@Proctor - Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference

The Freedom to Destroy Freedoms

TS Design Studio — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 20:43:11 +0000

Public Policy, Democratic Erosion, and the Counter-Narratives America Refuses to Remember

A Critical Essay on the 250th Anniversary of the United States of America, 2026

By Rev. Damien Durr

I. Introduction: The Paradox of Jubilee

In 2026, the United States of America will pause to celebrate itself. With fireworks, fanfare, and the full machinery of national mythology, the country will mark its 250th anniversary a proclaiming to the world and to itself that the great American experiment in liberty continues. Politicians will quote the Declaration of Independence. Flags will be raised. Speeches will invoke the founders. And the word “freedom” will be spoken more times in a single day than perhaps any other word in the English language.

But freedom for whom?

This essay argues that the 250th anniversary of American independence arrives at a moment of profound and dangerous contradiction. Even as the nation prepares to celebrate its founding ideals, the machinery of government is being wielded with surgical precision to dismantle the very freedoms it claims to honor. Public policy has become a weapon. The language of liberty has become a cover for denial. And those who have historically been denied the full promise of American democracy are once again bearing the greatest cost.

This is not new. It is, in fact, one of the oldest American traditions: the simultaneous proclamation of freedom and the systematic destruction of it, particularly for Black Americans, poor communities, and the most vulnerable among us. What is new is the brazenness, the degree to which these contradictions are playing out in the open, in real time, in a year that was supposed to be about celebration.

To celebrate 250 years of American freedom while millions of people are losing access to food, healthcare, economic stability, and democratic representation is not a celebration of freedom. It is a monument to the freedom to destroy freedoms.

This essay refuses to let that contradiction go unnamed. It places the present moment in conversation with the commemorations of 2026 that the dominant culture would prefer to overlook: the 100th anniversary of Black History Month; the centennial of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense; the 60th commemoration of the Tallahassee Bus Boycott; and the 50th anniversary of the landmark film and television event Roots. These are not footnotes to the American story. They are, in many ways, its most honest chapters.

II. The Architecture of Dismantling: Policy as Weapon in 2026

The current political moment cannot be understood apart from its specific policy choices. Abstract language about “freedom” and “equality” obscures what is actually happening on the ground. To see clearly, we must name what is being done, to whom, and by whom.

The Hunger of Governance: SNAP Benefit Cuts

Among the most consequential and least discussed attacks on freedom in 2026 is the systematic reduction of SNAP benefits: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — that serves more than 42 million Americans. Food insecurity is not an abstraction. It is a direct attack on the capacity of human beings to survive, to think, to work, and to participate in civic life. When a government cuts food benefits in the name of fiscal responsibility or “encouraging self-sufficiency,” it is not neutral governance. It is a political choice with racialized consequences, given that Black and Brown households are disproportionately represented among SNAP recipients.

The freedom to eat, the most elemental of freedoms, is being rationed by policy. And this is happening in a year that is supposed to celebrate liberty.

Redrawing the Map: Gerrymandering and the Erosion of Representation

The ongoing effort to redraw electoral maps across the country is not a technical exercise in democratic administration. It is a deliberate strategy to dilute Black political power, to fracture communities of color into electoral irrelevance, and to entrench minority rule under the cover of procedural legitimacy. When district lines are drawn to crack and pack Black voters, the result is that the votes of millions of Americans are rendered functionally meaningless.

This is the freedom to destroy freedoms in its most precise form: using the tools of democracy to undermine democratic participation itself. The 15th Amendment promised Black men the vote in 1870. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 tried to make that promise real. In 2026, the map is being redrawn to diminish that promise.

War and Its Discontents: The Cost of Conflict in Iran

Military engagement in Iran: whether through direct conflict, sanctions, or proxy operations, carries costs that are never evenly distributed. The young men and women who fight in American wars are disproportionately drawn from communities that are already economically marginalized. The veterans who return bear wounds, visible and invisible, that their communities are ill-equipped to treat. The financial resources consumed by military engagement are resources diverted from the domestic investments that could transform life in those same communities.

There is also the moral cost. When a nation launches or escalates conflict abroad while cutting food assistance at home, it announces its priorities clarity: the projection of power matters more than the lives of its most vulnerable citizens.

The Price of Everything: Rising Gas Prices and the Poverty Tax

Rising gas prices function almost as an extended tax on the poor. For Americans who must drive to work, who live in communities without public transportation infrastructure, who cannot afford hybrid vehicles or urban proximity to employment centers, fuel costs are not an inconvenience. They are a crisis. When gas prices rise, the ripple effects touch food costs, childcare logistics, medical access, and the basic calculus of economic survival.

This is the invisible architecture of inequality: structural conditions that insulate hardship among those who already have the least, while those with capital insulate themselves from the consequences. In this year of liberty for all, the poorest Americans are effectively paying a freedom tax for the privilege of simply getting to work.

The Erasure of Black Women: Federal Layoffs and Economic Violence

The disproportionate layoffs of Black women from federal employment represent one of the most targeted and least-discussed forms of economic violence. Black women have long found in federal employment a rare space of relative pay equity, professional advancement, and economic stability that the private sector has consistently denied them. To systematically remove Black women from the federal workforce whether through agency restructuring, ideological purges under the guise of “efficiency,” or the dismantling of DEI infrastructure is to strike at one of the few institutional ladders that has allowed Black women to build and sustain middle-class lives.

