...From White Supremacy: Individualism w/ Erna Hackett

In this episode, Brandi is joined by Erna Hackett to talk about individualism and the ways that it impacts how many of us see the scriptures and Jesus. They explore how this ideology operates in white spaces and offers opportunities to see and be another way.  

Special thanks to Erna Hackett and honor to the impact that Randy and Edith Woodley in particular have had on so many of us. If you want to support their work, you can buy seeds *seriously this is a good use of your money* at http://elohehseeds.com/ or support their work to create an indigenous center for earth justice at https://www.gofundme.com/f/ResurrectEloheh

Music: "Let's Get High" by Sanchez Fair

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Taking our theology back from ideas and systems that oppress.
@reclaimingmytheology

Transcript

Reclaiming My Theology: Individualism

Brandi: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Reclaiming My Theology, a podcast taking our theology back from ideas and systems that oppress. I’m Brandi Miller, and I’m so grateful to be on this journey together.

Today on the podcast, we will start into our more regular episodes available every Thursday. Through this series, we will examine the values of white supremacy culture and look the ways that it impacts how we see God and others. If y0ou’re like me, you might have a lot of questions as we go on from week to week. During future episodes we will have a segment called “Make It Make Sense,” a space to try and work through some of your questions together. If you have a question, please send them to me at reclaimingmytheology@gmail.com.

We know that no culture exists without values, and white supremacy is no different. So this season, we will look at values like paternalism, perfectionism, and worship of the written word, just to name a few. But today, we’re starting with individualism.

I’m joined today by Erna Hackett, founder of Liberated Together, a space for Christian women of color who are engaged in the work of justice and healing to find community, be equipped, and learn more about each other. We will discuss how individualism is read into the text and then lived in the church at large. We dive into more collective ways of being with the hope that as we look to marginalized communities, we can make sense of our experiences in order to reclaim a more collective and liberative theology. 

As a note: there is some explicit language in this episode, because, you know, sometimes white supremacy requires us using a few swears. And if those words bother you more than white supremacy, then this probably isn’t the podcast for you. But, you know, I give the warning more for those of you that have kids.

So, with that, please enjoy this interview and my time with Erna Hackett.

***

Erna: I’m just going to hang out with my friend and have fun talking about the stuff we like to talk about!

Brandi: Alright! Well, Erna, thank you so much for being on the show today!

Erna: I’m so glad to be here. I’m too glad to be here! I’m trying to calm down.

Brandi: I think I feel about the same, so this will be a good time. But Erna, I realize not everyone will know who you are, which is a shame—

Erna: Right! I find it shocking!

Brandi: —shame them personally for that.

Erna: I have like 250 Instagram followers and people still don’t know who I am? It’s just weird.

Brandi: Yeah, the internet is an unfair, inequitable place. But I would love to help our people get to know you a little bit, so Erna I would love for you to describe what does it mean to be you?

Erna: Oh, well, I mean, what does it mean to be a half-Korean half-white unicorn that runs freely, liberating theology from white supremacy and patriarchy and heteronormativity? It cannot be summed up.

No, let’s see—I just finished a role as executive pastor at The Way in Berkeley; I spent twenty years doing college ministry. What I – all of that has honed into starting something called Liberated Together, which is a space for women of color who do justice work to create community and learn from one another. Meaning that I just don’t think that there is very often spaces for Black women to talk to Indigenous women, and Latina women to talk to Southeast Asian women. Most of the time we’re doing heavy lifting in spaces centered around serving our own communities or around helping white people do better, and we have very few spaces that are about building true solidarity with each other.

So, I love that work because we’re never gonna get free from all these problematic systems until we build real solidarity. So, I don’t conflate that our experience is the same, but it gives us room to actually dig into that a little. So, I love that. Pursuing justice in a liberated and healing way is kind of the focus of what I do right now.

Brandi: Yeah, turns out pursuing justice and liberation doesn’t have to happen within the toxic confines of the systems that oppress us. Who knew?

Erna: Well, as someone who tried that for many, many years…

Brandi: Eugh. For me, as someone who’s trying that…right now.

Erna: Ah!! It’s too real. I didn’t – but – what’s sad about it, and why I think this podcast is so awesome is we don’t even know we’re doing it, right, because so much of the theology that we live into isn’t stuff that we actually put words to, right? Our lived theology is this sort of, like, underground reality, and so I think unearthing that and putting that to words is so clutch to liberation, so I love this space and these conversations.

Brandi: Yeah, that’s a huge part of why I’m doing this. Because so many of the values are just unnamed—

Erna: That’s right.

Brandi: —and the problem specifically with white supremacy is that – not that the values themselves are evil; it’s that they’re unnamed as the center of what we do, and people who don’t adhere to those values are penalized for it in all kinds of spaces, including the church and especially in theological spaces.

Erna: Yes. All the way, amen.

Brandi: So the hope today is, in some ways, to start conversations that make the values explicit so that people… Well, for white folks specifically, that they would know what values they’re operating with that are invisible or covert for them, and for folks of color, that we would just not be gaslit all the time by the values of whiteness and white supremacy—which I know you are an evangelist for that.

Erna: I am! I am. And I must from the beginning thank the many people who did work to educate me.

So, a lot of what I learned, I learned in my master’s program, which was with the North American Institute for Indigenous Theological Studies. So it’s a space that is taught and led by all Native American and First Nations Christians in North America, and they – um – particularly Randy Woodley and his wife, Edith Woodley, did so much work to, as they put it, “decolonize and indigenize” me and many of us in a beautiful and loving way.

They do this work in a really embodied way on their farm, Eloheh, and so I want to give credit to them, and I just want to give credit to a huge number of my first role models in theological formation around liberation came from Black folks and especially Black women; so honor to, you know, Delores Williams and Katie Cannon and James Cone, so, just to name those who have shaped me.

Brandi: Yes. I love that. I’m actually growing some Eloheh seeds on—

Erna: YES!

Brandi: —the little piece of land I live on right now as a result of what I’ve learned from Randy and Edith Woodley over time, so I feel really grateful to honor them and have space to honor them regularly and all the people that they’ve impacted.

But I think folks, like, hearing a biracial white and Asian woman talking about creating a fully liberated spaces – I’m thinking for, like, a college-aged student or someone who’s just entering into the Black Lives Matter movement for the first time, they probably don’t have an imagination of how you came to be who you are.

