
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Speaker 3: I'm leaning into joy I think it's an act of
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Speaker 3: resistance to play, to practice joyful things in the midst
15:22
Speaker 3: of it, in the midst of like working for racial justice.
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Speaker 3: That's exactly what we need to do, in the midst
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Speaker 3: of all the horrible things. Joyfully gather and not in denial,
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Speaker 3: but as an act of resistance. We play, we eat,
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Speaker 3: we celebrate, we do all these things. But it's only
15:38
Speaker 3: hopeful to me to actually be honest about what is
15:41
Speaker 3: also really happening both and so yeah, thinking about that incrementalism.
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Speaker 3: I hadn't really thought about how like, so early in
15:52
Speaker 3: the book, I have a chapter that I called Delusional
15:54
Speaker 3: Health Hope that's like on what goes wrong. And then
15:56
Speaker 3: later in the book, after we sort of walk through
15:59
Speaker 3: how do white Chris just get to the point of
16:01
Speaker 3: having this kind of hope, Like what does the resilient
16:03
Speaker 3: hope look like. And there is this common throad that
16:06
Speaker 3: I think both of them have an idea of looking
16:09
Speaker 3: at what is small. So I was struck by how
16:14
Speaker 3: many people what I'd ask, like, what is your hope? Like, now,
16:17
Speaker 3: how do you hope? People will be like, it's tiny,
16:19
Speaker 3: you can hardly see it. It's small. It focuses on
16:22
Speaker 3: the little things. But at the same time, then people
16:26
Speaker 3: would also talk about like, but while I'm focused on
16:29
Speaker 3: the small, I also have this vision of like the
16:31
Speaker 3: big and part of something that's big that needs to change.
16:35
Speaker 3: And I think maybe that's part of what's missing in
16:37
Speaker 3: the sort of delusional ways that we go about trying
16:40
Speaker 3: to approach justice, is it is forgetting that there is
16:44
Speaker 3: a big thing that needs to change too. So I
16:48
Speaker 3: talk about like conventional hope, and by that I mean
16:51
Speaker 3: like trying to hold on to just keeping things as
16:54
Speaker 3: they have been. And like, if you think about the
16:58
Speaker 3: history of say, you know, Black Americans, to take just
17:03
Speaker 3: one group that we could talk about, right, like what
17:06
Speaker 3: does it mean to say keep things as they are?
17:09
Speaker 3: And there's so much writing in sort of Black liberation
17:12
Speaker 3: and Christian black writing about the idea of like hope
17:16
Speaker 3: being not just keep things as they are. We have
17:19
Speaker 3: to hold onto a vision or a radical and a
17:22
Speaker 3: pathetic different society. And and if you're the person who's
17:28
Speaker 3: like had had privileged over your history, and I don't
17:31
Speaker 3: know if there's a word I need to unpack for
17:33
Speaker 3: your listeners too, but like your your incentive is just
17:37
Speaker 3: to say, like, let's keep things mostly the same, let's
17:39
Speaker 3: just change them a little bit. You know, we'll keep
17:42
Speaker 3: doing the thing that we're doing, but we'll do a
17:43
Speaker 3: little bit more of it, versus like, let's reconsider what
17:48
Speaker 3: maybe needs to be entirely strapped in what we're doing
17:51
Speaker 3: right now.
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Speaker 1: It's interesting, I mean I would be. I'm interested in
17:55
Speaker 1: hearing you sort of talk through privilege. But one comment
17:58
Speaker 1: I'll make is one of the I've done a lot
18:01
Speaker 1: of research on Christian nationalism and early American origins at
18:06
Speaker 1: this point, like Christians and politics and all that kind
18:08
Speaker 1: of fun stuff. And one of my theses that I
18:10
Speaker 1: haven't really run down much yet is that much of
18:13
Speaker 1: the early American theology that we see that sort of
18:16
Speaker 1: feeds a Christian nationalism or feeds the idea that America
18:19
Speaker 1: was found out as a Christian nation is actually has
18:21
Speaker 1: a lot of commonalities with liberation theology. They're coming out
18:26
Speaker 1: of the Great Britain, you know, they're trying to sort
18:30
Speaker 1: of free themselves from this tyrant. They're leveraging the Exodus
18:33
Speaker 1: in a very similar way as you see in almost
18:35
Speaker 1: every other liberation theology and a lot of the same
18:39
Speaker 1: texts and images and thought process around. We are the
18:42
Speaker 1: new whatever, the new Israel, the new people. We've got
18:47
Speaker 1: this new freedom. And where I see a lot of
18:49
Speaker 1: that falling down is that it's a it's a freedom,
18:52
Speaker 1: but not a freedom to serve the lord. It's a
18:55
Speaker 1: freedom to do as we please. And so I think
18:58
Speaker 1: there's some unwinding them from a theological perspective. It needs
19:01
Speaker 1: to happen as we look at sort of the psyche
19:04
Speaker 1: and mythos of America, because I think a lot of
19:08
Speaker 1: this has been baked in now and what we're running
19:10
Speaker 1: into is we're running into sort of these quasi theological
19:13
Speaker 1: hopes for the nation that condition us to maintain a
19:19
Speaker 1: status quo. Yeah, and so privilege, yes, I think I'm
19:25
Speaker 1: interested here you talk about that, But just to add
19:26
Speaker 1: in that sort of theological flavor, I think that there's
19:29
Speaker 1: a sense in which many people feel like they've achieved something,
19:33
Speaker 1: that something has been given to them that they shouldn't
19:35
Speaker 1: give up. It's an odd mix of things, but anyway,
19:39
Speaker 1: just that's my yeah aside.
19:41
Speaker 3: Too, it struck me how often people referred when I
19:46
Speaker 3: was interviewing them, but then also like you start to
19:48
Speaker 3: hear it all over the place, how people use the
19:50
Speaker 3: phrase in Christianity and maybe all over from Martin Luther
19:53
Speaker 3: King Junior of the moral arc at the universe is long,
19:58
Speaker 3: but itens for justice, and he actually voting that from
20:01
Speaker 3: someone else for him. But how that gets used is
20:05
Speaker 3: really revealing, right, Like is that being used to say
20:09
Speaker 3: the moral arc of the universe is long, and it
20:11
Speaker 3: bends toward justice, and therefore we can let it just
20:14
Speaker 3: bend and we can sort of let it do its
20:17
Speaker 3: own work and it'll get there on its own versus
20:20
Speaker 3: like if you read kings writing, he was very clear
20:23
Speaker 3: over and over again. Part of again why this seam
20:26
Speaker 3: of hope came up for me was I was reading
20:29
Speaker 3: a book of his essays with students and was just
20:33
Speaker 3: struck by how much he writes about hope and how
20:36
Speaker 3: resonant that was with my students. I think people desperately
20:40
Speaker 3: want to know how to hope with an active hope.