The numbers, as they have continued to emerge, are staggering in their specificity. Black women accounted for roughly a third of all federal job losses in 2025. Their unemployment rate climbed to 7.5 percent by the fall of 2025, nearly double the national average at the time. The Department of Education, one of the most targeted agencies under DOGE restructuring, counted Black women as more than a quarter of its workforce. As the Economic Policy Institute has documented, the overall net employment loss for Black women in 2025 was driven almost entirely by public-sector cuts, and the losses fell hardest on college graduates, on the credentialed and the experienced, on women who had done everything that the American promise said they were supposed to do. By March 2026, 9 percent of the entire federal civilian workforce had been eliminated. The federal government, one of the few institutions in American life that had offered Black women something approaching equitable employment has been deliberately, systematically dismantled.

It is not coincidental. It is not collateral damage. It is a policy choice whose effects are predictable and whose targets are specific.

Shutting Down the World: The Elimination of USAID

The closure or gutting of the United States Agency for International Development represents a retreat from the global commitments that American foreign policy has, for decades, used as evidence of its benevolence. Whatever the legitimate critiques of USAID and there are many, its dismantling removes a critical infrastructure of humanitarian support that affects millions of people across Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean, many of whom are Black and Brown. The ideological motivation is transparent: a retrenchment of global engagement under the banner of “America First” nationalism.

The irony is acute. A nation celebrating its founding ideals of freedom and human dignity is simultaneously withdrawing from its commitments to human dignity beyond its borders. Freedom, it turns out, does not travel well when it is inconvenient.

III. The Guise: Equality, Expansion, and the Language of Reversal

Perhaps the most insidious dimension of the current assault on freedoms is the language in which it is dressed. The attacks described above are not presented as what they are: reversals, contractions, and targeted deprivations. They are presented as expansions of freedom, corrections of unfair advantage, and returns to meritocracy and equality.

Cutting SNAP benefits is called promoting self-reliance. Gerrymandering is called fair redistricting. Layoffs of Black women from federal agencies are called restoring merit-based hiring. Shutting down USAID is called protecting taxpayer dollars. Each act of constriction is re-labeled as liberation. Each removal of a floor is reframed as a leveling of the playing field.

After Reconstruction, the restoration of white supremacist governance was called “Redemption.” After the Civil Rights Movement, the backlash against its gains was called “law and order.” After affirmative action created pathways for Black students and workers, its dismantling was called “color-blindness.” The language changes. The structure remains.

The most effective strategy for destroying freedom has always been to do it in freedom’s name: to use the vocabulary of rights and equality to reverse the hard-won gains of those who fought to make those words real.

In 2026, as the nation gathers under the banner of “250 Years of Freedom,” we must consider the contradiction before us in plain sight: the freedom being celebrated is being rationed, weaponized, and selectively distributed. And those who are paying the price are the descendants of the people who were never fully included in the original promise.

IV. Counter-Narratives: What 2026 Also Marks

The dominant celebration of America’s 250th anniversary will tell one story. It will be a story of progress, resilience, and the steady expansion of liberty. It will center founders and documents, battlefields and monuments. It will be partial, curated, and politically convenient.

But 2026 is also a year of other anniversaries: commemorations that tell a different and more complete story of what America has been, and what Black Americans have built in the face of what it has done to them. These are not counter-American stories. They are deeply American stories. They are, in many ways, the most American stories of all.

100 Years of Black History Month: The Radical Act of Remembering

Black History Month, now celebrating its centennial, was born in 1926 as Negro History Week, founded by historian and scholar Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Woodson understood that the suppression of Black history was not accidental, it was a political project. A people robbed of their history could be kept in a state of psychological subjugation, unable to understand the roots of their condition or the depth of their capacity.

The creation of a dedicated week, later expanded to a month was a radical assertion: that Black life, Black achievement, Black struggle, and Black culture were worthy of formal commemoration and study. Now one hundred years later, that assertion is under attack. State legislatures are restricting what can be taught about Black history. School boards are pulling books. “Diversity” has become equated with underserving or unfairly advantaged. And yet, here is Black History Month, entering its second century, still standing.

The centennial of Black History Month in 2026 is not simply a calendar milestone. It is a testament to the endurance of the radical act of remembering and a rebuke to every power that has tried to make Black people forget who they are.

100th Anniversary — Black History Month (founded 1926 by Carter G. Woodson)

100 Years of the Schomburg Center: A Cathedral of Black Knowledge

In 1926, the same year Carter Woodson launched Negro History Week, the New York Public Library acquired the extraordinary personal collection of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, an Afro-Puerto Rican scholar and activist whose lifelong mission was to document and preserve the history and culture of people of African descent. That collection became the foundation of what is now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, located in Harlem and recognized as one of the most important repositories of African and African diaspora history in the world.

The Schomburg Center’s centennial in 2026 represents 100 years of institutional resistance to erasure. In a country that has repeatedly tried to eliminate Black history from public consciousness, from the burning of records during Reconstruction to the contemporary legislative assault on “divisive concepts” in education. Schomburg has stood as a cathedral of Black knowledge, an archive of survival, and a living argument for the irreplaceable value of Black intellectual and cultural life.

That it endures and thrives in its centennial year, even as forces of erasure are once again ignited, is both an achievement and a challenge: the archive must be protected, the knowledge must be taught, and the people whose stories it holds must know it exists.

