Abstract
The dangerous memory of the crucified and risen Jesus confronts the “lie” of racism, past and present. The cross and resurrection disrupt our forgetfulness about the lie and awaken memory of our complicity in the reality of racism and its ongoing diminishment of the lives of racially-minoritized people. Indeed, the dangerous memory embodied in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus creates tension that evokes a relational and agitational community of resistance to racist ideas and policies.
We are living in a kairos moment of racial reckoning in this country, a moment that finds us grappling with the meaning and consequences of a painful history of racism and slavery. For Christians, a kairos moment is an “opportune” or “appointed” moment when the future God has in mind for us struggles toward realization now, demanding decisive action on our parts. The White church cannot be silent at such a moment. It cannot emerge on the other side of it unchanged. It must engage the reality of racism with eyes wide open to painful memories that must be fully exposed. Dangerous memories must be awakened, for kairos moments reveal things that have been hidden.
What is being revealed? James Baldwin spoke of the systemic racism he saw at the core of the American experience as “the lie.” Professor Eddie Glaude of Princeton University, in his powerful book on Baldwin’s legacy for contemporary American life, notes that this was Baldwin’s shorthand for the architecture of White privilege and supremacy.
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Disrupting the “lie” requires frank and dangerous confrontation with the past—with memory, individual and collective. As Glaude puts it,
Baldwin’s moral vision requires a confrontation with history—with slavery and with the ongoing consequences of the after times—shorn of the rosy tint of American innocence in order to overcome its hold on us. . . . Ours is “a cold Civil War.” We have those who are desperately holding on to a vision of the United States that has never really made sense, at least to me, and those who are fighting for the birth of a new America. But, even in the fight, the divisions in the country feel old and worn. Today feels like we are fighting old ghosts that have the country by the throat.
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From my perspective, the cross of Jesus Christ is an essential Christian resource for this moment. It exposes the ghosts of our past, awakening dangerous memory that lays them bare. Indeed, I would contend that it is a critical resource for the church’s reflection and action in a two-fold sense. First, the dangerous memory of Jesus crucified and risen awakens and confronts the “lie” of racism, past and present. Theologian James Cone has raised to visibility haunting parallels between the cross and the lynching tree—between the nature of Jesus’s execution and the lynching of Black bodies in the American context. 3 Second, once the dangerous memory is awakened and exposed by the cross, it empowers us for new lives of restorative justice. In this essay, I offer for your consideration theological and biblical resources for reflection on the cross that can inform the church’s navigation of a kairos moment, as it discerns what God is calling it to be and do.
My own reflection on the challenges the church faces has been deeply informed by the work of Womanist theologian Shawn Copeland, who powerfully articulates the central importance of the cross for our historical moment. In Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience, Copeland contends that Christian theology “must stand at the foot of the cross” and “not remain silent before the tears of a crucified world, the tears of crucified peoples.” 4 For Copeland, standing at the foot of the cross entails accountability for crucified peoples past and present. In the American context, this demands grappling with what she describes as the “dangerous memory” of chattel slavery. Though some contend that we are living in a “post-racial” world, the reality of racialized violence disrupts any such false assumption and awakens the memory of crucified peoples in America’s history of enslavement. That memory, and living Black ancestors who enflesh it, disrupt amnesia about racism in our history and culture. 5
Indeed, in recent months and years, one would be hard-pressed to deny that crucifixions of African Americans continue to take place, given increasing public exposure of them. The murder of George Perry Floyd, Jr. on May 25, 2020 in Minneapolis was one such crucifixion, catalyzing national protests about the racialized police violence to which African Americans are subject daily. Other crucifixions have been raised to visibility, forcing Americans to “say their names”: Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Philando Castile, to note but a few. One of the names that haunts me most is that of Freddie Gray, who died in the custody of the Baltimore police in 2015, for he was from a West Baltimore community (Sandtown-Winchester) that I knew well from faith-based community organizing efforts in that neighborhood. 6 All of these murders (and many others like them) could be, and have been, called “lynchings,” but I have come to think of them as “crucifixions” ever since Cone’s poignant book raised the haunting connection between the two. The term “crucifixion” also captures an important historical and political reality of the murders in view, for Jesus died on a Roman cross—a public, political instrument of state-sponsored terrorism. As much as we are inclined to domesticate that cross, when exposed to full view it represents a dangerous memory that disrupts our forgetfulness, our failures to acknowledge tortuous suffering and abuses of power large and small that continue in our own time and place. And in our American context, it exposes the lie of systemic racism.