20:42
Speaker 3: And he was so clear over and over again, that
20:45
Speaker 3: does not mean you get to sit by and let
20:46
Speaker 3: it roll in like you are actively involved in that.
20:49
Speaker 3: Like if you read the letter from the Birmingham Jail,
20:51
Speaker 3: it is all about his response to a bunch of
20:54
Speaker 3: white pastors who were saying, you should just calm down,
20:58
Speaker 3: stop doing this whole protesting, just let it roll and
21:00
Speaker 3: it's going to be fine. And he's like that hope
21:04
Speaker 3: is not okay, Like we have to do an active hope.
21:08
Speaker 3: I mean, like we have to act. You have to
21:10
Speaker 3: make society bend toward justice in the way that God
21:12
Speaker 3: is bending it also say that, do you find so.
21:17
Speaker 2: I want to come back to privilege. So no longer
21:19
Speaker 2: forget that.
21:19
Speaker 1: But this seems like a good time to get into
21:21
Speaker 1: at the topic that I mentioned before that we started
21:24
Speaker 1: recording The Habitist.
21:26
Speaker 2: So it seems to me like that habitist.
21:29
Speaker 1: That Pierre Bordia talks about and the way I sort
21:32
Speaker 1: of I think you used dancing if I remember right,
21:35
Speaker 1: sort of illustrate habitists, and I think that's a really
21:39
Speaker 1: great analogy.
21:40
Speaker 2: The way I try to usually give it to people.
21:42
Speaker 1: Is like, imagine the difference between a ballerine and a
21:46
Speaker 1: football aligneman right. They both have to be coordinated, they
21:50
Speaker 1: both have to be relatively athletic, they both have to
21:52
Speaker 1: have a level of muscular endurance and coordination and all
21:55
Speaker 1: these different things. But you're not going to catch usually
21:58
Speaker 1: alignment being a ballerina and a ballot in it being alignment, right,
22:01
Speaker 1: because the space that they occupy, the way that the economics,
22:07
Speaker 1: let's call it, of that situation actually work, would never
22:11
Speaker 1: really support a three hundred and fifty pound ballerina nor
22:14
Speaker 1: a one hundred pound alignment.
22:16
Speaker 2: It just won't work.
22:17
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter how athletic you are, that's not going
22:19
Speaker 1: to work. And so as we think about that, habitists, do.
22:24
Speaker 2: You think that there's a.
22:28
Speaker 1: Is part of what you're saying that there's almost like
22:31
Speaker 1: a reward system baked in that conditions. One sort of
22:35
Speaker 1: habitist to say it's all going to be okay, And
22:38
Speaker 1: one sort of habit is to say, you know what,
22:41
Speaker 1: it may not always be okay, but we're going to
22:43
Speaker 1: work toward something better regardless, Because I'm not sure even
22:48
Speaker 1: as you say that, you know the arc of the
22:49
Speaker 1: universe spends towards justice. I'm not sure I actually believe that. Yeah,
22:54
Speaker 1: I think it's a much more you know, it may
22:55
Speaker 1: be a more punctuated. Yes, do I believe God will
22:57
Speaker 1: bring justice? Absolutely, Like I think there is going to
23:00
Speaker 1: be a punctuated justice at the end, I'm not sure
23:02
Speaker 1: it bends toward it. And even as we you know,
23:06
Speaker 1: even as we perform our efforts, I'm not sure that
23:09
Speaker 1: we affect justice, you know often, and so there has
23:14
Speaker 1: to be some sort of a like I said, that
23:16
Speaker 1: habitist that says no, no, no, we're going to work
23:19
Speaker 1: at this and.
23:20
Speaker 2: It doesn't matter whether we win or not. The actual
23:23
Speaker 2: process for going through is the wind.
23:26
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, there's a one that I interviewed one of
23:31
Speaker 3: the few people that I do keep her name because
23:33
Speaker 3: she's a prominent researcher in addition to just being a
23:35
Speaker 3: member of a church that I attend, Gloria Lads and Billions.
23:38
Speaker 3: And she was telling me about how she teaches students
23:43
Speaker 3: she teaches in the University of Wisconsin in education, and
23:48
Speaker 3: she's saying, I use the analogy of Sissibus with my students,
23:52
Speaker 3: and how this is a person who is just pushing
23:55
Speaker 3: a boulder up a hill, and he knows that boulder
24:00
Speaker 3: is going to roll back down because gosh darn it,
24:04
Speaker 3: and she's gonna roll back down. And she said she's
24:07
Speaker 3: like white people focused on the bowlder and the top
24:12
Speaker 3: of the hill. And she said, black people, we learn
24:15
Speaker 3: to focus on Sissyphis and the muscles on Sissifus, Like
24:19
Speaker 3: you look at him and you see, like, look at
24:22
Speaker 3: who he is becoming through that process. And I found
24:26
Speaker 3: that really challenging just to even think about discipleship in
24:28
Speaker 3: that way, right, Like it doesn't mean stop pushing the boulder,
24:32
Speaker 3: but it means, like my relationship with God is is
24:36
Speaker 3: about what is that process of who I'm becoming as
24:39
Speaker 3: I push in the right direction with whatever is in
24:43
Speaker 3: front of me that you know that needs to be
24:46
Speaker 3: pushed for God's kingdom, for Shaloam to come. And and
24:49
Speaker 3: I love, Yeah, that ballerina versus football player analogy, I
24:55
Speaker 3: think is really great. And I like how you put
24:57
Speaker 3: it as like the economy around them or like the
25:00
Speaker 3: forces around them shape them, because it's not just about
25:04
Speaker 3: like we can all make ourselves into the kind of
25:07
Speaker 3: person we want to be, which is often the narrative
25:09
Speaker 3: we hear, right, it's just like as a Christian, like
25:11
Speaker 3: just you know, do the right thing and pray every
25:13
Speaker 3: morning and you become what you want to be. But
25:16
Speaker 3: we we discount and this is like what anthropologists say.
