...From White Supremacy: White Centering w/ Rev. Dr. Brenda Salter McNeil

In this episode Brandi chats with Rev. Dr. Brenda Salter McNeil on the heels of the release of Becoming Brave, the latest of her books. They talk about the dangers of centering whiteness and attempt to offer paths forward in the journey. You can find her book here.

We have also featured the added gift of the new song "Get it, Let it Go" by all around dope person and songwriter Hannah Glavor. Check her out!

Please, if you like the podcast, subscribe, rate and review. You can also join our patreon if you feel so inclined at patreon.com/brandinico. 

Taking our theology back from ideas and systems that oppress.
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Transcript

Reclaiming My Theology, Episode 11: White Centering

Brandi: Hello, and welcome to Reclaiming My Theology, a podcast seeking to take our theology back from ideas and systems that oppress. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed, rated, reviewed, and joined on Patreon. In the next few weeks, I’ll be announcing some exciting new projects that have been made possible through your generosity, support, and your kindness.

But, this week on the podcast, I’m joined by the esteemed Reverend Doctor Brenda Salter McNeil. She’s truly an icon in the work of racial justice and has been around the block of both white nonsense and Christian nonsense, as well as the intersection of the two, for a long time. In this episode, we talk about white centering and the ways that it deforms our sense of self, of others, and of God. She is a person that I deeply respect and I’m honored to have on. Everyone should check out her book, Becoming Brave, that just released this week.

For those of us who are newer to this journey of justice work, as in we’ve been doing it less than a few decades, I’m reminded in this conversation of the importance of honoring those who have done the work ahead of us. Work like this podcast can only exist because of, as the old heads would say, the cloud of witnesses that have come before us.

So, with that, I’m excited to share this conversation with Reverend Doctor Brenda Salter McNeil. Also, stay tuned at the end for some new music by my friend and songwriter Hannah Glavor—because who doesn’t need good music by dope women in this time? Enjoy.

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Brandi: Alrighty. Well, let’s do this thing then. Well, thank you so much for being on today. I really appreciate your time and rescheduling and all of that. It’s so good to have you on.

Brenda: Yeah, it’s my pleasure. I’ve been looking forward to this. I hear so many people talking about your podcast, so it’s an honor to be with you for real.

Brandi: So, so good. Well, I love having you on because you’ve been around doing this work for a minute, and I know that I am very green in doing justice work, and you’ve been doing this for the long haul of your life thus far. But, for someone who may not know who you are, I would love for you to describe: What does it mean to be you?

Brenda: Huh. Well. You know, identity is a process, right? It’s – it’s not a stagnant thing, where you can say, “This is who I am; this is who I’ve always been.” So, right now, what it means to be me is that I’m an influencer, I am a Christian, I am a Black woman, I am a mother, I’m a wife, and I have the capacity to preach in ways that persuade and mobilize others.

So that means that what it means to be me is that I have to take seriously the responsibility that I have and the influence I have that has the potential to create change if I use it well, wisely, and humbly. So, I – I am growing to understand that this life is not just mine. I’m here for a purpose, and I need to live fully into it.

Brandi: Well, in all of that, you’ve done a lot of work over your life, and I know that a person is not – I love that you didn’t actually say, like, “Here’s my work” as a part of who you are; I think that’s very much something that I would do if someone asks, like, who I was. And so I would love if you could give people a sense – what is your sense of vocation? What – what drives you, what powers what you do in the world, what do you do in the world?

Brenda: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Vocation is, you know, from the word “vocal,” is to be called. And so I did not know that I was called to preach. But I have been a person who has been a woman of words from the time I was small. I have talked a lot, and it wasn’t seen as a gift. I was on the debate team when I was in high school and did not realize that that was something – that I had a capacity to use words to persuade.

So, it wasn’t until I got to college and became a Christian that I understood that one part of my calling is as a person who gives voice to the truth. I am called. My vocation is to give voice to the truth, using words that help to transform and equip or empower others to live into that truth for themselves.

For me, that shows up as preaching. And then that preaching has to specifically do with the call to healing the divisions between human beings. That, for me, evidences itself in a calling for reconciliation. So I don’t just preach about anything. I generally preach about a call to reconciliation from a Christian perspective. And now that I am an adult, I realize that I have been called to do that since I was born.

Brandi: And can you give us a little bit of a sense of what has that journey looked like for you? Because I know that even as you use the word reconciliation, for a lot of us, that’s, like, not a word that we use that much, or one that we’ve been kind of taught to reject or discard in the name of other things. And so I’m curious what the journey is like for you. Because we do some work together and do really similar work. And so could you give us a sense of what the journey of that vocation has been for you, and what’s led you to where you are?

Brenda: Yeah, well, I’ve been talking, actually, as I’m getting ready for – you know that I have a book launch coming out, and it’s called Becoming Brave. And it’s really looking at my story of evolution. How have I evolved in this concept of reconciliation? How have I evolved in my understanding of it? And where did it happen? Because I didn’t always talk about reconciliation either. So where did it come from? Why did I feel like I needed to start using that word, and what does it mean for me?

So. For me, it started in college. And so, I grew up in a place called Trenton, New Jersey, primarily in an inner city or urban community. We didn’t know it was inner city. Working-class family, working-class community, Black, Latinos, particularly Puerto Rican folks in my neighborhood, some Irish immigrants, but definitely a working-class community. And we grew up there, and it was a great growing up there.

But I went away to college and discovered that the education that I’d received in New Jersey in that little working-class community where I went to school had not prepared me for Ivy League education, for people who had gone to private school, etcetera, etcetera, right? And then I realized, after becoming a Christian at nineteen when I was a college student, and I encountered white Christianity for the first time—[Brandi laughs]—that’s when I realized how different I was.

I remember going to my very first InterVarsity meeting at Rutgers. I had not heard of InterVarsity at that time. There was Campus Crusade, there was Chi Alpha, there was Navigators—

Brandi: [Brandi laughs] Yeah, yeah.