White Christianity and the Lie of Racism
White Western Christians can find it very difficult to see and acknowledge the “lie” of racism, for as a clergy friend astutely observed, “It is baked into us!” Throughout American history, Christian faith has been used to justify, underwrite, and then camouflage the racist structures of our lives. It is also difficult for many Western Christians to recognize the brutal historical and political realities of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection and their implications for our time and place, for several reasons. For one thing, traditional atonement theologies tend to domesticate the cross, obscuring its relevance for social and political reflection. Moreover, people of privilege can find it difficult to recognize that their place in this story is with the crucifiers rather than the crucified. The very architecture of Whiteness shields them from facing the cross and its symbolic social-political power to expose and disrupt the lie.
For example, in Baltimore, where I lived and worked for some time, Interstate 83 catapults drivers headed downtown right over Freddie Gray’s neighborhood, shuttling vehicles directly into the downtown Inner Harbor, the city’s landmark tourist attraction and business center, with its gleaming office buildings, restaurants, entertainment and sports venues. Gray’s Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood is literally out of sight, out of mind. Thus, many White citizens of Baltimore (and the nation) were shocked by the insurrection that emerged in the wake of Gray’s death in police custody. The architecture of Whiteness had shielded people from seeing the suffering of others and from recognizing complicity in racialized police violence and the city’s legacy of racism. Even when a modern crucifixion is right before White eyes, captured on video—as it was in the case of George Floyd’s execution—it can be difficult for White folk to recognize and acknowledge complicity in it.
This includes church folk, many of whom have regular opportunities to confess their sins during Sunday morning worship. But liturgical “confession of sin” is often so generic that it fails to place systemic racism, and our individual and corporate complicity in it, squarely on our radar. It rarely invites us to name, recognize, and repent of it. Ignacio Ellacuría, S.J., the martyred president of the University of Central America in San Salvador, pointedly suggested the following as an urgent focus for confession and reflection on the part of first-world Christians:
I want you to set your eyes and your hearts on these peoples who are suffering so much—some from poverty and hunger, others from oppression and repression. Then (since I am a Jesuit), standing before this people thus crucified you must repeat St. Ignatius’ examination from the first week of the Spiritual Exercises. Ask yourselves: What have I done to crucify them? What do I do to uncrucify them? What must I do for this people to rise again?
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To pray in this way, recognizing our complicity in the suffering of others and discerning redress, is risky and challenging, for it may will expose disciples of Jesus to danger.
The Dangerous Memory of Jesus
Catholic Theologian Johann Baptist Metz (1928–2019) was one of the first to speak of “danger” with respect to the public, political implications of Jesus’s life, crucifixion, and resurrection. Metz’s theology was profoundly shaped by trauma he experienced toward the end of World War II, when he was forced into the German army at the age of sixteen and sent to the front lines in the company of one hundred other young conscripts. By chance one day, he was dispatched to deliver a message to the battalion headquarters, and upon return found all of his comrades slaughtered, overrun by an Allied tank squadron. His youth came to an end that day. As he puts it, “I remember nothing but a wordless cry. Thus I see myself to this very day, and behind this memory all my childhood dreams crumble away.” 8 His struggle with memories of this experience and with the horror of the Holocaust framed his political trajectory—a struggle deeply informed by the emerging witness of Latin American liberation theologians (like Ellacuría) and base communities from countries like El Salvador. What emerged from Metz’s wrestling came to be known as “political theology”—a corrective to the privatized and excessively-spiritualized Christianity of Europe.
Metz’s political theology bears witness to “the dangerous Christ” who breaks through our forgetfulness of the suffering of others. He states the import of this every bit as pointedly as Ellacuría: “Whoever hears the message of the resurrection of Christ in such a way that the cry of the crucified has become inaudible in it, hears not gospel but myth.” 9 To follow Jesus, he says, is to risk danger and persecution. Yet for Metz, this is where salvation emerges into view. A Christianity that is easy to bear—that is “the symbolic exaltation of what is going on anyway and of what determines the way of the world”—is anemic. Metz contends that to be close to Jesus is to be close to danger, for it requires a political theology of conversion and repentance and discipleship in solidarity with the poor. 10 Thus Metz’s theology prompts reflection not only on the dangerous memory of Jesus, but also on the dangerous witness of life in Christ.