25:19
Speaker 3: I feel like every single day is like forget like
25:21
Speaker 3: don't forget culture, don't forget social structures. Like society is big,
25:25
Speaker 3: big forces pushing on you that shapes who you are.
25:28
Speaker 3: Doesn't mean you have no agency, doesn't mean you can't
25:30
Speaker 3: also like push the boulder and become something in that setting.
25:35
Speaker 3: But but those forces are big. And you know, back
25:39
Speaker 3: to your question too of like what causes people to
25:42
Speaker 3: give up? I think a big part of it is
25:44
Speaker 3: this what does it mean to be formed in an
25:49
Speaker 3: embodied way? I talk about how well, So I've kind
25:54
Speaker 3: of written most of the whole book and I had
25:56
Speaker 3: a whole outline for it, and then I looked at
25:58
Speaker 3: it one day and I was like, oh, like, actually
26:00
Speaker 3: the sections of this book kind of walk through how
26:03
Speaker 3: to love the Lord your God with your heart and
26:06
Speaker 3: mind and soul and strength, not the order exactly that
26:10
Speaker 3: Jesus says it in, right, but that is like the
26:12
Speaker 3: core of like the thing Jesus says we should do
26:14
Speaker 3: is love the Lord your God that way, and then
26:16
Speaker 3: he says the command to love your neighbor is like that.
26:18
Speaker 3: So we can think about how do we love our
26:20
Speaker 3: neighbor with heart and soul and mind and strength and
26:23
Speaker 3: with that strength part, like it's an embodied thing. And
26:27
Speaker 3: I run into this when I try to teach students
26:28
Speaker 3: about racism is in a classroom, we often focus so
26:32
Speaker 3: much energy on the mind part of it, right, like
26:34
Speaker 3: just get a bunch of information in the students, like
26:37
Speaker 3: plug them with history and like here's what redlining is,
26:41
Speaker 3: and here's the history of colonialism, and then then you're fine, Right,
26:45
Speaker 3: But it doesn't work that way because it's also a
26:47
Speaker 3: matter of heart of like we are emotional beings. We
26:51
Speaker 3: have like feelings about this process and loves that are
26:56
Speaker 3: attached to it. There's a soul portion of it, like
27:00
Speaker 3: what do we do with the harm, how do we
27:02
Speaker 3: deal with the guilts, how do we deal with the
27:04
Speaker 3: healing at a soul level? How do we respond to
27:07
Speaker 3: God about this whole issue? And then there's this strength
27:10
Speaker 3: and body part that like you know, you can read
27:12
Speaker 3: every book about racism that you can find on the
27:14
Speaker 3: shelf and I had there was a Latino man who
27:17
Speaker 3: was talking about this man that he was like, you know,
27:20
Speaker 3: in this phase of like who do you recommend for
27:22
Speaker 3: the study, He's like, well, you could talk to the
27:23
Speaker 3: certain man. But he's like, well, but just just know that,
27:28
Speaker 3: Like I forget how he said it exactly, but it
27:29
Speaker 3: was sort of like, but he'll make some mistakes, like
27:32
Speaker 3: he'll be a little awkward. And just as a sort
27:37
Speaker 3: of overall thing about the white people who are recommended
27:39
Speaker 3: for this study, I realized there's this pattern of often
27:42
Speaker 3: when they got recommended, it wasn't because they did things
27:44
Speaker 3: really totally right. It was more so how they recovered
27:48
Speaker 3: from what they didn't do right. And so like back
27:52
Speaker 3: to that analogy of like how you learn a hobby toost,
27:55
Speaker 3: you just got to get in there and you got
27:57
Speaker 3: to start doing things, like you learn to dance, like
27:59
Speaker 3: getting on the dance floor. You read all the books
28:01
Speaker 3: about it first, so you've got to try it and
28:03
Speaker 3: you're going to look foolish. And it's not just like
28:07
Speaker 3: there's stakes involved to it too. Like I was talking
28:11
Speaker 3: to somebody the other day and I was like, maybe
28:12
Speaker 3: I should have written in that section like there's also
28:14
Speaker 3: like knives in your hands sometimes, like when you're dancing,
28:17
Speaker 3: you can hurt the people around you, which is important
28:22
Speaker 3: to know, right, But it doesn't mean don't learn. You
28:25
Speaker 3: got to still learn.
28:26
Speaker 1: Right, you're going to stub on people's toes, but at
28:28
Speaker 1: the end of the day, you're still learning to dance.
28:31
Speaker 1: And so, just to underscore something you mentioned, I mean
28:35
Speaker 1: the embodiment that strength. When you look at the Hebrew
28:38
Speaker 1: of this, Dan Blocks done some really good work on
28:40
Speaker 1: the Shemah, and so the word for that's usually translated
28:44
Speaker 1: strength is actually ode. It's the same word that's used
28:47
Speaker 1: for very in the phrase very good during the creation narrative.
28:51
Speaker 2: And so it conveys this idea of muchness.
28:54
Speaker 1: And so a lot of Old Testament commentators, including myself,
28:56
Speaker 1: would say, this doesn't just refer to how much you
28:59
Speaker 1: can bench brass squad or deadlift or something like that.
29:01
Speaker 1: It's not your physical strength. It includes all of your
29:04
Speaker 1: material strength. Like everything that you have belongs to the Lord,
29:10
Speaker 1: and that's what you're to love him with. None of
29:12
Speaker 1: these things that he's given you, your herds, your your
29:15
Speaker 1: cattle or whatever, right like, this is all dedicated to
29:18
Speaker 1: him and so there's an expanded embodiment almost of what
29:22
Speaker 1: we see in that love for God and the resources
29:26
Speaker 1: we would muster then to also love our neighbor.
29:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love that. I have not heard that, but
29:32
Speaker 3: it makes me think about to this idea of perseverance
29:35
Speaker 3: and like the muchness of moving, like the long obedience
29:39
Speaker 3: in the long direction for yeah, and thinking about how
29:44
Speaker 3: One thing I noticed in analyzing what I had heard
29:47
Speaker 3: from people is that very much writing in sort of
29:51
Speaker 3: academic spaces around racial justice focuses on the scope of it,
29:55
Speaker 3: like sort of what is systemic? What is like how
29:58
Speaker 3: do you don't just focus on the person in front
30:00
Speaker 3: of you? Focus on the system. And that's a message
30:04
Speaker 3: that I think people really needed to hear and still
30:07
Speaker 3: continue to need to hear. But what I realized is
30:10
Speaker 3: there's also a longitudinal aspect of it that I think
30:14
Speaker 3: it's under mentioned in academic spaces. But if you are
30:20
Speaker 3: trying to address the entire scope of injustice in the
30:25
Speaker 3: world like all at once, you're probably going to quickly
30:30
Speaker 3: discover how limited you are, and it can actually detract
30:35
Speaker 3: from people having the longitudinal perseverance in that form of muchness.
30:39
Speaker 3: So because thinking about how muchness is both wide and
30:42
Speaker 3: it's long.
30:43
Speaker 2: Also, Yeah, I think that's helpful. Yeah, I like that
30:46
Speaker 2: a lot.
30:48
Speaker 1: Well, let's dip in a little bit to privilege. This
30:51
Speaker 1: is a term that I hear an awful lot, and
30:54
Speaker 1: I know what I want to do with it, but
30:58
Speaker 1: I have a hard time explaining it. And so I'd
31:02
Speaker 1: be interested in hearing your explanation and then we can
31:05
Speaker 1: have a conversation about it and maybe I can get
31:07
Speaker 1: some clarity on it.
31:08
Speaker 3: Yeah. I know I got myself into this. I offer
31:11
Speaker 3: to give you an explanation. You did.
31:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you're fault.
31:17
Speaker 3: Here's what I probably say to students that every one
31:21
Speaker 3: of us has everything that we have. Life itself is
31:26
Speaker 3: a gift. Uh. That's the starting point. We are, at
31:30
Speaker 3: our most basic, we are recipients from God. There's nothing
31:34
Speaker 3: that starts from us. It all starts from God, right,
31:37
Speaker 3: And then what we do is live with those gifts,
31:41
Speaker 3: and we're all given gifts that we don't deserve us
31:44
Speaker 3: the baseline, we are given gifts, different kinds of gifts.
31:48
Speaker 3: But some of what we also do during our lifetime
31:50
Speaker 3: is kind of take what we don't what we shouldn't have,
31:54
Speaker 3: And so the things that we've received from our lifetime
31:57
Speaker 3: include both gifts that are given in love and gifts
32:00
Speaker 3: given out of goodness and gifts that are given out
32:02
Speaker 3: of like a history of hurts and harm, and often
32:06
Speaker 3: those are so intertwined that it's not like we can
32:09
Speaker 3: just like parse them out. Let me just give an example.
32:12
Speaker 3: I love music. My undergrad major was piano and English,
32:16
Speaker 3: and I own a banjo. Okay, if you trace back
32:20
Speaker 3: through my history of my family, if you go back
32:23
Speaker 3: about three generations, I had a great grandfather who played
32:27
Speaker 3: banjo in a minstrel show, which is an extremely offensive
32:31
Speaker 3: way of appropriating and disrespecting African American music and the
32:35
Speaker 3: time period of people wearing like black face. What do
32:38
Speaker 3: I do with that? Right, Like, there's a gift that
32:42
Speaker 3: I have from my family which is a love of music,
32:45
Speaker 3: and there's also a stolenness to it, like a harm
32:48
Speaker 3: and an insult that's part of that history. So like
32:54
Speaker 3: a big part of what I often am thinking about
32:56
Speaker 3: is like what do you do with those legacies that
32:59
Speaker 3: we are all walking around with? These histories of having
33:03
Speaker 3: received through harm and having received through stolenness and also
33:08
Speaker 3: through loving gifts. So what is privilege? Maybe in one sense,
33:12
Speaker 3: you can just think of it as having a certain
33:15
Speaker 3: abundance of gifts that other people around you don't have.
33:19
Speaker 3: And that doesn't necessarily mean that there's always sin involved
33:23
Speaker 3: in how you got those privileges, but it just means
33:25
Speaker 3: that you have you have gifts, right, And when we
33:29
Speaker 3: look at that as social scientists, often we're trying to
33:32
Speaker 3: look like, what are patterns to how people end up
33:35
Speaker 3: with an abundance of abilities, of stuff, of material goods,
33:40
Speaker 3: of wealth and power, all the things that we end
33:43
Speaker 3: up with. And there's patterns right across history because we
33:47
Speaker 3: humans make those patterns. We make patterns of like colonialism,
33:50
Speaker 3: who had war capacities to conquer other nations, who enslaved whom,
33:56
Speaker 3: who wrote laws to say that whom was powerful? Or
33:59
Speaker 3: who we get a vote who wouldn't write So those
34:02
Speaker 3: those patterns are what we inherit, and then what do
34:04
Speaker 3: we do with them as Christians is a huge question.
34:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's because it feels like what I don't hear
34:12
Speaker 1: you're saying is that there won't always be asymmetries. So
34:16
Speaker 1: the giftedness is the different giftedness.
34:19
Speaker 2: Is always going to be there.
34:21
Speaker 3: Yeah?
34:22
Speaker 2: Is that correct?
34:23
Speaker 3: Am I?
34:23
Speaker 2: Hearing that, I don't know like the like I approach this.
34:28
Speaker 1: So if I'm thinking about the differentiation within the body
34:31
Speaker 1: of Christ and Paul's call like be unified, but recognize difference,
34:36
Speaker 1: an apostle is never going to be an evangelist. These
34:38
Speaker 1: are two different gifts that God has given in so
34:40
Speaker 1: there's difference there. There's asymmetry, is the way I'm phrasing it, right,
34:45
Speaker 1: And so it just feels to me like one body
34:48
Speaker 1: of many members there's going to be in asymmetry. A
34:51
Speaker 1: right hand is never going to be a left foot,
34:53
Speaker 1: that kind of idea, and so there's a valuing of that.
34:57
Speaker 2: But am I hearing you right?
35:00
Speaker 1: Are we trying to get rid of those asymmetries, get
35:02
Speaker 1: rid of those differences like level or are we trying
35:06
Speaker 1: to navigate those differences in a way that is loving
35:11
Speaker 1: and respectful to the entire to every member of the community.