So I know you’re giving honor to people, but can you give us a couple of highlights that would help us to know who you are? Because I want to make the journey accessible for people and create possibility models for who folks can be.

Erna: I love that! Ah! I love that idea, and I do think imagination is such a huge part of social justice. And I feel glad to talk about my journey, though it feels highly un-Asian-American woman, because – because I had so few role models, you know, of people in justice spaces.

So. Yes. I’m Korean and white, grew up in the suburbs of Seattle in the late 70s and early 80s, in a small Korean immigrant church. I would say a big pivotal moment for me was – um – I really grew up identifying as Korean American. I didn’t really grow up identifying as biracial, and I went to this Korean Christian church camp the summer before my senior year. And I got teased by all these Korean kids as being “just half.” And it was very shocking to me that the community I thought I was a part of, like, didn’t claim me. And it – it really stirred up what I would say was kind of a biracial identity crisis. Because I didn’t identify as being white; I had spent like every summer in Korea.

Right after that church camp, I went to a leadership camp called Governor’s School for Citizen Leadership, and my roommate was a young Black woman. And, we didn’t have this language back then – I would – what would that have been?—uh, the summer of 92—but now I understand, “Oh, she was woke, and she was giving me a racialized education.” But, basically, I came in there very wounded and confused about race, and I felt like she was like, “Oh, you want to learn to talk about race? Let me help you.” And her and her good friends, and really kind of a circle of young Black women, took me in and gave me language that they had to talk about race. And they were the first people to take me to a Black church. I remember this vividly. Like, walking in, and just someone handed me a tambourine, and I was like, I don’t know what’s happening right now.

Brandi: My people!

Erna: You know? And I remember – just – they – but they also just opened my eyes to a whole other lived experience, like, um, how they critiqued whiteness, and how they critiqued dynamics of interracial dating, and how their experience with the police, and, um, the education around hair, um, was—and I mean my education was, I just started using the hair products they used and that’s not really meant for like Asian hair. But I did spend a year using pink oil in my hair. And what—

Brandi: Oh wooooww. Wow.

Erna: Yes! All that to say, though, is that I had a deep experience of hospitality and love when I was experiencing trauma, and so I think when folks see me in racial justice spaces, um, they don’t know that my internal world is really coming at that from a very Korean-American place, which is one of gratitude and having been extended hospitality.

And so how I come into it, even – I also believe though in using the language of the community that is seeking their own liberation. But where that comes from is that when I went on – in to staff work, with InterVarsity, I asked to be put at Oxi – uh – Occidental College, which was very diverse college at that time, and to me, as I looked around and I didn’t see, like, Black students in the group, I felt like, “What does it mean to return the hospitality and generosity and advocacy that was extended to me?” Um so that has always been like my frame.

I think as time went on, people think – I think my language about, you know, white supremacy, and critiquing all these systems sound to some—not to all, but to some—very radical, and so they’re like, “Um, I am perplexed by this Korean lady.” But to me, I feel like it is always an offering of love to a community that offered love to me. And I also believe, as I’ve moved on in my journey, that when Black folks get liberated, everybody gets liberated.

Brandi: Yes.

Erna: Like, you know, my mom immigrated in the post-1965 immigration movement. That came on the rights of the Civil Rights Movement. No, it has never happened that Black folks get liberated and then other people get more marginalized, right? So, like, whenever they confront white supremacy—like, whenever they confront police violence—there is an impact on other marginalized communities. And, so, that’s why I feel like aligning myself with liberation movements centered in Black liberation and Black theology is – feels like freedom to me. Because it moves me closer to freedom and out of white supremacy.

Brandi: Totally.

Erna: So that’s some of my journey—

Brandi: That’s amazing.

Erna: —that’s some of my journey.

Brandi: I love that. And I love that hospitality and gratitude are at the center for you, because I feel like a lot of the time when people think about entering racial justice movements, they think about it in terms of aggressive change, isolation, loneliness, pain, needing to hide, shame, and all of those things. And, really, like, it sounds like in your story that it was the compassion and love of people around you and then your own willingness to hear the truth about yourself over time and to change, and for me, especially as a relatively academic person myself —

Erna: Oh, yeah, “relatively academic.” Oh ok, continue on, Gentle Statements About Herself.

Brandi: One of my earliest critiques of justice movements, particularly in academic spaces—I went to a small private liberal arts college—was that the movements were so language-driven, and so, um, inaccessible because of the language and the academy of it, that I just felt like forever that people were theorizing the most marginalized out of their own experience. And so I was like, man, if, like, Mama or Granny from the block can’t understand what you’re saying about her own experience, then that’s not liberative. Even as we talk about individualism here in a minute, part of my hope is that we can extend hospitality and grace by explaining some of these things to folks in a way that people can hear and understand—not to pander, but rather to say, “It is hospitality that got us here, and it will be hospitality that brings others into it, and I’m not too good or too academic or my hundreds of thousands of dollars of education doesn’t make me too good to make things that are complicated plain and clear.”

Erna: Oh yeah. Well, and, yes. I mean I think it’s like a form of like western world and white supremacy to think that the more abstract knowledge is, the better it is. I mean – do we swear on this podcast? I don’t know.

Brandi: That’s fine!

Erna: This is – this is bullshit! You know? To me, I think, Lenore Three Stars—who is an amazing Lakota woman, teacher, public theologian—she has given to me is – when you learn something, it’s not to try to master it, but simply to start with what you can understand and ask the question, “How does this make me a better relative?” And I just feel like if we came into any new information with “How can I just take what I do understand and how does it make me a better relative?” and move with that, we would all be so much better. But, like, Christian theology has moved into this, like, the more esoteric and the more abstract I think – they must think, like, the more expensive it is, the closer it is to God —

Brandi: Yes!

Erna: — because it’s like higher, and I’m like, “You understand the Jesus that you follow could explain, like, the most complex theology in, like, agricultural analogies, so if you can’t do that, what is the ego-stroking necessity of, like, making it so irrelevant?”

Brandi: Absolutely. And what makes it hard to talk about the attributes of white supremacy specifically, is that, because everything is so abstract, if it’s not academic, if it’s not housed in Christian publishing—

Erna: Journals.

