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The Risk of Being Woke [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-11-18
“A 21st century call to embrace racial justice action, live in beloved community, and seek refreshing mystic moments as we emerge from a health pandemic and engage in a racial reckoning.”
Curtiss Paul DeYoung is President of the Minnesota Council of Churches, and has been the Pastor of the Park Avenue United Methodist Church in Minneapolis. He is a white man who attended seminary at Howard University, which is historically Black. His wife Karen is Black, and so, naturally, are their children.
We are going to look at the high points in this book on making churches and society woke in various practical ways, but first, I have a beef with this book. It is way too Christian for me, not in a good way. Justice, mercy, charity, and all of the good stuff are in there, but they are overwhelmed by a relentless focus on Bible narratives of myths and fan fiction, both as alleged history and as alleged prophecy.
Ministry Mondays with Meg; The Risk of Being Woke, Episode 45 Curtiss DeYoung
But let’s put that aside, and talk about what DeYoung gets right.
We come to the actual point in Chapter 5.
The question must be posed: Can white Christianity free itself from the captivity of white supremacy?
Spiritually and economically both.
Christian theology and institutions have been the central tent pole holding up the very idea of white supremacy
Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity
Truth crushed to Earth will rise again.
William Cullen Bryant, quoted by MLK in “If the Negro wins, labor wins”
MLK’s last sermon was “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution”. He compared people at that time to Rip van Winkle, who went to sleep under King George III, and awoke 20 years later under President George Washington.
DeYoung gave a brief history of the word “woke” starting with
Best stay woke, keep your eyes open.
Lead Belly, at the end of his Scottsboro Boys song
We need to stay awake, stay woke, so that we do not sleep through, and miss, what God is doing.
There it is again. What about what people are doing?
Jews and others were crucified, sometimes by the thousands, for rebellion against Rome. DeYoung relates this to the thousands who were lynched under Jim Crow.
Too many whites have no significant relationships with Persons of Color. A survey by the Public Relation Research Institute found that 75 percent have no friends who are Persons of Color.
DeYoung devotes two pages to perversions of Christianity by empire builders and slavers, including “White Jesus”.
New York City hip-hop musician MADic crliticizes racialized policing and other social ills in his song “AmeriKKKa”. Until racial justice in policing comes...we must hang the flag upside down. MADic is my son. Until his life is safe, I hang the flag upside down
Blacks have a lot of hostility toward Whites and a lot of reasons for it. You listen and try to respond thoughtfully. But no matter how insulting they are, they are trying to communicate what’s inside of them. After all the abuse the Blacks have taken through the centuries, whites are just going to have to let them get some of those feelings out, if we are ever going to settle down to a decent relationship
RFK, on meeting with Black community leaders in 1968. When they observed him really listening, they became fierce supporters, telling crowds in Oakland CA to respect Kennedy.
The church can be a moral voice in society when it steps into its prophetic role. Should the church use its moral authority to call for reparations for Black and Indigenous People in the United States?
How about if we ask them?
I ask the faith community for these four responses: Presence
Protest
Prosecution
Prayers
How about getting politically engaged?
OK, we’re done. That’s nearly the entire positive content of the book, apart from Bible quotations and analogies.
Well, That About Wraps It Up for God
Oolon Coluphid, in HHGTTG, by Douglas Adams
Another Video
Curtiss Paul DeYoung: Discussing Race in Dominant Spaces [Biola SCORR Conference]
Further Reading
These writings are cited by DeYoung.
DeYoung
Others
The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America, by Thurston Clarke
The Creolization Reader, by Robin Cohen
From Here to Equality, Second Edition: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, by William A. Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen
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