On a Sunday afternoon in July, I wandered through the airport in Lima, Peru. My eyes scanned the faces of strangers, searching for one that matched the photo in my WhatsApp message–a wide face, curly mop of hair, and an impressive nose ring.

The man who matched that photo–José Pecar–is the kind of person who drives an hour across the city through packed traffic, picks up three strangers at the airport, takes them home, and offers them beds in his own kid’s bedroom.

A mutual friend had introduced me to José and his American wife Sarah Baker when I asked for tips on Peruvians doing justice-related work. Their neighborhood, Pamplona Alta, is one of the humblest neighborhoods in Lima. Through the 1970s-90s, a mass migration of rural campesinos arrived on the outskirts of Lima, fleeing terrorism and violence in other provinces. Without money or belongings, these internally displaced migrants built homes on the bare dirt with cardboard, plastic, and whatever they could find. Eventually they found and created work selling candies at bus stops, landscaping, and building market stalls and restaurants. While Pamplona Alta is now an official government-recognized neighborhood with electricity, water and sanitation, it is still marked by poverty, addiction, and the trauma of generational violence. Many households earn less than $10 a day–too little to meet basic needs.

We spent that afternoon watching the World Cup with José’s parents, who had come to the neighborhood as squatters decades earlier. Around halftime, José disappeared downstairs to his restaurant, a place he had founded to create jobs and a communal gathering space for neighbors. Soon he presented us with a stunning steak dinner.

We wound down the evening in their kitchen, where the walls radiated color. Sarah runs art classes for children, and she has worked with neighbors to adorn their building inside and out with paintings and murals.

“We spent the first three years here literally clearing out trash to make a home,” Sarah said.

In what follows, I invited them to tell us more about what it looks like to seek justice in this neighborhood.

Christine: José grew up in this place, but Sarah came from America, and you both have traveled elsewhere. What brought you back here?

Sarah: When I met José, he was a backpacker, travelling through South America looking for a place to start a Peruvian restaurant. I was working in Colombia, and honestly I loved my job and community and had no plans to leave. José started a restaurant little stall in an outdoor food court downtown and almost immediately it was a success! Because I was working with at-risk youth, it occurred to me that we could hire one or two to help at the restaurant. Knowing José’s turbulent background of growing up in a violent neighborhood and even participating with some of the local gangs, I knew he would be an amazing mentor. He is direct but compassionate.

José: When I met Sarah, she was a missionary and one of her projects was to work with youth graduating from the state-run orphan system. One of the biggest challenges they faced was finding work due to stigma and fear. I decided to hire one of these young people. This was a pivotal moment for me. Even though it was difficult to work with this demographic, I learned that I actually had a lot of wisdom and insight to share. That’s when I started thinking about what a project like this could look like in my neighborhood back in Lima where there are very few economic opportunities for young people and where violence is the norm. What if we could start a restaurant and hire youth and mentor them? I think God placed this idea on my heart.

When COVID hit and we had to shut down our little stall in Colombia, it seemed to affirm my growing desire to return to my neighborhood in Pamplona Alta, Peru.

Sarah: I don’t think I knew what I was getting into when we moved to this neighborhood, and maybe that naivety was a blessing! Our dream was to open a restaurant and build a community center where I could offer art classes for kids and families.

Our first few years in the neighborhood were extremely difficult. I was a fish out of water, living in a little room in José’s parents’ apartment and sharing all of the common spaces (including one tiny, musty bathroom for 7 people!) Plus, we were dealing with COVID. José and I got married, had our son, and then José’s dad passed away, all within two years. Our dream seemed unattainable. I remember looking for any excuse to leave our dry, brown neighborhood in search of green space. I would hop on a bus and sit in a park overlooking the ocean. I cried a lot.

Christine: I think a lot of people want to see quick results to development and justice work. What have you learned about patience and timing?

Jose: I learned that God’s timing is wise. If you focus on the world, you live like someone constantly racing under stress, relying on yourself and on other people—and people let you down. If you focus on God’s word, you still work hard and face stress, but now you have the hope and faith that it is all part of the process, a bigger picture.

Sarah: This question makes me laugh because it perfectly showcases the difference between my western mindset and José’s worldview. He has all the patience in the world, which stems from his family’s story of building their house literally brick by brick. It took them more than twenty years to build their house, so José has an innate knowledge of what it means to wait for change. I want things to happen fast. I remember constantly being on José’s case: “We need to do this, we need to do that. Everything is taking too long!” José was always reminding me that change is slow and that it should be slow. Slow is sustainable.

Christine: I’m impressed by the ways you each use skills you happen to have as you serve the community. How did you decide what initiatives to focus on–the restaurant, art classes, murals, and more?

Sarah: God surprises you. Most recently, we’ve started organizing a monthly pediatric clinic in our neighborhood, and I never saw that coming. In the course of one week, two different pregnant women came into the restaurant to eat. Being a mom myself, I sat with them and listened to their stories. They both had complications and were anxious about giving birth. There is a health clinic in our neighborhood, but no doctors specializing in children, so lots of things fall through the cracks.

I remember telling Jose that these women need a doctor who will actually listen to them with compassion. About a week later, a missionary pediatrician called me and said he wanted to open a pediatric clinic in our neighborhood. Then a pastor I had met through a moms and tots group offered a place for the clinic.

It has all shown me the importance of listening to neighbors’ felt needs and utilizing the resources and spaces already available. This restaurant has become a safe space to listen and respond to our neighbors’ hopes, dreams, and daily challenges.

Christine: You’re sharing a building with four generations of family. How has living close to family shaped the ways you think about seeking justice in your community?

Sarah: José’s family has been key to our success in the neighborhood. Not only does their longevity here offer me a certain safety net, but they are always willing to help. For example, my sister-in-law watches my son while I teach art classes on Saturdays and all of José’s family helped clear out junk from the restaurant space, pour the concrete floors, and install tile. Even though economically they live day-to-day, they are always willing to bless us with their time. It creates a mutual sense of respect and love. They want to see our hopes come to fruition as much as we want to support them and see their dreams realized. I don’t think seeking justice alone is possible. José’s family reminds me of that.

Christine: What advice would you offer to readers hoping to make positive change in their own communities?

Jose: First, every context is different. You will need patience; you cannot rush things. If you lack patience, you won’t survive. Be empathetic. Be patient. You have to adapt to the disorder and the chaos. Recognize that you won’t change everything, though you can change some people, and you can sow seeds of hope.

Sarah: Get rid of your conceptions of timeline or end product. God will surprise you. Be open to the people that he puts in your path. Start by listening to neighbors and participating in activities that are already happening. Don’t do. Be. And know that it will be uncomfortable.

Share

You can learn more about Sarah and José’s work on their website.

In 2008, George W. Bush walked into a press conference in Baghdad, expecting to speak routine remarks about the positive outlook he saw for Iraq after five years of war. He gave his speech, closed by thanking the group of journalists in Arabic, and then...

A shoe flew through the air, aimed straight at the president.

Bush dodged it.

A second shoe followed. Also dodged.

Guards tackled the shoe thrower to the ground.

The shoes never posed any real threat to Bush’s safety. Neither did they change U.S. foreign policy. And nothing would reverse the tragedies that inspired the thrower—hundreds of thousands of civilians, including half a million children, who had died in the years of American occupation and sanctions on Iraq.

In a new in-depth interview, Muntadhar Al-Zaidi, the journalist who threw his shoes, describes what those three seconds cost him—broken teeth, days of physical torture, a three-year prison sentence, and getting blacklisted from every major news outlet.

Was it worth it?

Here’s where this interview struck a chord for me. The interviewer, Sarah Qari at RadioLab, admits to Muntadhar that she chose to interview him because she, also a journalist, wanted to know whether her own work is worth it. She tells Muntadhar:

The reason I wanted to talk to you is because I’ve been having all of this anger and frustration about things that are happening in the world that I feel like I can’t change. And I don’t know what to do with it, you know?

“I get you,” Muntadhar responds.

Sarah continues:

I do wonder sometimes if I should continue being a journalist, or maybe I should leave journalism and go do something else, like be an activist or work in politics or, you know, something different.

Muntadhar responds, “No, don’t leave journalism. I don’t want you to leave your work, but your work should be for a cause, and you can help to support in one way or another.”

He goes on, expanding his advice not only to journalists, but to all listeners, especially Americans who have freedoms and global influence that few Middle Easterners have.

Ask yourself, how can I bring about change? How can I move things forward? How can I make a difference? During the occupation I thought about how to make a difference and how to respond to what was going on and how to face the occupation, and eventually I did think of something.

For him, that meant putting together what he had—his press credentials and his shoes—to launch something into the air.

Neither shoe hit the president, but they did hit something else—the attention of the world. Muntadhar’s act has been called “the shoe heard round the world.” Activists in the Middle East, United States, Latin America, and Europe gathered in protests, waving shoes in the air.

Disempowered people have been throwing ordinary objects—turnips, tomatoes, eggs—at their oppressors for millennia. In the space between peaceful and violent protest, between silence and shouting, shoes are not the only option.

In my introductory anthropology classes, I teach students something I often need to remember myself—culture is vast. Nobody can change culture alone. No individual gets to control the flow of culture alone.

But here’s the good news—culture is like a conversation that we all get to join.

Muntadhar’s shoes entered the global cultural lexicon on U.S. policy, war, suffering in the Middle East. That conversation has not ended. He could not end a war alone, but he did what he could to shift the conversation toward greater awareness and empathy.

For me, picking up a shoe means writing this today.

What does throwing a shoe mean for you? What influence do you touch every day? How might you steer the flow of your cultural conversation toward justice around you today?

In hope,

Christine

P.S. The whole interview is worth a listen.