100th Anniversary — Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (founded 1926)

70 Years of the Tallahassee Bus Boycott: The Geography of Resistance

While the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–56 receives most of the historical attention, the Tallahassee Bus Boycott of 1956 represents an equally significant and too-often-overlooked chapter in the geography of civil rights resistance. Launched on May 27, 1956, following the arrest of Florida A&M University students Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson for refusing to give up their seats, the boycott brought the bus system in Florida’s capital city to its knees and demonstrated that Montgomery was not an isolated event but the beginning of a regionwide uprising.

The Tallahassee boycott, sustained for months by the Inter-Civic Council led by the Reverend C.K. Steele, showed that ordinary Black people in communities across the South were willing to sacrifice, organize, and endure for the sake of dignity. It was a demonstration of collective economic power, the withdrawal of labor and patronage as political action that carries direct lessons for the present.

In 2026, as Black communities face renewed economic marginalization and political disenfranchisement, the 60th commemoration of the Tallahassee Bus Boycott asks a pressing question: what forms of collective economic action are available to communities today? What would a modern boycott look like? Who would it target? And who has the moral courage and organizational capacity to sustain it?

70th Commemoration — Tallahassee Bus Boycott (launched May 27, 1956)

60 Years of the Black Panther Party: The Enduring Legacy of Self-Defense

Of all the commemorations of 2026, perhaps none is more urgently relevant to the present moment than the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Founded in Oakland, California in October 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. The Black Panther Party emerged with a clear understanding: that Black communities in America could not rely on the state for protection, that the police were often instruments of terror rather than safety, and that self-determination required self-defense, in every sense of those words.

The Panthers are often reduced in popular memory to their leather jackets and raised fists. But the depth of their program demands more serious engagement. The Ten-Point Program called for full employment, decent housing, quality education, an end to police brutality, and community control of institutions that served Black communities. The Party’s free breakfast programs fed tens of thousands of children before school each day a program so effective that J. Edgar Hoover called it the greatest threat to internal security in America, and the federal government eventually adopted a version of it as national policy.

In 2026, when SNAP benefits are being cut, when police violence continues to claim Black lives, when housing is increasingly inaccessible, and when Black communities are systematically excluded from economic and political power, the Panthers’ ten-point program reads not as history but as present-tense indictment. Their model of community self-sufficiency, mutual aid, and principled resistance to state violence is not a relic. It is a roadmap.

No one inside the Black Panther Party understood this more clearly or built it more boldly than Fred Hampton. As Chairman of the Illinois Chapter, Hampton did not wait for coalition to come to him. He went and got it. In Chicago, he forged what he called the Rainbow Coalition: a working alliance between the Black Panther Party, the Young Patriots Organization (poor white Appalachian migrants on the North Side), the Young Lords (Puerto Rican street organization), and the Brown Berets, among others. Hampton understood that the enemy of poor Black people and the enemy of poor white people and the enemy of poor Brown people was the same enemy, and if they remain divided, they would all remain in its grip. “We’re going to fight racism not with racism,” he said, “but we’re going to fight with solidarity.” He meant it. And he made it real.

What Hampton called the people’s agenda was not a platform drafted in an office or a manifesto written for posterity. It was a living thing: emerging from the actual conditions of actual people in specific neighborhoods with specific grievances that could be addressed through specific action. Feed the children before school. Stop the gang wars. Build the alliances across lines the powerful have drawn to keep the powerless fighting each other. Hampton grasped what many organizers take careers to learn: that the work of liberation is not the work of persuading those in power to share it, but the work of building enough power, across every division that the people no longer need to ask. In 2026, when multiracial working-class coalitions are forming in tenant unions, in labor actions, in mutual aid networks that look strikingly like what Hampton built in Chicago in 1969, his model is not being remembered. It is being rediscovered: because it works.

The 60th anniversary of the Black Panther Party also demands that we account for what the Party’s women built, and what they transformed. At its height, women constituted the majority of the Party’s membership, and figures like Elaine Brown, who served as the Party’s only female Chairman, and Kathleen Cleaver, its communications Secretary, did not simply occupy leadership roles, they redefined what those roles required. They challenged, from within, the patriarchal structures that had shaped Black political organizing, and they did so while feeding children, running schools, managing political campaigns, and resisting state repression. Ericka Huggins, who led the Party’s Oakland Community School, built an institution so effective in its educational model that it drew national recognition. These women did not wait for the movement to make room for them. They made the movement. Any honest commemoration of the Black Panther Party’s 60th anniversary must center their contributions, not as a footnote to the founding fathers of the Party, but as the structural spine of everything the Party actually accomplished on the ground.

The 60th anniversary of the Black Panther Party is an invitation to consider the insight, clarity and courage that animated its founding: that freedom cannot be petitioned from those who benefit from its restriction. It must be built, defended, and sustained by the community itself.

60th Anniversary — Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (founded October 1966, Oakland, CA)

50 Years of Roots: Memory, Identity, and the Power of Story

In January 1977, the television miniseries Roots, based on Alex Haley’s landmark 1976 novel tracing his family’s lineage from Kunta Kinte’s capture in West Africa through generations of American slavery and into freedom aired on ABC and became one of the most-watched television events in American history. An estimated 130 million people watched the finale. The series cracked open a national conversation about slavery, identity, ancestry, and the meaning of Black American life that had never been conducted at that scale or with that level of cultural penetration.