Brenda: —there was Baptist Student Fellowship, everything you can think about was at that school. But a friend of mine had gone to InterVarsity, I went with her, and they said that we were gonna have – we were gonna have a time of prayer.

Now, I was a part of a Pentecostal church in New Jersey, Emmanuel Tabernacle that I still reverence to this day and the foundation they laid in my life. But when we prayed, we came to the altar, and we—what they would say—we bombarded heaven. And we prayed together. In the Korean community, they call it praying in one voice.

So when they said we were gonna have a time of prayer, I instinctively prayed out of my cultural identity, like I understood prayer to be. I was fervent, I was vocal, and I realized at some point that I could only hear my voice; no one else was praying. And when I opened my eyes, every person in that room was looking at me like I had just dropped out of Mars.

Brandi: Ooh.

Brenda: And, uh, it was – and – and it’s interesting, because there’s a scripture where Jesus is talking to the woman at the well, and the disciples come back. And the text says, “No one said to him, ‘Why are you talking to her?’ But the look on their face communicated clearly that they saw her as odd. And she left her water jar and left that – that – that place with Jesus.”

I felt the exact same way in that InterVarsity meeting. I felt like I was out of place, and I could tell, even though no one said a word, that I had to tone myself down if I was going to be in this white Christian space. That was my first beginning of grappling with this concept of – of something being ajar, and it seemed as if what was wrong was with me. And that was the beginning of me having to wrestle with whiteness and its implications on my faith.

Brandi: Yes. And that makes sense that even an experience like that would cause dissonance, that would draw you into this kind of dissonant work for the rest of your life. And so, yeah, we’re talking a little bit about white normalcy, or white centeredness, today.

For folks – I feel like, at this point, we’re so far into the podcast that people probably know, like, kind of what white normalcy or white-centeredness looks like. But I was wondering, from your perspective, what would you say – how would you define the normalizing of whiteness or white-centeredness in Christian space?

Brenda: Yeah, it’s interesting that you ask, because I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about, as I mention, my own journey, and my own use of language. And what it meant to be socialized, as a young Christian on a college campus, trying to figure out two things.

One, how to be a fervent follower of Jesus. So, I was serious about it, right. And I grew up, as I mentioned, in this Pentecostal church that believed that anything other than Christian radio was, uh, of the Devil. [Brandi and Brenda laugh] So, let me just be clear. So, no more dancing, no more smoking, no more partying, no more secular music, that kind of stuff, right.

So, unknowingly, I started listening to only, what we used to call then, family radio or Christian radio, right? And I did not realize it, but I was – while I was listening to the worship songs—because my church, which was a Black church, basically barred me from anything, quote unquote, secular, right—that I was being funneled toward a particular way of thinking and seeing the world that came from a white lens. Because family radio, that bible study stuff that I was listening to, and the worship songs I was hearing, they’re not devoid of a cultural lens. They’re not devoid of a social perspective. It’s not devoid of a political perspective. And as I was only listening to that particular form of radio, of media, because that was what was told to me was Christian, I was being socialized. I was being indoctrinated. And my church was complicit in helping me do that, because of their belief system about this dichotomy between the church and the world, right.

And so, slowly, I began to take in a worldview that was Eurocentric. The bible study leaders were all white men, for the most part; I think there was one woman who came on as a bible study teacher. And I was trying to understand the Bible. I was a new Christian. So you see? You see what’s happening to me? I’m slowly drinking the Kool-Aid, trying to follow Jesus. That’s what happened.

Brandi: Yeah, it seems like what you’re talking about here is epistemology. Like, how do we come to know things? What are our ways of knowing? And in your background, you have this Black Christian epistemological framework, but that’s being cross-sectioned, because of morality, or a sense of morality, with whiteness, which then frames whiteness as being the most moral or the most normal. And that word “funneled” feels so significant in how that kind of indoctrination happened. So, in that indoctrination, as you’re describing it, what were some of the things that came out of that indoctrination or that worldview? What – yeah, what were some of the results of that?

Brenda: Yep. I think that what – what – what whiteness and what I – what I did not realize was I had to deconstruct all of this to be able to have this conversation with you. That’s been a part of – of the journey for me, of finding the language which to say, “What did happen?”

So let me give you an example, right. I’m trying to be a good Christian. I got saved, as we said it back in my church, at nineteen. And I’m serious. I’m trying to be a follower, right. So I’m – I’m doing all that I’m supposed to do. And I’m listening to this Christian radio station all the time. So, this will date me; I’m going to tell you when I went to school, amen. But at the time, Ronald Reagan was running against Jimmy Carter.

Brandi: Mm.

Brenda: Yes. And Jimmy Carter, for those of you who don’t know, is a Bible-believing, Sunday-school-teaching, married-to-one-wife, building-houses-for-the-poor Christian, and has been that way his entire life. That’s the man that was in the presidency. Evangelical white Christians did not like Jimmy Carter.

Brandi: Hmm.

Brenda: Mmhmm. It had something to do with – ah – this is really true, and it’s interesting to have to say this out loud – that it had something to do with Jimmy Carter allowing the IRS to question the nonprofit status of Christian colleges that did not allow interracial dating.

Brandi: Mmm.

Brenda: A-ha! And they felt as if the government was encroaching upon their – their faith, their – their belief system that the Bible said that people of color, Black people, should not marry white people.

Brandi: Ugh.

Brenda: Yes. So there was a strong campaign in the Christian community against the one Christian president who, at that time, was living this moral life, but they did not like his stance on race. So, when – when Ronald Reagan comes, right, they rally around Ronald Reagan. And then John – one of the things that – that Jimmy Carter did was sign a treaty with Russia, believe it or not, and that treaty with Russia was called the SALT Treaty, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, and there was this big kind of Christian prophetic mumbo jumbo that basically said that Russia was the bear coming from the north in the book of Revelations.

Brandi: Ugh, god.

Brenda: Listen Jesus, help us. But that’s how they make sense of it, because you can’t just say the man is not a moral man, a good man, so you got to give something else. And they Christianized it with all of this prophetic, futuristic kind of stuff that – that he was colluding with and saying that he was basically partnering with the anti-Christ.