I’ve been writing less often this summer because I got the rare opportunity to motorcycle across the Western United States with my husband and adult kids. It turns out that takes a lot of mental focus. But it also taught me a thing or two about justice and diversity.

Along the way, we got pretty familiar with the requisite features of most small towns along the backroads of these fly-over states—churches, bars, schools, gas stations, and if you’re lucky, one good old Dairy Queen.

But when we visited our long-time friends Shanna and Cam Doughty, we noticed something less common happening in their town: ethnic diversity.

The town’s largest employer, a meatpacking plant, has spent the last decades recruiting employees from populations most desperate for work—migrants and refugees. For a population of just over 10,000 people, their town is spectacularly diverse. Over fifty percent are Latino or Hispanic, along with a sizable East African population. More than 15% were born outside the United States, and children in local schools speak more than twenty languages.

Shanna and Cam Doughty moved there ten years ago specifically for this reason. Since then they have worked to make it easier for people across this diverse population to navigate education, healthcare, housing, and immigration systems. Cam plugged himself into local life as an elementary school teacher. Shanna has built relationships of trust with the East African community as well as local churches and residents who have lived here for generations. She completed a certificate in Strategies for Trauma Awareness & Resilience from Eastern Mennonite University, a Masters degree in Justice and Mission, and became an accredited representative with the Department of Justice to provide legal support for migrants.

More recently, Shanna has been working as chaplain at the meatpacking plant. She also started a church with “international” in the title.

On the Sunday we visited their church, we sang songs in four languages. Afterward kids raced around the playground. A handful of people sang and drummed in an extended jam session while others piled food onto a table for lunch. As we munched hotdogs and rice, Shanna pointed out that so far every core family in the church has a single-parent household.

I asked Shanna what she’s been learning lately about how to foster an intercultural and socioeconomically diverse community like this one.

I invited Shanna to tell us more in the following interview.

Christine: Can you tell us about an example of a time in an intercultural relationship when you were challenged to receive a gift that you didn’t anticipate receiving? How did you and the giver grow through that interaction?

Shanna: I was leaving for a week-long work trip when my English student, who had become a good friend, dropped by with food for my family while I was away. Internally, I laughed at the assumption that I regularly feed my family. Of the contributions I bring to our home, good meals are pretty low on the list.

My friend could have given my family something she thought they would want, like macaroni and cheese or pizza, but she didn’t know how to make those things. She could have also just made something the way she makes it for her family. Instead, she chose to make food she knew each person enjoyed. She knew our daughter liked doro wat and that my husband enjoyed her lentil sambusa. She even lowered the spice level. She stayed rooted in her cultural identity while adapting her gift to offer it in a way it could be received.

On my end, I had to swallow my pride. My family was receiving a good gift that I had not thought to provide. My friend is a mother of five small children and wife to a truck driver. She spends her days meeting the needs of others, and here she was adding our family to hers. The old internalized shame that accused me of failing as a wife and mother was quickly washed away with gratitude and relief. Receiving doesn’t mean I am incompetent. It means I am loved.

Christine: What about a time when you were challenged to give something you didn’t anticipate giving?

Shanna: These last ten years have been a rollercoaster between thinking I understand my role and having no idea what my role should be. Early on, I needed to give less. Then I went through a process of discerning what I do have to offer. Finally, I’m getting better at giving what I can uniquely offer in various contexts.

For example, I was hesitant to step into visionary leadership for fear of harming or overstepping others. But my community needed clarity. A teammate of mine once told me, “Shanna, tell us what you need to accomplish the vision. Clarity is kindness.” Yes, listen to the voices of those most impacted. Yes, join their initiatives. Yes, create spaces together for gifts to be shared. But my gifts also include using what I’ve gathered through that work to lead with wisdom and humility. Then, as a diverse community we reflect on how it’s going, and we start the cycle again.

Christine: Why do you see gift-giving and gift-receiving as central to building intercultural communities? What is it about those experiences that are both challenging and good?

Shanna: Gift-giving and receiving need to happen on all levels—physical, spiritual, emotional, mental, and social. This is rooted in my belief that we were created to be one another’s face-to-face allies who cultivate peace together. We were created in mutuality. That means God has created me for you and you for me.

When people interact within their own culture, they have a shared sense for how mutuality works. They know what is expected of them. But when we are with people from other cultures, we tend to be oblivious to how our normal practices impact others. Or conversely, we get overwhelmed by what is normal for others, lose our sense of place within the community, and shrink back.

When we practice giving and receiving, we are being who we were created to be—strengthening and caring for one another. We all have something to learn from one another, and our lives are richer for it.

Christine: For readers who are in less diverse settings than yours, what challenge could you offer to put this lesson into practice where they are?

Shanna: Think of someone who feels entirely different from you. Can you see them as a person who has something to offer you? Can they see you as a person who has something to offer them? Are you open to listening, learning, and changing? We break down divisions by being willing to see one another as people capable of giving and receiving.

To learn more, check out Shanna’s newsletter dedicated to the exploration of love, justice, and multicultural community in the Great Plains, Winded.

Despite efforts made to tackle racism in recent decades, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) of the UK recently published a survey revealing Black and ethnic minority workers are experiencing rising levels of discrimination in the workplace.

The most common form of abuse remains racist ‘jokes’ and workplace ‘banter’, which has a significant impact on the mental health and wellbeing of Black workers. Reports of physical violence and intimidation have also increased from 19% in 2020 to 26%.

This month a UK magazine invited me to write an article about how ordinary coworkers can make a difference in addressing this sort of workplace racism. Here are five practical steps I offered.

1. Get curious

Addressing racism begins by believing people when they describe experiencing it. If you’ve shrugged off someone’s story of racism—or even your own—consider whether it reflects a larger pattern that needs to change.

Learn to recognize common behaviors that communicate exclusion or disrespect to particular racial and ethnic groups. Even when unintentional, moments of discrimination can accumulate over time, leaving people exhausted by the constant need to decide how to respond. Researchers sometimes describe this experience as “racial battle fatigue.”

Learning to understand and talk about race may feel intimidating at first, but it is a learnable skill, and it becomes easier with practice.

2. Find yourself in the story

For people in majority groups, racism can feel like somebody else’s story. But race has shaped everyone.

Consider setting aside time to reflect on experiences that shaped your beliefs and assumptions about race. When have you experienced collisions—moments when your assumptions about society clashed sharply with reality? How have you also been shaped by more subtle interactions, like comments indicating which neighborhoods, schools, or types of people are “bad,” “dangerous,” or “undeseriable?”

No one grows up in this nation without learning something about race.

Tracing the ways you have been shaped by race—whether through harm, silence, privilege, fear, or misunderstanding—is a starting point for empathy and responsibility.

3. Know the benefits of diversity

Research consistently shows that workplaces benefit when people from different backgrounds work together. Teams with an array of differences tend to show increased creativity, problem-solving, and decision-making over teams with less diversity.

And yet many people still associate unfamiliar groups—or even the word “diversity”—with anxiety or negativity.

Learning to value diversity as a strength changes how we approach coworkers, hiring, collaboration, and leadership.

Ask yourself: can you name three reasons diversity is good and worth struggling for?

4. Keep filling the trust reservoir

One of the most important—and enjoyable—ways people reduce racism at work is by building honest friendships.

Trust is like a reservoir. Every workplace depends on it. But racist incidents crack that reservoir, draining trust from teams and relationships.

Trust is rebuilt slowly through ordinary, consistent acts that communicate care, respect, and reliability.

Who fills the trust reservoir in a workplace? Everyone.

You do not need to be a manager to help build trust. Start with the people beside you. Invite someone to lunch. Include coworkers who may feel isolated or overlooked.

Do not wait until a major racist incident forces people to scramble for trust that was never built in the first place. Build relational capital now. Those relationships enable you to advocate for one another in practical ways: making introductions, writing recommendations, connecting coworkers to opportunities, or speaking up when someone is repeatedly overlooked.

And trust must move beyond words into action. If someone in your workplace experiences discrimination, trusting relationships make it more likely they will speak honestly about it—and more likely someone else will step in to help.

5. Build an active and abiding hope

One reason people give up addressing racism is that they give up hope.

Many people begin with unrealistic expectations that a single training, initiative, or conversation will solve racism. Trainings may help when they are done well, but they are never enough on their own. Addressing racism will also require some changes at the root level—unearthing unconscious assumptions, adjusting hiring practices, reconsidering promotion methods, or more.

That takes time, strategy, and intentionality. And it will not be a smooth ride. There are going to be obstacles and setbacks.

Hope is going to get hard sometimes.

Among the Christians I interviewed for Racial Justice for the Long Haul, people who endured in pushing back racism knew they were following a God who never gives up, even if takes all of history. They saw themselves as following a God who moves toward the vulnerable and mistreated, seeing their stories and writing a better one.

We all need a hope that does not depend on whether progress feels fast or visible.

There is work to be done in our workplaces to drive out racism. At times, we will struggle to even imagine how that could change. But each of us participates in a work that began long before us and will continue long after us.

I’m grateful to be joining you in that work.

Christine

P.S. I’ll be on the road delighting in wonderful people and places for most of the summer, so newsletters will be fewer than usual. You’re welcome to follow our family’s journeys by motorcycle and foot across the Badlands, Rockies, Peru, and Bolivia on Instagram!

Sometimes lately just keeping up with the Supreme Court news feels like a full-time job, and none of us can keep up. So today I want to offer a little background on just one of many recent life-altering court decisions. It’s a starting point for remembering how we can—and must—participate in democracy.

Colorblindness won out over color bravery.

This week the U.S. Supreme Court considered whether to strike down a voting district in Louisiana. That district had been drawn in 2024 for a specific reason—because Black voters won a court case two years earlier saying that the previous map diluted their vote by leaving them only one majority-Black district in the state.