Paul and the Dangerous Witness of Life in Christ
New Testament scholar Brigette Kahl’s groundbreaking work on Paul’s letter to the churches of Galatia provides a biblical resource for reflection that resonates profoundly with Metz’s “political theology” and sense of the danger entailed in life in Christ. In Kahl’s brilliant reimaging of Galatians, the “other gospel” that Paul condemns in the letter is not that of Judaizers, as long supposed, but rather the gospel of Caesar and imperial religion—what Kahl calls the megachurch of the Roman empire, with its law and order violence against those who bucked the system. Roman law, rather than torah, is front and center. For Kahl, the crux of what was happening in the Galatian churches had to do with Roman law vis-à-vis the Jews. Roman law did not require Jews to participate fully in the imperial cult. Jews were granted an exception—a back door of respectability that did not require of them full recognition of Caesar’s divinity. They were largely exempt from worship in the megachurch of imperial Rome. 11
But what were gentile followers of Jesus in the Roman province of Galatia to do with respect to imperial religion? They found themselves in a serious bind, for the Gauls (or Galatians) were historic enemies of Rome. Indeed, Roman hostility towards the Gauls was enshrined in public media, such as statues depicting them as a vanquished barbarian menace.
The Dying Gaul. 3rd cent. BCE. Statue celebrating Roman victory over the Celtic Galatians in Anatolia. Capitoline Museum, Rome. HIP/Art Resource, NY.
Most notably, a legendary sculpture commonly known as “The Dying Gaul” (and also as “The Dying Galatian”), portraying a wounded Galatian warrior, commemorates Roman subjugation of barbarian and lawless peoples. This depiction has an eerie resonance with ways in which racist imagination construes and distorts Black bodies in our own day. Consider, for example, theologian Kelly Brown Douglas’s description of the Black body in American racial history: “The very construction of the black body as an uncontrollable beast, given its hypersexualized nature, means this body must be controlled. . . . A free black body is tantamount to a wild animal on the loose.” 12 The symbolism of the dying Gaul is much the same. Gauls then, and Blacks now, are viewed in their respective racist contexts as savage, requiring violence to control them.
Thus, people were likely to take notice if Galatians/Gauls, the vanquished enemy of Rome, did not acknowledge Rome’s sovereignty and Caesar’s lordship through participation in the imperial cult—if they refused to join the megachurch and bow before Caesar. Think of the repercussions in our own day when NFL football players take a knee during the national anthem to protest racialized police violence—the backlash that comes their way when they are deemed insufficiently patriotic. Now, as then, people notice, and there are consequences. So the politically dangerous bind in which gentile Galatians found themselves was this: they believed that Jesus was Lord, not Caesar; moreover, their Lord was crucified by Rome as an insurrectionist. How, then, were they to navigate the expectation of participation in the imperial cult? Failure to participate would be noticed and place them under threat of persecution. Circumcision provided an answer. By circumcising themselves, they could “pass” as Jews and secure exemption from imperial worship, taking a back door to respectability. 13 Indeed, it would have been dangerous to do otherwise! Kahl’s reimagining of the circumstances the Galatian churches faced makes perfect sense of Paul’s declaration in Gal 6:12: “It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh that try to compel you to be circumcised—only that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ.”
From Paul’s perspective, this solution was an abomination, for the church was to be a witness in this world to an alternative reality. Indeed, the church was to be the beachhead of God’s new creation precisely as a community of diverse people united in worship of Jesus Christ as Lord—a countercultural community in which hostile divisions and subordinations based in race, class, and gender were washed away in baptism (Gal 3:28). By submitting to circumcision, the Galatian churches were reinscribing ancient divisions and hostilities between Jews and gentiles. They also were allowing the very system of domination that crucified Jesus to go unchecked and unchallenged by their public witness as a community in which “neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything!” (Gal 6:15). 14
Paul acknowledges that witness to new creation and the lordship of Jesus Christ are costly. It may well result in the persecution they seek to avoid through circumcision (“that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ,” Gal 6:12). Thus, his letter to the churches of Galatia clearly provides biblical support for Metz’s dictum that to be close to Christ is to be close to danger.
