Fanny Lou Hamer famously once said that she was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” I’m thankful to Jemar Tisby (author of The Color of Compromise) for teaching me about her. At the age 42, after working as a sharecropper most of her life, Hamer became a civil rights activist and politician. She was fed up with the violence and injustice and oppression she saw and experienced in Mississippi and decided to do whatever she could, enduring threats and a terrible beating as a result. You can read an interview with her from Spring 1965 here.

Hamer’s deep faith in Jesus fueled her hatred of injustice. The concept of the Gospel as separate from the arenas of justice and policy were foreign to her.

I am thinking of Fanny Lou Hamer’s words and work today because there is mourning and grief again in our country over the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in February. For many it’s not a new grief, but an old grief, a wound ripped open again and again. 2020 to 2016 to 1965 to 1619.

It may be tempting to view this as a tragic, but isolated incident, the work of the worst among us–the outright racists and bigots–but not US surely?

But the more I learn, the more I understand that the ideology and systems of white supremacy are the threads woven into the fabric of our nation. Bryan Stevenson explains it so well:

“The great evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude and forced labor. To me, the great evil of slavery was the narrative of racial difference, the ideology of white supremacy that we created to make ourselves feel comfortable with enslaving people who are black. We’ve never addressed that legacy” (from this article).

Thomas Normal DeWolf and Jodie Geddes, in their Little Book of Racial Healing, explain that slavery left both a legacy and an aftermath. They write:

“Aftermath describes political and economic structures, while legacy refers to cultural ideas, beliefs, and prejudices. Legacy and aftermath work together to help maintain detrimental cultural norms that result in, and sustain, violence.”

Do you see how we can draw a line connecting white supremacy and slavery to the murder of Arbery–the assumption of guilt and danger of a Black man, the audacity and confidence of the white attackers, and the lack of justice (as I write the men have just been arrested months later)?

You and I may not have had anything to do with slavery, but we certainly live in its aftermath and legacy. We are not innocent and neutral bystanders.

We cannot give Ahmaud Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, her son back for mother’s day. We should grieve and lament her loss.

We can’t immediately change an entire system that is being painfully exposed right now as COVID-19 ravages black and brown communities.

Here are some things we can do:

We can lament with those who lament. We can truly grieve this loss and others, especially with our brothers and sisters in Christ, our body, who are hurting (1 Corinthians 12:26). In a broader sense, have we ever truly lamented what our nation has done? If we have ever felt a sense of national pride in our nation’s accomplishments (which we should!), have we felt an equally national sense of shame and guilt for our atrocities?

We can learn our whole history. I love Marcie Walker’s Mockingbird History Lessons for adults (read my interview with her here) for amazing resources for learning our history.

For white people like me, we must think deeply about what it means to be white in this country and repent of all the ways white supremacy has crept into our identity (Daniel Hill’s book White Awake has helped me a lot with this). Surely, this is part of the work of discipleship. By the way, when I talk about being white I’m NOT talking about our inherant value as human beings; I’m talking about what our culture has taught us that our skin color means.

We can educate ourselves, our children, and our church family by reading and listening to antiracism educators of color. Brings your kids into this conversation in age-appropriate ways. Don’t teach them to be colorblind, which further stigmatizes color (I learned this from Jennifer Harvey’s book, Raising White Kids). Teach them to love and value color. Teach them the realities of racial injustice.

Share the things you learn with your friends. Get together with people from church and read a book together or watch a video (I have a list of ones that have helped me on my anti-racism page). Get involved with a Be the Bridge group.

Begin to think about public policy in antiracist ways. We can support antiracist candidates starting first at the local level. We can learn to discern ideas that are racist and work against them–in ourselves and within our sphere of influence (I find Ibram Kendi’s work really helpful for this). I have also appreciated the work of the AND Campaign in articulating a political platform that is both biblically moral and socially just.

Learn what the Bible has to say about justice. What does the Bible say about poverty, about the vulnerable, about the oppressed (and the oppressor)? What does it say about the widow, the orphan, the prisoner, and the foreigner? Think about the filter that you bring to reading and studying Scripture. How has it been affected by white supremacy or white American values of individuality, consumerism, and materialism? I liked Soong-Chan Rah’s book, The Next Evangelicalism, on this topic.

Know the pain points of your community and get involved as God leads you and your church community. Who are the most vulnerable in your city? What role has racism played in the formation of your city? How is that legacy impacting people today? Who is already doing the work? How can you support them? Can you volunteer? Can you give money? Can you share information and be informed?

Lastly, don’t let fear or expectations of fixing things hold you back. We will make mistakes. I think one of the values of white culture that I’ve begun to see is that we often feel like we have to do it perfectly and understand it all before we act. We want to be the heroes, the saviors. Maybe it’s just another manifestation of white supremacy that we want to fix things.

I’m sure I’ve missed something on this list. In fact, Be the Bridge has an excellent list of specific responses following the arrest of the two murderers HERE.

Fanny Lou Hamer got “sick and tired of being sick and tired” and decided to go to work. My dear friends, do we even know that we’re sick–enough to be tired of being sick? Are we tired of being sick–tired enough to do something about it?

Let’s lament Ahmaud Arbery. And then let’s get to work.

anti-racism let's talk about anti-racism race