The 50th anniversary of Roots in 2026 arrives at a moment when the very history it depicted is under legislative siege. The effort to restrict teaching about slavery, to sanitize its horrors, and to prevent children from understanding the foundational role of enslaved African labor in the building of American wealth is a direct attack on what Roots accomplished: the insistence that this history belongs to everyone, that it must be faced, and that the descendants of the enslaved have the right to know their story.

Alex Haley’s act of genealogical recovery was itself an act of resistance. To trace one’s lineage through the middle passage, through the auction block, through the plantation, and out the other side into freedom and dignity was to refuse the erasure that slavery was designed to accomplish. In 2026, that refusal is as necessary as ever.

50th Anniversary — Roots by Alex Haley (novel 1976; television event January 1977)

V. The Whole Story: What a True Celebration Requires

A genuine celebration of 250 years of American history would require the courage to hold all of this at once: the founding ideals and the founding contradictions; the Declaration of Independence and the Three-Fifths Compromise; the Bill of Rights and the Fugitive Slave Act; the Emancipation Proclamation and the Black Codes; the Civil Rights Act and the ongoing assault on voting rights; the promise of freedom with targeted legislative acts to destroy that freedom!

The commemorations highlighted in this essay: Black History Month’s centennial, the Schomburg’s centennial, the Black Panthers’ 60th anniversary, the Tallahassee Bus Boycott’s 60th commemoration, and Roots’ 50th anniversary, are not grievances to be aired against the celebration. They are essential components of any honest accounting of what America is and has been. They represent the counter-pressure that has always existed against the freedom to destroy freedoms: the freedom to remember, to resist, to build, to organize, and to tell the truth.

The Black Panther Party did not ask the state to feed Black children. The Panthers fed them. The Tallahassee boycotters did not petition the bus company for dignity. They withdrew their patronage. Carter Woodson did not wait for the American academy to include Black history. He created the infrastructure to preserve and teach it. Arthur Schomburg did not wait for an institution to collect Black cultural material. Schomburg built the collection himself. Alex Haley did not wait for American culture to honor the story of enslaved people. He wrote it.

Every institution, every archive, every movement, every act of cultural production examined in this essay represents the same fundamental insight: when freedom is under assault, the response is not to beg for its restoration. It is to build the conditions of freedom yourself.

This is the deepest lesson of the Black radical tradition, and it is the lesson most urgently needed in 2026.

VI. Conclusion: Beyond Celebration, Toward Reckoning

The 250th anniversary of the United States of America will be celebrated with great enthusiasm by those whose relationship to American freedom has been, on the whole, uninterrupted. For them, the story of America is a story of progress — imperfect, halting, but directionally correct. The celebration will feel earned.

For the descendants of the enslaved, for communities currently watching their food benefits disappear, their electoral maps redrawn, their federal jobs eliminated, and their history banned from school curricula, the celebration will feel like a different kind of message: that their freedom is contingent, suspect and subject to the political calculations of those who never fully intended to extend those freedoms.

This essay argues that this is not a new story. It is, in fact, the central story of American democracy: the endless contest between the promise of freedom and the freedom to destroy it. What the commemorations of 2026 teach us is that the response to this story has never been despair. It has been resistance. It has been memory. It has been the stubborn, creative, communal insistence on building freedom when the state refuses to deliver it.

The Black Panthers built survival programs because the state would not. The boycotters walked miles to work because they refused to fund their own degradation. The scholars-built archives because they knew that a people without a past is a people without a future. The storytellers wrote and filmed and performed because they understood that the power to name one’s own experience is the foundation of all other freedoms.

In 2026, the question is not whether freedom is being destroyed. It is whether those who know this to be true will rise to meet the moment with the same creativity, conviction, and courage as those who came before.

Two hundred and fifty years in, the American experiment remains unfinished. The only real question is who gets to finish it — and whose definition of freedom will prevail.

The answer, as it has always been, will depend on what we remember, what we refuse to forget, and what we are willing to build.

Rev. Damien C. Durr is General Secretary/CEO of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, Inc.

Sounding An Alarm!

TS Design Studio — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 21:08:30 +0000

Before oppression is written into law, it is almost always preached into legitimacy.

By Traci Blackmon

In the fall of 2023, I spent my sabbatical in Cape Town, South Africa. Through the extraordinary generosity of my dear friend, the Rev. René August, I experienced not only the breathtaking beauty of her homeland, but also its history through the eyes of someone whose vision had not been shaped by curated stories or redacted histories.

René is an Episcopal priest whose family’s story is deeply rooted in Cape Town. She possesses a rare gift: the ability to illuminate not only history’s wounds, but also the extraordinary resilience that struggle so often reveals.

During my month there, she introduced me to the South Africa tourists come to see: the open-air markets, the dramatic coastlines, and the place where two oceans meet. She taught me to drive on the left side of the road before graciously handing me the keys to her car. She welcomed me into gatherings of family and friends, invited me to listening sessions in townships, took me to a young artist’s exhibition, and shared countless evenings over good food, good wine, and spectacular sunsets

But the greatest gift she gave me was conversation.

History. Theology. Sociology. Soteriology.

Conversations that linger with me still.

One day, René pointed out Groote Kerk while we were riding through the city. Groote Kerk “The Great Church” is the oldest Christian church in South Africa, established by Dutch colonists in the seventeenth century.

It is also the place where the theology of apartheid was first preached.

The architects of apartheid were not content merely to create a political system. They sought something more enduring: divine legitimacy.

They taught that racial segregation was not simply good policy but God’s will. Not merely a political preference, but a sacred obligation.

