I recently led a lengthy workshop on white identity with a group of students at an InterVarsity event at a university in Chicago. It was a vibrant conversation, and I left feeling very positive about our interactions. When I was in college, neither my friends nor I were engaging in anything deep regarding faith—and certainly not anything as significant as cultural identity. Yet there was a group of young adults wrestling very seriously with what it means to be a white Christian in our day and age, and it inspired me.
We covered much of the same material as what’s in this book and then set aside some time for Q&A and discussion at the end. One of the students, who had clearly been paying attention, put a preface before his final question: “By now I am very clear that I shouldn’t ask the question ‘What am I supposed to do?’” Everyone laughed, which affirmed that I had covered that point more than enough times. He then asked, “Is there any way to tell if or when we are moving toward authentic awakening? Are there any markers along the road that tell us whether we’re going the right direction?”
These are legitimate questions, and they set the stage for what I’d like to explore in this sixth stage: awakening. While I always emphasize the need for white people to seek revelation, knowledge, wisdom, and insight humbly, it’s also reasonable to be paying attention to certain markers of progress along the way. This isn’t to insinuate that we’re looking for a finish line or planning to get to a point where we’ve arrived at a destination. Just as in our Christian walk we are to renew our minds consistently, so we always will be in the process of moving from blindness to sight.
I vividly recall many conversations with mentors of color in which I sheepishly asked a version of this same question: What are the mile markers that indicate I’m experiencing authentic awakenings? I was aware that what awake meant for me may be irrelevant to a larger set of questions that I needed to be asking. So this chapter is an overview of the seven markers that confirm that we’re experiencing awakenings needed to continue moving down the path of cultural identity development.
Given that I’m writing this book for those who are looking at racial justice through the lens of faith, it’s appropriate that we fix the first marker on a deeper revelation of the character of God. In his book Knowledge of the Holy, A. W. Tozer said, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”1 I couldn’t agree more with this quote. There’s nothing that shapes our actions and behaviors more than how we see God.
Colossians 2:6-10 tells us that in Christ Jesus we see the full expression of the character of God. And when we surrender our lives to him as Lord, we are brought into his fullness. Therefore, an awakening to justice, reconciliation, and cultural identity begins with seeing the full expression of Jesus with increasing clarity. To be awake is to see Jesus as he identified his mission, as stated in his hometown of Nazareth when he opened the scrolls of Isaiah in the synagogue and said,
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. . . .
Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
To know Jesus is to know the one who is anointed by the Spirit to proclaim freedom, to heal the blind, and to liberate the oppressed. This is how Jesus introduced himself, and it remained central to his identity.
When John the Baptist was imprisoned for preaching about Jesus, he was understandably shaken. His faith was wavering, and he wanted to ensure that he had indeed seen clearly. John sent some servants to confirm, and this is what Jesus told them:
When the men came to Jesus, they said, “John the Baptist sent us to you to ask, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?’”
At that very time Jesus cured many who had diseases, sicknesses and evil spirits, and gave sight to many who were blind. So he replied to the messengers, “Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor.” (Luke 7:20-22)
Jesus identified himself with those on the margins right up to the end. He famously used the imagery of sheep (righteous) and goats (unrighteous) to represent those who understood his ministry and those who did not:
Then the King will say to those on his right, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” (Matthew 25:34-36)2
Jesus bluntly stated that the difference between those who knew him and those who didn’t came down to seeing. After commending the righteous for seeing him in the hungry, the thirsty, the immigrant, and the naked (Matthew 25:37-40), he rebuked the unrighteous for failing to see him: “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’ He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me’” (Matthew 25:44-45).
To be theologically awake is to take these words of Jesus seriously: “No one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again” (John 3:3). It is also to embrace the fact that a spiritual rebirth ushers in both the salvation of our souls and our participation in the redemption of this world. It is also to hold together activism and evangelism; protest and prayer; personal piety and social justice; intimacy with Jesus and proximity to the poor.
When Jesus said no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again, he was pointing to a contest between two rival kingdoms. Therefore, it follows that one of the first and most important signs of transformational awakening is a newfound ability to recognize and distinguish between these two kingdoms as well as to identify the battle line accurately.
