1Where Are We?
The white people who raised me did it in the Denver public schools in the 1970s and ’80s, when our district was under a mandate to desegregate. Lots of other families in our neighborhood sent their kids to private schools to avoid busing. This meant I was a racial minority at Stedman Elementary when I climbed on the bus in first grade.
Most of my earliest childhood friends at Stedman were Black girls; I was especially close to Mari, Wendy, and Tyra. My best friend that year was Mollyeka. My mom always got Mollyeka’s name wrong at home. “Mom, don’t call her Molly!” I’d say. “Her name is Mollyeka.”
“That’s right. I’m sorry,” Mom would respond. “I keep thinking her first name is Molly and her last name is Eka.” Mom’s apology was sincere. But usually, within days, I’d have to correct her again.
In fourth grade, the bus routes flipped and I started walking to school while the African American and Mexican American kids were bused to my neighborhood. I can still easily picture my white Jewish teacher, Ms. Boss, who had flaming red hair (dyed, I now realize). But I don’t remember the classroom itself very well. And the look of the classroom says a great deal about equity and justice when it comes to race and education.
To that end, there couldn’t have been a bigger difference between my fifth- and sixth-grade classrooms. When I was in fifth grade, Ms. Brown, who was Black, had a palpable love for all of us. That year shines in my memory as an experience of profound collective community. A kind of messy oneness constituted our identity as a class. But Ms. Brown also made each of us feel like we were uniquely important. I think that’s because, to her, we were.
Fifth grade is my last memory of warmth and diversity being bound up together and presumed as a natural part of life. I didn’t know it at the time, but being part of a multiracial group with a shared sense of identity that didn’t require a second thought—to me, anyway—would never again come with ease. From here on, this would have to be sought out, created, or even fought for and defended. And starting that next year, my classrooms would forever look different from what we’d known in Ms. Brown’s class as simply normal.
My sixth-grade teacher was white. Ms. Swenson was older than other teachers I’d had, and though I liked her a lot, she was sterner than any of my earlier teachers. In Ms. Swenson’s class, we sat in rows. Every day. The entire year. And the rows were determined by reading level. Two rows of desks for each level, and the first two were placed closest to the teacher’s desk. Here’s where my now friends sat: Julie, Tyler, Greg, Christopher, John, and a few others. All white, in my memory.
I sat there, too. Because I was one of the “good readers.”
The kids in the next two rows were a more racially mixed group. That’s where my childhood nemesis sat. Jeff used to tease me relentlessly. One day he sent me over the edge when I walked past where he stood in line after recess and he snorted, “I’ll bet Jenny does Minnie Mouse Jazzercise!” I have no idea why, but that did it. I hauled back and punched that boy in the eye as hard as I could; to this day, he’s the only person I’ve ever hit.
But other than Jeff, who was white, I don’t remember the kids in the middle rows. They certainly weren’t my friends.
In the last two rows, the “worst readers” sat all the way across the room from Ms. Swenson’s desk. Lots of Brown kids sat there. Some mostly spoke Spanish. I remember one girl named Consuelo who was very shy, smiled a lot, and seemed nice. I don’t remember ever talking to her. There were Black kids in those rows, too. But I wasn’t friends with them and I don’t remember their names.
The racial tracking that began in late elementary school was a precursor to our being smashed together in middle school hallways that now thrummed with racial tension before we went our separate ways when the bell rang. By the time we hit high school, it was a done deal. At South I remained friends with most of the same white kids I’d grown up with in my neighborhood—the ones who’d also sat in the good reader rows. Only now we had entire classrooms to ourselves. Advanced Placement (AP) trig and calculus, AP English, AP social studies. Check, check, check, check. Aside from one friend who was Native American (Navajo and adopted), one who was Korean American (immigrated when we were all in second grade), and one who was African American, the rest of us in those classes were white.
For some reason, I started to notice this. I’d get an occasional sensation that something was wrong. I had no way to talk or even think about it, really. But I knew something was off and that whatever it was had to do with race.
I’d find myself wondering about Mari and Wendy and Tyra. What had happened to them? Were they at a different high school? Would I ever bump into them at a soccer game?
Why were there almost no Black kids in my “real” classes? I developed some rapport with a few Black students in shop and home economics, and with a couple who were on the soccer team—but it wasn’t really friendship. Where did those kids go the rest of the school day?
The strength of my questions ebbed and flowed. But mostly my experience was the same as most white teenagers. Which is to say, not a single adult who was helping to raise, support, and nurture me talked with me about any of this.
So I just noticed. And I knew something was wrong. All by myself.