35:15
Speaker 3: That's a great question. Yeah, difference is good, Like I
35:19
Speaker 3: think that's a starting point for us. Right, even if
35:22
Speaker 3: you start from the creation narrative, it's like God separated differences.
35:27
Speaker 3: Every single c of it is like there's light, there's dark,
35:30
Speaker 3: there's sky, there's sea, there's differences. There's like bird and
35:33
Speaker 3: fish and are different. There's man woman different, right, and
35:37
Speaker 3: it's good. It's always like, here's a difference and it's good.
35:41
Speaker 3: And so difference is not going away. We definitely don't
35:43
Speaker 3: want that, right, that's part of God's creativity and joyful,
35:46
Speaker 3: delightful existence of the world. Right, asymmetry I think of
35:51
Speaker 3: as a slightly different word and right. You know, it
35:55
Speaker 3: depends on what's asymmetrical, I guess, but usually when we
35:58
Speaker 3: talk about that, we think about like a symmetric power
36:01
Speaker 3: of who has the right or the privilege or even
36:04
Speaker 3: like the dignity in a situation. And that's where I
36:09
Speaker 3: think we take difference and we make it into our
36:12
Speaker 3: own sinful, flawed version of it. I explain to students,
36:17
Speaker 3: like there's a difference between race and other kinds of
36:21
Speaker 3: differences between human groups. When we use the word race
36:26
Speaker 3: in social sciences, we're talking about specific way of differentiating
36:30
Speaker 3: human beings, and that is a hierarchical way and a
36:34
Speaker 3: way that like basically one group of people in our
36:37
Speaker 3: Western racial system that was historically European white people from
36:41
Speaker 3: Protestant like a specific area of Europe that said, we
36:46
Speaker 3: think we are better than the rest of the world.
36:48
Speaker 3: And they also at that time in history, had the
36:50
Speaker 3: power to start to enact systems that would last, so
36:54
Speaker 3: to conquer nations, to write laws, you know, to enslave
36:58
Speaker 3: human beings, to make that system of hierarchy lasting and enduring.
37:04
Speaker 3: And it was that group who was saying like, I
37:08
Speaker 3: will tell all the rest of you what your groups are,
37:10
Speaker 3: Like you will be red, you will be black, you
37:12
Speaker 3: will be yellow, right, like putting terms on other groups
37:15
Speaker 3: of people, you know, taking all of the African continent
37:18
Speaker 3: and saying like, oh, now you are black people, and
37:19
Speaker 3: they're like, we don't speak the same language, we don't
37:21
Speaker 3: know each other. We are people, right. Yeah, So there's
37:26
Speaker 3: I think where that kind of like sin enters into
37:29
Speaker 3: what we do with difference of that house it does.
37:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's really helpful.
37:35
Speaker 1: And so then my other question on privilege, to sort
37:37
Speaker 1: of piggyback on some of this, is you do have
37:40
Speaker 1: different layers of privilege. So it seems to me at
37:44
Speaker 1: least and this you can you can interact with this.
37:47
Speaker 1: So I'm not trying to assert this, I guess I'm
37:49
Speaker 1: trying to state a thesis. Right, So when I look
37:54
Speaker 1: at Bordia for instance, right, semi autonomous fields of interaction.
37:59
Speaker 1: So think about again, maybe the lineman in the ballerina. Right,
38:03
Speaker 1: if if you're born and you're in a you're born,
38:07
Speaker 1: let's say in a Texas town where football is just
38:11
Speaker 1: you know everything, right, and you grew up playing football, right,
38:15
Speaker 1: and you're just playing football all the time. But there's
38:18
Speaker 1: no ballerina studio, ballet studio, it's not a balerius, no
38:22
Speaker 1: ballet's studio. Right, you have a certain degree. There's a
38:26
Speaker 1: differentiation of that privilege there, right, just through access, right,
38:32
Speaker 1: And so that's what I guess I'm saying there. It
38:35
Speaker 1: seems to me like there are different layers of privilege
38:38
Speaker 1: that go way deep. And so I'm wondering a lot
38:43
Speaker 1: of times when I have discussions about privilege, it stays
38:45
Speaker 1: sort of up here, right, like everybody of a certain
38:49
Speaker 1: color has this privilege.
38:52
Speaker 2: And I don't know. I mean, I grew up in
38:54
Speaker 2: rural Illinois.
38:56
Speaker 1: There are a lot of white guys who just didn't
38:57
Speaker 1: have any privilege at all, you know what I mean.
39:00
Speaker 1: And so it seems to me like there's something And
39:03
Speaker 1: I know people are a little skittish about intersectionality, right.
39:07
Speaker 1: But it seems to me that there are all these
39:09
Speaker 1: different characteristics that we have to take into account, and
39:12
Speaker 1: so a descriptive model appear may not necessarily hit the
39:16
Speaker 1: ground in the same way with every single person along
39:20
Speaker 1: the way. Not trying to give an excuse, but just
39:22
Speaker 1: trying to say, where does the theory meet the concept
39:28
Speaker 1: meet the concrete.
39:30
Speaker 3: Yeah, great questions. Yeah, so I you know, you said,
39:37
Speaker 3: like the white man in.
39:38
Speaker 2: Rural Yeah, rural Illinois, Illinois.
39:41
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, there's there's huge like lack of privilege in
39:46
Speaker 3: living in say like a rural area in the United States.
