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I have read the work of you and your fellow emancipatory maximalists. It seems to me that you are all being denigrated, insulted, dismissed, and called out because you are challenging the empire and it's policies (religious authority, white supremacy, patriarchy, radical exclusion, voter suppression). Jesus challenged Rome, the religious authorities, and their policies so they literally killed him. The religious authorities and political hacks are trying to damn all of you into silence because you are pointing out their violence, hypocrisy, and hatred.

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I am wondering if this phenomenon of negative, misrepresentative and often downright slanderous labeling is a “strategy” in the Ephesians 6:11 sense; a strategy of what Charles W. Mills called White ignorance. He wrote that this is an “ignorance that resists…that fights back…an ignorance militant, aggressive, not to be intimidated…an ignorance that is active, dynamic, that refuses to go quietly--…” By God’s grace we have so many resources and teachers available to us to help us learn history more accurately and be discipled out of White supremacy. An often effective way to prevent learning is to misrepresent and denigrate the source of knowledge. That way one can easily dismiss that source as not worth their time and effort without any sense of possibly missing out on something important.

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I just finished reading How to Fight Racism and was impressed with your calm and even-handed tone throughout the book, and your call for us to be humble as we approach others who do not yet get it. Far from the “coercive power” in Green’s analysis, I am constantly amazed how patient you and other Black Christins are in the face of racism. I expect it comes from years of practice. Which brings me to thank you for pointing out the lack of even considering at the Black Church in Greens article. I don’t know that I would have noticed that, steeped as I am in my white church tradition. I need to keep a sharper eye out for omissions that I am too accustomed to.

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Labels are used to dismiss.

Woke.

Liberal.

Progressive.

And now Emancipatory Maximalist.

It's difficult to not just return fire à la Bulverism: "You say that because you are conservative."

Labels are useful sometimes for ad hoc categorization, but no one fits into a box just because there's a label on it.

And sometimes labels are used to declare that one's own box is the right one: "You are an Emancipatory Maximalist, but I, on the other hand, am in the right box. Lucky me."

It's too bad that the reaction to injustice and the calls for change get the response of "everything is just fine & perhaps centuries from now things will be better, but your call for change threatens all of civilization with destructive, fire, and ruin."

To someone who studies history in an attempt at a neutral view, American history is like any other nation's history. It can be viewed and critiqued while still holding to the values it represents. And American history is problematic from the get-go : the nation started with Europeans coming over to take land that wasn't theirs, decimating the Indigenous and buying kidnapped humans from Africa for replacement labor.

If that's the founding history and the organizing principle, then critiquing that is likely going to raise awareness of the injustice as well as create a call for change.

That can't be helped if we study history and examine the past. And it especially can't be helped when those who study history know that they have been seen as those worthy of being ruled over rather than being the rulers.

Calling for changes in injustice does strike at the foundations, and it can be seen as maximalist if those calls include fundamental changes in how people relate with one another. But if there was a mistake made in a mathematical formulation back at the beginning of the solution, wouldn't it be best to go back to that beginning and fix it rather than just plow on heedless of the increasing error caused by the early mistake?

The labels are used to tag people as threats, and I understand that. But rather than let that label limit what can be done, I'd reject the system of labeling & simply continue to pursue justice & love mercy.

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Well stated Dr. Tisby. I agree that the ignorance (sometimes willful) of the Black Christian tradition in America by too many a white Christian is a major problem. Several years ago I taught a multi-week adult sunday school series on church history. When I decided to not use Mark Noll's Book Turning Points, which has a mostly Eurocentric POV on what Prof. Noll identifies as key moments in Church history, I got some push back when I had one session on the Black church in America. One older white brother objected to the phrase "Black church," arguing that there is only one church and dismissing the actual history of Black congregations and the uniquely prophetic witness of the Black Church.

