Dr. Negus Rudison-Imhotep, Ph. D.’s Post

---------THIS IS FOR MY WHITE FOLKS. All are welcome to engage ------ Find yourself scratching your head at the state of the world and how we seem to keep repeating the same mistakes? Wondering how we could possibly be rolling ourselves into yet another Trump presidency?? I highly recommend Robert P Jones's book, White Too Long. It is no exaggeration to say that the future of America will be determined by white Christians. This is not an appeal to altruism, but rather a roadmap of how white Christianity has shaped our country. Jones argues that contemporary white Christians must confront these unsettling truths because this is the only way to salvage the integrity of their own faith and their own identities. This book calls for an honest reckoning with a complicated, painful, and even shameful past. It challenges white Christians to acknowledge that public apologies are not enough—accepting responsibility for the past requires work toward repair in the present.

"Where is the Black Church?" This question informs Marquisha Lawrence Scott's article "Functions of the Black Church in a Global Society: A Du Boisian Approach," another piece published in the special issue, WEB DuBois: Religion and Social Inequality, of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, co-edited by me (Editor-in-Chief) and my esteemed colleagues and leading scholars of social inquality and religion, Sandra Barnes and Cheryl Townsend Gilkes. You can check out the video abstract here. https://lnkd.in/gDt2_Gbt

Jesus’ White Supremacists: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan - PDF: https://lnkd.in/g3rN6gXf The story of the Ku Klux Klan is a story of United States identity, and how some parts of the US perceived their divine inheritance. The story of the Klan is also a story of modern misconceptions: many have strong opinions on what the Klan was, or how the Klan operated, without having examined Klan literature or the findings of multiple US government investigations into the KKK. In an era of social media memes and posts when people make strong claims about the Klan’s political motivations, this article offers a glimpse into this unique brand of White Christian nationalism based on historical sources. Perhaps the most revelatory aspect of what the Klan was, in its two iterations discussed below, is how its worldview remains ever present.

This will be a great discussion with Dr. Mingo on this Wednesday. What compels a person to risk her life to change deeply rooted systems of injustice in ways that may not benefit her? The thousands of Black Churchwomen who took part in civil rights protests drew on faith, courage, and moral imagination to acquire the lived experiences at the heart of the answers to that question. Dr. AnneMarie Mingo brings these forgotten witnesses into the historical narrative to explore the moral and ethical world of a generation of Black Churchwomen and the extraordinary liberation theology they created. These women acted out of belief that what they did was bigger than themselves. Taking as their goal nothing less than the moral transformation of American society, they joined the movement because it was something they had to do. Their personal accounts of a lived religion enacted in the world provide powerful insights into how faith steels human beings to face threats, jail, violence, and seemingly implacable hatred. Throughout, Dr. Mingo draws on their experiences to construct an ethical model meant to guide contemporary activists in the ongoing pursuit of justice. A depiction of moral imagination that resonates today, Have You Got Good Religion? reveals how Black Churchwomen’s understanding of God became action and transformed a nation.

In my latest, published by the Institute for Christian Socialism, I examine Frederick Douglass' critiques of Christian nationalism and American Christianity more broadly. With strong parallels to today's conservative movement, complicity in (and even preference for) systems of theft, abuse, and murder rendered historical American Christians the enemies of justice and equality for Douglass. At minimum, Douglass shows the violence and vacuousness idealizing such a past. https://lnkd.in/eMTUvqKs

#SteveBiko #BlackConsciousness #egalitariansociety 'The ruling class and elite Africans befit the title of the Frantz Fanon work Black Skins, White Masks; a clear demonstration that neo-colonialism is a monstrous system that kills the intellectual creativity of people and deforms their minds and personalities. As Amilcar Cabral would say, the liberation struggle is a revolution that does not end with one getting a flag, a seat in the United Nations, and a National Anthem. “It is perhaps fitting to start by examining why it is necessary for us to think collectively about a problem we never created. In doing so, I do not wish to concern myself unnecessarily with the white people of South Africa but to get to the right answers, we must ask the right questions; we have to find out what went wrong—where and when; and we have to find out whether our position is a deliberate creation of God or an artificial fabrication of the truth by power-hungry people whose motive is authority, security, wealth and comfort. In other words, the “Black Consciousness” approach would be irrelevant in a colorless and non-exploitative egalitarian society. It is relevant here because we believe that an anomalous situation is a deliberate creation of man—- Thus, a lot of attention has to be paid to our history if we as blacks want to aid each other in our coming into consciousness. We have to rewrite our history and produce in it the heroes that formed the core of our resistance to the white invaders. More has to be revealed, and stress has to be laid on the successful nation-building attempts of men such as Shaka, Moshoeshoe, and Hintsa. These areas call for intense research to provide some sorely-needed missing links. We would be too naive to expect our conquerors to write unbiased histories about us but we have to destroy the myth that our history starts in 1652, the year VanRiebeeck landed at the Cape.” “Black Consciousness refers itself to the Black man and to his situation, and I think the Black man is subjected to two forces in this country. He is first of all oppressed by an external world through institutionalized machinery, through laws that restrict him from doing certain things, through heavy work conditions, through poor pay, through very difficult living conditions, through poor education, these are all external to him, and secondly, and this we regard as the most important, the black man in himself has developed a certain state of alienation, he rejects himself, precisely because he attaches the meaning white to all that is good, in other words he associates good and he equates good with white. This arises out of his living and it arises out of his development from childhood.” Steve Biko from "I Write What I Like" Long live the legacy of Steve Bantu Biko.'

A black Jesus would understand and address racial oppression, lament with those that suffer, and acknowledge the existence of structural racism. On the other hand, a white Jesus preaches triumphalism, individualism and antistructuralism, ignoring the importance of justice. It’s no surprise that white churches lose white congregants when black Christians start attending, and bringing in a black senior pastor only exacerbates the problem. To avoid white flight, multiethnic churches often prioritize the comfort of their white congregants over engaging difficult topics. But is that really what the Biblical Jesus would do? This essay digs deeper into this important topic: https://lnkd.in/g6s_yK-m

A black Jesus would understand and address racial oppression, lament with those that suffer, and acknowledge the existence of structural racism. On the other hand, a white Jesus preaches triumphalism, individualism and antistructuralism, ignoring the importance of justice. It’s no surprise that white churches lose white congregants when black Christians start attending, and bringing in a black senior pastor only exacerbates the problem. To avoid white flight, multiethnic churches often prioritize the comfort of their white congregants over engaging difficult topics. But is that really what the Biblical Jesus would do? This essay digs deeper into this important topic: https://lnkd.in/gD_PMtbd