Danger as the Consequence of Discipleship
The notion that to be close to Christ is to be close to danger raises a disturbing question: could exposure to danger or persecution be described as “God’s will” for disciples of Jesus Christ? This question inevitably surfaces in relation to a classic Gospel text, when Jesus says to his followers: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34). But what, exactly, is Jesus asking of us? What does cross-bearing entail? Is suffering ever the will of God? Some traditional readings of this text have suggested as much, conveying suffering not only as God’s will for us, but even as redemptive. But I would contend that suffering due to abuses of power is always antithetical to the will of God. Moreover, it is important that we be clear about the fact that when Jesus calls for cross-bearing, suffering in general is not in view, but rather suffering that comes our way as a consequence of discipleship—as a direct result of following Jesus and embodying in our own lives the alternative reality (the “kingdom” or “reign of God”) to which he bore witness. Disciples of Jesus Christ should have eyes wide open to the fact that bearing such witness may well provoke the world’s enmity and backlash.
My own reflection on this text has been clarified through an important study by Raquel St. Clair, entitled Call and Consequences: A Womanist Reading of Mark. St. Clair argues that traditional interpretations of the text, commending self-denial and the bearing of others’ burdens, have been harmful in the lives of African American women, who have been forced into exploitative surrogacy roles (e.g., as domestic workers or surrogate mothers) throughout their history. From this social location, it is offensive to suggest that the suffering of surrogacy is ever “God’s will.” Moreover, St. Clair critiques traditional interpretations of the text that detach Jesus’s cross from his life and ministry, in which he nonviolently resisted social evils that deformed and defaced human life and sought liberation for the outcast. In other words, Jesus’s life and ministry conveyed that humans, rather than God, are the source of persecution and suffering. Humans are crucifiers, not God. Indeed, followers of Jesus are called to name and resist evil as he did, rather than to accept it—this is God’s will for disciples. But as St. Clair notes, there can be painful consequences to following Jesus and resisting evil. In Jesus’s case, that consequence was a cross. Thus, she clearly distinguishes between suffering that comes one’s way due to abuses of power and the pain of social consequences that result from resistance to suffering. 15 I find this distinction helpful.
In light of St. Clair’s important distinctions, I would interpret Jesus’s teaching on taking up the cross as agitational in nature. He calls disciples to embody an alternative reality—the “kingdom” or “reign of God,” which entails the always dangerous process of naming and resisting the crosses of suffering that many already bear in our world, fully aware of the fact that this may well evoke backlash. Such cross-bearing is dangerous because it disrupts the status quo and elicits reaction, even persecution. In our current historical moment, there may be no doubt that racism is the dominant cross bearing down on our landscape—the dominant cross of American history and culture. Therefore, disciples of Jesus Christ are called to nonviolent resistance of its savage force. Cross bearing, in our context, entails the daily tension of agitating, naming, and resisting racism—knowing that there will be backlash, for regrettably, forces of White supremacy are alive and well in our midst. Yet as theologian Ted Jennings claims, disciples of Jesus must be willing to face the consequences of naming and resisting the crosses in our midst, and to show “the audacity of solidarity with the crucified.” 16
Naming the Crosses that Litter the Landscape
A key first step toward solidarity with the crucified entails recognizing and naming the crosses that litter the landscape of our world. For American Christians, this will mean acknowledging and naming racism as a major wound in our collective psyche—a systemic reality present from the beginning of our history as a nation that continues to deform our common life. In Galatians, the apostle Paul chastises early Christian churches for their failure to recognize crucifixions in their own landscape, berating them with these words: “You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly exhibited as crucified!” (Gal 3:1). At first glance, it is an odd statement, for Galatian believers in Asia Minor were not present in Judea on the occasion of Jesus’s crucifixion. But Pauline scholar Davina Lopez makes a piercing observation about this verse: “Paul’s Galatians did not see Jesus’ crucifixion, but they did not have to. There were plenty of examples before everyone’s eyes (in real life, in stone, on coins) of capture, torture, bondage and execution of others in the name of affirming Rome’s universal sovereignty through domination.” 17 Cross bearing, in Paul’s context, entailed naming and resisting the crucifying forces of empire.
