Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

There was lots of good stuff in this book, but it didn't have a clear narrative arc. It felt a little scattershot. It is told from the point of view of a white man raised in the evangelical south. Good to see folks coming awake to their privilege. I always appreciate hearing other people's stories and try to find where my outlook overlaps and needs redirection and improvement. I would have appreciated a bibliography and index. The notes provide some of that. It left me feeling that I had work to do, but would have to figure my path out on my own.… (más)

There’s a lot that I could say, about racism in the churches, none of which I really want to say, but.

I guess that the topic that I’ll take is the idea of “blindness”, the opposite of which would be, I think, teachability. A good example of a teachable person would be Abimelech in Genesis 20–God told him to stop doing something that he hadn’t known was wrong, so he did. That’s incomplete knowledge, but not really blindness. Blindness is that angry, “What do they mean by racism? People should just stop bringing it up if they can’t explain what they mean, no matter what happens! They’ve never explained it to me, and they better not start now!”

On the other hand, I hate speaking when it’s not wanted, to people who don’t want to see. People who are blind to racism are part of my life whether I like it or not, and I can’t convert them or think for them. It’s not up to me what happens on the day of judgment, nor mine really to puzzle, in the end, whether people are blind because they truly cannot see and think everything’s okay, not seeing anything not okay, or whether they are blind because at the bottom they hate and reject the light. (But why?)… (más)