To give apartheid moral weight, theologians selectively interpreted Scripture until oppression appeared righteous. Forced removals, the denial of political rights, and the degradation of Black, Coloured, and Asian South Africans became, for many, not acts of cruelty but acts of obedience.

On my final Sunday in South Africa, I chose Groote Kerk as my place of worship.

René had kindly alerted the pastor that I would be attending, and his hospitality was warm. Still, I sat alone. As worship began, I realized I would understand almost none of the sermon being preached in Afrikaans.

The language barrier should have been the most unsettling part of the morning.

It wasn’t.

Instead, my mind drifted thousands of miles north to Elmina Castle on Ghana’s coast, a place I’ve visited several times.

Originally constructed by the Portuguese in 1482 and later occupied by the Dutch, Elmina became one of the principal slave-trading forts of the transatlantic slave trade. Above ground, Europeans conducted commerce and daily life. Beneath them, captured Africans were separated from their families, raped, tortured, starved, and imprisoned for weeks or months before being forced through the infamous “Door of No Return.”

In the middle of that castle sits a church.

The people who brutalized enslaved Africans gathered there to pray.

To sing.

To worship.

Not every slave fort contained a chapel. But many of the largest European forts built churches directly above, or beside, the dungeons where human beings were held.

The proximity of the sanctuary to the suffering was no accident. It was theology.

The holy stood beside the profane until the profane came to be called holy.

History teaches us that before oppression is enforced by law, it is almost always justified by theology.

That is why the report released yesterday by President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission should concern anyone who loves both faith and democracy.

Not because religion has no place in public life. It does.

But because history teaches us what happens when governments begin confusing the authority of the church with the authority of the state.

The commission rejects the longstanding metaphor of a “wall of separation” between church and state, urging instead that America build “bridges” between them while recommending a significantly expanded role for religion in public institutions.

That language feels familiar.

Not because America has heard it before.

Because the Church has.

Every generation that has sought to sanctify domination has first wrapped itself in Scripture.

The theology of apartheid did not begin in Parliament.

It began in the pulpit.

The theology of American slavery did not begin in Congress.

It began in churches.

Long before legislators wrote laws, preachers preached sermons. Before judges issued rulings, theologians wrote treatises.

Before governments enforced segregation, Christians declared segregation to be the will of God.

Law follows imagination.

And imagination is often formed by theology.

That is why Groote Kerk unsettled me.

That is why Elmina Castle broke my heart.

In both places, worship was offered while human dignity was denied.

The sanctuary stood only steps away from unspeakable suffering, not because the worshippers lacked compassion, but because their theology had taught them that domination could be holy.

That is always how it begins.

Not with hatred.

With hermeneutics.

Not with violence.

With interpretation.

Not with legislation.

With liturgy.

The most dangerous theology is never the one that announces itself as evil.

It is the one convinced it is righteous.

Less than a kilometer from Groote Kerk stands the legacy of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who spent decades insisting that apartheid was not merely bad politics.

It was heresy, not because it separated races. But rather because it separated the Gospel from the God who gave it.

Tutu understood something the Church must remember again.

Whenever Christianity becomes useful to political power, political power eventually begins redefining Christianity.

Faith loses its prophetic voice the moment it becomes the chaplain of empire.

The Church’s calling has never been to rule the state.

Nor is the state’s calling to define the Church.

Religion is the work of faith communities.

Democracy is the work of the state.

One is sustained by invitation.

The other by obligation.

One forms the conscience.

The other protects the common good.

To weaken the integrity of either is to diminish the power of both.

Cape Town remembers.

Elmina remembers.

The question is whether America is willing to remember before history asks us to relive what others have already survived, because the distance between a sanctuary and a dungeon is often only a staircase.

The distance between faithful witness and baptized oppression is only a theology.

Rev. Traci Blackmon is a Trustee of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, Inc. and Founder of Faith Out Loud. Visit Rev. Blackmon’s Substack, “My View from Hagar’s Porch.

We Are At War

TS Design Studio — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 21:14:59 +0000

“Blessed be the LORD my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight.” — Psalm 144:1

By Leah Daughtry

Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

I write to you with the weight of the watchman on the wall. The prophet Ezekiel was given a charge: “If the watchman see the sword come, and blow not the trumpet, and the people be not warned… his blood will I require at the watchman’s hand.” (Ezekiel 33:6). Beloved, I am sounding the trumpet. I will not be silent, and I will not be still.

What Has Happened

On April 29, 2026, the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in Louisiana v. Callais. By a vote of 6 to 3, the Court struck down a Louisiana congressional map that had been drawn — under court order — to give Black voters a fair opportunity to elect representatives of their choice. In doing so, the Court did not merely rule on a single map in a single state. It gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the last remaining pillar of the law that the blood of the martyrs purchased.

Section 2 was the protection that survived after Shelby County v. Holder dismantled federal preclearance in 2013. Section 2 was the door our people walked through to challenge maps drawn to dilute our power. With this ruling, that door has been all but nailed shut. As Justice Kagan wrote in her dissent, the decision renders Section 2 “all but a dead letter.”

And it did not stop there. Within days of the ruling — on May 4 — the Court took the unusual step of finalizing its judgment immediately, brushing aside its own thirty-two-day waiting rule and the long-standing principle that courts should not change the rules in the middle of an election. More than 100,000 Louisiana voters had already cast early ballots. Forty-two thousand absentee ballots had already been mailed in. None of that mattered. The primary was suspended. The map can now be redrawn while the election is in motion.

Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana have already moved — or are moving — into special legislative sessions to redraw their congressional maps before November. The aim is plain: to dismantle majority-Black districts and to silence the voices of our communities before the 2026 midterms and the 2028 election.This is not speculation. This is the public record.

Why I Say We Are At War

I do not use the language of war lightly. I am a pastor. I am the daughter and granddaughter and great-granddaughter of pastors. I know what words carry. But I also know what I am looking at.

And I take my cue from David. The shepherd-king who faced Goliath, who faced Saul, who faced his own son in rebellion, did not flinch from naming his condition. He wrote, “Blessed be the LORD my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight.” Hear what David is doing in that one verse. He names the war. He does not deny it, soften it, or spiritualize it away. But in the same breath, he names the source of his strength — and the One who does the teaching. The hands are his. The fingers are his. But the training is the Lord’s. That is the posture I am calling us to. Clear-eyed about the battle. Clear-eyed about Whose we are.

This is a coordinated, multi-front assault on the political voice of Black Americans — and on the moral architecture of this democracy. It is the harvest of decades of legal strategy, calculated court appointments, and patient erosion. The map cases are one front. Voter roll purges are another. Restrictions on registration drives, on souls-to-the-polls, on absentee ballots, on student IDs — these are all fronts. Disinformation aimed at our communities is a front. The criminalization of organizers and election workers is a front.

Our forebears understood this kind of war. Fannie Lou Hamer understood it. Medgar Evers understood it and gave his life. John Lewis crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge knowing the troopers were waiting on the other side. Dr. King wrote from a Birmingham jail because he understood it. They did not flinch. They organized. They prayed. They marched. They voted. And they sent us.

We are their inheritance. We are not without resources. We are not without God. But we are without the luxury of waiting to see how this unfolds.

What Is Being Asked of You

I am asking you to do three things:

Register voters.Every congregation in our network should have an active voter-registration ministry by July 1. We are joining the One Million Black Voters Rising coalition effort, and our network will be on the front lines of registering, re-registering, and verifying voters in your communities. No member of our church family — and no neighbor within reach of our doors — should remain unregistered through our inaction.
Watch the maps and the rolls. Many of you live in states where new maps will be drawn in the coming weeks. We need eyes and ears in every state legislature, every county election office, and every polling place. We need members willing to serve as poll workers and poll monitors, and to track changes to district lines, polling locations, and voter ID rules in your jurisdiction.
Tell the truth, in love.Disinformation is a weapon of this war. We are establishing a national information network within the House to share verified updates, alerts, and resources to every congregation. We need members in every region to receive that information, translate it for your local context, and disseminate it through your church communications, social media, and pulpit announcements.

A Direct Call for Volunteers

I am asking for volunteers to serve in one of three roles:

Voter Engagement Captains — to lead registration, education, and turnout work in your local church.
State and Local Watchers — to track redistricting activity, election law changes, and voter access issues in your state and report back to our national team.
Communications Disseminators — to receive verified information and share it quickly and accurately within your congregation and/or community.

If God is stirring you to serve in any of these capacities. No prior political experience is required. What is required is willingness, prayerfulness, and a heart for our people.

A Word to Steady Your Heart

I know some of you are afraid. Some of you are tired. Some of you have been doing this work for forty years and were hoping not to have to do it again. I hear you. I see you. I am one of you.

But hear me: our God specializes in creating calm out of chaos. He brooded over the deep when the earth was without form and void, and He spoke light. He stood with the three Hebrew boys in the furnace. He shut the lions’ mouths around Daniel. He raised Jesus from a sealed tomb. He has not changed. The God who carried our ancestors through the Middle Passage, through Reconstruction’s betrayal, through Jim Crow, through Bloody Sunday, through every season they were not supposed to survive — that same God walks with us now.

This is not a moment for despair. It is a moment for assignment. Every one of us has one. Find yours. Take it up. Do not lay it down.

Standing on the wall with you.

Bishop Leah D. Daughtry is Chairperson of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, Inc. and Presiding Prelate of The House of the Lord Churches in Brooklyn, NY.

They Have Stolen Our Vote

L. Julie — Mon, 11 May 2026 19:00:38 +0000

They Have Stolen Our Vote. Now They Have Stolen Our Voice. The Faith Community Must Rise.

On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States dealt a devastating blow to the heart of American democracy. In Louisiana v. Callais, the Court’s six conservative justices effectively dismantled what remained of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—the law for which our ancestors bled, marched, and died on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, issued a dissent that should be read from every pulpit—Black, white, brown, and every shade in between — in this nation. She wrote that the Court’s decision “eviscerates the law” and “greenlights redistricting plans that will disable minority communities — in Louisiana and across the Nation—from electing, as majority communities can, ‘representatives of their choice.’”

We need to understand what has happened and why the faith community — with the Black church as our moral compass—must lead the response.

A Simple Story That Tells the Whole Truth

Justice Kagan offered a simple example in dissent. Imagine a state shaped like a rectangle. Imagine a county in the middle shaped like a circle. In that circle, 90% of the residents are Black. In the rest of the state, 90% are White. And voting is divided along racial lines.

The circle district works. It allows Black voters to elect someone who represents their interests.

But then the state legislature decides to cut the circle into six pieces, like slicing a pie. They attach each piece to a different White district. Now, Black voters are scattered. They can still vote — but their votes no longer matter. They have no chance to elect a candidate of their choice. Their votes have been diluted. Their voices have been stolen.