And so we were – all of us who were listening to these bible studies, day in and day out on Christian radio were told in subtle and not-subtle ways, “Do not vote for this anti-Christ,” that we were to vote for Ronald Reagan, who had been – his wife was into astrology—no shade, but that was just true. Had been married before and divorced. Not Jimmy Carter. So all of this, right. But they all went for this guy as opposed to Carter, because of his stance on race. And they wanted to get him out of there.

And it hurts me to this day. I know, I’m paying by telling you. I voted for Jimmy – I voted for Ronald Reagan the first time he ran. And I voted for Ronald Reagan because, as a Christian drinking white-Christian-Kool-Aid through listening to the only thing that my church allowed us to listen to, I was indoctrinated to believe, that somehow or other, I was doing the right thing as a Christian to follow what Christians were saying to me.

Brandi: Mmhmm. Yes.

Brenda: I have – I can tell you that this is not a new revelation. At some point, probably early on in my seminary career, after I graduated from college, I made up my mind I would never let white people tell me how to think or vote or see the world again. Because I do, truly, with all my heart, believe that Jimmy Carter was the most authentic and has lived a life of authenticity, Christian authenticity and credibility, from when he was in office and after he was in office. And it hurts me to think that I was so influenced by white—not just – it’s not Christianity. It’s Christianity and nationalism combined.

Brandi: Yes.

Brenda: But nobody tells us that. And so, if you come from a church like mine that knew how to pray and praise God but hadn’t had anybody that had gone to seminary, the only teaching I was receiving was through these networks that were owned by white European voices. And that deformed me, and I had to reclaim myself when I began to do my own theological work.

Brandi: I think, as you share your story, it feels cryptic, challenging, and so familiar. Because I think for me, even as a young woman becoming a Christian, like, in the early 2000s, the same conversation was happening around – around Barack Obama. And so I had been told via newspapers and by my pastors that Barack Obama was the anti-Christ. And so I voted for a ticket that had Sarah Palin on it. I voted for John McCain in my first election, effectively voting against the first Black president.

And I did that because my faith was so tied with these white norms and that anything that involved race wasn’t about humanity or about humanizing people; it was about how Christians couldn’t capitulate their values to the left, or couldn’t put themselves in a place where they were fighting – it just became single-issue politics that were centered around demonizing a particular person. And it was – it wasn’t Christianity. It was – I think what we’re describing is, like, the history of the religious right.

And so even as I see the upcoming election – you know, I wasn’t excited about any Republican candidates in 2016, but how we came to the least moral, most reprehensible, least godly person is alarming on a visceral, emotional sense, but so historically predictable when you describe your story and tie that to my story and to – to this history that we’re talking about of white mainstream theological indoctrination.

Forty-five did an interview yesterday where he was talking about how Biden is against the Bible and how he’s against God and how he’s against – and I was like, “Is there no cognitive dissonance in whiteness?” Is there no cognitive dissonance that, “Oh, we’re saying this thing while living this way that’s creating colonization and oppression and alienation?”

And so I know that you are a theologian and a preacher, as you’ve said, and so I would love if you could help us to fill out what kind of theology comes out of those white spaces? Like, what are the – the tenets of that kind of white theology, what are the things that are most important? Because we’ve talked about this a little on the podcast before, but, in some ways, this is like “What is white theology?” part two. [Brandi laughs]

Brenda: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You know, I – I don’t know if I know the answer to that, but I can tell you this: that what we’re discussing is not new.

I went to this reconciliation and legacy museum in Birmingham, Alabama, with the Equal Justice Initiative, and as I went through the Lynching Museum and as I went through the Legacy Museum and the memorial, I learned – I did not know this. I knew that Christians were in the Ku Klux Klan. What I did not know was that you had to be a Christian to get into the Ku Klux Klan. Amen. Christianity was a requirement to be in the Klan. Hence cross burnings. This was a Christian club. This was like the rotary club, you hear me? That lynching and terrorism was perceived as Christian.

So I don’t know if it’s actually a theology, do you know? I’m wondering if it’s a sociology that is masked with a theology that makes sense of it. Sort of like when I was in South Africa, I was – I went to a place called Stellenbosch University. And when we walked onto Stellenbosch University, one of the brothers said – he whispered – he said, “Be quiet, shh. We’re going into the apartheid room.” And I was like, “What?”

When we went into that room, he explained to us that apartheid did not begin as a political movement to dehumanize. It started in Stellenbosch University School of Theology. It started in a place where the theologians came up with the justification for the stratification of human life. And hence the – then the social and political system was rooted in that.

So, Jemar Tisby and other people have said to us, this notion that the church’s complicity in justifying white supremacy is part of how theology has been used. And then there’s all kinds of twisting and turning of the word of God, the theology that people embrace, in order to make sense of the social, cultural, political decisions that allow the justification for taking Native Americans’ land, for enslaving human beings, for separating children from their parents at the border.

One cannot look at themselves in the mirror and feel okay without giving some sort of a theological justification for it. Because we would have to face the inhumaneness of anyone who does something like that, unless they somehow say, “You came from Ham, and as a result of that, you know, you looked at – at – at Noah, and that’s how come – ” But that stuff doesn’t hold any water. It’s the – it’s – it’s not the theology that is in the text. It’s the justification that one has to give to the text to give some sort of credence to that kind of behavior and evil.

Brandi: Yes. It sounds like what you’re saying is that there is some, in white spaces, like a “what came first, the chicken or the egg”—like, white theology or white values. But what it seems like you’re saying is that the values actually are the thing that came first, and the theology follows the values, justifies them, and then creates more theology out of them that then reinforces the normalcy of those values. Am I hearing that right?

Brenda: Exactly. You said it better than I did. That’s exactly what I’ve experienced. And so I think there was this whole thing about knowing that there was going to be the taking of Native land. But how do you do that? How do you do that unless you have to make someone not be human—but then. How do you do that without somehow having some way to make sense of it?