39:48
Speaker 3: They want to look at like patterns in life, sectancy, violence,
39:53
Speaker 3: like rural urban. It's rural is where it's like where
39:57
Speaker 3: the struggle is, right, So, like that's another aspect of
39:59
Speaker 3: privilege in the United States. Like you can make these
40:03
Speaker 3: different categories. I was thinking one way to maybe explain
40:07
Speaker 3: this is I think sometimes we there's sort of like
40:14
Speaker 3: popular conversations about privilege that want to simplify things, and
40:18
Speaker 3: we all want to see I want to sub sometimes, right,
40:21
Speaker 3: But I think one of the shortcuts we sometimes use
40:24
Speaker 3: is thinking it is all about just these categories that
40:26
Speaker 3: have names to them, right, Like it's about your race,
40:30
Speaker 3: your ableism, like as if there is like a clear
40:34
Speaker 3: line between like who is disabled, who is abled able bodied? Sure,
40:39
Speaker 3: or like you know, it's gender sexuality. Like we have
40:42
Speaker 3: these terms which I see as like a starting point
40:47
Speaker 3: for understanding concept, but the concept is so much more
40:50
Speaker 3: complicated than that. Like there's this kind of you can
40:53
Speaker 3: think of it as like a watercolor drawing of like
40:56
Speaker 3: the layers of privilege are not neat little boxes with
40:59
Speaker 3: black lines around them, but they blur together. So so yeah,
41:03
Speaker 3: like what privilege I have, Like, yeah, it depends partly
41:07
Speaker 3: on like being in a female body, right, but it's
41:10
Speaker 3: also like I grew up in a family where my
41:13
Speaker 3: dad was a professor and my mom was a teacher,
41:16
Speaker 3: and so like I got a great education, so you know,
41:19
Speaker 3: it's never just like a yes no answer to whether
41:22
Speaker 3: you have a privileged So where I go with this
41:26
Speaker 3: in my book and how you deal with this? What
41:31
Speaker 3: I really saw, like going to American Anthological Association kind
41:35
Speaker 3: of meetings and hearing people in the academy talk about racism,
41:39
Speaker 3: is you know, we are very good at talking about
41:42
Speaker 3: the problem, but we are afraid to talk about the solutions.
41:47
Speaker 3: And I think Christians actually offer a concept that is
41:51
Speaker 3: excellent for trying to get from the problem of like
41:55
Speaker 3: the harm that is done in our history and in
41:59
Speaker 3: our current world around racism to a solution. And that
42:02
Speaker 3: concept is grace. Like this is the word that we
42:05
Speaker 3: have how we deal with undeserved gifts. And and I realize,
42:11
Speaker 3: you know, it's a helpful word because it's undeserved gifts
42:13
Speaker 3: of all sorts, like God's gifts of grace to us
42:17
Speaker 3: is goodness, you know, it just like given us life.
42:22
Speaker 3: But it's also for like the harm aspect of it,
42:24
Speaker 3: like God gives us grace to deal with our debt
42:27
Speaker 3: of sin and what we've done wrong. And and when
42:31
Speaker 3: I started reading like John Barclay's work on grace, he emphasizes,
42:36
Speaker 3: like so much of writing about Christian grace forgets that
42:41
Speaker 3: there's a response anticipated to it. And I see that
42:44
Speaker 3: happen in how Christians deal with racism sometimes like so, uh,
42:50
Speaker 3: I'll just like name white people when we talk about racism. Historically,
42:55
Speaker 3: often white Christians have said, well, the solution to this
42:59
Speaker 3: is that people of color should forgive right, because that's
43:02
Speaker 3: what we're called to do as Christians is forgive, get
43:04
Speaker 3: over it, move on, let's not talk about it. But
43:09
Speaker 3: there's there's a part of grace also which is responding
43:12
Speaker 3: to it and healing the wrong and creating actively creating shalone,
43:17
Speaker 3: creating a community where God's justice is threaded throughout all
43:22
Speaker 3: of society. So what I realized, you know, and hearing
43:25
Speaker 3: people talk about how they came to be like long
43:28
Speaker 3: term advocates or justice as white people, is that was
43:32
Speaker 3: a shift that also happened. Like it wasn't just learning
43:34
Speaker 3: about hope, it was grounding hope in a response to grace.
43:39
Speaker 3: It was like being able to name like I don't
43:41
Speaker 3: deserve what I have in life, not you know, not
43:45
Speaker 3: any of it really from God, but also like specifically
43:47
Speaker 3: the privileges that come through through racial privilege, and so
43:53
Speaker 3: like you know, I can't pay back slavery, I can't
43:56
Speaker 3: like pay it back, but I can respond to those
44:00
Speaker 3: undeserved gifts that I received over my lifetime. So that,
44:03
Speaker 3: you know, I could talk about that for a very
44:05
Speaker 3: long time, because it's messy. I think that's one of
44:07
Speaker 3: the hardest way right things for me to wrap my
44:10
Speaker 3: head around.
44:11
Speaker 1: No, I appreciate it though the way you said it here,
44:13
Speaker 1: I mean I love the section of the book as well,
44:15
Speaker 1: because what you're doing is you're basically calling us to
44:19
Speaker 1: respond differently than we have in the past, and that
44:22
Speaker 1: to recognize that what we have has been given and
44:27
Speaker 1: therefore we didn't really earn it, right. I mean, I
44:30
Speaker 1: think we get so caught up in earning things. This
44:32
Speaker 1: is the whole meritocracy conversation, And whenever I've gotten into
44:36
Speaker 1: those conversations, I'm kind of like, I remember how I
44:39
Speaker 1: got my first job. I wasn't I could not have
44:44
Speaker 1: been the most qualified guy on that list, no chance.
44:46
Speaker 1: I knew some people at the school that I got
44:48
Speaker 1: the job at, and so they advocated for me, and
44:51
Speaker 1: that was fantastic.
44:52
Speaker 2: And it's like, do I feel bad about that?
44:55
Speaker 1: Not particularly bad, but you do start to recognize that
44:59
Speaker 1: talent doesn't necessarily equate with success, right, Like there is
45:06
Speaker 1: a networked effect that we're all dealing with, and there
45:09
Speaker 1: are other factors that are in there. So I mean,
45:11
Speaker 1: even just to look at those kind of things in
45:14
Speaker 1: the past and go, no, this was a gift. This
45:16
Speaker 1: was something that I was given. It doesn't mean that
45:19
Speaker 1: I didn't do something to earn that, right, but it
45:22
Speaker 1: does mean that I didn't exactly deserve it either, Like,
45:25
Speaker 1: if you Iraq and stack me against everybody else, how
45:28
Speaker 1: do I compare up? I'm betting it wasn't just that
45:31
Speaker 1: I was so uber qualified that I got this job.
45:34
Speaker 1: And I think it's really important for us to recognize that.