Was the 2024 district strangely shaped and designed to take race into account? Yes. And that’s what the Supreme Court ruled this week, striking down the district and saying the districting plan relied too heavily on race.

But here’s what that means for Black and Latino voters, and for our nation.

Lawmakers across the country gained new freedom to redraw maps where Black and Latino voters played an important role in swinging outcomes. Already on the day after the Supreme Court decision, Florida passed a new districting map. These maps will return to a practice called “cracking and packing”—diluting Black votes by condensing similar voters into one district.

Those supporting the Supreme Court decision have argued that by refusing to “see” race in districting, they bring fairness to mapping. Those dissenting point out that colorblindness doesn’t work—people still see race, and to undo the effects of racism, we have to be willing to name the impact of race. As finance executive Mellody Hobson argues in this classic TED Talk, rather than being colorblind, we need to be color brave.

But there’s more. The court also set a precedent that could shape Civil Rights law beyond redistricting alone.

Intentions won over outcomes.

In explaining their decision, the court articulated a new way of interpreting the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the historic act designed to protect minority groups’ access to a meaningful vote.

Section 2 of that Voting Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race in voting. The court this week stated that if plaintiffs want to allege that there is a violation of that section, they need to show that there is intentional discrimination on behalf of the state.

That word intentional is a real sticky one. As Justice Elena Kagan argued in her dissenting opinion on the case, it’s going to be virtually impossible for anyone to prove that discrimination is intentional.

It’s the same pattern that plays out in everyday discrimination. When a man speaks over a woman’s voice in a meeting, is it intentional, or just excitement in the moment? When a white person reminds an Asian American woman of her perpetual foreigner status by asking her where she’s really from (surely someplace far away, not Illinois), is it intentional, or just well-meant small talk? You’ve seen the scenarios play out too many times.

There are a thousand ways to make excuses for intentions. If we want to build a better society, we have to get curious about outcomes. And we need more than neutral intentions—we need to put our very best intentions into action.

This struggle is not new. Nor is it impossible.

This morning my friend and fellow Substack writer Julia Van Der Werf wrote a response to the Supreme Court decision that centered on one of the powerful women who fought to create the 1965 Voting Rights Act. I want to share a portion of her post as a reminder of what we owe to people who came before us, and what the people after us deserve from us.

She writes:

I want to introduce you to Fannie Lou Hamer.

In 1962, this Mississippi sharecropper went to the courthouse to register to vote. She was 44 years old and had never been allowed to try before. She was denied the right to vote because she failed the literacy test, a requirement not equally applied to illiterate white people at the time.

She kept going anyway. After three tries, she passed the literacy test but was denied again because she would have to pay a poll tax. These taxes were technically race-neutral and applied to certain white voters as well, but in practice, the law was applied loosely for whites and with a hard line for Black voters.

Eventually, Hamer was able to pay the poll tax, but that was far harder when economic opportunity was scarce because of the color of one’s skin.

Trying to vote caused her to be evicted from the plantation where she’d lived and worked for 18 years, shot at by white supremacists, and later arrested and beaten so severely in a Mississippi jail that she suffered permanent kidney damage and a blood clot behind one eye.

Two years later, she stood before the credentials committee of the Democratic National Convention and testified about what Black Americans faced simply for trying to participate in democracy. Her testimony was so powerful that President Johnson, fearing the political fallout, called an emergency press conference to pull the cameras away from her. It didn’t work. America heard her anyway.

The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. It said, plainly: you cannot draw electoral district lines to cancel out a community’s votes. You cannot use the machinery of government to make sure certain people’s votes never add up to actual representation. And it worked. Black voter registration surged. Black candidates won office. Communities that had been deliberately locked out of political power started to have a voice.

Then the courts looked at that progress and said, “See, things are better now. You don’t need this law anymore.” That’s like removing stitches from a wound and calling it healed, and then being surprised when it reopens.

So many people today believe that we are past the need for the Voting Rights Act, and some even think that white people are the ones being discriminated against, which is precisely the argument being used to dismantle the protections that Hamer gave everything to win.

In the 1970s, the dominant white narrative was that America had looked at itself, recognized its sin, passed the laws, and leveled the playing field. Busing and affirmative action became the flashpoints, reframed not as remedies for documented exclusion but as reverse discrimination against white people who “had nothing to do with slavery.” This is the decade where “I’m not racist, I just think everyone should be treated equally” became the standard deflection.

In the 1980s, the word racism was quietly replaced with the word culture. Racial disparities were explained as the result of Black culture — broken families, welfare dependence, and a lack of work ethic.

In the 1990s, multiculturalism became the buzzword. We celebrated Black History Month and learned about Black culture, but rarely learned the full history of slavery, segregation, lynching, and economic disenfranchisement that shaped it. At the same time, the “war on drugs” was quietly becoming a war on Black communities. The US went from roughly 300,000 people incarcerated in 1980 to over 2 million by the early 2000s, with that population being disproportionately Black.

Fannie Lou Hamer didn’t just fight for the right to cast a ballot. She fought for the right to have that ballot count — to have her community’s presence translate into actual political power. She understood that the vote was the lever that moved everything else: schools, hospitals, roads, safety, dignity.

The people dismantling her legacy aren’t doing it with fire hoses and billy clubs. They’re doing it with legal briefs and a Supreme Court majority. But the outcome she would recognize immediately — communities locked out of meaningful representation, by design, with the law’s blessing.

So here is my call to action: learn this history and share it. Talk about it at your dinner table, in your workplace, in your community. Contact your representatives and tell them you are paying attention. Support organizations on the ground doing voting rights work — groups like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Brennan Center for Justice, and Black Voters Matter. And vote in every election, at every level, especially local ones where district lines are drawn, and voting rules are made.

The people working to dismantle these protections are counting on our silence and distraction. The best thing we can do to honor Fannie Lou Hamer’s legacy is to refuse to give them either.

Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.

Check out Julia's Substack

P.S. Julia is leading an online book discussion of Racial Justice for the Long Haul this summer! You can join the book club or find out more about her work as an educator and consultant at her website.

This week I have for you a print interview I did with Amos Yong, Professor of Theology and Mission at Fuller Seminary. Our conversation explores how perseverance, grace, and hope sustain long-term work for racial justice, especially amid the loneliness and uncertainty that often accompany this work.

Amos: Christine, there are some big theological and spiritual notions like perseverance right there in the subtitle of your book, Racial Justice for the Long Haul: How White Christian Advocates Persevere (and Why). Perseverance, grace, and hope play central roles in your own vision for how white Christians can sustain the work of racial justice for the long haul. Why is perseverance needed? At one point you discussed how the white brothers and sisters you interviewed working among communities of color felt like they did not belong either there or in their former white neighborhoods of origination, and it reminded me as a Chinese/Asian American of being a perpetual foreigner: accepted neither in Asia (because I don’t have that accent or speak Chinese) nor in America (because I look different). How does perseverance work in this space of loneliness for those—anyone, Christian, religious, or not—working toward justice, racial and otherwise?

Christine: I appreciate you naming loneliness, because addressing loneliness was one of my main motivations in writing this book. I want readers to know that they are not alone in pursuing justice and never have been. I have felt loneliness myself at times as a white person working for justice, and I also hear from friends of color who experience loneliness, not only in predominantly white spaces, but also in choosing to take on the added risks of speaking out for justice. In interviewing people of color and white Christians about their long-term journeys pursuing racial justice, I found that loneliness is a common pitfall to perseverance, along with uncertainty around complexity and the fear of making mistakes. Many people I met with discovered that orienting your life toward racial justice means taking relational risks. But these pitfalls don’t have to be the end of the journey.

One way to envision racial injustice is as a tear in the social fabric. When we rank people’s value according to constructed racial or ethnic categories and create institutions that distribute resources according to those, we ruin the relationships we were created for, both at interpersonal and societal levels. And so dealing with racism involves mending those relationships. That might begin with relational risks, but it moves toward relational healing. Mending relationships is a goal of racial justice, but also part of the process—you can’t persevere alone. You can’t persevere without some core transformative work, which is what my book is all about.

Amos: So, perseverance may be a kind of capacity that emerges from out of some of the new relationships that we hang in there with and press into, as uncomfortable as such might be initially, which leads me to think about your part 5 on grace, which actually comes after your part 3 on collisions, which are about having one’s white privileges unmasked, gradually sometimes but painfully always. Say more about what these collisions are, how they can be received as gifts of divine graciousness, and perhaps why what happens between ethnic and racial others can be gracious gifts also for our currently contested public square.

Christine: Right, so in order to mend that social fabric, we need at least three things. First, we need to see that the fabric is actually torn. That’s what happens in what I call collisions, moments when reality clashes with our imagination of reality so forcefully that we can’t ignore it. I saw this happen in moments like Geoge Floyd’s death, but also in small encounters like when a wealthier person strikes up a conversation with someone in a neighborhood they’d written off as “sketchy.”

Secondly, we need to learn how the fabric works. I call this, “asking a lot of why.” This could involve exploring what Christians would call the biblical principle of shalom, and for any and all others, cultural differences, historic patterns, or what’s happening in your own community.

And the third piece of becoming a mender of the social fabric involves being willing to stretch across the torn and painful places. For Christians, Christ gives us our picture for how this works: like it or not, we have to receive grace from Christ and respond to that grace by passing on grace to others. If we think we will somehow one day pay or earn our way to racial justice, we’re fooling ourselves. Grace is a gift that is given rather than demanded or deserved, tracing ultimately to God, and anticipating response. I might suggest that for any of us, religious or otherwise, when you look at the lives of people persistently pursuing justice, you see grace—and the humility to respond to grace—everywhere. Grace doesn’t mean demanding an easy forgiveness to let you off the hook, it means recognizing you’ve already been given so much that you’re hooked into passing that on for life.