My argument then was that the majority white America church disregards the history of the Black church to its peril, mainly because the majority white church is not using all of the tools, knowledge, and resources available to it. Ironically, when I shared some brief histories of folks like Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, most in the class had never heard of them. Nevertheless, out of some misguided view that not talking about race and becoming colorblind is "the goal," ironically, most went back into their states of blissful ignorance and "happy Christian" lives.

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I wonder if part of the issue isn't the "Black Christian" but just the Christian.

Much of what distinguishes you and others who speak from a Black Christian prospective from those who eschew the Christian is precisely the ability to "speak the truth in love." Those who are tone deaf to this particular set of tones will only hear strident extremes

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Feb 12·edited Feb 12

Green's distinction between Civilizational and Emancipatory seems fairly coherent. It's basically just whether you believe civilization as it has existed up to this point has been oppressive to individual persons. But the distinction between Minimalist and Maximalist seems a lot less clear. Of course in the general sense, it's a distinction between individual freedom and coercion. But the way these things will manifest will vary a great deal depending on a social structure (what one might call a society's "constitution"). We generally want as much freedom for individuals as possible, but we also hope to reach consensus so important things can get done. For example, there is evidence that a majority of Americans would like lower drug prices, more restrictions on the availability of firearms, and the right to abortion through the first trimester of pregnancy. Yet with our Constitution, it's almost impossible to achieve those things. The Minimalist appears to be overconfident that if we're just patient with individuals, everything humanity needs will happen. The Maximalist may tend to be impatient. I suspect that one motivation for Critical Race Theory is the difficulty of achieving social change in America. Adherents think "we made some in the 60's with the Civil Rights Movement. Maybe if we can convince enough people of the systemic nature of racism, we'll make more now." People of color should be doing better, but is the primary problem really racism or general inequality? People who come into the world with more money will do better whether they are white or black. More whites have generational wealth to pass onto their children. This affects the various kinds of opportunities they get. If we could reduce inequality, I believe that the disparities between whites and people of color would go down, too.

I put what I wrote above on pages by Kristin Kobes Du Mez and Jay Green. Let me say a little more here that is related to race. A lot of problems of race today are due to the "white flight" that happened in the 60's and 70's. That was definitely racist. It was also facilitated by the building of the Interstate Highway System, which made it easy for whites to move to the suburbs. It is well known that whites moving to the suburbs was subsidized by the federal government, while funding to improve housing in the central cities was harder to get. So there was structural racism. There are also poor suburbs like Ferguson, Missouri that were impoverished by white flight. As one speaker said, a place like Ferguson shouldn't exist at all. It should be consolidated with more affluent areas so it has a decent tax base. It's outrageous that the suburbs of Detroit, St. Louis, Birmingham and other cities have no responsibility for the problems of the central cities. But I would suggest that the racist element of this is somewhat in the past. Today, if you demanded better cooperation, opponents would say it violates their "freedom." Almost no one would give a racial justification for this inequality.

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What examples from your work does Green use to back his characterization? And yes, white evangelicalism is treated as normative and isn't even named in these various conversations. I've noticed that in the recent-ish discussions of deconstructing faith. White evangelicalism is often assumed as THE Christian faith while other healthier traditions, like the Black Christian tradition, go ignored when they absolutely could offer so much salt and light to these conversations.

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It does seem that many are intent on creating narratives to describe others rather than accept what others, such as Dr. Jemar Tisby, say about themselves.

This approach seems to be high minded and insulting to the intelligence of others. As an African-American, it looks like a paternalistic attempt to put us "in our place," or to establish themselves as arbiters and standards of rightness. Something we've experienced time and time again.

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I think your kind nature made an appearance here; "I understand the impulse to create categories. This is often integral to the work of scholars..."After have read/scanned his article, I'm not sure he'll look back on it as a noteworthy landmark piece. While he attempts to avoid opposing labels, we are presented a different "better" system but is the same at it's core. (Sort of like enneagrams being a "better" horoscope, imo) And thank you for my introduction to Parthia Hall. I like her already.

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