45:36
Speaker 1: And so how we respond to that then, is I
45:41
Speaker 1: appreciate in the chapter in the emphasis on forgiveness, but
45:43
Speaker 1: I also recognize like there is some sort of way
45:47
Speaker 1: of doing this. I kept going back to Ephesians four,
45:50
Speaker 1: and it's not exactly about grace, but let the thief
45:53
Speaker 1: no longer steal, let him labor so that he cay
45:57
Speaker 1: share with those who have need.
46:00
Speaker 2: In the community. It's a butchering of that passage, but
46:02
Speaker 2: that's essentially the paraphrase.
46:03
Speaker 1: And so you have this orientation to even what you've
46:07
Speaker 1: earned through labor, you're now not detracting or taking away
46:11
Speaker 1: from the community as a thief. You're actually contributing back
46:15
Speaker 1: to the community as a laborer, as someone who is
46:20
Speaker 1: being productive with the community. And so so I was
46:22
Speaker 1: reading through that chapter of Grace, that verse kept coming
46:25
Speaker 1: to mind, and I was like, this is the dynamic.
46:27
Speaker 1: I think maybe at least I connected that dynamic to
46:32
Speaker 1: what you were saying about grace, like this should be
46:34
Speaker 1: there should be an emphasis of our contribution back to
46:37
Speaker 1: the community because we have this gift.
46:41
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love that. I'd never thought about that, but
46:43
Speaker 3: that makes so much sense. Yeah that like the thief
46:47
Speaker 3: should labor. Yeah, you know, I think about like Jesus
46:53
Speaker 3: and the key is too, and like what does the
46:55
Speaker 3: key iss do? Is like I will pay it back.
46:58
Speaker 3: That's a starting point for following Christ trying to find
47:02
Speaker 3: the way to pay it back and like how does
47:03
Speaker 3: he do that? I don't know, Like what is the
47:05
Speaker 3: keys do with his money? And you walk around to
47:07
Speaker 3: like all the people passes from and just like you
47:09
Speaker 3: get ten dollars, you get four? Like I don't know.
47:12
Speaker 3: It's messy, right, Like how do you actually live that out?
47:15
Speaker 3: But it's more like a posture like I talk about.
47:18
Speaker 3: It's not it's never a checklist of things that you
47:20
Speaker 3: do that like repair racism. It's more a lifetime of
47:24
Speaker 3: posture and practices that you put into place over your lifetime,
47:27
Speaker 3: like being on the lookout for like how do I
47:31
Speaker 3: how do I give back? And something I'll say too
47:34
Speaker 3: that really clicked for me and hearing people tell these
47:36
Speaker 3: stories about it is that if your motivation for trying
47:41
Speaker 3: to deal with racism is a sense of guilt for
47:44
Speaker 3: like the need that is out there, that's really that's fragile.
47:49
Speaker 3: Also like again in the way of like hope being
47:51
Speaker 3: like you know, if you think it's only going to
47:53
Speaker 3: be when things are going well, well, I think often
47:56
Speaker 3: people also try to adjust racism out of like, well,
47:59
Speaker 3: I'm only there when it's forrid like and I feel
48:02
Speaker 3: so bad and like, oh this story is terrible, right, yeah,
48:07
Speaker 3: But the people who have it as a long term posture,
48:10
Speaker 3: it's just like, well, I know every single day of
48:13
Speaker 3: my life, I have undeserved gifts that I have, and
48:16
Speaker 3: so this whole lifetime is a bonus, Like, you know,
48:19
Speaker 3: why would I not give back for me? Like one
48:22
Speaker 3: story in my life that I go back to along
48:23
Speaker 3: those lines, when I was six, I had heart surgery
48:26
Speaker 3: and my heart actually stopped beating, and my my parents
48:30
Speaker 3: got this message from the doctors that like, we had
48:33
Speaker 3: some trouble restarting her heart and stopped in the middle
48:36
Speaker 3: of surgery, and she might have some brain damage and
48:38
Speaker 3: we don't know she's gonna be okay. And then I'm okay, right, Like,
48:42
Speaker 3: I like, you know, I can joke about like I
48:44
Speaker 3: forget people's names maybe because of that or whatever, but like,
48:48
Speaker 3: I have this life and I look back at that
48:53
Speaker 3: now and I just I consistently have to tell myself,
48:55
Speaker 3: like every single moment of my life is a bonus.
48:58
Speaker 3: I could have been just swept away to the hereafter
49:01
Speaker 3: in that moment, but instead I'm alive. And I think
49:04
Speaker 3: approaching justice out of that mindset of the abundance of
49:08
Speaker 3: what we've been given, rather than the like the world
49:12
Speaker 3: is a mess and if I don't do something it's good,
49:16
Speaker 3: it's gonna a burn. Right, Like that's too much. We
49:18
Speaker 3: can't bear that. I had a woman who put it
49:20
Speaker 3: this way, like I'm part of the bruck bucket brigade,
49:23
Speaker 3: but I'm not the whole thing. Like just get in
49:25
Speaker 3: the line, carry your bucket.
49:28
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, So, I mean, if you were given any
49:32
Speaker 1: advice about this, I have a lot more questions, but
49:37
Speaker 1: we're kind of running out of time. I don't want
49:38
Speaker 1: to I want to respect the time, and there's only
49:40
Speaker 1: so much time we can put a podcast out. So
49:43
Speaker 1: for one, I've really appreciated the conversation, but I guess
49:47
Speaker 1: if you were giving advice to someone who's you know,
49:49
Speaker 1: kind of looking out at the state of the world
49:52
Speaker 1: and saying, I don't it's so immense, I don't even
49:55
Speaker 1: know how to get involved, right. I want to cultivate
49:58
Speaker 1: this hope. I want to I want to respond to
50:00
Speaker 1: the grace that I've been given. What any concrete step
50:05
Speaker 1: you'd tell them to take, you know, find a collision
50:08
Speaker 1: somewhere or something like that, I mean, what do you
50:11
Speaker 1: what do you think?
50:12
Speaker 3: Yeah, this word collision I talk about is like these
50:16
Speaker 3: moments when reality hits you so hard that you cannot
50:19
Speaker 3: ignore the difference between reality and the way you imagine
50:23
Speaker 3: reality to be. And I think that's part of what
50:26
Speaker 3: I think a lot of us maybe are experiencing right
50:28
Speaker 3: now as we read the news, and there's always news
50:31
Speaker 3: stories that are going to make collisions for us or
50:33
Speaker 3: are like, WHOA, I didn't know that bad thing could happen,
50:37
Speaker 3: And no, don't go make those happen, right. But I
50:43
Speaker 3: think one concrete thing that you can do is is
50:46
Speaker 3: reflect on those moments in your life when you have
50:49
Speaker 3: had a time that you were hit emotionally, like hit
50:53
Speaker 3: in your heart with this thing is so wrong and
50:57
Speaker 3: then ask yourself, what what is that prompt for me?