That, Justice Kagan wrote, “is racial vote dilution in its most classic form.”

For forty years, the Voting Rights Act made that practice illegal. A state could not slice up a community’s voting power simply because it wanted to.

But now the Supreme Court has said it is legal.

The Court’s New Rule: Intent Is Everything, Results Mean Nothing

Here is what the majority decided. Under the new rule, a state can destroy a community’s voting power without legal consequence — as long as the state claims it was acting for “political” reasons rather than racial ones.

Let that sink in.

If a state says, “We are not trying to harm Black voters. We are just trying to protect our Republican incumbents,” the Supreme Court will not stop them. Even if the result is that Black voters lose every single representative they ever had.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) called the decision “profoundly misleading” and warned that it “blesses racially discriminatory gerrymandering” while “dismantling the legal protections for minority voters as we become a more important voice in the country’s politics.”

Justice Kagan saw this clearly. She wrote: “Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power.“

She called the majority’s opinion a “now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”

NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson put it even more starkly: “What the Supreme Court essentially did is destroy the most significant piece of policy legislation of the civil rights movement.”

A Brief History: Why This Law Existed

We cannot understand the weight of this decision without remembering why the Voting Rights Act was passed in the first place.

After the Civil War, the Fifteenth Amendment promised that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Frederick Douglass called it the nation’s “second birth.”

But that promise was a lie for nearly a century. Southern states invented endless mechanisms—poll taxes, literacy tests, character exams, convoluted registration processes—to keep Black people from voting. Louisiana, the state at the center of this case, drove the number of Black registered voters from 130,000 in 1896 to just 1,342 in 1904.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was Congress’s answer to that century of theft. It was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson after John Lewis and other marchers were beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Blood was spilled for that law.

And for decades, it worked. Black registration soared. Black elected officials went from a handful to thousands. The law was reauthorized by overwhelming majorities in Congress—most recently in 2006, when the Senate voted 98-0 in favor.

But the Supreme Court has now undone what Congress repeatedly affirmed.

What Comes Next: A Threat to Us All

The immediate impact of this decision will be catastrophic — not only for Black communities, but for Latino, Asian American, Indigenous, and every other community of color that depends on the Voting Rights Act for protection.

Louisiana will likely lose its second majority-Black congressional district. The state will be redrawn to have only one district where Black voters can elect a candidate of their choice—even though one-third of the state’s population is African American.

And Louisiana is just the beginning. Experts predict that this ruling could allow Republicans to gain as many as nineteen additional House seats across the South. States like South Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, and others will now have a green light to slice up majority-minority districts.

The League of Women Voters condemned the decision, stating: “Today’s decision will turn back decades of progress toward securing a multiracial democracy.”

Justice Kagan warned: “The Callais requirements have thus laid the groundwork for the largest reduction in minority representation since the era following Reconstruction.”

That is not hyperbole. That is history about to repeat itself.

Congressman Steven Horsford (NV-04) stated: “People fought, bled, and died for these protections. They marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They organized in church basements and community halls. Today, the Supreme Court has seemingly erased those sacrifices with a single decision. This is a moral failure this country cannot accept.”

Why the Black Church Must Lead – And Who Must Join

The Black church has always been the conscience of the nation and the defender of the voiceless. From the hush arbors of slavery to the pews of the civil rights movement, our sanctuaries have been places where resistance was planned, where hope was sustained, and where justice was preached.

But this fight is not ours alone.

The same decision that harms Black voters will harm Latino voters in Texas, Asian American voters in California, Indigenous voters in Arizona, and poor white voters in Appalachia whose voices have also been silenced by partisan gerrymandering. When the Court says that states can destroy voting power as long as they claim a “political” reason, every community that lacks political power is at risk.

The Rev. Traci Blackmon, leader of the Faith Out Loud initiative, said it best: “Solidarity is not selective.” Her group is working in fifteen Southern cities to mobilize congregations around voting rights.

The Rev. Mike McBride of the Live Free movement has been organizing “Sunday dinners” across the country—from the San Francisco Bay Area to Atlanta—to bring diverse congregations together. “It’s impossible, from the Black prophetic tradition,” he said, “to say, ‘Oh, we’re not going to respond to the pain of our immigrant loved ones,’ whether they be from Latin America, Africa, the Caribbean, because we’re all connected together.”

This is the moment for multiracial, multifaith coalition-building. The labor movement, immigrant rights organizations, environmental justice groups, and every person who believes in democracy must stand together.

What You Can Do: Organizations to Join and Support

The time for passive outrage is over. Here are specific organizations and initiatives already on the ground, fighting for our voting rights. Join them. Support them. Show up.

National Organizations Leading the Fight:

NAACP – The NAACP has convened emergency town halls and is coordinating legal challenges. Contact your local NAACP branch to get involved in voter protection efforts.
League of Women Voters – The League has condemned the decision and is mobilizing voters nationwide. They are also fighting proof-of-citizenship laws that create additional barriers. Join their “Unite & Rise 8.5” movement.
MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund) – MALDEF is defending Latino voting rights and has pledged to challenge discriminatory maps.
Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law – They run the Election Protection Hotline (866-OUR-VOTE). Volunteer as a poll monitor or hotline operator.
ACLU Voting Rights Project – The ACLU is intervening in lawsuits across the country. Sign up for their action alerts.