Brandi: Yeah, freaking journals—then it’s not a valid way to think about the world. Especially if things are experiential.

Because white supremacy culture disembodies things so quickly, it makes it hard to even point out the culture of white supremacy, particularly in the church, because we have so many defenses and escape mechanisms from doing that.

So – so let’s talk a little bit about individualism. Because my hope in talking about values is to make plain what is just kind of a cluster of abstract ideas. I think that for folks who are learning about white supremacy for the first time, it’s easy to be like, “Yeah, I’m against that!” But it’s hard to extract the specifics of white supremacy from in us, and, especially in the pandemic and in the current racial uprising that we’re experiencing, individualism seems to be on full display—

Erna: Absolutely.

Brandi: —and I know that this is something that matters a lot to you, so I’m curious for our listeners if you could just talk a little bit about what is individualism and how do you see that playing out in the church and in theology, which I know is a huge question, but—

Erna: Yes. Sure. Well, for me, it is – I just want to acknowledge – it is hard to become aware of because, it’s, like, I didn’t understand English grammar ’til I learned to speak Spanish, right? Because when people would – like – I didn’t need it broken apart, I just speak the language. I think that’s how white supremacy and western worldview and patriarchy are for us. Like, no one has to explain it to you; it’s just, like, the language you speak, until you start to have something to contrast it to. So that’s where I think, like, being Korean and white is helpful, because Korean culture is collective, right? And so language has been a helpful tool.

So, for me, in English, just becoming aware of the fact that the first-person pronoun is capitalized, like, to think about what that – that’s a value. I – Korean language has a value where you never use somebody’s name. You always talk about their relationship to you. So if somebody’s older than me, I would never call him by his name; I would just say “oppa” which means I am a girl calling a boy older than me “oppa.” And then if I have an aunt, I would – I don’t even know any of my aunts’ and uncles’ names, because I just call them “imo”, “imobu”, because the relationship we have to each other is what – is the value that the Korean language holds and that the culture holds.

But English, the first-person pronoun – like the first-person pronoun is capitalized! That’s a choice. It could have been – “we” could have been capitalized or “you.” So that, and the fact that our language doesn’t have a plural you—so, y’all. So when, um, why I think that is important is that when we read scripture that is addressed to a collective, we don’t hear it as addressed to a group of people. We collapse it down to a singular you.

So the easiest way to see this is: “I know the plans I have for you.” That’s God talking to a group of people who are collectively in exile for, like, sin that was committed before they were even born but that they were being held accountable for – for like seventy years. The whole thing is collective sin, collective accountability, consequences that run over a generation; and yet, the western worldview, with its individualism and the white supremacy, the lens of it, turns that into: “God knows the plans he has for me as a person and his plans as an individual is always to prosper me and to make my dreams come true.” And that is so the opposite of what is happening.

So, to me, that’s just a quick, easy way to see how our language carries values, and then we impose it onto our reading of scripture—

Brandi: Yes.

Erna: —and it makes everything more individualistic even when profoundly collective things are happening.

Brandi: Totally. And I think about the benefits of white supremacy culture from using that type of ideology. When I think about how vehemently white folks do not want to take responsibility for enslavement and its impact on Black lives right now, when, right, we’re looking at like – the US is a baby nation. We’re like, you know, 2-400 years of space that, depending on who you’re talking to about what we want to be accountable for, but when God is speaking to people, in scripture, like, when Amos is talking and giving a prophetic word from the Lord, Amos gives them 1500 years of history and says, “You’re accountable for that.”

Erna: Right? At no point is he like, “I remember Bob. Bob did this. Joe also did this.” Right? It’s not about, “Is there one good individual in there?” Like, God feels free to do very broad assessments of the direction that a country or a people is moving. Or if people—because I know some Christians be like, “Well, that’s the Old Testament”—or Jesus felt fine saying, “The Pharisees – Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees.” He wasn’t, like, “But I did meet with that one nice Pharisee, Nicodemus, so Pharisees are cool.” He looked at the whole collective of what Pharisees were doing and critiqued it or critiqued Tyre or Sidon or had a whole thing about Jerusalem. Even though some individuals in Jerusalem had welcomed him on Palm Sunday with this beautiful parade, he still had a critique of the whole city.

Brandi: Yes.

Erna: And so, to me, when you ask, “How does individualism affect – impact the church?” The understanding of sin has been utterly collapsed into an individual endeavor; the understanding of the cross has been collapsed into an individual endeavor. So even though John 3:16, a beautifully, frequently football-game-quoted scripture, “For God so loved the world he gave his only son.” If we think about that, it’s important to consider – so, the impetus for this movement meant the whole world and everything and every system and all of creation was taken into consideration, and then hence impacted by what Jesus did on the cross. But individualism has collapsed it down to “For God so loved me that he died for my sins on the cross.” And I’m not saying he didn’t. But that’s not all he did.

Brandi: Right. 

Erna: And that’s not necessarily the driving impetus of what brought Jesus – of what Jesus’s intended work on the cross was. But because people have collapsed sin down to something individual, and they think that what Jesus did on the cross resolved each individual person’s sin, then when you try to talk about collective accountability, it literally – people feel like their entire Christianity is being challenged.

Brandi: Yes.

Erna: Because you’re saying what they think is the most valuable thing about what Jesus did is not the most valuable thing.

Brandi: Yes.

Erna: And it’s so disconcerting that you feel this profound expulsion, right, and rejection of it. Which I think is so interesting because we live with a lot of theological cognitive dissonance. Because we believe that God is unknowable and so vast and so wide and so great and so amazing, and yet at the same time we are terrified of expanding our theological understanding of that huge God.

Brandi: Yes.

Erna: Think about how weird that is! Like, people – I – I saw this interview of a, like, a four-year old for an Easter video at a church and it was like, “What is Easter about and why did Jesus die?”  And he was like, “Jesus died for my sins” and “Jesus came back from the dead” and gave these very cute answers. But I am confident that if we’d asked the same questions to a forty-year-old in the church and a sixty-year-old, they would have given the exact same answers.

Brandi: Yes.

Erna: And I think that is a tragedy, that we – that when you know more of God and you know more of the world, wouldn’t what happens on the cross grow into a deeper, wider, broader, more glorious theological reality instead of this thing that has to stay trapped in a tiny equation that a third grader can understand!