* * *
The white people who raised me also did it in church. Bethel Baptist sat at 1801 South Logan Street. On a slow week, my family of nine could be found there at least three times. Denver’s Christian radio station, KWBI, played in our living room day in and day out. Every Saturday morning, James Dobson’s voice seeped through the speakers as my siblings and I listened to Children’s Bible Hour before lacing up our cleats to go play soccer at the local park. Images of Billy Graham adorned our home.
My grammy especially loved Billy Graham. Grammy had been widowed young and never remarried. She’d read and reread the piles of Graham’s books she kept stacked on her headboard. When I’d spend the night at her house, I would sometimes find her having fallen fast asleep mid-page, a book drooped down over her sweet face, Graham’s image with his dimpled chin and smoldering eyes staring at me off the back cover.
Grammy was also our church pianist. She played every service for decades. She was the preschool Sunday school teacher and, during the week, the director of our church’s TUC preschool (from Proverbs 22:6: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it”). All six of my younger siblings went through her Sunday school and preschool classes before they hit first grade.
Bethel was basically the sun around which we orbited. This white evangelical Christianity was more than a belief system or set of moral values. It was my family’s formative identity, an ethos and a world, encompassing culture and community. Bethel nurtured the ecosystem through which I came to know and understand myself as a self and to make sense out of my relationships with others.
I have lots of critiques I would make now of this ecosystem. The sexism was everywhere—in my church, women didn’t even serve communion, let alone ascend to the pulpit in any official capacity besides choir director. Knowing one was “saved” rested on a traumatically close call—how many times did I sit and give repeated thanks I was born into a Christian family, the dumb luck of such a near miss with eternal damnation making me sweat?
And of course, Christian meant Baptist. Catholics, Lutherans, and Methodists certainly weren’t included.
My dad told me his conversion story once. In it, he described banging on the door of a Methodist church, soaking wet from the rain on a day when he was feeling depressive despair and on the verge of suicide. No one answered the door.
That was a good thing, Dad told me. “That was the day God saved me from the Methodists.”
But despite the troubling parts of this ecosystem, what I knew most deeply because of it was that God so loves the world. God’s love for this world was, for me, a fundamental existential framework. I believed it utterly. And I assumed God loving the world meant God so loves the whole world. As in, God so loves all of us.
I was not prepared, then, for the crisis I would go through when I went off to a predominantly white and conservative evangelical college after high school.
My first year at Westmont College, I volunteered at a local Salvation Army shelter with a student ministry group. I soon found myself spending more and more time talking to families who were unhoused and hungry. Learning about poverty and economic injustice for the first time rattled me. I couldn’t believe the suffering. The juxtaposition of such suffering with my own daily life became stark.
At the same time, I was falling in love with the study of theology. I did well and got high grades. Professors reached out, wanting to mentor me. But I sat in my classes of mostly men and the debate turned to questions like, “Can women be leaders in the church?” It started to matter that the same students insisting women couldn’t be ordained were unbothered when they whizzed their Mercedes-Benzes past hungry families hunkered down on the streets of Santa Barbara on a Saturday night. The absurdity of this moral position became intolerable.
The longer this went on, the more I found myself realizing the emperor had no clothes and being unwilling to pretend he did. I was noticing contradictions that weren’t merely intellectually shattering (though they were). They weren’t causing just a faith crisis (though it was quickly becoming that). Rather, all the threads weaving through my understanding of God—threads that held me together as a self, bound me to a community, and rooted me in a world—were being more strained with each passing semester.
Everything changed when, in my third year at Westmont, I was introduced to a form of Christianity rooted in what’s called liberation theology. Liberation theology’s basic premise is pretty simple: It claims that “God so loves the world” really does mean the whole world. God so loves the whole world means God cares about every single part of our lives as humans. This includes caring about human suffering, all of it—including the massive suffering caused by sexism and racism, economic oppression and homophobia, colonialism, and so much more.
The Bible depicts a God who takes sides with the poor and a Jesus who talked about this all the time. But even setting these biblical descriptions aside, if God cares about the suffering caused by profound and pervasive injustice—caused by isms—then by sheer force of logic, God has to be a God of justice.
My trips down to the Salvation Army began to make theological sense. God hated homelessness and the wealth accumulation that turned a blind eye to it. Classroom debates over women’s capacity to lead were thrown into sharp relief. I saw them for what they were—straight-up sexism that presumed women were less than.
Then came the day I was introduced to James H. Cone, the father of Black liberation theology. Like other liberation theologians, Cone wrote that God is a God of justice. But he got more explicit. Cone wrote that if God is a God of justice, then God has to be Black, because in the United States, Black people are the oppressed of the oppressed. That’s where a God of justice must dwell.