The kingdom of God is a sweeping term encompassing every dimension of a Christian’s life. But there’s no need for the broad scope to distract us from what is most esteemed in God’s kingdom: human beings. God has affection for us that eclipses anything else in the created order. As human beings, we’re created in the image of God, are known and set apart before birth, are knit together in our mother’s womb, are of such importance to the Father that he knows the individual hairs on our head, are specifically sought after by Jesus, and have an angelic party thrown in our honor whenever we repent and turn to God (Genesis 1:26; Jeremiah 1:5; Psalm 139:13; Matthew 10:30; Luke 19:10; 15:10).
This is why the sin of racism is so serious. The system of race, at its core, is a revaluation of human worth. Instead of ordering human value around the doctrine of the imago Dei, it ascribes value based on proximity to whiteness. Dr. Reggie Williams, a professor at McCormick Seminary, describes this historical act of playing God by ascribing value to the creation of the “white normative human being.” He says that throughout American history the white male has been held up as the ideal human that everyone else is measured against. “It is what historically allowed us to colonize Native people, subject Black people to slavery, to control immigration narratives for Latino and Asian people, etc., and it still remains coded into our values.”3
One place where we can clearly see a disturbing reordering of human value around whiteness is in portrayals of Jesus. For centuries, he has been cast as a white man in Western art, often with European features such as blue eyes and light hair. This is obviously inaccurate from a historical standpoint, yet that hasn’t stopped us from accommodating that image.
I was with a white friend once at St. Sabina’s Church on the South Side of Chicago, which has a large mural of a black Jesus on the ceiling. He began to grumble under his breath that it was sacrilegious to portray Jesus in a historically inaccurate way. I reminded him that not only was Jesus a Jewish, Middle Eastern man, but as a carpenter he surely spent a lot of time in the sun. If one had to guess which side of the dark/light spectrum his skin was, it would be reasonable to assume dark. I challenged this friend to take note of the unexamined ways race had shaped the way he viewed everything, in light of a black Jesus seeming sacrilegious while a white Jesus was comfortable for him. I also challenged him to research ways that portrayals of Jesus as white have impacted nonwhite minorities.
For the person whom God has awakened, recognizing the imago Dei is one of the preeminent battles in our country’s legacy. It is, in effect, a brawl between two warring kingdoms. The kingdom of this world continues to accommodate and promote a racial hierarchy that values people based on their proximity to whiteness. It attempts to erase the story of native people, to perpetuate a narrative that says black people are dangerous, and to portray Mexican immigrants as an economic threat. It attempts either to render Asian Americans as invisible or to paint them as a monolithic group—and one that can be used as pawns against black people. All the while, it attempts to deceive white people into cowering in fear and trying to protect what we believe is our racial birthright.
The kingdom of God, on the other hand, has a completely different narrative. It shouts from the mountaintops that all human beings are created in the image of God and are therefore inherently valuable. It says that Jesus Christ has come to tear down the old visions of humanity that divide and to create in and through him “one new humanity” (Ephesians 2:15). It says that we who are in Christ are new creations, armed with the vision of reconciliation and sent into the world bearing witness to God’s kingdom.
The term white supremacy tends to trigger defensive reactions and is often taken personally as an accusation of racism. But once you’ve crossed the threshold of awakening, you understand that there is a fundamental difference between the system of white supremacy (which must be challenged and ultimately dismantled) and the personhood of white individuals (who are made in the image of God and are therefore inherently worthy and valuable). The system of white supremacy is the offspring of the dark powers of this world, a descriptor used by the apostle Paul: “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:10-12).
Zora Neale Hurston, an African American novelist and short story writer, was a significant literary figure in the Harlem Renaissance, along with Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman. In her seminal 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, she wrote, “Common danger made common friends. Nothing sought a conquest over the other.” The common danger (Hurston’s term) that makes common friends out of all of us is the power of darkness (the apostle Paul’s term). In this context, the enemy goes by the name “white supremacy.” The battle should never be seen as one waged against “flesh and blood” but instead against the system of darkness that attacks those made of flesh and blood.
And that is exactly what white supremacy does. It attacks the humanity of every living being. It attacks the personhood of people of color by promoting a hateful view that they are subhuman (sub comes from the Latin “under” or “less than”). It attacks the personhood of those white people by promoting a hateful view that they/we are suprahuman (supra comes from the Latin “above” or “beyond normal”). The enemy is not each other; it is the system of white supremacy and the evil one who leverages it for destructive purposes. We all need to have our humanity restored and recalibrated to what and who God says we are.