So there was a philosophical belief system that came from Europe, which was this great chain of being, where God is at the top and then the aristocracy is then below the level of the angels, and then the commoners below them, and you keep going down this hierarchy until you get to barbarians, or then, under them, animals and rocks.

And so when the Europeans then began to travel the world and began to engage people in India or Africa and then come to this new world and find Native Indigenous people, then they look at them through their own ideology that says there is a hierarchy, there’s a philosophical belief that there’s a hierarchy of beings and certain people are closer to God than others.

And these people who dress with feathers, these people who are close to the earth, they must be more like animals. They must be barbaric; therefore, we have a justification in treating them like animals. Because we have made God in our image and we are closer to God and they, therefore, are further away. And that justifies our enslavement of them, our taking their stuff because they’re too dumb to know what to do with it, so we’ll take the buffalo, because we’re the smart ones, because our philosophy says we are closer to God.

And that philosophical belief system then gets married to a theological belief system, and that leads to a society that dehumanizes human beings and continues today.

Brandi: Yep. And I think that in some ways, that makes sense of one of the things that I see being very true of white theology and practices that – so, for a lot of communities of color, I think a lot of our experience of the scriptures are less rooted in Paul and more rooted in stories, that – that our communities center around stories. And a lot of white culture, I’ve seen, really leans into proof-texting, single verses to interpret holistic engagements with the world.

And what it sounds like is that is not a new thing, but rather it is the foundation of how white theology has come to be. It is that it – it doesn’t start with a story; it starts with a practice rooted in whiteness and then adds theology to it and creates the story from there.

Whoo. So – so I’m hearing this marriage of philosophy, practice, and theology as a historic notion.

This may sound like a stupid question in some ways—how are you seeing that play out right now? Because this is a particular moment that we are in that is – I don’t want to use the word “divided” but that is, um, polarized in such a way that I just don’t have the history that you do to see the bigger picture of it.

And so how are you seeing this kind of marriage of theology, philosophy, and practice playing out in our political moment right now?

Brenda: Yeah, well, I think you’ve already pointed to the election of 2016. The most blatant example of the church’s complicity is 81% of Christians voted for the – the 45th president, whose ideology, whose lifestyle, whose rhetoric dehumanizes, devalues. We heard with his own voice, his confession that he gropes women; “You can do anything you want if you’re rich.” Lying incessantly, to the fact that we don’t even expect the truth to be told anymore; we don’t – I don’t watch the news with the expectation that anything he says will be true. I don’t watch the news in hopes that anything he does will be empathetic, moral, just, kind. I don’t expect leadership to be demonstrated, and Christians continue, to this moment, to try to put something on that to make that sound like God.

So, I think that that is the most stark example of what we see. I think that – and it continues to this day. So, you see a man get strangled on TV. You see somebody after nine minutes—nine minutes. Now, I’ve had to preach in ten minutes, so I know you can accomplish a lot in ten minutes. Nine minutes and some seconds, a police officer kneels on the neck of a human being, and there’s no time in that nine-minute framework that that person could have caught himself and stopped that.

And then, when Christians explain that away and keep trying to explain that away, that’s that kind of theological back-and-forth, that Cyrus says God is using him because – it sounds like the Jimmy Carter thing with the beast – the bear coming from Russia. It’s just – it’s mumbo jumbo to defend and explain something else. And you have to go then into this realm of prophetic kind of – you can’t make sense of it in real time, so you have to almost go to more of a futuristic kind of interpretation of what’s happening.

And, so, people like Paula White, who is one of the people who is an advisor to Donald Trump, she preached at my Black church in Chicago, Illinois. She preached at our church, and she said that she was white on the outside but Black on the inside, because of how she preached. She said that T. D. Jakes was her father in the ministry and – and to see now the flip that has happened, it’s suggesting to me, in answer to your question, that there’s a theological ability to change one’s posture and position as it is advantageous to privilege and power.

And – and I’m seeing the gospel being used to justify that. I’m seeing the gospel being the veneer put over it, that somehow allows people to still feel as if they’re doing God’s will, because they have already aligned themselves with a national, political posture that now has to have something that sounds Christian about it, and that’s where the theology has to come in. Now, we’ve got to do the kind of stuff that interprets or, you know, it’s the hermeneutical work now. So it’s a way of saying, “We see scripture this way, and so we’ll interpret it that way, through this lens, so that it can make sense.”

Brandi: Yeah. It sounds like, in some ways, what you’re saying is that whiteness being rooted and established in political power and privilege has chosen Christianity as its weapon to ensure its existence. Yesterday was the 75th anniversary since the bomb dropping on Hiroshima, and I am just aware that that kind of violence is, in abstraction, you have – you have to justify so much to do that kind of thing. And so it just seems like the history of the United States is a history of theologically justifying the most obscene forms of violence in order to stay in power.

And I hear what you’re saying, too, that there’s some sort of, to use the most academic terminology I can think of for this, it seems as though whiteness relies on eschatological abstraction: Who are we going to be in the future? What are we going to move toward? What’s the end goal? What are – Right, and that becomes tricky, because it’s – “the ends justify the means” becomes the framing, it becomes the foundational framing for white theology, is “the ends justify the means.” And anything for the sake of Christ, anything for the sake of Christianizing, anything for the sake of, really, a theologically convoluted space where power is maintained while looking at a cross of a crucified Lord in a way that obscures and abstracts that to the point where it has no meaning.

Brenda: Absolutely. Absolutely. And that’s why, if you hear the justification for what’s happening in the White House right now, what’s happening in our country right now, it has to be eschatological in nature, because if you name it for what it is right now, it’s sin.

And there’s no way to make that sound better, so you have to try to go futuristic and eschatological in order for it to sound justified. And if you don’t get it—which is how I felt back in college, and maybe you did, too—if you don’t get it, it means that you don’t understand the eschatological deep understanding that’s nuanced in this text, right. That somehow, we’re missing it, and that’s why we need to go to school and read more of the European people that tell us how to understand to read this, because you’re just missing it because it’s a spiritual insight that allows you to understand why this is crazy. [Brenda laughs]

And I’m saying, “No, let’s call a thing a thing.” Let’s stop trying to put all this extra-special stuff on it to try to make it sound right, because, the truth is, taking children from their parents at the border and having no idea how to reunite an infant with their parent is just evil. And if you are pro-life, you should care about that life. So being anti-abortion is not the same as being pro-life.