Jesus Christ is Black, too, Cone said. Orthodox Christian belief is that Jesus the Christ was fully human and fully divine. If this is true, it means the Christ—the divine one who is still with us today—is who he was back then, when he was embodied as a specific human being in a particular time and place. Well, Jesus was a working-class Jew who lived under Roman occupation and the oppression of Jewish people. He lived a life insisting on dignity for the poor and discarded (“blessed are the poor”!). And he did this so persistently that the powers that be found him a threat too significant to ignore. He was executed by the state. So Jesus the Christ is present today amid struggles for the freedom, dignity, and liberation of the poor—for those who are made poor by violent systems and structures of subjugation, including white supremacy. Jesus is Black.
Cone didn’t only crack open my understanding of “God so loves the world.” He handed me an interpretation of my high school experience, shedding light on those confusing questions that haunted me. Cone showed me that structural racism, racial injustice, and white supremacy had been defining features of my short life. He helped me see how they’d infused my education, as well as my church community and its version of Christianity.
Race had already been a central force shaping my life. But from the moment I read God of the Oppressed, a switch flipped. Race became a central preoccupation.
Naturally, then, I did what any other economically secure white girl in my situation would do. I gasped with excitement at such newfound clarity, took a deep breath, and announced, “I’m going to Union Theological Seminary to study with Dr. James Cone!”
And that’s exactly what I did.
Well, sort of.
That’s a story we’ll have to come back to.
* * *
These are the two stories I usually start with when people ask me, “How did you get passionate about racism?” That’s not how the question is always asked, though. Usually people stumble a bit at first while reaching for their words. Maybe they’re afraid of offending or being misunderstood. “So, how did you, I mean, when did you become so interested…” Their voice trails off. “You mean,” I sometimes try to help, “why do I care about racism when I’m white?”
A relieved chuckle often follows. “Well, yeah.”
Many kinds of people have asked me this question and for various reasons. But in recent years, when white people ask me how my concern about racism came to be strong enough that working against it and for reparative justice has defined so many of my life choices, I hear some things in the question that are familiar. I hear an ache and a sense of longing.
I recognize these because they’re mine, too. It’s a longing that began inside of me—as soon as I left my fifth-grade classroom—for what all of our communities could be like. It’s an ache because they almost never are.
There are so many white people in touch with a yearning for which we don’t have words, for a way of living beyond our national racial brokenness and the constraints systems of racism impose on all our lives. More than a few of us feel the trap of being caught inside white culture—even if we’re not sure what “white culture” is. Many Americans long to be part of a community that is rambunctious and flourishing, promiscuous in its diversity and its loving justice–filled energy—all of which are the opposite of what white cultures allow white Americans to experience.
This was true long before the Trump era. But it’s become truer since its onset.
In this time in which we are grappling publicly like we never have before over race, identity, who we are as a nation and who we are going to be, I invite you to imagine the possibility that this is the moment in which more of us are ready. We’re ready to dig in and go deeper than we’ve ever gone. We’re ready to allow that yearning to help us take a giant leap forward in the liberating journey of changing white communities to realize freedom for all.
When masses of people poured into the streets to protest the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the summer of 2020, the multiracial nature of the protests was widely remarked upon. More white people participated than any of us had seen in our lifetimes.
I remember marching through the streets of downtown Des Moines, Iowa, and running into a fellow teacher from my university. This is a white guy I’d worked with for years. He’d always shown me respect when we disagreed over race and reparations. Even when I’d disagreed in turn, I basically liked him. But he was also someone who seemed to find my vocal stances in support of Black Lives Matter over the years a bit—I’m not sure what—unbecoming? naive? overly simplistic?
Now here he was. He was wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt he’d obviously made by hand and trying to figure out the chants so he could join in. He was even putting his fist in the air when the Black youth leading the protests called us to do so. He looked awkward and a little uncomfortable. But my coworker gave me a small smile and nod when he saw me. This seemed to me an acknowledgment of our past disagreements and that he was now seeing something different. He knew his participation mattered.
It made me happy to see him there.
This wasn’t “performance activism” or “virtue signaling”—these labels we throw around so easily to decry people who aren’t really committed but just want to be seen doing something about racism because it’s cool or something. This is not a man at all worried about looking uncool. His presence, like that of so many who’d never gotten into the streets before, was evidence the call for white people to get more involved had for a moment broken through.
Some type of shift in white consciousness has taken place. Historian and antiracist public intellectual Ibram X. Kendi says there “may have never been [before now] such a governing majority that recognizes racism as a big problem.” This shift has come about because of persistent and powerful Black organizing and leadership. It’s a response to BIPOC-led advocacy in local communities all over the country.
When journalists and commentators saw so many people in the streets, the question of the day became “Is this the start of a national reckoning on race?”1 And as we now sit looking back at all that has happened in our struggling democracy since 2020, that question remains in the air.
Copyright © 2024 by Jennifer Harvey