The only way we can move past defensiveness about white supremacy is to realize what it is and what it is not, a task that will be daunting during the early stages of the journey. Without being born again and starting over in a new kingdom reality, we have almost no chance of making the distinction. When we hear about white supremacy, superiority, and anything else in that lexical family, our natural reaction is to assume we’re being attacked. But once we can identify it as a system, principality, and power of darkness, we realize there’s nothing left to defend. In fact, we realize that our own interests are at stake, for that system dehumanizes us as much as it does anyone else.
Brandon Green, a pastor on our staff, summarizes this distinction between the danger of the system and the value of individuals in a crisp manner: “As Christians, we are trying to kill white supremacy without killing white people.” To a person new to this journey, that statement may sound threatening. But to someone awakened to the kingdom reality of race in our country, it makes perfect sense.
That’s why I’ve come to believe that a white person’s reaction to the term white supremacy is the most tangible sign of his or her being awake or not. Once white supremacy is understood as the evil and dangerous system it is, the common enemy becomes abundantly clear. The enemy is not each other; this is not white people versus people of color. No, the enemy is white supremacy, and the evil one leverages that system for destructive purposes. It’s a dark and dangerous system, and it must be opposed and dismantled at all costs.
Remember Drew Hart’s story of a white woman who joined a group of Christian reconcilers for an honest discussion on race, and the contents of the discussion caused her insides to start spinning? Despite an interest in growing in this area, she felt threatened by the conversation around white supremacy to the point that she began to mishear things, such as thinking participants were saying white people can’t be Christian. Hart asked her a number of follow-up questions, and I think the most important was this: Is it possible that conflicting emotions from the conversation were a sign of still drawing a substantial amount of self-worth from being white?
This was a profound yet practical question because it got to the heart of this third marker: defensiveness. He asked if she had awakened to the point that she could differentiate between the system of white supremacy, which is evil, and her innate value as a white human being, which was not being challenged. The fact that she couldn’t do so was not a condemnation of her character or a devaluing of her personhood. It was simply a reality check. She was awakening but still had some distance to go before her own identity was free from being propped up by subliminal messages about whiteness.
The ability to no longer be defensive about white supremacy is a significant mark in the journey of blindness-to-sight and toward cultural identity development. It means you see the distinction between your worth and value as someone created in the image of God as well as the false set of values ascribed to you (and others) by white supremacy.
You realize that who you are in Jesus is beautiful and precious and worth living from at all costs and that the message of white supremacy is sinful and something you have to untangle yourself from.
Being confident and clear in identifying white supremacy is central to the awakening process, and I assume this as we explore the four remaining markers. One of the most immediate implications of this clear vision is that the awakened person has a new respect for what diversity can and can’t do. He learns to see a lack of diversity as the branch of the tree and white supremacy as the root.
One of the first blindness-to-sight discoveries for a white person (or church) tends to be the aha moment when she realizes her world is almost entirely white. When this epiphany happens, there’s an almost immediate desire to pursue diversity. For a white individual, the pursuit happens through forming friendships with people of color. For the white congregation, it happens through diverse populations merging into the congregation. The reflex to pursue immediate diversity is understandable, as it often appears to be the logical next step upon discovering the Eurocentric nature of friendships and ecclesial circles. Yet this approach is fraught with problems. When our first attempt is to pursue diversity, we risk prioritizing the secondary problem (lack of relationship) over the primary and most threatening problem (white supremacy).
Crossing the threshold of awakening reverses this order. Transformative revelation allows us to see that the lack of diversity is not and never was the result of a random set of social factors; instead it’s a direct fruit of the legacy of white supremacy. We come to terms with the fact that since the time we were born we have been conditioned to prize whiteness and to associate it with all things good—beauty, intelligence, capacity, etc. We come to terms with the fact that we were steered as young people toward “good” schools districts, “good” neighborhoods, “good” universities, and “good” jobs. We didn’t have the eyes to see it then, and we now realize that “good” was the politically safe way to say “white.” This normalization of the goodness of whiteness has led to a lack of diverse experience, and we realize it has shaped us as white people in a very specific and unique way.
Transformational vision allows us to see that the root of all these problems is white supremacy and that the growth of its branches is the racial segregation that we now find ourselves afflicted with. This is the epiphany that most matters; it puts the problem of lack of diversity in its proper place. It also gives us clarity about how to prioritize our efforts: nothing is more critical than to pursue the dismantling of white supremacy, both in the prisons of our own minds and in the toxic structures that everyday people participate in. From there we can pursue diversity, but only when the main priority is clear.