And I believe that where we are right now, Brandi, is there’s a need to tell the truth. I think that, more than anything, we’ve got to stop trying to say it from a Christian perspective in this eschatological justification. I think we have to literally tell the truth: This is wrong. This is sin. This is evil.

If that happened to my son, if my son, no matter what my race, nationality, our socioeconomic status, gender, sexuality—if my child was running, going for a jog ,and happened to look at somebody’s house that was being built and got shot because of that, we would all be outraged. And if that were to happen to anybody, no matter what their race, no matter what their gender, etcetera, etcetera, you, we should be outraged for Ahmaud Arbery as we would for any child, any young person going for a jog.

And when we keep making excuses for that, it destroys the credibility of the church. And that’s one of my greatest concerns right now. Many, many, many people are through with the church. And if we continue, if white Christians continue to do this, they will lose not only their – their credibility, but their children will not come to church, because there’s a generation rising up that doesn’t believe all this stuff. And they now are starting to question even the – the truth of Christianity because of the hypocrisy they see.

Brandi: And that feels so fair. Like, if the thing that you’re looking at is – even, right, scripture even talks about this. Like, if the thing that you’re doing is void of power—power in, like, the non, like, white power privilege kind of sense—like, if it’s void of the work of God in its midst, then it is – it’s useless. It – it is false religion; it is false faith.

And so it makes sense that people, particularly of my generation, have decided to be done. And if this – and as we’re in this political moment, it doesn’t seem like there’s some – like, a lot of hope in white-centered spaces to rescue folks from that. Like, you can’t – it’s Audre Lorde, I say this all the time: “You can’t use the master’s tools to break down the master’s house.”

And it seems like that’s what a lot of white theological work attempts to do, is take something like eschatological abstraction or, what you’re saying, these justifying narratives, and then say, “We just don’t know enough about the grandiose-ness, the bigness, the glory of God to know what’s going on right now. How could we possibly know?”

And it becomes about an individual’s lack of revering God enough to know what God Godself might do, rather than saying, “No, we see an evil. We know it when we see it.” As you said, “We call it what it is.” But instead we would rather abstract that into obscurity in our inner lives and then hope that it’s going to do something in a future that we cannot imagine or refuse to imagine, because it would require us giving up power, privilege, and our oppressive ideologies.

Brenda: Exactly. Exactly. I think you name it so very, very well. And I think that that’s the conversation we’ve got to have moving forward.

Now, I don’t know. I think that there’s a generation that may not ever want to have this conversation. And I have tired of trying to convince them. So I believe that there’s a younger generation who sees what’s happening around them, and they understand that the world that they are inheriting is different and is demanding something of them. I am for them. I am wanting to speak to them; I’m wanting to help empower them.

And it could be – in the Old Testament, it talked about the children of Israel wandering in the desert, and there was the question, “Must a generation die?” And that’s a very, very hard thing to say, and I don’t say it with any gleefulness at all, but I’m wondering if there’s going to be a generation that will have to die for a new generation of young white, Black, brown, gay, straight, socioeconomically diverse, nationally, international human beings who decide to be people who thrive together, because they realize that, somehow, our existence is – is coexistence. That we don’t thrive alone. That we need each other, and that’s part of what it means to be human.

So I’m thinking that there’s a new way forward, a new way thinking, and I’m not going to spend a lot of my time trying to argue back and forth. I told someone today – I was in a conversation, and I told him that a person on my Facebook page, white male, probably middle-age of some sort, based upon the picture, and he said to me, “We liked you better when you just quoted Bible verses.” And it hurt my feelings; it did. I deleted him, blocked him from my page, because I feel like, “Not in my house. You don’t get to be nasty, snarky, and – and vomit on me in my house.” So, delete.

But what he was saying is that, “As long as you talk about things on our terms, that sound nice to us and doesn’t make me feel guilty, then we like you. But if you start saying stuff like, you know, talking about these children being separated from their parents or kids drinking poisoned water in Flint, Michigan or, you know, the DACA recipients, if you start talking about Native land and environmental justice, if you start talking about queer people and our brothers and sisters who have every right to thrive as anyone—if you start talking about that kind of stuff now, you’re starting to really get on our nerves.”

And the way power works is that people then will disinvite you. They won’t have you speak; they won’t have you – they won’t buy your books. They’ll – they’ll put you in kind of a category that says, “You only thrive if you do it our way. And the moment you stop doing it our way, we will forbid you to thrive. We’ll find a way to keep you from ever having access to the places that would cause what you do to be seen, heard, and – and – and received by other people.”

So I can tell you, I know people of color whose ministries were completely destroyed because white evangelicals decided that, “It’s on our terms and our terms only. The moment you digress that, we take away our – our – our blessing, and we hang you out to dry.”

Brandi: Yes, and the phenomenon that you’re naming there is that whiteness is always interested in protecting itself, and that there’s a use of power that keeps people from thriving in order to maintain white power and dominance, and that is alive and well in Christian space.

I think about the late Rachel Held Evans, and when she was writing books that were affirming the full dignity of our queer siblings, that Lifeway Books—which, right, RIP Christian bookstores, this is maybe the judgment that – that happens for this kind of bigotry—but, like, pulled all of her books from their shelves and demonized her in Christian posts and all sort of things like that, because the thing that she was doing stepped outside of white evangelical conservative Christianity in such a way that they employed their power to silence her.

It makes sense to me that white evangelicals can follow someone like Donald Trump if we are already using the tools that he uses in our own spaces. It’s not a far cry from – from shutting out people who disagree with you to killing people who disagree with you. I think it’s a very, very short road from one onto the other. So I think that that helps to make sense of some of the ways that – the ways that theology is used in the context of whiteness creates, maintains, and justifies violence in particular ways.