Amos: I love this: grace means we have been given just what we need for the next step of extending this impossible work of racial justice with the unexpected accompaniment, even friendship of others. Perhaps it can now at least be comprehensible why, despite the severe challenges of this endeavor, you write from the beginning to the end about hope. As you know, our evangelical family, whether at Wheaton (where you are), Fuller (where I am), or in our surrounding realms, are inextricably divided by the deep fractures in our churches and across the wider society navigating what you call the “big problem” of racism that is also interwoven with the many other big problems of our culture wars. What did you learn from your research and writing Racial Justice that might yet dare us to hope (against, with, and through delusions), enable our abiding in hope (despite lots of whys pressing on us along the way), and then inspire our living hopefully in this season?

Christine: When I asked people what changed across decades of working for justice, often they answered, “My hope changed.” As an anthropologist, I started analyzing how their hopes changed. I wanted more of us to learn to hope with the resilient kind of hope they found. I learned that resilient hope involves knowing why you hope. Often when we’re asked what makes us hopeful, we fall back on whatever happens to be going well at the time. But basing our hope on current conditions is an unstable way to hope; we need reasons to hope even when injustice is bad and getting worse. For Christians, that means knowing the full story of a God who continually interrupts bad with good. We also need to know what we hope for. That means knowing not just that we’re “anti” injustice, but what we are for: a mended social fabric where we can relate to people in a good way. And it involves knowing what to do in our hope. People with resilient hope actively struggle—they lament, they intervene, and they lean into joy.

Amos: So good, Christine, to know that Christians who set out on this will be able to find others to take up this difficult but important work, even as some of my readers who might not be Christians but are engaged in the world of racial justice will know that there are Christians, whites and others, who are looking for collaborators, partners, and friends in this effort! Thank you for engaging with me in this space. I hope many pick up your important book, not just white folk but also people of color who are looking to grow their networks of allies. I am going to give you the last word to undergird all of us, whatever the pigmentation of our skin, for the long run.

Christine: Thank you, Amos. For anybody feeling like this walk for justice is long, you’re not wrong: it is long. But the good news is you’re not alone. And the more you keep walking toward justice, the more it becomes not just a task, a book to read, a weekend volunteer event, a political slogan, or a gross feeling as you read the news. Instead, justice becomes the very posture of your life. This book is not a “Racism 101” primer with a few quick tips to get started, it’s about becoming a person of justice for the long haul. The world sure needs that now. If you’re on that journey, you’ll find your people here.

Check out Amos Yong's Substack

Today is Good Friday—a day designed to practice what we do when hope dies.

For Christians, Good Friday commemorates the day when Jesus—considered God in human form—died. It’s hard to imagine anything less hopeful than a dead God.

More people attend church on Easter than any other day of the year, but in my opinion, if you really want to see what the church is about, attend church on Good Friday.

Because really, this day is about a crazy moment. Jesus was 33 years old. By this point in his life, tens of thousands of people believed he was God in human form, coming to save the world. And then within the span of a week, Jesus was double-crossed by a friend, imprisoned through a mistrial, condemned by an angry mob, tortured, humiliated, and publicly executed.

Imagine you’ve pinned all your hopes on somebody, then watching people destroy their life. Imagine watching them cough, splutter, and fall bloody, stinky, ugly dead.

Churches pull out their very grittiest embodied rituals to communicate this most hopeless of happenings. I’ve been at Catholic Good Friday services where everyone walks forward to kneel and kiss a wooden cross. In Black churches, Good Friday services often include not one but seven sermons—one for each of the statements Jesus made while hanging on the cross. Often services are scheduled at night so the falling darkness can play a part in the story. Midway through some services, women strip everything from the altar, including even the candle symbolizing Christ’s presence. In my current church, the night ends with a chiming gong, then a violent clanging of pots and pans. We exit in mute silence.

It’s spine-tingling and disturbing.

All this moody ritual is not just about replaying a distant event two thousand years ago. It’s about paying attention to where we are today.

Because hope dies again and again. We participate in killing it. And we have a choice to participate in the story of its resurrection.

In many Black churches, the biggest day of the year isn’t Easter, it’s Good Friday. Black Americans have learned that if you want to hold on to a long fight for justice, you’ve got to practice sitting tight on Good Friday.

It was Good Friday on April 12, 1963 when law officers in Birmingham, Alabama arrested Martin Luther King Jr. I’m not sure whether officers at the time recognized the irony of arresting Civil Rights protestors on Good Friday, but it seems not to have bothered the White clergy leaders who published an open letter to King in the local newspaper that same day.

“We recognize the natural impatience of people who feel that their hopes are slow in being realized,” the pastors and rabbis wrote. “But we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely.” Urging King and all of the city to withdraw from demonstrations, they wielded their own way of hoping as reason: “We do not believe that these days of new hope are days when extreme measures are justified.”

From his jail cell, King began scrawling his response, filling scraps of notepaper and margins of newspapers. King, too, had much to say about hope and justice.

“I have been so greatly disappointed with the White church and its leadership,” King wrote. “I say it as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen.” With palpable emotion, he continues, “Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and fear of being nonconformists.”

King is blunt about the religious leaders of his day—they are missing the point. They are similar to the religious leaders who condemned Jesus to death. And they are similar to more than a few religious leaders today.

“The judgment of God is upon the church as never before,” King goes on. “If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.”

King saw people of good repute standing by as evil won out.

“More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood.”

King managed to hold two truths in tension that Good Friday: perpetrators of injustice are many, and some people advocating for justice will not give up. He said of those few, “They have carved a tunnel of hope through the mountain of disappointment.”

At the time of Jesus’ death, people had no idea that he would be raised from the dead three days later. At the time of King’s imprisonment, Americans had no idea that the Civil Rights Bill would be passed 15 months later. In our present time, what hopes do our present circumstances make it hardly possible to imagine? Can we keep walking toward those when hope feels dead?

King offers two reasons to keep keeping pursuing justice when hope feels dead: “We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.”

I’m not sure the “sacred heritage of our nation” reason holds enough weight for many of us today, but the second reason does keep me grounded. I hope because I believe in a God whose eternal will is to interrupt injustice with justice.

King was looking for more “noble souls from the ranks of organized religion who have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom.” They are “still all too small in quantity, but they are big in quality.” They are witnesses, he said, of “the true meaning of the Gospel in these troubled times.”

All the clanging gongs and kissed crosses of Good Friday are meant to remind us that when God dies—when hope dies—it’s not the end of the story. It’s a story that I chose to make my own story, and one I desire for the whole church and beyond.

I hope this Good Friday offers you a chance to pause to consider why you hope and what you’re going to do with that hope. You might consider setting aside time to read King’s Good Friday letter. I find reading it from the original typed copy especially moving.

Peace through the darkness,

Christine

I set the paper aside and tucked it into my journal, thinking I’d return to it when I had more time to reflect.

That moment came this week. In celebration of the sunniest day of spring so far, I hopped on my bike and spent the day in a part of my city often described as “under-resourced.”

I chose the neighborhood because I had books to pick up at the library and a Google search turned up a new highly rated coffee shop nearby. But as I sat—first in the coffee shop, then at the library, then outside at a picnic table along the street—I couldn’t help paying attention. The anthropologist in me never really sleeps.

And what I noticed was this: not everyone does the sort of evil that kid described. Some people have stopped pretending they don’t have power.

I began to notice small signs of people who have been quietly using their power to help all around us.

• The smile on the Jamaican barista’s face as he explains how he’s inviting small businesses to share his space, ranging from a soap maker to a company inventing the most delicious dairy-free coconut milk chocolates you’ve ever tasted.

• The children outside inventing games as they skip ahead of their mother, carrying bags full of groceries from the food pantry truck.

• The stocked shelves of another mini food pantry inside the library.

• A photo of a Black girl’s eager face on the cover of the book displayed at the library front door.

• The librarian seated beside a patron as they edit a CV together.

• Posters on a bulletin board explaining in several languages how to register to vote.

• Four young Black men in the parking lot swapping stories about their first and worst cars, and nobody giving them grief for lingering loudly in a public space.

• An abundance of bike racks.

• A woman entering the health clinic that offers free and reduced-cost care on an income-based sliding scale.

• Customers buying fresh vegetables in the corner market, outnumbering the customers at the McDonald’s.

• A stooped grey-haired man jogging past in a knee brace.

• A middle-aged Latino man choosing a table in the sunlight and spreading out textbooks to study.

• Trees full of birds.

• A woman in a pink track suit shouting to someone across the parking lot, “God bless you!”

None of this happens by accident. Somebody noticed what needed doing and used their power to make it better. Some of those stories (like the building of the new Black Business Hub, Center for Black Excellence and Culture, and Family Life Center) show up in the news, while others unfold without fanfare.

But that wasn’t all I noticed. I also noticed work yet to be done.

• Tiny booze bottles in the gutters.

• A man on the phone negotiating with a customer service rep to decrease his minimum payment due.

• A police car slowly cruising past.

• Payday loan companies around the corner.

• Empty business real estate.

On my bike ride home, I thought of another quote I heard this past weekend. At Madison’s annual Kingdom Justice Summit, author and activist Shane Claiborne quoted this sentence attributed to Dorothy Day:

“Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.”

We are still accepting a lot of filthy, rotten systems. We are still pretending we don’t have power so we don’t have to use it to help people. As the kid in New York City said, that’s evil.

My challenge for you this week is to spend some time noticing. What evidence can you find of systems needing mending? Where do you find people putting together their powers to do the mending?