Let me share a story that illustrates the difference between early sight and advanced sight on this front. A pastor of a large, suburban, white church asked for advice on diversifying his congregation. He shared his enthusiasm about a recent epiphany he’d had about racial justice and told me he and his board had made a commitment to add at least two nonwhite employees to the team over the next twelve months. He then asked for guidance on setting that process up.
Rather than giving him suggestions, I asked, “What do you hope will happen to the church as a result of hiring two staff people of color?” He was ready for this question and answered quickly: “I want my congregation to know that our leadership is serious about this vision. I believe that the best way for them to know how serious we are is to back it up by hiring people of color.”
That sounded great, and I could see he was serious about it. I also recognized it may be the beginnings of a transformational awakening, so I continued to probe. “How will you create structures and systems for allowing these staff members to speak into any vestiges of white supremacy that they discover in the culture of your church?”
This question threw him for a loop. He hadn’t thought about this angle, and to his credit, he was very transparent about that. He said, “I don’t think I could use the phrase white supremacy within my church. They aren’t ready for it yet.” I thanked him for his humility and candor. I told him that if he continued to walk in spirit of truth, love, and humility, he would come to see God’s kingdom in new ways.
We spent the next hour talking about the relationship between white supremacy and diversity, and he developed a new appreciation for the prioritization of each one. He began to realize that hiring staff of color might be a detrimental first step for the journey God had that church on. After all, how could he possibly empower the new staff to speak into vestiges of white supremacy if the congregants were unable even to utter the term? And how could he protect the new staff from the backlash when they began to challenge the historical assumptions of that institution? It was a nearly impossible task that would guarantee pain and sorrow. While I very much hoped he would be able to figure out how to seek diversity in the leadership team, it was also clear that a lot of shepherding needed to happen to get his white congregation ready for it.
This same dynamic applies to the awakening white person who longs to have diverse friendships. We tend to underappreciate two dynamics when we seek crosscultural interactions, and we save both our friends and ourselves a lot of pain if we take the time to consider them up front: First, we should count the cost of what we’re trying to accomplish. Second, we should count the cost of what it will require of our friend.
Count the cost for yourself. If the only reason you pursue friendship with a person of color is because diversity seems to be the next step, take a lengthy pause before moving forward. The primary enemy of God’s kingdom in this realm is white supremacy, and what we need in our transformational journey is friends who can help us understand what that means. So if the purpose of a friendship is to learn to see and dismantle white supremacy, that’s a great reason to pursue friendship. But even then, you must be ready for the challenge this will pose to your upbringing and views. If you’re feeling sensitive about probing around the idea of white supremacy, it’s not fair to pursue your future friend without letting that person know where you stand. Pursue your own awakening journey outside the context of crosscultural friendships until you truly long for that type of interaction.
Count the cost for your friend. If you’re white, and you’re pursuing friendships with people of color who can help you understand white supremacy, take into account what it may cost them. In a conversation in which I was talking about my illumination about race with an African American friend, her eyes suddenly welled with tears. When I asked her what was wrong, she said that though she valued conversations and though she was glad for my progress, such conversations were often very painful for her. She said, “I believe that the gospel calls me to participate in the journey of enlightenment in friends like you, and I’m happy to do so. But the truth is that every traumatic memory I’ve experienced is associated with race, and every time I talk about those, it’s as if I’m reliving the trauma. There’s a human part of me that wonders why I put myself through this time and time again.”
A number of friends of color read the draft of this book, and almost all of them double-underlined this point. We must be conscientious about the cost that comes for our friends of color when we ask them to play this role.
Everything I’ve explored under this marker to this point assumes that the white person is taking the initiative. But what happens when the one taking the initiative is a person of color? What if he’s the one that challenges you to become more aware of the presence of white supremacy?
The percentages show that they are far more likely to be initiators, and that brings the truth of this marker into sharp focus. If we’re unable to realize the presence of white supremacy, we aren’t going to be able to listen to the wisdom being offered to us. And if diversity becomes the limit of what we desire, our cultural identity journey will stall. Holy Spirit awakenings must translate into an ability to challenge the ideology of white supremacy.