Brenda: Yeah, yeah. And so, for me, Brandi, the truth is so critical, and that’s why I keep – I keep kind of, um, urging the church, “If we ever needed to rise up, it’s now.” And it’s – it’s to tell the truth. If we believe the Bible—and I do. So people who think I’m just some radical person who’s angry, I’m not. I’m really not. I love God, and I love people.

But I do believe that the Bible is right when it says the truth will make you free. And if we ever want to be free, if we ever want to be free of these things that we keep seeing cycles of over and over and over again, and you marched for it last time, and now you’re marching for it again. We were one hashtag after the other. You know?

Now, a woman with four young girls in a car, face-down on the – who does that? And – and to not see that, not to see that. In Texas, I think it was, there was a – a shootout between a motorcycle gang, and I saw them sitting on the curb, just as nice, with their hands with plastic little things on their – on their wrists. And now they have this little baby girl, six years old, laying down on asphalt, because it could be a stolen car. Or you send the police into Portland because of protestors, and people armed with AK-47s, white people with machine guns storm the governor’s office, and they are seen as, quote unquote, justifiably upset.

When Christians don’t tell the truth about that duplicity, we then become complicit with keeping the injustice and the evil. I want to call it what it is; it’s not just injustice. It is evil. And if we are the church, we’re supposed to be the healing to evil. But we can’t get there if we won’t call a thing a thing and tell the truth.

Brandi: And for me, part of that – I feel like “truth” is maybe a strong word for what I will say, but to me, it does not seem like white evangelical Christians want freedom. They want themselves to be free. Free to control politics, free to control Christian spaces, free to control theological movements, free to control publishing, free to control every institution. And so, to me, I don’t think that, in that way, white evangelical Christians actually want to believe the truth, to tell the truth, to see the truth. Because the freeing of people that are not white, that do not fit into cis, hetereo, white male, able-bodied wealthy white men is not the kind of freedom that white evangelical Christianity is currently built on.

__

Brenda: Exactly. I agree. I agree. So, hey, maybe we can move toward a solution. So let me tell you what I’m starting to think about here lately.

Brandi: Please.

Brenda: I think that this – there’s two things I’m sensing happening right now in the earth.

One has to do with women. Wherever, around the world, wherever there has been genocide, wherever there has been atrocity, there – there is – often, the ones left to heal the community is – is the women. The men have been killed and slaughtered and somehow – the women have to somehow bring their broken bodies somehow together, gather up the children. Name a place: Cuba, Peru, Liberia, the United States. When women decide you’re going to stop doing this, and women across all differ – all of their differences, faith differences, religious differences, Muslims and Christians, we come together, and we say that we will bring our collaborative healing energy together. So I think there’s something about women rising up.

I think that prior to Joe Biden looking as if he’s going to be the presumptive nominee, I was excited as I heard people saying, after the #MeToo Movement, this was the year of the woman. I still hope and believe that there’s something about the women’s energy in the earth that can help bring a different collaborative versus combative spirit that is currently in the earth, right. So I think women.

But I want to tell you a quick story. I was on an Allyship Tour with Lisa Sharon Harper called Ruby Woo tour, and we saw a film, the original film of the Harriet Tubman story. And the – the person playing Harriet Tubman was Cicely Tyson.

Long story short, Cicely Tyson is in her cabin, preparing to go to church. It’s a Sunday, and the master has heard that she’s gotten up enough money to – to buy her freedom. She wants to buy her freedom; she’s been, over years, squirreling away a little bit, and she might now have – I think it was $200 to buy her freedom. So he hears about this, he comes to her cabin on that Sunday, and he says to her, “Where you going, gal?” And she says, “I’m going to church, master.” And he said, “No, I need you to go in town with me.”

She looks dejected because it’s the only day she gets to go to the Lord’s house. And so she gets ready to take off with the best little dress she’s got, which is a rag in itself, but it’s the only one that she’s got for her Sunday best. And he said, “No gal, you don’t have to take that off. You can wear that.” So he leaves, and she starts to pull herself together to go down to this wagon to go into town, and when she gets to the wagon, she notices that there’s a lawn port party right in front of the master’s house with all these women and white men just dancing in all of their antebellum self kind of outfits, right. They’ve got mint juleps in their hands and they’re having this lovely time together.

As she comes up, she notices the wagon, and there’s no horses or mules in front of it to pull it. So when the master sees that she’s standing there, looking bewildered, he comes out of the party, off the lawn, and he says, “What’s the matter, gal?” And she says, “Master, where’s the horses?” And he said, “They’re here.” And she looks around like, “Where?” And he said – and he looks at her, and she has this look of fear and dread and, “Ah – you can’t – I – I can’t pull—” And he said, “Oh, sure you can, gal.”

And then he puts the saddle on this woman’s body. And when she gets ready to take it off, he pulls back his hand like, “I will beat you down if you dare take it off.” So she knows where she is, and she knows she has no option. So with her body, she begins to pull, try to pull this wagon, and she is now pulling to the point that the weight of the wagon drags her back, and she’s on her hands and her knees, and with each time she moves, her dress is being shredded off her body, until she’s almost naked. And all of those people on the lawn come close down and watch her crawling like a dog, and the women, the white women are laughing and just kind of jeering.

And I saw something when I watched that clip of that movie that I believe is important about women to hear. There is a white patriarchal system that’s at the top of the food chain when it comes to white supremacy. And white women are given the message that, “If you want to be given any of the power that white men have, you’ve got to side with whiteness. We are your brother; we’re your father; we are your tie to being in power. And if you dare side with that Black gal on the ground, you lose your power. So you have to choose whiteness and not your womanness.”

And that is what we’ve got to start to fight. I think women have got to start to tell the truth, that there’s this carrot being dangled and is being dangled by white patriarchal structures, and I think white women have got to disavow themselves of it to become real allies, so this could be the year of the women who brings a healing energy into this land.

That’s my prayer. That’s what I’m working toward. I believe that could be possible. But it will mean that we won’t want to take the bait. We won’t have to believe that any of that real white male power is ever gonna fully be yours. So how about we come together and be united in changing and healing our land?