This will require putting yourself in a place where you can see the effects of broken systems. Choose a neighborhood where properties are cheap. Take a walk or linger in a restaurant or library in the area. Notice the people, the infrastructure, the advertisements, the conversations.

Ask yourself what’s working and what’s not. If you find a way to get involved, great, but just noticing is an important place to start.

And before you go, find an excuse to return. You might return to work remotely in a public library. Or choose an immigrant-owned restaurant and become a regular. Make a habit of stopping at a local grocery store to grab milk and fruit after work. Schedule your next meeting at coffee shop in the area. Show up at a community event advertised on a bulletin board. Bring your children to a playground where they’ll hear more languages than yours.

Paying attention is the first step toward refusing to accept broken systems. The systems around us were built by people with power. That means they can also be rebuilt by people willing to use it.

Christine

P.S. We met and surpassed our goal of 50 Amazon reviews for Racial Justice for the Long Haul! To keep the momentum going, consider recommending the book or this Substack to a friend or influencer in your life. Thanks for all you do to spread hope and justice!

Racial Justice for the Long Haul

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The questioner gave an example of a relative who espoused racist rhetoric from youth until the day he died. Despite efforts of loved ones to teach him otherwise, this relative doubled down, leaving broken lives in his wake.

This question—is justice teachable—cuts to the heart of my whole career. If the answer is no, what am I doing with my life?

And I suspect it cuts deep for each one of us. Even if teaching isn’t listed in your job duties, you know people you hope to influence—children, coworkers, social media followers, and friends. If you’re reading this newsletter, you probably want to steer people toward justice.

You, too, are a teacher.

And teaching is hard. Because people are hard. We calcify. We resist vulnerability. When confronted with our shortcomings, we would rather blame someone else than adjust ourselves.

Teaching is, at its core, an act of hope. To teach is to believe that humans can change, that we have agency in that change, and that we can move from bad to better together.

Teaching is also an act of grace. It requires facing shortcomings head-on. Teachers give time and energy not on the basis of what’s deserved, but as a gift. There is never a guarantee that it will work, but we do it anyway, trusting it might just multiply beyond our comprehension.

And there is good reason to believe it works. I do believe people can learn to do justice. I believe we are redeemable. I believe this not only because it makes good theology, but because every semester I watch students grow toward justice. I heard people I interviewed trace that growth process across decades. Nobody’s born knowing how to make the world more just. We all need teaching.

One person who has helped me learn how to teach as an act of hope is David Smith, founder of the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning and contributor to the book Habits of Hope: Educational Practices for a Weary World. He taught a workshop at my college many years ago that has shaped my teaching practices ever since.

So I was deeply honored when David invited me to his podcast for a conversation about how to teach about justice.

Whether you’re an educator by profession or just someone compassionate enough to walk alongside others in their learning journeys, I hope you’ll listen. I think you’ll find practical insights to teach—and learn—justice with effectiveness and hope.

Take a listen on Apple or Spotify.

Thanks for being a teacher of justice and a person of hope.

Christine

I got halfway through writing a newsletter about what’s going wrong this week when suddenly I paused.

And I deleted it.

Because you already know about that. The evil in our world isn’t hard to find.

What we don’t hear much are the stories of people undoing evil.

It’s easy to blame muckraking journalists, clickbait conspiracy theorists, or social media algorithms that profit from our attention. But maybe the rest of us aren’t trying hard enough either.

I think there’s more we can do to spread good stories. And doing so is a step toward justice we can all join in.

This week, one of my classes listened to an interview with David Bornstein, co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network. I’ve written about him before, but his work deserves still more attention.

Bornstein explains that for decades, journalists have been operating under the belief that “the world will get better when we show people how awful everything is.”

Shining a light on what’s wrong can spark change, but not when it’s all we read. Bornstein says it’s like believing that “my children will get better if I point out their deficiencies at breakfast every morning.”

Haven’t we all felt the emotional overload of horrific news hammering us 24 hours a day? The result, Bornstein says, isn’t social change—it’s numbness. “People are saying, ‘My nervous system is overwhelmed. I just can’t. I have to unplug. I need an air gap between media and me,’ because it’s like the human nervous system becomes the limit.”

The journalistic focus on bad news isn’t just harmful at a psychological level, it’s bad for society because it leaves out information we need to change the world.

Bornstein gives an example of a hypothetical city with one school that goes from an 85% graduation rate to a 50% graduation rate, and another that rises from 50% to 85%. Which one will journalists write about? The plummeting one. But which school has the information we need to make better schools? The one quietly getting things right.

Negative news is the default. Our brains are hard-wired to lock onto danger. But we need to make a practice of paying attention to the stories of people making good happen, because those are the stories that teach us what to do next.

We need to “make goodness as riveting as evil,” Bornstein says.

To find more tips on how to do so, check out his interview. But following his advice, let me offer one story as an example.

About seven years ago, my church took a hard look at a big problem.

Fifty percent of Black students in our city were not graduating high school on time—three times the rate of White students. Black students were nine times as likely to habitually skip school, and fifteen times as likely to be expelled or suspended. These and other racial disparities in our district were among the highest in the nation.

After consulting a few experts, we decided to start a partnership between our church and the nearest public high school. A few members of the church and the school leadership met together to brainstorm.

In that first year, we recruited a few congregants to help with school events and tutoring. More were filling out paperwork to join when our plans screeched to a halt: COVID happened.

During the year of lockdown, we reached out often to offer help, but options were sparse. No volunteers were coming in or out of the building, and students needing the most assistance were hardly even showing up on screen.

One thing we knew—teachers were shouldering an impossible weight. That year brought unprecedented teacher resignations and mental health crises. We watched from screens, unable to lend a hand.

That’s when we heard about another church designing a teacher appreciation event for a school they were partnering with. We loved the idea. We couldn’t stand beside teachers in the classroom, but we could remind them they were appreciated and invite them to gather around food in a lonely year.

But the cost was daunting. The high school had more than 200 teachers and staff, and our budget was around $200—too little to buy even a cup of coffee each.

The mood on Zoom was dreary as we considered how to cheer up a school full of teachers for pennies per person. Then someone suggested we call a coffee shop to ask if they would donate any coffee.

I made the call to a nearby coffee shop, and to my disbelief, within 24 hours they had agreed to provide not only enough coffee for everyone, but cream, sugar, and paper products to go with.

We called a bakery, and they donated two hundred baked goods. I nearly wept as I loaded my trunk with the boxes.

The next year we added another bakery and a grocery store. The year after that, we organized a team of volunteers to request donations from businesses across town. To date, those calls have brought in thousands of dollars of donations for biannual teacher celebrations and events serving low-income families.

This is how I learned the magic of spreading the stories of what’s working and inviting people to join in. I discovered there are businesses and individuals across our community eager to pitch in their expertise, time, and gifts. Often they’re just waiting for someone to start something that works and welcome them in.

What good stories have you witnessed? How might you share a riveting good story and invite someone in?

Christine

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P.S. For more stories of the good, check out Racial Justice for the Long Haul. If you’ve started reading, I’d love to hear from you! What caught your eye? What stories from the book would you like me to expand upon in this newsletter? Thanks for sharing.

I have mixed feelings about that question.

I love that it voices a desire to do something for justice, not just think about it. But answering that question is tough. Here’s why.

The more I learn about what keeps people pursuing justice, the more I’m convinced that there is no single “next step” for everybody. Different people need different next steps.

That’s why I put together a tool that can help find your next step for racial justice.

As a professor, at the end of a semester I often ask students which activities were most impactful. Their answers are all over the map. Some name a reading that explained a concept. Some name an emotionally moving video. Others describe a conversation that connected a social issue to their faith. Still others point to an activity that put their learning into action.

The variety in their responses is no accident.

A lifelong posture of responding to racial justice requires our whole selves—heart, soul, mind, and strength.

When people asked Jesus which commandment is most important, he quoted Hebrew scripture: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,” and then added that we should likewise love our neighbors.

I find the words heart, soul, mind, and strength to be a helpful mnemonic for remembering that justice is a holistic process. We can’t love our neighbors by choosing to address just one portion of human life.

Trainings about how to pursue justice often focus on just one aspect of the person. In academia, we often focus on the “mind.” Shorter diversity trainings sometimes jump to putting “strength” into action. Churches preach to the “soul,” and media grips the “heart.” But none of these alone is enough to sustain an effective, enduring commitment.

So where do you naturally lead—heart, soul, mind, or strength? And which area might be an opportunity for growth?

Are you a “heart” person who easily follows a surge of emotional energy when you hear stories of injustice? Do you lead with your “mind, “wanting logical explanations and evidence to fit together the pieces of the problem? Does “soul” engagement come easy for you—connecting actions to your faith commitments? Or are you always ready for action, a person led by “strength?”

The reality is that justice work isn’t segmented. We need to fit all these pieces together.

In this free quiz, you’ll answer a few questions to discover your style of engaging racial justice. Based on your results, you’ll receive a few of my suggestions for next steps that fit who you are and how you’re wired.

I hope you’ll take a few minutes to try the quiz. Invite a friend to take it too, and talk about what you learn together.

Thank you for being someone who’s open to growing in love for your neighbors.

Christine

P.S. Hooray for all the great book reviews, and keep ‘um coming! When we reach 50, the book can be nominated as an editor’s pick to reach even more people with research-backed advice for enduring action. Help us meet the goal by leaving your review today!

To keep the momentum going, would you please take a moment today to help in one of these ways?

• Order a copy for yourself or a friend

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• Write a five-star review at your bookseller or Goodreads

These easy steps make a real difference. The more orders and reviews, the more Amazon and other booksellers promote a book. Your support helps people find this book and become more effective and enduring advocates for justice. Thank you.

And Lord knows we still need justice.

Which is why I also want to write about Minneapolis.