I have frequently made reference to the tendency of white people to ask the question “What am I supposed to do?” when embarking on a quest to understand cultural identity. Nikki Toyama-Szeto, a brilliant thinker on race and justice, confirms that this reflex is one of the most important dynamics to address when attempting to progress down the road of enlightenment. Nikki is a vice president within the International Justice Mission, and her role includes directing the IJM Institute for Biblical Justice. She has trained thousands of white people across North America and beyond, and she believes that the tendency to start the exploration journey here is a direct reflection of WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant) influence on our culture.4 This acronym is a broad (and some would say insufficient) label that describes an aggregate of high-status and influential white Americans of English Protestant ancestry that played an instrumental role in establishing American values well into the twentieth century.
White Protestantism would eventually split into two mutually hostile camps—liberals and fundamentalists—that had controlled a disproportionate percentage of the financial, political, and social power in the United States until then. While there are many defining marks associated with the influence of WASP culture on America today, what directly applies to this fourth sign is the way they tended to approach problem solving, according to Toyama-Szeto. Those shaped by the Protestant culture often feel we need to dissect something to understand it; we need to take it apart and put it back together again before it makes sense to us. This drive is what motivates many of us to ask, “What am I supposed to do?” as a starting point and to feel frustrated when we don’t get a clear answer.
We do this instinctively partly because we’re looking for concrete ways to move forward, and that question highlights something worth affirming. But this sits upon a highly dangerous assumption, and that is the part of the question that begs to be seen with greater clarity. When we allow our cultural ethos to shape how we approach problems of racial justice, we easily miss the greatest problem of all: our conditioned blindness. We aren’t engineers who need technical training on how to disassemble and reassemble the pieces of race; instead, we are blind wanderers who need help to see a world that functions according to a different set of rules than what we’ve been raised with. Said another way, we aren’t Nicodemuses who need just a little push over the edge; we must be reborn through the power of Jesus in order to see his kingdom.
Embracing blindness-to-sight as our primary transformational motif has many important benefits. It helps us know how to engage with our friends of color in a new way. It helps us to avoid self-righteousness, because no one ever graduates into the position of authoritative expert. Embracing blindness-to-sight keeps us hungry and humble. Embracing blindness-to-sight helps us to remember that while sincerity and good intentions matter, they aren’t to be confused with a genuine transformation of our vision.
In chapter six, I opened with the healing of the blind man in Mark 8. After Jesus spit into the blind man’s eyes, he asked, “Do you see anything?” When preaching on this passage, Dr. Timothy Keller used humor to underscore the importance of being honest about the progression of sight, saying, “If the man had never admitted that he could not see right, maybe Jesus would not have finished healing him. What if after Jesus asked him if he could see right the man answered, ‘Yes, I see fine.’ That man would have then spent the rest of his life cutting down people and talking to trunks.”5
I love this as a metaphor for the cultural identity journey. Moving from blindness to sight is a process, and it’s imperative that we maintain a grasp on it being a central part of our transformational work. When “What am I supposed to do?” trumps “How do I learn to see?” the result is often the equivalent of cutting down people and talking to trees. The white person who has crossed the threshold of awakening never loses sight of the most important question of all: “How well do I see?”
Another major mile marker of awakening is an increased comfort with acknowledging the reality of privilege. This is a natural extension of awakening to white supremacy. In the same way challenges to this system aren’t meant to be emotional attacks at a personal level, conversations around the special rights or advantages granted as a result of privilege are independent of a white person’s value or identity. The awakened white person therefore realizes that blindness-to-sight applies to privilege as well as supremacy, and she is on the lookout for two different manifestations of privilege blindness.
The first step in overcoming privilege blindness is recognizing that it exists; we get faster and more precise at seeing its everyday manifestations. For example, when I walk down a street in my neighborhood, I recognize that none of my neighbors cross the street to avoid passing me or lock their doors as a safety precaution against me. But that’s not the experience of residents of color, who are often perceived as unsafe. When a police officer drives down the street in my neighborhood looking for potential problems, they look right past me. Yet when they spot a young black or brown person, the chances are high that they’ll stop and interrogate that person. I’ve witnessed this firsthand dozens of times and watched as a random frisk escalated into a problematic situation. It’s heartbreaking that I’m immediately screened out as a potential threat, due to my privilege, while innocent youths experience the opposite. These examples scratch the surface of everyday manifestations of privilege that we can now recognize faster and with greater precision.
A second form of privilege blindness is recognizing our own privilege yet remaining blind to the ways privilege continues to blind us. We must grasp that while our social status privileges us in certain ways, it handicaps us in others. There are literally whole dimensions of reality we don’t understand because of privilege, and certain lenses through which we’ve learned to view the world must be challenged fundamentally. Though it’s significant to be able to overcome the first form of privilege blindness (recognizing it exists), it’s important that we not treat it as a box we check and then move on to life as usual without having checks and balances that help us to continue the awakening process.