Brandi: Yes. And I think that people would come to you and be like, “Erna, but Jesus says to become like a child.” 

Erna: Nooo. No. No. Ok —

Brandi: Well, what would you say to that?

Erna: Well, I don’t see that there is, in the arc of scripture, a strong argument for remaining immature. I would say that there is an argument for those who are powerful to handle themselves with humility. I would say that there is an argument for those who are powerful not to gatekeeper those who are most marginalized and silenced from having access to Jesus.

I wouldn’t say “be like a child” means “don’t wrestle with deep and complicated implications of your sin,” because when I look at scripture, literally pages and pages of dynamic and creative artistic performance art and poetry are dedicated to trying to help you have a robust interrogation of not just yourself personally but of the city you live in and the culture you live in and the country you live in.

And so this resistance to collective accountability—that actually is an individual sin that is being perpetrated collectively that white people and white people who are subscribing to white supremacy need to stop doing! Because it’s not an abstract idea. This theology—all theology—leads to life or leads to death. And these theologies are literally leading to death. They have led to the death of Native Americans; they are leading to the death of babies locked up in cages at the border. And, clearly, it’s leading to the death of Black men and Black women at the hands of not just the police, just random white people—

Brandi: Yes. 

Erna: —who want to like patrol Black folks taking a jog or trying—

Brandi: Yes.

Erna: —to look at a bird.

Brandi: And I think it’s important in what you’re saying, too, to name that individualism in white supremacy doesn’t apply to all people; it only applies to white people. Because, as I think about what you’re saying, we want to see individual police as being good, but we want to see an entire group of protestors defined by the most violent thing that happens in the protest. And so, I’m just aware that the individualism, yes, is lived out and embodied by folks of color, but is really meant to protect white folks, fundamentally.

Erna: Oh yeah. And the logic of white supremacy is that it has no logic, right? Even though it prides itself on being rational, if you look – I mean, I think the Trump administration is like a great example of, like, there is no logic to it other than it protects whiteness. 

Brandi: Yes.

Erna: And that’s why white people – that’s what white people recognize. And that’s why you can’t argue like a singular Trump policy or a singular Trump action, because it’s not about a singular thing. It’s about the understanding that he protects whiteness—

Brandi: Yes.

Erna: —and so people move in alignment to that.

Brandi: Yes. Yes. And even that just becomes about him as an individual, not about an entire system that’s keeping him empowered. And I think about that really often and how I learned theologically that that kind of thing was ok, and I think it starts with, like what you were saying before, with talking about sin and the gospel. Because for me, I remember when I first became a Christian in middle school, I was given a tiny little Bible tract—for those of you who don’t know what a bible tract is, it’s like a—

Erna: It’s a – it’s a little piece of paper folded up that tries to sum up the gospel in a cartoon or like eight proof texts.

Brandi: I remember the first Bible tract I was ever given. The first page of it says, “Can I ask you a question?” And you open it up and it says, “What if I told you that you could know for certain whether you were going to heaven when you died?” And you were like, “Oh-kay, sure.” And then the tract goes on to say, “The good news is something about God. The bad news is something about you.” So, from the beginning, the whole thing is about you sucking and God seeing that you suck so bad that God has to kill God’s own son to love you as an individual.

And it feels like, if that’s the center of our gospel expression, if that’s, like, a way that we think about God’s plans for the world, then it makes sense that when we go into spaces of evangelism that they become entirely colonial, because we’re trying to make it so that cultures are destroyed so that individuals can hear whiteness in the gospel as close to godliness. And so it just feels inundated in everything that we do!

And fundamentally, all of this keeps us from reading scripture well. I’ve had so many interesting conversations where we’re reading stories about Zacchaeus or Peter and Cornelius and all these stories where Jesus shows up, or someone from the early church shows up, and shares some iteration of the gospel—which is always practical and it always meets people’s needs, it’s never abstract—and the scriptures say that the entire household was saved. And I feel like white Christians’ first response would be, “No, no, no. Cornelius was saved. No, Zacchaeus was saved. Did they all pray the prayer? Did they all do the individual thing to be with God forever?”

Erna: Right. Which, I think, one, I don’t even know if people would say that—I think they just don’t see it. Do – right? Their eyes just move right past it and conform it to the narrative. And I love the idea of, like, pray the prayer. Because that does – nowhere in scripture do people pray the prayer. But it is because – people have adopted it as if that is the arc.

And there’s – what – what – part of what you’re describing to me is this pressure that people feel to conform to one narrative. So the acceptable narrative is “I once – I once was lost and now I’m found.” Now there’s a version of that, the prodigal son, you know, “I was a sinner, and then I repented, and then I started following Jesus”—I was so bad and now I’m so good. There’s like a before and after. It’s, like, why people love weight loss before-and-afters.

The thing is, I remember talking to my godson, and he was like – I could feel him trying to put his self – himself into that narrative of, “Oh, I used to be sinful and now I’m not.” The thing is, he was raised in like a pretty stable Christian house, and he’s been following Jesus most of his life, and he didn’t have a way to tell the story that was not that narrative—even though I think scripture is chock-full – I mean, the Jewish tradition is that you would, like, raise up faithful children who wouldn’t necessarily have to have that prodigal – quote-unquote prodigal experience. But isn’t so interesting that he felt the need to try to, like, turn his narrative to conform to that because that’s the acceptable Christian story?

Brandi: Yes.

Erna: And so, yes, it’s all anchored in — it’s not to say that there aren’t beautiful stories of individual redemption and salvation.  But we’ve just made the whole thing so much smaller than it’s supposed to be. So, for like, Zacchaeus, which again is a story we’ve got to take back from —

Brandi: Sunday school?

Erna: —Sunday school. Because, essentially, you have somebody who has succeeded by exploiting a broken economic system and is super wealthy because of it—so that seems relevant to the United States of America—and he decides he’s going to change his priorities. And he realizes that he can’t just change without acknowledging that there were consequences to who he used to be. There were consequences; he can’t say, “Ok, well, now I’m different because I’ve experienced the grace of Jesus.” The grace of Jesus is what lets him acknowledge that what he did before had impact and then be responsible for that. So when he’s like, “I’m going to give away half of everything I have.” He’s saying, “Money used to control everything I did and it’s not going to anymore.” But then he’s like, “Anyone I exploited, I’m going to give them back multiple more times what I took”—what he’s acknowledging is that, “It’s not just about paying back what I took, but that when I took it, it had this impact on your life. Consequences, financial ramifications, mental, emotional, spiritual, economic ramifications, that won’t be set right by just giving back the money I exploited.”