Let’s begin… with snow.

To be clear, snow is the least of the concerns this week. But I want to start with snow because when ICE agents shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis this week, snow was one of the first excuses Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem offered.

“Because of the adverse weather that Minneapolis has seen in recent snow, one of the vehicles became stuck and ensnared in the snow. Law enforcement were attempting to push out this vehicle when a mob of agitators...”

Hear me out. I’m a Wisconsinite, born and bred in snowy winters. I take pride in my winter driving. I’ve been stuck in snow more times than I’ve swum in the ocean. I taught two kids to drive a stick-shift sedan in snow. I know how to spot the difference between crunchy, safe snow and dangerous, icy snow that will slam you into a telephone pole. I know which way to turn the wheel when I skid, how to pump the brakes, how to rock a car to find traction in a snowbank.

And I can tell you this: a knobby-tired pickup on a residential street in Minneapolis this week was not at any risk of getting stuck. You can watch the video yourself—the road is black and wet, the vehicles are huge. If agents were stuck in snow, the only reason I can imagine is that they intentionally drove off the road.

As a Wisconsinite, Noem’s insinuation that snow caused the unraveling of this encounter felt like an insult to my Wisconsinite existence.

And I’m not just talking about snow.

This indignation a Wisconsinite feels when somebody speaks of our midwestern winters with exaggerated fear is the tiniest tip of an iceberg. Pun intended.

Every unchallenged false narrative builds a platform for more falsehood. For Noem, that platform included the term “domestic terrorist” to describe Renee Nicole Good, a woman with a glovebox full of toys who waited patiently to wave two ICE agents past her vehicle before being shot and killed.

Kristi Noem’s false story about the supposed danger of snow pales in comparison to the story she’s telling about the supposed danger of human beings:

“For years... tens of millions of dangerous criminal illegal alien terrorists and suspected terrorists were allowed to invade our country over our southern border. They were allowed to steal, to defraud, and to perpetuate violence against American citizens...”

That’s so many strong words, blanketed across so many people. Tens of Millions. Dangerous. Criminal. Illegal. Alien. Terrorists. Invade. Violence.

Do you feel the indignation?

This how people stoke fear where danger does not exist.

I know the investigation is still underway. And I know legal cases are complicated. But in the words of independent, nonpartisan journalist Isaac Saul, “Setting aside the legal question, let’s state plainly that government officials are selling a narrative that is not attached to reality.”

In other words, I’m not saying that snowbanks don’t exist. People crash and die on icy roads. But not this road. Not this sunny day when the street was wet and clear.

Yes, narco-trafficking and weaponized vehicles do exist. But we need to distinguish crime from the actions of millions of people using the best means available to live good and moral lives for themselves and their loved ones.

I want to ask South Dakotan Kristi Noem, haven’t you driven in snow?

And much more importantly, I want to ask how so many people in power can ignore the truth about our friends and neighbors.

I want to ask, have you ever eaten tamales and plantains with a Nicaraguan grandmother?

Have you heard a Mexican woman recount how she swam across the Rio Grande in high heels because she was tired of being raped?

Have you sat at a lunch table with an El Salvadoran man who works two jobs and still manages to keep his eyes open through night classes to learn English?

Have you visited villages in Honduras where children have rice, shoes, and pencils because of money sent from aunts and uncles in America?

Have you watched a Haitian mother coach her daughter through homework in a language she can’t read, reminding the child that she is beautiful, smart, and precious no matter what anybody says?

Have you seen your brother dragged from your front porch knowing you might never see him again?

Don’t you know that people from Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, and Haiti came to the U.S. under the Biden administration lawfully, with background checks and work authorization, under the humanitarian parole program?

Maybe none of us knows all of this. But we can try. We can ask questions. We can listen, read, and imagine. We can humbly correct our own ignorance.

We can stop putting up with dehumanizing narratives about human beings.

Somebody asked me this week how to find courage these days. My answer: courage is built in the little things.

When a big news story drops, suddenly everyone has the courage to spend hours reading the news and crafting their social media post. (Admittedly, you’re reading the result of me doing that).

But the courage that matters is the courage that becomes the very posture of our very being. Courage is found in the day-to-day. Where could you show up for your community this week to put courageous hope into action?

Renee Nicole Good died this week. This is a tragedy. This is a time for mourning and prayer.

And it’s also a time to prevent Good from dying tomorrow and the next day. That’s up to us.

-Christine

• Order the book for yourself or a friend

• Write a five-star review at your Amazon or Goodreads

When I was 23 years old I spent December with a basket hung around my neck, weaving my way across mountainsides picking coffee in a Nicaraguan forest. I’d moved here to become a part of this Nicaraguan village for a year, and so when December came, I joined every man, woman, and child strong enough to carry a 30-pound basket of coffee in the harvest.

I’ll skip to the end of the story and tell you this: the world coffee price dropped to the lowest it had been in fifty years that year. The bank refused to lend money to this village to pay harvesters before Christmas, so every one of these men, women, and children spent Christmas without feasting or presents. In the coming months people survived without half their year’s already meager income. Shelves in the village shops sat empty as even shopkeepers ran out of income to restock. Children’s bellies grew bloated with hunger.

But that came later—after these days stripping berries off one branch and then another, sun up to sun down.

I was so slow. This being my first harvest, I had nothing on these people who had walked forests in flip flops and handled coffee branches all their lives. We were paid by the pound, so they couldn’t afford to linger. The only one picking at my speed was another first time harvester—a nine-year-old girl named Fran.

And so it was Fran beside me one afternoon when I sat to rest on a hill of biting ants. I squealed and jumped to my feet, spilling my full basket of coffee berries. It was Fran who calmly wiped the ants from my bare legs, Fran who helped scoop up every blessed berry, sifting out the leaves, sticks, and ants.

And so when we resumed picking, we were hopelessly behind the other pickers, out of sight and even out of earshot. Gone was any illusion that we would ever catch up.

Suddenly Fran remembered a question she’d been meaning to ask: “Can you sing the baseball song?”

“Baseball song?”

“You know, the one they sing before baseball in America.”

Ah, yes. The National Anthem. I had not sung in a choir since eighth grade. Bit parts in high school musicals had convinced me I was not a singer. But feeling the strange freedom that can come of desperation, I obliged.

And oh my, did singing feel good.

By the high notes in the finale I was belting at a volume I did not know my vocal cords could produce. We rolled in laughter, and she begged for another. I chose a Christmas song. Then another. Somehow now the trees seemed loaded with berries, the rows shorter, the forest lighter.

Fran could not understand my English song words, but I think we both understood what Isaac Watts envisioned when he wrote, “Joy to the world… Let heaven, and heaven, and nature sing.”

We did not know yet how the bleak midwinter ahead would bring months without pay, eating only tortillas and beans rationed from last year’s harvest. Had we known, I think we still would be singing. Perhaps all the louder.

I sing in a choir today because that day taught me why we sing. This year the song that’s still gripping me from our winter concert is the hauntingly beautiful “Earth Song.” The song opens with images of the horrors that fill our daily news: “The scorched Earth cries out in vain. Oh war and power, you blind and blur.”

And then, mid-sentence, the song irrupts into an ethereal tenderness:

But music and singing have been my refuge.
And music and singing shall be my light.

Yes, song is high on my list of what we still need when justice feels far away—when the end of the row is beyond sight, when all the workers seem to have left you behind, when the load is heavy and the story ahead is bleak.

We need song because it synchronizes our heartbeats. Music is a unity-maker, and we need unity.

We need song because it embodies an alternative imagination. Art exposes a vision of the world not as we see it now, but painted in the beauty it deserves.

We need song because it gives courage to voice the rallying cries we fear to speak in words alone. As David wrote, when we are “forced to dwell among ravenous beasts,” with music we “will awaken the dawn” (Ps. 57:4, 8).

We need music because it laments. As another poem reminds us,

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.
(Bertolt Brecht, “Motto to the ‘Svendborg Poems,’” 1939)

As the longest night of the year approaches, I wish you music about the dark times, music to awaken the dawn.

Christine

P.S. For more ways to find hope in dark times, remember to order a copy of Racial Justice for the Long Haul.

As I was signing books afterward, I asked several people, “What stood out to you tonight?”

“Hope,” they kept saying. “I want to have a better kind of hope.”

I think we all do these days.

If we’re basing our hope on what’s happening in our present circumstances, when the news gets bad we’re going to run out of hope.

If we’re basing our hope on a general sense that “things usually turn out fine for me,” when we meet somebody whose life doesn’t usually turn out fine, we’re going to run out of hope.

Hope that endures has an existential thesis—a core belief about the nature of the universe. For people in this book, that thesis went something like this: “Goodness interrupts the bad.”

Hope that grows out of that thesis knows that life might get really, really bad. It doesn’t expect any one individual can eradicate that bad by their own mighty push. Instead it believes that over and over again, through all the course of history and existence, goodness has continued to interrupt the bad. For the folks who describe this in terms of a Christian faith, interrupting is the very essence of the story of God.

Enduring hope knows that life is going to require struggle. It knows that the healing of society depends upon a million singularly miraculous and tiny interruptions of the bad with good, again and again, until it becomes the very posture and movement of our lives.

Here’s a snippet from the book that I read aloud. It invites you into that kind of hoping.

I know that for a lot of us, hope itself is hard to even hope for. If you feel yourself hanging on by only a thread of hope—hope either for racial justice, or for the church, or for this thin sliver of overlap between the two—I wrote this book with you in mind. … Whoever you are, this book is for you if you share just one thing: Deep down you feel a kind of vibrating uncertainty about what can be done about injustice and the future of this country and the world. You just don’t know anymore. There may have been a time when you could believe things would get better. Some days you still can. But there’s a darkness you have faced, and when you look into that darkness, it’s hard to be so sure. …

If you are anything like me, this journey comes with a lot of tears, some cursing, and throwing a book or two across the room. It can be lonely and tedious. It very well may break your heart. But let me say again what I want you to know: You are not alone. You are going to meet a certain kind of unusual people in this book. Together we’re going to scoop out the litter that has clogged up our wellspring of hope, scrub it out, and see whether we find something shimmering.