So, I find myself wondering what Paul would write to twenty-first-century American Christians about our own failures to recognize and name the cross of racism and suffering dominating our own imperial landscape, and our collusions in it. This is what I imagine he might say: “O foolish American Christians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Freddie Gray were publicly exhibited as crucified!” In our day such crucifixions are recorded on cellphones, and images of them even more widely disseminated, so we are truly without excuse.
The cross is a primary Christian resource that exposes such suffering—one that can move us to see, name, and stand in solidarity with the crucified in our communities. Having taken this first step, solidarity then demands that disciples of the crucified and risen Jesus agitate for change, fully aware of the backlash that may come their way in agitation’s wake. Such solidarity is essential with respect to the racialized wounds that deform our common life, for they are embodied in the political structures and policies of our social world. It is to these racialized structures and polices that we now turn, in order to discern means by which to resist them.
Self-Interest, Agitational Power, and the Antiracist Politics of the Cross
Historian and antiracist activist Ibram X. Kendi contends that neutrality with respect to race (e.g., the claim that one is “not racist” or “color blind”) is detrimental to healing the wound of racialized violence in our common life: “One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of ‘not racist.’ The claim of ‘not racist’ neutrality is a mask for racism.” 18 Moreover, Kendi notes that racism and antiracism are not static but dynamic states of being—one can be racist in one moment and antiracist in another. Movement between the two is fluid and ongoing throughout our lives. In Kendi’s view, the key to dismantling racism is disrupting and transforming self-interested power and policy: “Powerful economic, political, and cultural self-interest. . . has been behind racist policies.” 19 Thus, racist policy should be the target of antiracist initiatives because policy is more specific than general notions of systemic racism or discrimination. Racist policy sustains racist power. 20
I find it helpful to bring these astute observations into conversation with the political theology of the cross that I have been articulating in this essay. Clearly, racism, which finds expression in both public and personal abuses of power, has been a predominant crucifying power throughout American history. But as Shawn Copeland contends, the cross of Jesus can disrupt our amnesia of Black crucified bodies by initiating us into a community that remembers Jesus’s suffering and enables us to see that “the plantation is not a relic of the past,” but rather reinscribed in the present. 21 We can embrace this dangerous memory because a “loving God will hold us in our risk, will not allow us to forget, and will hold us in hope.” 22 Indeed, the very Spirit of the crucified and risen Christ empowers his disciples to disrupt crucifixions in their midst and to agitate for liberating, transformative and reparative policies that promote the flourishing of life for minoritized people— though disruption and agitation is likely to provoke backlash. How might people of faith discern constructive ways to live into this calling?
In my own practice of ministry, I have found that broad-based community organizing offers a practical, hands-on set of tools for constructive disruption and agitation—for countering crucifixions in ways that create space for God’s resurrecting power to be at work in concrete situations where racism resides. For those unfamiliar with the term, “community organizing” is a process of bringing people together to act in their shared self-interest. The Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), founded in the 1940s, is the nation’s largest and oldest network of faith- and community-based organizations. As its website explains, it “partners with religious congregations and civic organizations at the local level to build broad-based organizing projects, which create new capacity in a community for leadership development, citizen-led action and relationships across the lines that often divide our communities.” 23 For the past thirty years, I have served on the clergy leadership teams of two IAF affiliates (in Baltimore, Maryland and Washington, DC), so community organizing is in my blood and has played a formative role in my practice of ministry. It has taught me a great deal about the power of relational culture—the power of connecting deeply with people’s stories of anger over injustices and their yearning to do something about it. Over and over, I have found that the tools of community organizing are an effective way to organize a local community for engagement on issues that present obstacles to human flourishing. I am convinced that they can play an important role in the kairos moment in which the church finds itself at present, as it lives into the challenge of antiracist work. Let me explore four principles central to the practice of community organizing—“self-interest,” “power,” “relational and agitational power,” and “action in the reaction”—as a way of developing concrete applications of an antiracist theology of the cross.