Brandi: Yes.

Erna: “I have to give back multiple times that to compensate.” The common vernacular for that is called—

Together: Reparations

Erna: And so when Zacchaeus says – when Jesus says, you know, “Today, the good news has come to your house, it is that Zacchaeus, who has problematically participated in an exploitive economic system is taken”—see, that’s where I do want systemic change, but that’s where I’d love to see individuals do more. It isn’t that individual redemption narratives erase accountability—they should increase accountability.

Brandi: Yes. Yes.

Erna: They should create a more robust sense of wanting to make things right instead of erasing what has happened and then calling your community that you’re a part of to also participate in that. So…

Brandi: Totally. And that feels like the big difference in what individualism and collectivism bring. Individualism wants the response to your sin to be abdication, when collectivism means it’s reparation or restoration. And, so, it feels like, “No wonder Christians or the religious right is so against the idea of reparations”—because we don’t have a functional framework to engage with what that would even mean, without it just becoming about a giant guilt and shame festival about why I should feel bad individually for something I don’t feel like I did as a person. Like the cultural values don’t let it work. 

Erna: Right. Right. Which it – versus, I think what people are trying to press us to imagine is could there just be a whole different way? So, I think that when – I think about the ways I first learned about justice, my first invitation into justice was, like, “Erna, you go tutor somebody from an under-resourced community.”

Now that’s not bad—I was, like, “Ok, I have a lot of educational privilege. I’m going to redistribute my educational privilege to someone with less privilege.” That’s fine—as a baby step, right? And it speaks to the solution of a lot of individuals going in and continuing to redistribute their educational privilege—but why don’t we just ever ask, “Why do some people have all this educational privilege and some people don’t?”

White supremacy comes up with very problematic explanations for why that is. There’s so much anti-Blackness and so much – uh – there’s just so much, you know, around why some people – why certain communities have struggling schools. And, so, if you don’t have a robust analysis for why this is happening, then your solution will not be robust enough. It will not be systemic. It will not deal with something broader.

And so, um, you can be trying to pursue justice and be doing it in an unjust way. That’s why there’s so many white-run nonprofits that are, like, perpetuating paternalism. And they might be like – I mean, right – if you watch Insecure, that’s such a classic example of this dynamic – but people who are the problem – and white supremacy makes you so utterly confident in yourself that you can be both the perpetrator of the problem and confident that you will be the solution. And so then you go in and problematically try to solve a problem that you just discovered, instead of understanding that it is white supremacy that you believe that you have the solution and your belief that the community doesn’t have the solution.

Brandi: Which, right, is the entire logic of many missions trips.

Erna: Oh yeah. Yeah. Just…yeah. Are we gonna start talking about that?

Brandi: I actually do – I do want us to talk about how we see individualism playing out in the church. Because I want to give people practicals. We are in the ideological, we’re in the theological, but I want it to be clear for us, and for this podcast in general, that reclaiming our theology isn’t just about changing our ideas. Because that’s what the deconstruction movement has done, and it – and it hasn’t really helped. Because it makes it really hard to see specifically what’s happening in our communities.

Erna: So. Um. More practical expressions of individualism in the church.

Brandi: Yes. Yeah, let’s talk about it. Because I want people to have a chance to see what are the practical implications of individualism, and therefore white supremacy, in the spaces that we occupy, whether Christian organizations or churches. 

Erna: So, I mean, once you start looking for individualism, you see it everywhere. I mean, even, just, the head pastor model alone to me is so, like, problematic, um: the expectation that one typically man – one person, typically a man, is going to be able to steward all the spiritual needs of a community. It just goes against the whole, like, different gifts to serve the body situation. It’s so hierarchical, and it is essentially a form of individualism, right? The church planting model, like, why isn’t church leadership collaborative? Why isn’t power shared? Why isn’t the trinity a model for how churches are set up? So, I think – and even that. People’s understanding of the trinity has been coopted by individualism. Because instead of it being, like, three deeply relational entities, it’s turned into, like, Father, Son, Spirit, like a hierarchy, where we all know like the Father is most important, and Jesus is most obedient, and the Holy Spirit is sort of a lady, so she’s, like, full of feels and, like, the least important. And so we’ve turned it into a hierarchy versus, like, a truly collaborative dynamic relationship that is full of love. Why isn’t something like the trinity a model for how churches are led? I think the celebrity model of pastors, the lack of accountability, if somebody has a big personality—

Brandi: Yes.

Erna: —those are all very toxic and incredibly problematic dynamics. I think the idea that accumulating more people that – you know – the church growth model that was so big for a while that, like, attract people that are more alike, because that makes church grow faster. That, like, imposing a business growth model on the church is also disgusting and just filthy to me—

Brandi: Yes! And we’ll call it the gospel by calling it a multiplicative discipleship model.

Erna: Right! It’s always like, “Well, God would want more people to know him, so more is better, so shut up.” Is really – you know – and the fact that the more is better is basically consuming people, exploiting particularly people on the margins toward that end. And the reason it’s so difficult is that Christians are so confident of their good intentions as they’re doing it, so you cannot critique it, because they become so butthurt, because you’re questioning their intentions.

I would say that also Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, who wrote Mujerista Theology, talks about prayer for her as being in the streets for her people; so I think even understanding that, like, prayer is highly individualized. Like, you having a personal quiet time by yourself is people’s—

Brandi: In your prayer closet…

Erna: —in your prayer closet. Ok. That – there’s a place for that. I believe in like that type of internal spiritual formation. But the fact that prayer isn’t also standing up for your people and being in solidarity with your people and, like, fighting for the full humanity of your people.

You know, nobody likes to read the sermon on the plain from Luke because it’s so clear, like, “Blessed are the poor and woe to the rich.” So that’s why everybody trots on over to Matthew’s version of it, where it’s like, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”—because then people are like, “Oh, that’s just individuals who feel sad inside about their sin” versus “Blessed are the poor, it’s bad to be rich” makes you have to think in a collective way.