If you’re looking for that kind of hope, please order a copy of Racial Justice for the Long Haul. Seriously, I’m convinced that this book holds something that people need right now—a way of hoping and connecting the dots across your lifetime to become people who don’t give up in the face of injustice.

I bet you know somebody else who needs that, too. Why not order them a copy?

Just to let you know, all my proceeds from this book are going to organizations working for racial justice. This has been a labor of love, and I’m excited you’re a part of this journey.

Christine

Order the book

This week I’m serving up an early newsletter with something special for this holiday week.

A poll conducted last Thanksgiving found that a third of Americans were uncomfortable at family gatherings due to political differences, and half of Americans had at least one estranged relative.

We are living in what author and journalist Jonathan Rauch calls an epistemic crisis—a breakdown in how our society decides what’s true and how to make collective decisions. We have lost the skills for understanding one another, but more than that, many of us have lost the will to try.

As holiday gatherings become a battleground of this larger epistemic crisis, many of us choose avoidance. While there may be times when letting a subject rest can be a step toward healing, we cannot build loving relationships without honesty.

But here’s some good news: Talking about sensitive topics is a learnable skill. As an anthropology professor, I traffic in difficult conversations. I teach people how to understand each other across differences, and that means talking about the whole gamut of intimidating topics—race, gender, sexuality, religion, immigration, politics, and more.

To ease our way into this holiday season I wrote an article based on my research and personal experience on how to talk about the tough subjects your family doesn’t talk about.

Check out the whole article online for free here. And consider passing this along to somebody who needs it this season.

Wishing you a hearty portion of honesty, grace, and healing this season.

Christine

P.S. A big thank you to all of you who have already pre-ordered Racial Justice for the Long Haul! Here’s a little secret—the publisher is already mailing out copies in advance of the official launch date, so now’s a great time to order one as a Christmas gift for your mother, father, auntie, cousin, pastor, bestie, or mentor!

I’d like to tell you a little cautionary tale today.

First, let me place some cards on the table: When it comes to women in leadership, I’m an egalitarian. That means I believe in a theology that says both men and women are created to work and serve in interchangeable roles, including childcare, preaching, and church leadership. (This will not be a surprise if you’ve read my earlier post explaining patriarchy.)

In line with these beliefs, I might expect that women and men in egalitarian organizations would be happier and freer than in organizations with the opposing view—complementarianism.

This is exactly what Lisa Weaver Swartz, a sociologist at Asbury University, expected when she started her doctoral dissertation. She set out to compare two seminaries—one complementarian and one egalitarian. She expected to meet women experiencing some discontent in the complementarian setting and more freedom in the egalitarian one.

As she began interviews, she heard mostly that. She heard what she expected to hear.

Because that’s what humans do. We have a powerful ability to ignore information that doesn’t fit our pre-existing narratives of the world.

And it wasn’t just Swartz who overlooked evidence to the contrary. Women in the egalitarian seminary were also dismissing evidence. They wanted to believe that men and women in their egalitarian-believing setting were unified and free. Evidence to the contrary became invisible. But as Swartz puts it, “the invisible is as important as the visible.”

When Swartz reviewed what she’d seen and heard, she started noticing what had been invisible. Women in the egalitarian seminary were taking more responsibility than men for housework and childcare—just like the complementarians across town. They felt pressure to dress and behave just feminine enough but never so much as to appear slutty or weak. They watched men make leadership decisions without them. And instead of admitting that their group wasn’t living up to its own ideals, they blamed themselves for those challenges.

In other words, patriarchy in the wider society still affected them, but they couldn’t see it because they thought they were on the good team. They imagined themselves immune to the wider cultural forces.

The moral of the story is not that the egalitarians had the wrong theology of women in leadership, or that aiming for gender equity is a waste of time. The point is this: all of us need to take an honest look in the mirror.

This tale has implications far beyond women and men in seminaries. In research interviews among people of color, I heard several people say that organizations that believe themselves to be antiracist can be the most difficult to work in. People who think they’re on the good side sometimes forget they have room to grow.

When we believe we have eradicated our own capacity for injustice, we become a greater danger to the marginalized people in our midst.

This week, try paying attention to moments when your group assumes it’s the good team. What stories or voices might challenge that assumption?

To read the full story of Lisa Weaver Swartz’ research, check out Stained Glass Ceilings.

Christine

P.S. A big thank you to all of you who have already pre-ordered Racial Justice for the Long Haul! It’s not too late to join the launch team and get advance access to the book. Sign up here!

When I was little, my mom made me a sticker chart. Each time I made it through a whole day without crying, I earned a sticker on the chart. I remember standing in the kitchen counting my accumulating stickers. And I also remember days when I couldn’t hold back tears. I remember being scolded for coming out of my room before I finished crying.

They meant well, but sometimes that threat still rings in my ears when I don’t earn my stickers. I have cried in front of my students, colleagues, and several bosses. I have cried in workshops, classes, libraries, and interviews. Of all the lessons my parents tried to teach, holding back tears was probably my greatest failure.

Or so I believed.

Then some years ago over dinner, an older woman casually mentioned to me that she had “the gift of tears.” That phrase shifted tectonic plates inside me. Tears—a gift?

Since then I’ve come to believe that tears are even more than a gift—they’re a superpower. Tears say we will face the fullness of reality. We will admit that some things in this world are not okay. Tears can supercharge us for the long fight against injustice.

Tears remind us what matters

When I was a new professor, I attended a conference and sat at a restaurant table surrounded by seasoned professors—all very intimidating people. One man described a book that influenced his research. Then he said something that grabbed attention all around the table. He admitted he had cried when he read it. “That’s how I knew what I wanted to study,” he said. Somebody across the table followed with a story about crying over a dataset. Then another. One by one, we shared stories of the tears that led us into our careers.

Most of us told stories of crying over the world’s unsolved problems. But some found our vocations by crying in regret, anger, confusion, or even wonder. Humans are the only species that cries not only for what’s wrong but for what unexpectedly turns so very good.

Tears are an embodied response to facing what matters. So why do we so often apologize for tears?

Tears are not weakness

Like my young self hiding in the bedroom, many of us were socialized to hide our emotions. As Tom Hanks’ character in A League of Their Own famously shouted at a sobbing female baseball player, “There’s no crying in baseball.”

Oh but there is crying. And denying it won’t stop it.

Aside from the logistical challenge of pronouncing words through the throat-tightening reflex of crying, there’s a more daunting problem with crying: we fear losing respect.

Women’s emotions have long been treated as chaotic and dangerous to society. Freud labeled strong emotions among women as “hysteria” and treated them as pathological. In patriarchal societies (see what I mean by that), people often learn to categorize sadness as a feminine emotion and thereby inferior to the supposedly masculine trait of “rationality.”

In response, we reward both women and men for putting on an emotionless mask. We reward women with the right to become leaders if they tone down their emotions. Psychologists like Jonathan Haidt have shown the folly in dismissing emotions, demonstrating that emotions are in fact foundational to decision-making and tightly intertwined with what we usually consider rationality. We are all emotional beings—and that’s a good thing.

Weakness is not bad

I often remind students that most of what we call learning involves tacking new ideas into our existing mental bulletin boards alongside the old ideas, bur real awakenings only happen when we’re willing to rip some false ideas off the bulletin board. Our thinking is clogged with illusions. Tossing them out hurts. In Christian terms, the word for this is repentance—a turning away. It is costly and painful. It can drive us to tears.

Vulnerability is how we prepare to be transformed. As one teacher put it, “We will fight for authentic over perfect, courage over comfort, connected over isolated, empathy over shame and vulnerability over armor. I can’t help but believe this is the key to healing a broken nation.” We need to stop avoiding weakness.

Tears are a beginning, not an end

In recent years, increased public attention has focused a particular kind of tears—a phenomenon dubbed “white women’s tears.” The phrase refers to situations when white individuals who learn about injustices respond with tears in a way that directs attention away from the suffering of the people affected. Rather than focusing energy on solving the injustice, the tears cause people to comfort the sad white people.

But crying about injustice—whether you’re white or not—doesn’t have to be performative or self-centered. As one woman with years of experience working for racial justice told me, there’s such a thing as “justified crying.” She told me frankly, “This is upsetting, heavy work. And you’re going to cry.”

At best, crying is not an end point that leaves you stuck on the couch with a box of tissues. Crying is a beginning of something powerful.

Jesus said that our greatest tasks are to love God and likewise our neighbors with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Crying signals that the heart is activated, but we also need to engage the other elements. We can turn heart-based emotions like sadness and anger into a starting point to engage our minds to learn, our souls to repent and forgive, and our strength to make changes in the world.

When tears start, don’t just grab a tissue and look away. Tap into a superpower. You care deeply about finding good in the midst of evil. Go do something about it.

Christine

P.S. It’s exciting to hear from so many of you who have already pre-ordered Racial Justice for the Long Haul. It’s not too late to join the launch team and get advance access to the book. Sign up here!

Pre-order the book

As you know, I’ve spent the last five years of my life investigating how and why white Christians advance racial justice. It’s been thousands and thousands of hours. Now the findings are ready to share. And none of this matters if people don’t hear about it.

You are my people.

You care deeply about justice.

You want others to do the right thing.

I need your help.

My fourth book, Racial Justice for the Long Haul, is about to be released.