Self-Interest
The first principle and tool of community organizing is “self-interest.” A chief polarity to which organizations like the IAF closely attend is the tension between “the world as it is” and “the world as it should be.” In “the world as it is,” self-interest is the prime motivator for survival and leads to individualism, selfish behavior, and, more broadly, to racist ideas and policies. The IAF, however, teaches that self-interest can actually be a relation-building, world-affirming motivation—it can move us toward the “world as it should be.” In terms of its etymology, the notion of “interest” is a combination of two Latin terms: inter (“between” or “among”) and esse (“to be”). What this suggests is that our interest is not necessarily confined to our own wellbeing, but also resides within our relations with others. 24 Indeed, Arnie Graf, a master community organizer, contends that self-interest can be the opposite of selfishness in the sense that a deep understanding of “multiple self-interests” is needed in order to create a robust community needed for change. 25
Initially, persons of faith may need convincing that “self-interest” has a constructive role to play in Christian community engagement. However, as ethicist Sondra Wheeler observes, “the ultimate moral ideal to which theologians like Augustine point is not really the suppression of self-love in favor of love for others. It is instead a vision of love rightly ordered, with the love of God being both the source and limit of all proper loves for created things. Only those who love God above all else can love God’s creatures, including themselves, as they should.” 26 Self-interest, positively construed as rightly ordered loves, has everything to do with engagement in antiracist work that aims to disrupt racist ideas and policies. Indeed, a broad-based coalition of multiple self-interests is, for community organizing organizations like the IAF, the key to building community, thereby generating collective power for engagement with obstacles to human flourishing—obstacles standing in the way between “the world as it is” and “the world as it should be” and the power for addressing the issues therein.
Power
The second principle and tool of community organizing is “power.” The word “power”—like “self-interest”—is a word that initially, for some, may have negative connotations, given rampant and abusive exercise of it in ways that mar our common life. Indeed, I have argued that the cross is a symbol for the abuse of power—that one of its primary functions is to expose all such abuses of power, large and small as not the way of God in the world, and to summon resistance to them. Resistance, however, is another kind of power. In fact, Kendi argues that all of us have the power to resist racism and racist policies—even though one of the inherent features of racism is selling the illusion that racial supremacy cannot be countered. But as Martin Luther King Jr. argued, “power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice.” 27
Moreover, the resurrection of Jesus represents God’s emphatic “no” to abuses of power and is itself a symbol of the political power of resistance, especially for the crucified. Ted Jennings traces the political roots of the concept of resurrection in Judaism to the period of the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucid emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes (167–160 BCE). Antiochus’s aggressive Hellenization of Jerusalem and the temple eventually entailed decrees forbidding Jewish religious practices. The Maccabean resistance to this tyranny led to the execution of many Jews, and belief in the resurrection of the executed emerged as a protest against the fate of these martyrs (Dan 12:2–3). The resistance against Antiochus provided a template for later generations of Jews, including the first generations of Jesus followers. As Jennings puts it, “The resurrection of the executed is the hope for divine justice that overthrows the dominion of the tyrant,” for “in the resurrection of Jesus the principalities and powers of the world are already judged and condemned as rebels against the rule of God.” 28 Thus, the resurrection of Jesus is the foundation for the church’s political resistance to Caesar. 29 So when Paul claims co-crucifixion and co-resurrection in Christ (Gal 2:19–20), he is placing himself in solidarity with crucified others in his midst, resisting the forces that deform and deface the defeated and vanquished. For Paul, the violence of racism, classism, and gendered hierarches is washed away in baptism (Gal 3:28). In short, God’s resurrection of the crucified one is a critical resource for people of faith that inspires the formation of communities empowered to resist racism—communities that embody God’s emphatic “no” to racialized abuses of power.
Relational and Agitational Power
The third principle and tool of community organizing is the “relational and agitational power” that is generated in community. The foundation for this kind of communal power is a simple practice called the “relational meeting.” Indeed, it is the guts of community organizing, for as IAF leader Ed Chambers noted, there are two ways of acting in the world: one is task-oriented and the other is relational, and the latter is far more powerful, for it can be the means for achieving many tasks. In a relational meeting, two people meet face to face to share passions and what makes them tick. The relational meeting is the “glue” that enables people to embrace the tension between the “world as it is” and the “world as it should be,” and to agitate movement between these two worlds.