Let’s talk about individualism: why do rich churches have nice buildings and poor folks have crappy buildings? Like what kind of biblical model for like – people are funding their churches off this capitalistic system that is entrenched in problematic white supremacy. And, like, people talk about Acts 2 and sharing resources, but they talk about it just within the tiny community of their white suburban church, not realizing that they exist as a super rich white suburban church because of white flight, redlining, and fundamentally anti-blackness and all these people who are like, “I’m not going to put my kid into school with Black folks.”

Little nice white progressives won’t say that, but I’ve lived in Seattle, Portland, and now next to Berkeley. I have a PhD in white progressives. They are as white supremacist and problematic as, you know, confederate-flag-flying-in-their-giant-truck white folks from the south. So. Whiteness is whiteness. 

Brandi: Yes. And what I’m hearing you say in a lot of those examples is that individualism doesn’t operate by itself, but that it dovetails with all of these other values of white supremacy. I heard you talking about progress as being bigger and more, with hierarchy, with defensiveness with capitalism, and that doesn’t feel surprising.

And I think that’s why this journey for us, even on this podcast, is such a challenge, is because it’s so hard to parse out individual particles of the air you breathe. And I guess for me the primary concern that I—well it’s not the primary concern—but one of the major concerns that I have is that these ideologies make it fundamentally impossible to read the scripture as it would have been read by its original readers.

When I think about how we – right – a Christianity or a faith system that has the phrase “your personal Lord and Savior”—would Jesus have ever said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit; I’m your personal Lord and Savior”? That wouldn’t make a bit of damn sense to a group of people who are poor. It would have made no sense. Because it would have no implication beyond the nicety of a relationship. And I think that’s where churches start to let individualism bleed out into this very strange communal way, where it’s us as an individual, or us as an individual church, can go in and save because Jesus as an individual comes in and saves. And so we co-opt the way of Jesus to capitulate to our individualism to justify what we then call the white savior complex, or missions, or evangelism narratives and things like that. 

Erna: Yeah. I mean this dynamic to me comes from – it’s what I call the Disney princess theologizing. Where it’s, like, whenever you read a story in scripture, you’re always, like, the hero character. You know, it’s, like, ok, well – the story of the Good Samaritan. Most people don’t end with being like, “Oh, I’m the person who passed on the other side.” They might be like, “Oh, I’m tempted to be that,” but in the end they identify with the Good Samaritan.  And part of this comes from – because part of white supremacy is having no analysis of power dynamics. Right? So when people read the story of even, like, something like slavery in Exodus, they don’t – white people from the United States, they don’t identify with Egypt. They’re like, “I’m Moses.”

Brandi: Always.

Erna: You’re not, Disney princess little unicorn! Have some power analysis of where you fall in society. You’re not Pharaoh either. Right? If Trump is Pharaoh, you’re just like an Egyptian, watching this terrible system go down. So you have to figure out what would it mean to be a faithful right and repentant Egyptian in this moment. That’s what white folks need to ask. But what they’re asking is, “How can I be more like Moses?”

And, because of that, we’re, like, literally one protest away from white folks starting to explain to Black people what disruption is, and how they should be protesting better, and they’re – we’re already at a place where, like, white folks are going to explain to Black folks how they don’t really understand, like, the system of policing and how, like, it’s just too much to defund the police, like, “Let us help you, we believe in your cause, but like now we have to help you guys, like, more, you know, practically, like, reach your goals”—and like it’s already happening, but watch it. Watch it happen.

Brandi: Yes. That dovetailing of paternalism, which feels connected to one of the cores of individualism, that says that, “If something is going to be done correctly, I myself have to do it. Or my people have to do it.” And I think white folks are so entrenched in individualism that they see something they don’t like or don’t understand and then decide that they are the solution to that problem. And that is so fundamentally western Christian.

Erna: To me—I mean, just to put it in just stark relief to me—that’s, like, rapists being like, “Also, let me solve – like – let me set the laws surrounding rape, all while I’m still out here being a rapist.” That’s what I hear when white folks are like, “I’m going to solve white supremacy and let me explain to people of color how this is going to work.”

I’m like, “One: you are still the problem. You have zero comprehension of what’s going on. And you know who understands how to, like, bring the system to the end? The people who have been the object of this evil for hundreds of years.” You know who’s going to end colonialism? Indigenous people. Not the perpetrators; not us settler-colonials. Right? You know who’s going to end white supremacy and anti-Blackness? Black folks. Let’s just follow their leadership. Sit down. Shut. Up.

There’s nothing more arrogant than these white pastors who’ve stayed silent for years – so – but these white pastors who they have perpetuated violent white supremacy—see what they think is just by saying Black lives matter, like they’ve done something. To me, that’s like the equivalent of, “I am sitting on a pile of poo.” All you’ve done is name, but you have not addressed the fact that you have an entire theological framework that allowed you – you have been indoctrinating your people with white supremacy and the seminary you went to indoctrinated you with white supremacy. And I am sorry that you didn’t know that was happening when it happened, because you went to a beautiful and lovely moderate evangelical seminary like Fuller. You are deeply entrenched in the system and you have been passing it on, and that’s the nature of systems. And so just acknowledging that it exists does not in any way actually correct for all the ways you have kept it in place these last years.

So stop. Sit down. I always know white supremacy and patriarchy are still in place because these white pastors – it literally never occurs to them that they should stop leading. Stop it! Stop leading your church! You literally have kept them entrenched in white supremacy but you don’t question for a minute that this little institution should keep going.

Brandi: Yeah and I recently saw that the – one of the founders of Reddit stepped down and told the board to hire a Black person to take his place. And I was like —

Erna: Yeah, you know who that is though, right? That is the GOAT’s husband. That is Serena’s husband. Right? So I was like, “That’s how that brother got an education!”

Brandi: And that’s the thing, right? If that’s the case, even sinners do that. Like, if a white pastor can’t step down from their position, and I don’t know about that man’s Christianity or whatever, but our bar needs to be that. Not “I individually feel sad about myself and therefore you need to enter into my feelings and not critique me because I finally said Black lives matter.” Because individualism will always make things about individual people’s feelings more than the systemic. This is white feminism and how it plays out in white tears, in their most key form.

Erna: Oh my gosh. Yes. Yes.