Too often I’ve seen white people discover that they have privilege but then treat that recognition as an all-access pass to push forward into their personal agenda for solving problems without any checks or balances on their privilege. While it’s an important step to become aware of one’s privilege, the impact of that awareness becomes diffused if we don’t put steps in place to monitor and challenge that privilege.
The most effective way to guard against this tendency is to make a personal commitment to never lead from privilege without first accessing the voices of those on the margins—particularly those most affected by whatever endeavor you’re undertaking. A great biblical case study for this is Acts 6. In a spirit of caring for the vulnerable, the apostles instituted a food-sharing program for the widows of the community. It served widows of two different cultural backgrounds that were having very different experiences with the food giveaway. The first group of widows was of Hebrew origin, and as such had direct access to the dominant culture of the time. The second group was of Grecian origin, and they felt that their outsider status was resulting in their marginalization when the food was distributed.
This is an important story in the New Testament because it’s the first time we see a conflict involving power and privilege in the emerging church. Luke is the author of the book of Acts, and as a Gentile outsider, he seemed to be curious to see how the early church would respond. Would the apostles recognize the dynamics of power and privilege, or would they dismiss the complaints?
Presumably Luke was delighted as the situation was handled delicately and thoughtfully. Rather than exercising their privilege and making a unilateral decision on behalf of those who were being marginalized, the apostles first paid significant attention to those who were experiencing pain. They empowered the group most affected by the problem to solve their own problem and created a pathway for leaders in the marginalized group to emerge. It was both effective and honoring of everyone in the community. This is a model for racial awakening: we see that we have privilege and that analyzing that privilege must be a communal affair.
This final marker comes in the form of a two-part phrase: hopeful lament. When I reflect on the lament side of the phrase, I’m reminded of the sobering words of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers and social critics, James Baldwin: “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” While I’ll never know even a modicum of what it’s like to be black in America, I imagine that the heart of his statement could extend to all residents of this country.
When we become even relatively awake—or to use Baldwin’s term, conscious—we begin to see with increasing clarity the ways our system of race has dehumanized everyone as well as led to suffering for many on the margins. There’s no way to be conscious of this without feeling grief. I have come to believe we aren’t supposed to ignore, anesthetize, or screen out this grief. In fact, if I can be audacious enough, I will suggest a corollary quote, but for white people: “To be a white person in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of lament almost all the time.” To be awake is to see clearly the sorrows that come in this world.
Lament is a beautiful and needed resource because it has a unique way of remaining awake to sorrow without succumbing to it. Lament allows us to grieve injustice but not fall into despair. We can be awake to the pain of the world but still press forward in faith because of another beautiful word at the center of the gospel: hope.
In an interview with Frontline, Harvard professor Dr. Cornel West, another modern-day freedom fighter, was asked if he was optimistic about where America is heading. Here is how he answered:
I am not optimistic, but I’ve never been optimistic about humankind or America. The evidence never looks good in terms of forces for good actually becoming prominent. But I am a prisoner of hope, and that’s very different. I believe that we do have signs of hope, and that the evidence is underdetermined. We have to make a leap of faith beyond the evidence and try to energize one another so we can accent the best in one another. But that is what being a prisoner of hope is all about.6
I have found this to be a helpful way to describe the state of an awakened Christ-follower. Optimism rarely feels like the right word. When dominant-culture folks try to portray our national progress in optimistic terms, they sound tone-deaf to the struggles of so many on the margins. But West says that doesn’t stop him from being a “prisoner of hope,” a term lifted directly from Zechariah 9:12.
To be awake is to lament that much is wrong with the world, but to be awake also means we are prisoners of hope. We remember that hope was never found in our ideas, solutions, or proposals in the first place; hope always has been and always will be found in Christ alone. We remember that Jesus will eventually make all things right and that our hope is found in this truth. But we remember that he is ushering in the kingdom of God—right here and right now. We are to pray for God’s kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven, right here and right now. We are to believe in his power and his redemption. We are to remain prisoners of hope!
While we’ll always need to humbly seek revelation, knowledge, wisdom, and insight, we also affirm mile markers of awakening along the way. These signposts point to the activity of the Spirit of God in our lives and continue to drive us forward in seeking first God’s kingdom.