Brandi: Yeah, and we have to recognize that there isn’t freedom in white patriarchy. That there might be protection, but that is at the cost of one’s freedom or ability to be fully themselves.

And I think that is the great danger, especially for white women in the church who’ve had to fight so hard for any kind of platform, that to say a single thing—which is actually why I’m, like, here for Beth Moore these days, who is just out here, saying what she got to say. And I feel like she is giving me some hope that white women won’t just defect to 45 in the same way as we’ve seen in the last few years. Because I was like, “If that woman, who was on every” – like, the original Christian webinar is a Beth Moore cast—[Brandi laughs]—you know? Like, I would have never thought in my lifetime that that woman would be out here, fighting white supremacy through her words in the way that she is. And she’s doing that as, like, a devoutly Christian platformed white woman. So I just think there are some possibility models for what that can look like.

But I also know she is at an age where the cost for her, as an established person, is much lower than folks who don’t have the same kind of power she does. And so, as I think about women, and as I think about my queer siblings, I’m like, the cost that they are paying already, that we are paying as women of color, to be in spaces, there is a cost to pay in defecting from whiteness.

But I also think that now, more than ever, there are spaces to be and the capacity to create spaces that are different than ever before. Like, even having, like, a podcast or, like, being able to blog or write or speak or whatever, do art, and create change. I think there’s just a different way than there was before.

But I think, in the spirit of your upcoming book, which I’d love for you to talk about some, it takes a certain amount of courage, especially in these next – I think especially in these next two months prior to the election, that the requirement for us as marginalized people, as siblings in Christ, is – the requirement of courage is high.

Brenda: I think so. I exactly – I think – I feel it. Not just that I think it; I feel it. Because it’s not like you get to a certain place in life and you don’t get scared anymore, you know? It – it is, and that’s why it’s called Becoming Brave. I think that this is going to be the moment that we’re all going to have to swallow hard, and we’re all going to have to summon our courage. I really do mean that.

I – I agree with you, that, um – two things. One is that the cost is high, but we do have other ways to express ourselves. When you talked about what happened to Rachel Held Evans, for me, it was what happened to Tom Skinner. Tom Skinner was, for me, an icon of Black righteousness. You know? But – but he was given all kinds of platforms to speak as long as he did it on white-dominant culture terms, but he came to Urbana in the 70s, and he spoke from the bottom of his heart with great fire and passion and prophetic precision on white supremacy and racism and the call to reconciliation.

And after that talk that we now reverence in InterVarsity and other circles as a watershed moment for the movement—after that, he was taken off of Moody radio, and they took away his radio program. They stopped inviting him to speak on platforms like Urbana and other ones, and his ministry died. He was reduced to going back to itinerant preaching in Newark, New Jersey. So that is what happens.

But you’re right. That was limited, because then you had to be invited, and they disinvited him. But now we have these other means that allow our voices to go out into the earth, and it’s not controlled by people inviting us to speak on their platforms or to speak at their conferences or invite us to their churches. They don’t own the radio station, because we can have a podcast, and we can now have a voice. So, that’s one thing that I think gives us agency, and I’m grateful for that.

I think the other thing that I want to say, about courage, is that I think it’s going to take some courage for everybody, period. And I think it’s gonna be scary. Because for me, for the first time, I’ve never, ever, ever thought that the election would be like what we see around the world in places where people don’t – don’t succeed the power, where they don’t believe the election results, that there’s wars and fights and – and civil unrest. I never thought I’d ever see that here. But the kind of conversation happening in our country suggests that that could be so. And I would trust that – that we would, as Christians, not – not be so tied to our political ideologies that we would want to do – the – be a part of tearing the country apart. That’s my hope and prayer. I don’t know, but I do pray that.

But I want to say something, too, as I’m talking about my own journey of becoming brave. We talked about patriarchy, white patriarchy, and how it impacts women, particularly white women. I want to talk about how it impacts Black men. Because I think there’s something to be said there; and again, we said we’re gonna tell the truth on this podcast, and we’re gonna call a thing a thing.

And so what I’ve watched happen, particularly around the conversations of sexuality and gender equity, is Black men side with white men in the same carrot being dangled that basically knows we won’t be white, you’ll never let us be white. But, somehow, if we side with you in maleness, if we side with you in patriarchy against those people—whoever we want these white men to have said, “These are the bad people”—and if we side with you and say, “That’s right, we’re gonna go against Beth Moore,” or “That’s right, we’re gonna keep the queer people out”—if Black men and men of color side with patriarchy in hopes that they get a piece of the pie, that too must be something we speak out against.

And so I’m hoping that the Black community, that people of color won’t allow a check or some – some commitment that the government’s gonna put 600 extra dollars in your unemployment check – I’m hoping that we cannot be bought. Because this is not the day or time for Donald Trump or anybody else to think that if they put some – give us a handout that that buys our silence, that that somehow gets us to look the other way, because “Woo-hoo, I got a little extra money this month.” Because ultimately, it’s more than that that we’re trying to change. We literally have to change the literal fabric of this country, and it will not happen if we allow people to dangle a carrot at us, and we go for it.

Brandi: Yes. And that is the great lie of white-centeredness, is that anyone who is not white and male can become the fully actualized version of white – yeah. That’s – that’s the great lie. It is that whiteness and maleness are closest to godliness and that white men themselves are the only ones to hold that space and power.

And so, at this point, I’ve been talking to some of my friends, and we have like a moratorium on white male pastors and preachers. We’re, like, just not listening anymore. We’re trying to find womanist theologians and read mujerista theology and sit under queer theologians and – and just really anybody, at this point—[Brandi laughs]—who is – who is not a white man. Because we just need to know: What are the ways to get free from that? What are the ways that we need to – what are the ways that we can reveal for ourselves, to ourselves, and reaffirm for ourselves that that is not freedom? That being a white man is not freedom. Being a white man is power, but it is not freedom.

