Reckoning With White, Christian, Moderacy
On still being more moderate than I'm comfortable with
In 2020, I read The Color of Compromise by Jemar Tisby and met myself in chapter eight, Compromising With Racism in the Civil Rights Movement. I was a white, Christian moderate- sitting in that comfortable space of not being outrightly racist, but also not doing anything to oppose racism. Tisby describes Christian moderates this way,
“This chapter focuses on the Christian moderates- mostly white and evangelical but also some black churches and ministers- who played it safe, refusing to get involved in the civil rights movement. These people of faith may not have given their full support to the most extreme racists, but neither did they oppose racists outright or openly disagree with racist objectives…The American church responded to much of the civil rights movement with passivity, indifference, or even outright opposition.” (Color of Compromise, p.132)
This was one of my most unsettling and galvanizing revelations from that year. Four years later, I still see way too much white moderate in myself:
-I can “take a break” from figuring out racism when I get tired of reading all the books.
-The fact that I’m reading all these books is itself an indicator of living with privilege.
-It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day today, and instead taking my kids to our library’s event I’m sheltering at home, avoiding the negative temperatures.
-I have not managed to truly cross racial or class lines when it comes to choosing a church. In the end I’ve let discomfort win out, letting a list of rationalizations assuage any guilt.
-I can have long discussions about racism with my kids, but I don’t have the embodied encounters to back them up. Honestly, the thought of having those encounters still scares me.
-My bookshelf has diversified, but still has more books on racism by white authors than by BIPOC ones.
Racism is something that must be reckoned with again and again, and moderacy is one of the most anesthetizing, rationalizing, and blinding forces to reckon with. Being a moderate is easy. Shedding that identity is hard. But that doesn’t change what MLK called, “the fierce urgency of now.” Today I’m meditating and engaging with that urgency.