For this project to achieve as much good as possible, I’m building a team of people who will see the book now and help spread the word.

Would you consider joining the team?

As part of the team, you’ll receive:

• Immediate access to an early digital copy of the book (months before you can buy it)

• An invite to a live online Q&A with me about the book and what it means for U.S. Christians

• My undying gratitude

Here’s what I’m asking of you today:

• Pre-order Racial Justice for the Long Haul (Yes, pre-order. The more pre-orders, the more Amazon advertises. Your order helps put this book in front of somebody else who might need it). Many of you have already done this. Thank you. Next…

• Fill out this short form so I can send you the electronic copy right now!

When the book is available to everyone in January, I’ll send a reminder to write a review, because even a one-sentence helps people find the book.

If that sounds like something you’d enjoy, click here to sign up:
👉 Sign-up form

Your support means so much. A book is a community endeavor, and I couldn’t do this without you!

With gratitude and hope,

Christine Jeske

P.S. The most helpful thing you could do today is fill out this short form to tell me you would consider helping people pursue racial justice in this way. Thank you so much!

This Tuesday I sat around a table eating chili and oatmeal cookies with a dozen young people and two special guests—Palestinian theologians, authors, and brothers John and Samuel Munayer.

The day before, Hamas returned 20 Israeli hostages, and Israel freed nearly 2,000 Palestinian detainees and prisoners. News stories showed people on both sides in exuberant celebration.

These Palestinian brothers were not exuberant. “We do not call this peace,” one said somberly. “This is a ceasefire. We have had ceasefires before. We have not yet had peace.”

Peace, they reminded us, takes work—ending not just war, but its causes.

One brother reminded us of a maxim familiar to Palestinians:

“To critique is easy. To build is hard.”

Especially when what you’re building is peace.

In both Palestinian Arabic and Israeli Hebrew, the words for peace—salaam and shalom—stem from the same Semitic root. And that root is both a noun and a verb.

As biblical scholar Tim Mackie explains in this short video, the ancient Hebrew word shalom means “something that’s complex, with lots of pieces, that is in a state of completeness, wholeness.” As a verb, “to shalom” means to put together many moving parts of relationships and situations to make life whole again. It can mean repaying damages, reconciling relationships, or working with your enemies for their good. For biblical authors, Jesus was the personification of shalom—the one who brings into wholeness the relationships among God and humans.

What that means for the Middle East right now is beyond me.

But Samuel and John are working on it. Their work of shaloming includes convening people around tables like the one where we ate chili. They’re committed to bringing to those tables youth and people who have lived through genocide and apartheid. Together they’re assembling stories and imagination that guide the way of shalom.

They’re not just wishing for shalom as a noun, they’re doing shalom as a verb.

Another shalom builder I’ve been following is David Bornstein, co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network. He points out that journalists have long viewed their role in society as shining spotlights on problems. They work under the assumption that if you highlight a problem, people will solve it.

That spotlight approach worked for the Watergate scandal, but when you multiply it across a 24/7 news cycle, you get a fractured society full of anxious and paralyzed people.

Fear makes clicks, and clicks make money, and so goes the media.

We know this. And if Bornstein was just shining one more spotlight on this polarized, siloed world, he wouldn’t contribute much to shalom.

But Bornstein does something more. He shows us how journalists can build something better. He offers another way to draw readers into goodness that doesn’t rely on fear: puzzles. People love puzzles—not just Wordles and Sudokus, but suspenseful stories of the trials and errors that lead to societal solutions.

Bornstein teaches journalists to find “how-done-it” stories—accounts of people making good in the world, told with all the suspense of who-done-it mysteries. In other words, Bornstein is teaching journalists to report on shaloming, and in doing so, Bornstein himself is shaloming.

Who do you know who is building shalom? How could you share their story—or join in?

Read and review the Munayers' book

This article is part of series on proven, effective ways to pursue justice for the long haul. We’re going to need perseverance, strategy, accomplices, humility, tears, and a lot of other things. That’s why I decided to call this series “What we still need.” Read more posts in this series here.

“I’m being treated unfairly at work.”

“My wife/husband/boyfriend/girlfriend/parent is calling me names and speaking cruelly to me.”

When someone discloses an injustice that happened to them, it can be when we least expect it. I’m often so shocked when I hear their story that I feel like I’m playing catch-up the whole conversation, trying to digest what they’re saying while my mind is whirling. Has this ever happened to you? I have really bungled some of these conversations and I cringe thinking back to what my friends and colleagues were experiencing on the other side of the table. Maybe you have bungled some too.

“My friend is lying about me.”

“These are the kinds of barriers I face in life that you may not have to think about.”

“My husband/wife hit me.”

Maybe you’ve been on the other end, too, sharing something unjust or abusive that happened to you. It’s so vulnerable. You’re waiting with baited breath to see if they are going to take you seriously and take what happened to you seriously. Maybe you’ve tried to tell others before and it didn’t go so well. Maybe this is your first time ever talking about it. Maybe you’re even doubting whether what happened to you is that big of a deal, questioning if you’re making a mountain out of a molehill.

Let’s set the stage for why disclosure conversations matter so much:

1. How we respond is a huge deal. Any dismissiveness can add an additional layer of trauma to the situation. Victims of injustice often say that the community response is MORE impactful than the actual injustice itself. When a person brushes off what they say, it can be even *more* devastating than the abuse or injustice they experienced. That sounds wild but it’s true. When a person engages, it’s such a balm and relief.

2. When someone discloses an injustice, very often they will start with just the tip of the iceberg. They may start small to see how you’ll respond. In our discomfort, sometimes we rush to respond before we even know all of what happened. But if we aren’t scared of the discomfort, we can bring the gift of peace to the conversation and learn the whole story.

But when we’re in the moment, caught off guard, and can barely process what they’re saying (or have no framework for what they’re saying), how can we think of a helpful response? It’s almost impossible for most of us! The only thing that helps me is planning ahead - having at least a rough idea of what to say ready in advance.

Just like the Instagram parenting gurus who give scripts to help parents live out our values with our kids, having a rough script in place for these disclosure moments can be the difference between being there for someone in a crucial moment and looking back wishing we were better prepared to love well.

So here’s what I recommend: prepare a phrase along the lines of “Wow, thank you so much for telling me about this. Please tell me more, if there’s more you would like to share.” Reflective listening can be great: You can restate or paraphrase what they said to give them a chance to clarify or add to what they shared (“So what I’m hearing you say is …”). This kind of response gives them a clear message that 1) you care and 2) their experience matters. Those two messages are SO important for the healing process.

Last week in the college group my friend Sara and I are leading through the Learning Justice study, we actually practiced saying our own version of this phrase out loud to each other to build muscle memory for when the situation actually happens. It felt kind of silly but it was actually helpful!

What would your version of a response be? Feel free to comment and share your ideas. You can practice your version out loud too!

Thinking back on your own life, was there a time when you were bracing yourself to be dismissed and someone said something like this to you? How did that affect the conversation? Or can you think back on a time when you wishsomeone had said this to you? What difference would it have made for you?

We’re not always going to get it right and you can always circle back if you feel like you bungled it: “I didn’t know what to say in the moment so I kind of froze (/didn’t give you a chance to finish/tried to explain away what you were saying). I’m really sorry. But I’m so grateful you shared that with me and I would love to hear more about happened if you still want to talk about it.”

Getting a phrase embedded in your brain for disclosure moments is a very practical way to be equipped for the work of justice. It’s soooo simple but it is amazing the difference it can make. For a victim, it can be a turning point in their life - either toward healing or away from it.

What about when a victim confronts you about an injustice YOU did to them?

It can be really hard to be confronted by someone who says you were offensive, unjust, abusive, deceptive, or manipulative. Ouch.

But y’all, what if we reframe these conversations as a gift? Our job on this planet is to love God and love people - and this confrontation is a chance to learn to love better! What better gift is there? I think back to so many times when I WISH someone had been bold enough to confront me so I could learn and change, rather than continue the damage I was doing. But it’s so hard not to be defensive!

Here again, have a phrase to have at the ready to override your brain flooding in the moment. For example: “Thank you for telling me directly. This gives me the chance to make it right and learn a better way. Please tell me more.” Keep asking questions or just saying “tell me more” until they feel heard and understood. Forget about trying to explain yourself. Work to understand the impact your actions had. Do research into the issue raised to educate yourself further.

As my dad says: “Don’t get defensive, get curious.”

And as Adam Grant says “When you get defensive about feedback, you fail twice. You fail to learn today, and you fail to encourage people to keep teaching you tomorrow.”

And as Jesus says “Do to others as you would like them to do to you.”

When your INSTITUTION is confronted by someone:

If an accusation is brought about your institution, the same humility is required. Ask questions, try to understand what is happening, and find out what needs to happen to make it right.

But if there’s not a quick resolution or path forward (or if there is any conflict of interest), you absolutely must bring in an outside mediator or expert to help you understand the issue that is being raised or an outside, trusted, neutral entity to conduct a formal investigation. Whatever the situation is, reach for those outside resources. Too many abuses have continued unchecked because of “internal investigations.” Don’t be afraid of what a third-party investigation will find – light is a good thing and God is faithful, even if it’s painful.

Too many people and institutions take a defensive, liability-focused approach advised by their lawyers rather than simply looking for and telling the whole truth. Tates Creek Presbyterian Church is a great example of an orientation focused instead on God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness. Their motto for investigating allegations of sexual abuse in their church was “Righteousness over Reputation.” You can read their full statement here.

Let’s make sure we welcome the truth and let’s prepare to do that well.

To read more of Sarah Driver’s posts, visit sarahdriver.substack.com. Learn about her work at www.justicedriver.com and www.instagram.com/justicedriver.

© 2025 Sarah Driver