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There are two things of note about the relational meeting: listening is as important as talking, and asking the right questions is critical. Chambers says that:
In relational meetings, the “why” questions so often avoided by people have a space in which to surface: Why are things like they are; why am I doing what I do; why don’t I spend more time on the things I say are most important to me? . . . Short succinct question are the best: “Why do you say that;” “what does that mean to you;” “why do you care:” “have you ever tried to do anything about it?” You must be prepared to agitate with brief, tight questions like these, then to shut up and listen, and finally to share stories about yourself.
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Arnie Graf speaks of the relational meeting as a way of sharing stories that reveal our deepest self-interest and that can break down stereotypes, enabling us to challenge assumptions or to negotiate new ways of being and acting in concrete situations. 32
I have used relational meetings in a variety of settings, many of them related to adverse effects of racism such as lack of affordable housing and jobs—both of which predominantly affect racially-minoritized people in urban areas. Perhaps a concrete example will illustrate the potential for such meetings to effect structural change. In the mid-1990s, a broad-based organization called BUILD (Baltimoreans United In Leadership Development), of which my congregation was a part, organized predominantly Black low-income workers in Baltimore. Scores of relational meetings with workers revealed that their wages were not paying the rent and keeping food on the table. Many people had to work two jobs to make ends meet, and, as a result, parents struggled with childcare and found it difficult to participate in the life of the schools that their children attended. We learned that this was true for many of the predominantly Black, low-income citizens of Baltimore’s inner-city. What eventually emerged from relational meetings between workers and members of BUILD churches became Baltimore’s Living Wage Campaign.
Backlash was swift. BUILD’s initiative created a huge amount of tension within the business community and even in our own churches. The mayor of Baltimore initially supported BUILD’s living wage efforts, until the city’s business community began to pressure him to withdraw his support. The Baltimore Sun’s editorial staff opined that BUILD’s living wage campaign was giving the city a “black eye” and that Baltimore would cease to be an attractive site for new businesses. Workers were threatened with job loss if they continued to work with BUILD. Members of our own congregations resisted, extolling the near “canonized” principle that minimum wage work was an anchor in the workplace and could lead to a better life. There may have been some truth to this principle when the minimum wage law was originally passed, but by the 1990s a convincing case for this could no longer be made.
But BUILD stood fast; clergy and church members vowed to use our power to stand with workers when they were threatened. We also did countless relational meetings with disgruntled church members concerned about our work—some changed their minds and joined us. Eventually, BUILD successfully lobbied the Baltimore City Council to address the situation, which then pressured Mayor Kurt Schmoke to pass the first city service-contract living wage bill in the country. It became a model for other cities around the country, including a similar bill passed in New York City.
Some might question whether the wage structure in an urban area like Baltimore was inherently “racist.” But surely, by definition, any economic structure that predominantly affects racial minorities and creates racial inequality is racist. As Kendi contends,
A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups. By policy, I mean written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people. There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.
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For this reason, as noted above, community organizing work directs its energies toward changing policies, and it all starts with relational meetings.
Action Is in the Reaction
The fourth principle and community organizing tool holds that, with respect to any successful action (like the one above), the “action is in the reaction.” Not only was the racist wage structure of Baltimore changed, but heretofore marginalized workers were recognized as people with power demanding respect. Thereafter, workers organized to respond to other issues affecting their livelihoods. None of this could have happened without the resistance and agitation of organized people.
To this day, I would contend that it was the Spirit of the crucified and risen Christ that empowered the churches of BUILD to discern crucifixions in the landscape of their community, and then to endure conflict and tension as they agitated to disrupt them, working for liberating, transformative, and reparative policies that would affect a greater degree of flourishing life for minoritized people. There is much work still to be done, in Baltimore, and in all the corners of our nation, as we grapple with the challenges of antiracist work. To organize is to re-organize. But I can attest that I experienced in those low-income workers of Baltimore the very presence of the crucified and risen Christ who said, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me” (Matt. 25:41). Joining them in cross-bearing—in naming crucifixions in our city and standing in solidarity with the crucified—was taking steps at least into God’s future as it struggled toward realization in our midst.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I have argued that we are living in a kairos moment of racial reckoning in this country and that the dangerous memory of Jesus crucified and risen disrupts our amnesia to the lie of racism and empowers us to become agitational communities of resistance to racist ideas and policies. Indeed, our calling as the church of the crucified and risen Christ is to name and resist racism, even if it provokes reaction or persecution.