51:02
Speaker 3: How has that changed me? Has it actually led to
51:04
Speaker 3: anything long term? Or did I actually kind of like
51:06
Speaker 3: shift away and say, like I want to go back
51:08
Speaker 3: to optimism. I want to like turn away from that
51:11
Speaker 3: bad thing and focus on the sort of happy present
51:15
Speaker 3: moment or whatever I can sort of hould on to.
51:17
Speaker 3: And that doesn't mean that you can't like hold onto joy.
51:19
Speaker 3: We need joy in the present too, but I guess
51:23
Speaker 3: maybe more in a concrete steps you can take kind
51:26
Speaker 3: of way. I love an analogy that comes from Beverly
51:34
Speaker 3: Daniels Tatum I believe her name is, and she talks
51:39
Speaker 3: about like a moving walkway. If you imagine sort of
51:42
Speaker 3: like being in an airport or wherever you have those
51:44
Speaker 3: like conveyor belt things, right, you get on it and
51:47
Speaker 3: you're just swept away in a certain direction. And the
51:53
Speaker 3: history of racism in our country has created a certain
51:56
Speaker 3: moving walkway. It's kind of like what you said of
51:59
Speaker 3: like being in a town where there's lots of football players,
52:02
Speaker 3: like you're going to you're going to go through like
52:04
Speaker 3: being trained to be a football player and not a ballerina,
52:07
Speaker 3: and those kinds of systems surround us all the time
52:11
Speaker 3: that are going to guide us in a certain way,
52:15
Speaker 3: and and you can get on it and just not
52:17
Speaker 3: pay attention. You can get on it actually like actively
52:19
Speaker 3: walk in the same direction of the conveyor belt. Also,
52:23
Speaker 3: but if the conveyor belt is going in the wrong direction,
52:26
Speaker 3: like it is leading to injustice, then what do you do?
52:31
Speaker 3: And and I tell students, like, there's multiple responses that
52:34
Speaker 3: you can have when you realize you're on a conveyor
52:36
Speaker 3: belt that is leading toward injustice. One thing you can
52:39
Speaker 3: do is just stop walking, like just pause for a
52:41
Speaker 3: second and be like I need to look around and
52:44
Speaker 3: maybe like read a book or two or watch a
52:45
Speaker 3: movie or two and understand how that where is this
52:48
Speaker 3: conveyor belt going? How what's happening here? Asking why, questions.
52:53
Speaker 3: So some people just need to do that, just start learning.
52:56
Speaker 3: Other people have already done that, and they're like, oh,
52:58
Speaker 3: this this conveyor belt is bad, to do something about it. Well,
53:01
Speaker 3: then you can stop and actually walk in the opquisite direction,
53:04
Speaker 3: and then you start telling other people on the conveyor belt, hey,
53:06
Speaker 3: like maybe you could also stop and read this book
53:08
Speaker 3: and question was going. So you're walking in the other direction.
53:13
Speaker 3: But then there's also like jump off the conveyor belt
53:17
Speaker 3: all together, and then there's like grab a sledgehammer and
53:20
Speaker 3: start breaking the thing to pieces and dismantle it, and
53:25
Speaker 3: so like, depending on where you're at in life. You
53:28
Speaker 3: don't start dismantling from like far away. You start where
53:30
Speaker 3: you're at. Like, if I'm teaching out a college, I
53:33
Speaker 3: can start asking questions like what about students who come
53:37
Speaker 3: into college and their first generation students are from underrepresentative
53:40
Speaker 3: populations and college is going to be really hard. Well,
53:42
Speaker 3: I can start by learning how to be the best
53:45
Speaker 3: bestor I can possibly be so that they're going to
53:47
Speaker 3: succeed the college. And you need to do that whether
53:49
Speaker 3: you're in healthcare or law or accounting or whatever you're in. Right,
53:52
Speaker 3: is just look at like how do you start understanding
53:55
Speaker 3: why things are the way they are and is there
53:58
Speaker 3: something that needs to get dismantled and how do you
53:59
Speaker 3: do in that?
54:01
Speaker 2: That's really helpful. Yeah, I like that answer, really helpful.
54:06
Speaker 3: Yeah, go for it.
54:08
Speaker 1: Well, Christine, thanks so much for being here this. I like,
54:11
Speaker 1: I enjoyed the book. I think I enjoyed the conversation
54:14
Speaker 1: even more so. Really appreciate being on. Is there anywhere
54:17
Speaker 1: that I could send people other than obviously to the book.
54:20
Speaker 1: IVP gives us a twenty percent discount code if you
54:22
Speaker 1: buy the book off IVP dot com, so I'll have
54:25
Speaker 1: that link in the show description. But anywhere else, website,
54:28
Speaker 1: anything like that where you'd send people do.
54:30
Speaker 3: Yeah. You can find the rest of our ready at
54:32
Speaker 3: Christine Jeske dot com. And you can also subscribe to
54:35
Speaker 3: my newsletter there on substack called Just Learning, and it
54:38
Speaker 3: gives you sort of little snippets every couple of weeks
54:40
Speaker 3: of things that you can do to practice justice in
54:42
Speaker 3: everyday life. So check out the book and subscribe to
54:45
Speaker 3: the newsletter if you want to.
54:47
Speaker 2: All right, we will.
54:48
Speaker 3: James, it was great talking to you too, that's great.
54:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely absolutely, and we'll.
54:53
Speaker 1: I'll put Christine Jeske dot com in the show notes
54:56
Speaker 1: as well, so check all that out, everybody, if you're interested.
54:59
Speaker 2: I really arned you to pick up the book.
55:01
Speaker 1: I enjoyed it, and I think these conversations are really
55:04
Speaker 1: necessary and just appreciate the work you're doing.
55:06
Speaker 2: So thanks very much. All right, everybody, we will catch
55:10
Speaker 2: you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care