Brandi: Well, let’s move towards closing out—I don’t want to take all of your time today. Ok. So if white supremacy, at the end of the day, is fundamentally – about – rooted in anti – it’s – if white supremacy is fundamentally rooted in anti-Blackness, and it does generally three things—it privileges white folks; it disempowers, oppresses, and harms people of color; and it rips our humanity from all of us—what do you think are the primary dangers for Christian people in aligning ourselves with individualism?

Erna: I think that one of the gravest consequences of aligning ourselves with individualism is that we energize and buttress a system that allows a great amount of evil to continue. I mean we are in – refusing to see that policing is an anti-Black system that comes out of slavery and slave patrols and basically the assumption that white people always have the right to police and control Black bodies. Right? Which isn’t just inside policing—it’s just the armed version of that.

But that’s why that white woman in Central Park, absolutely knew, without having to go to Problematic White Woman College, right? She didn’t have to go take a special class to know that if she called the police, they worked for her. She knew how to put that sentence together because the world taught it to her.

And so when we align with individualism, when we don’t – when we exegy scripture that way, when we respond to unjust systems in that way, we energize and support and perpetuate evil; we energize and support and perpetuate the death of people on the margins. We energize and support the death of people on the margins, and we give it a Christian justification. I think that’s wicked and evil, and we should – we should hate, hate, hate to be a part of that in any way. So, that’s my first thought.

Brandi: Yes. And I think, for me, it just keeps us from seeing the breadth of who God is. And to me, at the end of the day, it just feels lonely. Individualism is fundamentally lonely. And in a culture where, statistically, we are becoming more and more lonely, I think Christian individualism specifically is at the center of that. Because it says, “Yeah, sure, Jesus saves me. But my decisions toward Jesus are what really saves me. My personal repentance, my personal confession, my personal, personal, personal, personal…” 

And it doesn’t allow us to be held by each other, to be held in community or to be given grace by community, or to have the hospitality and generosity that we started this conversation talking about. It becomes about hiding my process and hiding my sin, whatever you want to call that, and dealing with that but calling it a light in the darkness. It’s wild.

And, so, I just wonder if people would be less lonely if we weren’t—excuse me—I am certain people would be less lonely if we weren’t leaning so heavily on a type of theological framework that makes it just me and Jesus and Jesus is all I need, when Jesus says very frequently that there is an intersection with how we experience God and how we experience relationship with each other and how that brings wholeness to us.

Erna: Right. And I think it’s, like, if you look at like the entire – basically the entire witness of the New Testament is God interacting with a group of people. The individualistic lens has been that we fixate on, like, the singular prophet or the singular person; but there’s something about, “What does it mean to be a part of a collective?”

And the way God views time – right – even our view of time is affected by culture, right, we think that – we only think in the arc of an individual’s heroic life versus, like, what is – if we think about the larger narrative of, like, God has been sending prophets to white people in the United States literally for hundreds of years, and they refuse to repent. Like, what does it mean to understand as a white person that you are part of a longer history and to want to be part of helping your people, in the best way, right?

I think white folks have a hard time thinking collectively, because all the folks who think collectively about whiteness are so problematic. But what would it mean to say God has been giving white people—and which I understand is even a construct right because there was ethnicities of whiteness but now that it has become what it is here—he’s been trying to wake you up with prophets, literally the blood of the prophets. Literally.

How is Ahmaud Arbery not a prophet, with his body in the streets, George Floyd, Breonna – it’s like – how – and I don’t – I don’t say that to romanticize it, to say that the sacrifice of Black folks is necessary to wake up white people. Uh, no. Not that narrative. But it is happening, and is it having an impact on you, or are you continuing to erase it and silence it and refuse to see it, collectively?

I think what – what – the grieving thing to me is that white folks who are most deeply entrenched in a problematic system are the ones who are most unable to see it. I mean, that’s how you keep it in place, is, you make the people who most benefit from systems and institutionalized white supremacy, give them a language that’s only individualistic and make them incapable – create this dissonance that they cannot resolve. That’s how you keep the system in place.

Brandi: Well, and I think to that end, I see in our – in the modern protest movements that are happening, that people keep calling back to Martin Luther King, Jr. or to individuals, rather than saying, “I will follow the collective of Black folks or the collective of particularly queer Black femmes” and saying, “I will follow those people.”

Because an individualistic culture doesn’t know how to follow a group movement, and it would rather isolate itself out of a group movement to try to solve from the outside than be a part of what I think would be a beloved community on the inside. Because when I look at protest community, it looks a far more like the kingdom than most churches do. People caring for each other and holding each other and helping each other be better and correcting each other in love and creating space for a better and more beautiful manifestation of the world to exist.

Erna: Absolutely.

Brandi: And so I think, like as you were saying before, that protest is in that way so much like the church, and I just wonder if there would be beauty and redemption for white people in choosing out of that and freedom for folks of color to recognize that individualism has never saved us and it never will.

And so, to that end, if individualism is doing all of that to all of us, what is the other way? Who do you look to for examples for how you can reclaim your theology from individualism?

Erna: Yeah. Um, well honestly, I think Black Lives Matter is a beautiful example. I love that it is three Black women. I love that even how they set up the movement is that each city has a way that it moves into it, in and of itself, right? There’s a nostalgia for these like very single figurehead movements towards justice, but it is – it’s a problematic – it’s problematic for a variety of reasons. But I look towards – the way the movement for Black lives is set up, it actually has so much that I think the church should be absorbing. Collaborative. Even though those women are figureheads, they have in no way moved to make themselves immortalized.

I think that at any given protest you want the most local people to be the voices that are heard and who are leading. Protest culture has some beautiful theology to it. Again, those most impacted by it are the ones who should be given voice, and the crowds should support that. I think that there is something beautiful about some of these giant protests where you see that the individual has disappeared. Of course there are critiques to be brought; but I think – just from the bigger picture, I think there’s a lot to learn.

I think also, why I did my master’s program with Indigenous folks, is because I need Indigenous people to teach me how to decolonize. And, particularly the approach to leadership, is – is flatter, right, it’s less hierarchical. Like, the people choose who they will follow.

I was at a conference and there was some problematic dynamics that happened and they basically – the white folks who were leading passed the leadership off to all the Indigenous Native folks who were there. And the way the Native folks responded to that was every Native person who was there got a chance to talk. 