Brenda: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so – and I want freedom for us all. You know? That’s why Jesus came. right. That’s the whole thing about me being a preacher. It’s not just because I want to entertain people. I truly believe that Jesus came that we might have life. And that we would have it abundantly. That – that we would be free. That – that whom the son sets free is really, truly free. And so I want that for human beings. I want that for me. I want that for every person I love.

I literally – it’s interesting, I was doing an interview, I think with – I forget which newspaper outlet, but she – this secular – this woman who’s – I think she was with the Washington Post, she said to me, “You’re thoroughly loving.” And I don’t think I’ll ever forget her saying that to me. Because I was saying just what I’m saying to you right now, things like this, and for her to hear in that “loving.” Because in the church, when you tell this kind of truth, you’re combative. When you say this, you – you’re threatening, or you’re angry.

And for that woman to say to me that I was thoroughly loving, I thought – I could cry, even now. I am. I really, truly am. I have no hate. I’m not – I don’t want to hurt anybody. But I tried for over 35 years to be the person who didn’t say hard things, didn’t call a thing a thing, kind of talked about it from a biblical perspective and hoped that if I could put the word of God out there, theologically and biblically, rigorous and clearly articulate it in a way that I had no hidden agendas or motives, I truly believed that if people could hear the word of God and take it in, they would be transformed by the renewing of their minds. But now I understand that you can’t dance around it.

So, even though I’m stronger and I’m saying it with way more force than I ever did before in my life, hence Becoming Brave, it still comes from a fountain of love for me. I want to see people reach their full God-given potential. I want that. I want it for every single human being. And, to the best of my ability, I’m going to use whatever influence I have, whatever platforms I’m given, to say those things. Because I don’t think that we have time anymore to keep going around in circles. I think it’s time to move forward and only forward, and that’s my commitment in this day and time.

Brandi: And I think that that is a good invitation for those of us who are newer on the journey to not start in the place where you’ve paved a way for us to not have to. Because I don’t think I want to spend my life talking to white evangelicals who are not listening.

And so I think there’s probably an invitation for some of us who are listening to the podcast to – to choose the intersection that we’re being given right now, which is the intersection of being deeply loving but telling the truth. And that we can do both of those things at the same time. And that when we find that people are utterly unwilling to listen, it doesn’t mean that we no longer love. But it does mean that we no longer waste our time telling the truth to rocks.

And so I would love for you – to give you a chance to just plug your book a little bit more. Can you give us some – some details of when that comes out as we – as we close up today? Want you to showboat a little bit. [Brandi laughs]

Brenda: Yeah, thank you so much. I just received her in the mail yesterday, it’s a girl. She’s just pretty. [Brenda laughs] 

Brandi: Yes. Yes! [Brandi and Brenda laugh]

Brenda: I feel like this was a birthing process. It took five years to write this book. And it went through all kinds of iterations. So, for any budding writers out there, I’m here to tell you, writing a book is not easy, and if you – if you just want to get your name on a cover, you can do that. But if you literally feel like there’s something God has put in you that has to come in and through you, it’s a birthing process. And it literally ends up writing you while you think you’re writing it.

And so I want you to know that I thought I was going to be writing a book about the book – a book on Esther in the Old Testament, a young woman who was not looking to be a political activist. She did not have her fist in the air; she was a normal Jewish girl who had had drama in her life. Amen, somebody say drama. [Brandi and Brenda laugh] So, you know, it wasn’t like she came from perfect family and all that kind of stuff. Nobody would have picked her to say, “Oh, you are going to be the next queen.” They would have said, “Girl, please.”

But the social, political, cultural climate of her day, just like the social, political, cultural climate of our day, created such an environment that, whether she liked it or not, she got swept up in what I call a kairos moment, a moment that was undeniably asking for somebody to step up. And whether she liked it or not, she was put in a position where she had access to speak up and stand up, and she had to make a choice.

And so that was what the book was about, it’s still about that, but when I first finished it, it was all about that. My dear friends, particularly our pastor, Pastor Gail Song Bantam, said, “Hey, I need to hear how you became brave. I hear all this Esther stuff. But this needs to be more intertwined with your own evolution. What made you come out of the palace? What happened to you?” And that’s when the thing got real scary. Because to go that deep, to tell that kind of truth, takes courage.

And so Becoming Brave will be released on August 18th. I’ll have a week of book launch events virtually and people can stay tuned. My website is saltermcneil.com and we’ll post things there and I’ll put things on social media. But this time I’m not trying to sell a book, I’m really not. And I’m usually not. What I’m really trying to do is empower a generation. I’m trying to mobilize the people of God to be the people of God. And I think it’s gonna make us all have to find a courage we didn’t know we had. So come on, y’all, let’s do this.

Brandi: Yes. Yes. And subscribers, at the – at a couple levels of Patreon will be getting that book in the mail, because I’m making sure I’m getting it into the right hands, too. So you can expect some purchases from me. So I know you’re not trying to sell them, but we’re trying to get those books into the hands of folks who are trying to reclaim their theology and, really, reclaim their lives from white supremacy, this political moment that we’re in, and the chaos that ensues all around it.

So, thank you so much for the work that you do. And I don’t just mean now; I mean the decades of work that you’ve done. Because I know that the Christianity, the faith, and the political reality that I get to step into now is in part because people like you have come before. And so I honor you and the people who have come before you, because without – again, I’m just like – without Black women who’ve been doing the work, ain’t none of us free. Like, nobody’s free if Black women aren’t – aren’t fighting for freedom. And so – well, really, in our case, right now, like, if Black women and Black femmes and Black queer folks were not fighting for freedom, none of us are going to be free. And so I honor you as a Black woman for fighting for my freedom so that I can do the same for others now. So thank you so much for being on the show today.

Brenda: It’s been my honor and my pleasure. Thank you.

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Brandi: Thanks again for joining for another episode of the podcast. Doing this journey with you all is such a gift. Speaking of gifts, please enjoy this clip from Hannah Glavor’s new song, “Get It, Let It Go.” And peep the video, which features a lot of badass female musicians and artists. See y’all next time. And, as always, let’s keep trying to do better together.