And I was like, “What? What are we doing right now?” Like, I was like, “Sure I’m all about shared power” – right – it – it showed how like deep it – “I’m all about shared power, but actually shouldn’t like this person with, like, the PhD, who is a leader I know and love get the mic for the whole time?” And they’re like, “That’s not our way.” Literally every person got the mic.

And then I was like, “Well, now everybody’s talked, and it’s taken a long time,” and like – they were like, “Yeah. Because we trust that the people will sift out who of all those voices should be listened to. Everyone gets to speak. And we also trust the people to – leadership isn’t forced onto them. Someone’s a leader because the people are following them.” And I was like, “What? What?” Even when they explained stuff to me, I’m just like, “What?”

So part of how I moved to a different way was just to continue to try to immerse myself as much as possible into, not people who were trying to tweak white traditions, but to just folks who come from something completely different. Like I just – this whole – let’s just keep trying to tweak white supremacy—why? Why be loyal to death? Why be loyal to something so problematic? Why exert so much energy when there’s like Indigenous people who are willing to offer their wisdom and liberation to us? When there are womanist theologians who are offering their exegetical work to us?

So, me, it’s about, one: all white theology, theologians, they’re in a Zechariah season of silence for me. Like, it’s time-out time. Like, it’s just – sit down and be quiet. And listen to Elizabeth and Mary. So that’s probably my main practice, is, like, stop reading white people. I don’t care how cute you think Richard Rohr is. There’s a million people of color doing that kind of work and indigenous people doing that kind of work that you can listen to so stop it. 

Brandi: Yes. And to acknowledge that a single voice or a single narrative doesn’t get to represent the cosmic Christ, to, you know, give a little Rohr reference.

Erna: I rolled my eyes so hard my headphones fell off.

Brandi: But it sounds like what you’re saying, in some ways, is some practices for disentangling ourselves from individualism are: one, to reject paternalism, the idea that we – that someone in a hierarchical position knows best, and to trust that in – right – in a church situation, that parishioners or that congregants can learn for themselves without indoctrination or without paternalism.

And then I heard you say that it’s something about becoming a person, even as an individual, who has integrity to the people. It’s not about performance or performative wokeness. It’s about becoming a good ancestor, becoming a good elder, becoming the person who, when you speak, your voice matters, not because you created an Instagram account that says all the right shit, but that instead is for the people, because you know that you are a part of a collective.

And so I wonder if there’s an invitation for us as we reclaim our theology from individualism—if the invitation is to see ourselves as a part of the collective movement of God and to ask, “How can I be the best part of that?” And if you get something from that, if you get platform, if you get – then sure. But if that’s your starting point, it will always end in paternalism and individualistic white supremacy—

Erna: Oh yeah. I think that white folks really need to take to heart the whole like “do stuff in secret.” Do it in secret, saints.

Also because I just – I don’t think the majority of the work is done online. Real – people who are dismantling systems—I think there is a certain type of conversation that can be helpful, but I think real work happens – is – is not cute clapback on the internet. And I think again, that type of desire to think that it’s individually oriented! “I want to be a celebrated individual for my social justice work.”

Brandi: Yes.

Erna: “I want to be a social justice influencer.” Right? 

Brandi: Yeah, I want credit.

Erna: Versus, like, if you don’t have – you have to build up – anyone who is going to endure in this work has to build up a capacity to not shut down when your ego is not soothed. Social justice work is ego-breaking in the best way.

Brandi: Eviscerating.

Erna: It – it just – I – the level to which I constant – you have to constantly stay humble to as much as you know, there’s always more to learn, that you’re – even when you’re trying to do right, you’re still participating in something problematic. That can’t devastate you every time. You have to be someone who’s like, “Yes, that is how it is because of what reality is and who I am even when I’m trying to do right, I’m participating in something wrong; that’s not going to shut down the whole thing. But I’m gonna do the work I need to learn and then move forward and do it a little bit better.”

And hopefully creating a way for those who come after me to do better. Because they’ll build off of – I mean I want people, like, ten years from now to be like – look at what I’m doing and go, like, “That’s nice, but we know so much more now,” so we can like imagine forward. Like please. Walk across my back to like a place of even deeper liberation, as I walked across those who came before me and taught me to go further than they could. Like that’s what we’re doing as we try to imagine this new world. Let’s just want more.

Brandi: Yeah. And what it sounds like, in kind of summation, is we have to want collective freedom and liberation more than we want individual accolades and credit.

Erna: Ooh, yes, yes!

Brandi: And I think that’s a good starting point for us, especially for Christians who want so much credit for the basics of Christian faith: repentance, confession, forgiveness, activism.

And, so, Erna this has been awesome. I’m so grateful to have had you today.

Erna: It’s so fun!

Brandi: Um, where can people find you, and where can they find your work?

Erna: Just lurking in the bushes, umm…

Brandi: Oh-kay.

Erna: Um, liberatedtogether.com is my website, and that’s where I post about different cohorts that I’m doing. I’m just opening up a cohort for Asian American women who want to engage white supremacy and colonialism and anti-Blackness so I’m collating that with this amazing Filipina woman. So I think that’s an important space where we can hold the complexity of being Asian American women who engage with this work.

I’m on instagram, ernakimhackett on instagram, and, um, those would probably be the two spaces. My blog is also on liberatedtogether.com, and so I put some thoughts out there.

Also, I don’t know if people are into this, but particularly – I do one-on-one coaching for people of color, particularly women of color who are navigating white spaces, and so I love that work, so if that’s something if you are like, “I am a woman of color who is, like, drowning in the white place I must go because I need employment,” let me support you in that journey.

Brandi: Yes, and you can probably get your organization to pay for that kind of training.

Erna: Word!!

Brandi: Use the tools of the system.

Erna: People got that kind of energy right now.

Brandi: This is the time to do that if you’re going to do that.

Erna: Carpe – yes, exactly this is the moment.

Brandi: So, thank you so much, Erna. Really appreciate having you on

Erna: Love it, thanks Brandi, this has been really fun.

***

Brandi: Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Reclaiming My Theology. If you would like more resources and practices in your journey to reclaim your theology, feel free to follow along with us on Instagram at reclaimingmytheology. We will post ways to unlearn, relearn, or at the very least, look at the values that may undergird how we see God and each other.

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