Faith-Based Organizing Initiatives:

Live Free – Founded by Rev. Mike McBride, this nonprofit focuses on community violence reduction and voter engagement. They are collecting signatures for the “Love Free” pledge, which includes “showing up, taking action, and working with others to defend democracy, defeat authoritarianism, and build shared power in my community.”
Faith Out Loud – Led by Rev. Traci Blackmon, this initiative works in fifteen Southern cities to mobilize congregations “from just the talking and believing to the actual embodying of our faith.” Find out if your city has a Faith Out Loud anchor church.
Just People on a Zoom – Created by Rev. Cece Jones-Davis, this online space offers “confession, repentance, and accountability” across political divides. It is “not a place to bash anybody” but “a place of ‘What now?'”
Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, Inc. – This predominantly Black faith-based organization is developing a “Moving the Needle” civic literacy curriculum for congregations and has held “Sacred Strategy” sessions on voter mobilization.
Souls to the Polls – This faith-based voter mobilization movement operates primarily in Black churches but welcomes all congregations. Organize a Souls to the Polls event at your church.

Local and Regional Efforts:

Power Coalition for Equity and Justice – Based in Louisiana, this coalition is fighting voter suppression at the state level.
Young Black Lawyers Organizing Coalition (YBLOC) – Based in Detroit, this group visits barbershops and churches to register voters. “Voting is just one tool,” says founder Abdul Dosunmu, “one way that people can feel that sense of agency over their lives.”
Voice of the Experienced (VOTE) – This Louisiana-based organization advocates for formerly incarcerated people’s voting rights.

Call Your Members of Congress:

Congressman Horsford has called for the immediate passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. This legislation would restore the protections gutted by the Supreme Court. Call your representative. Demand a vote. Do not let this bill die in committee.

The Theological Truth

Here is what the Supreme Court cannot take from us.

They can dilute our votes, but they cannot dilute our dignity.
They can slice up our districts, but they cannot slice up our spirit.
They can make it harder for us to elect representatives, but they cannot make us stop believing that God is on the side of justice.

The Rev. Traci Blackmon reminded us: “I don’t believe that the gospel is right or left. I believe the gospel is the gospel.”

Justice Kagan ended her dissent with words that should become our rallying cry:

“The Voting Rights Act is (or – now more accurately – was) ‘one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history.’ It was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers. It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality.”

That blood was not shed in vain. The marchers did not walk across that bridge for nothing. John Lewis did not have his skull fractured so that we would sit silently while our rights were taken.

The Court has acted. Now the people must respond—across every race, every faith, every community.

We have prayed. Now we must march.
We have preached. Now we must organize.
We have trusted God. Now we must act.

Join one of the organizations listed above. Call your representative. Show up at a Sunday dinner. Take the Love Free pledge.

The vote is not a gift from the powerful. It is a right from God. And we will not let it be stolen without a fight—all of us, together, across every line that has ever divided us.

The Reverend Forrest Harris
Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, Inc. Board Member
President Emeritus of American Baptist College

Professor of the Practice and Director
Kelly Miller Smith Institute on Black Church Studies
Vanderbilt Divinity School

Leadership Transition

L. Julie — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 01:42:42 +0000

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 20, 2025
Contact: Rev. Dr. Susan K. Smith
Email: susan@sdpconference.info

Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, Inc. Announces
Planned Leadership Transition

Rev. Damien Durr Appointed General Secretary; Rev. Dr. Iva E. Carruthers to Assume New Strategic Role

[Chicago, IL] Today, the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, Inc. (SDPC), a leading faith-based justice organization serving Black churches and communities nationwide, announced that Rev. Damien Durr will assume leadership as General Secretary, effective December 1, 2025. Rev. Dr. Iva E. Carruthers, who has served with distinction as founding General Secretary and trustee, will become general secretary emerita. As trustee, she will focus on strengthening strategic partnerships and increasing philanthropy.

“Rev. Durr and I have worked together for the past fourteen months. As SDPC enters its next chapter, continuity and capacity are key,” said Rev. Dr. Iva E. Carruthers. “I look forward to supporting Damien and our team by focusing on philanthropic partnerships, strategic initiatives, and the organizational infrastructure that ensures SDPC’s work is sustainable and scaled for the future.”

“SDPC’s work at the intersection of faith, justice, and community resilience has never been more vital,” said Rev. Damien Durr, General Secretary. “I am honored to step into this role and to build on SDPC’s powerful legacy – expanding our pastoral support, deepening our civic and theological engagement, and growing the resources to sustain our impact.”

Under Dr. Carruthers’ leadership, SDPC expanded national partnerships across denominations, strengthened policy and advocacy initiatives, convened scholars and clergy around a theology of praxis and sufficiency, and launched innovative storytelling and archival efforts that lift the moral voice of the Black Church. Additionally, she achieved United Nations NGO Consultative Status for SDPC, positioning the organization to engage global policy conversations on race, justice, human rights, and the moral witness of the Black Church.

Rev. Durr brings new energy and a deep pastoral heart. He previously served as a community engagement facilitator with the Children’s Defense Fund Nashville Team, as Executive Director of Faith Formula Human Services, as Youth & Young Adult Pastor at The Temple Church in Nashville, TN and as Executive Pastor of Community Development at Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas, TX. He is passionate in the mentoring and developing of a strong social and emotional character in African American boys. His leadership will help SDPC deepen its civic engagement, strengthen its programs, and expand our impact in communities nationwide.

Bishop Leah Daughtry, Co-Chair of SDPC’s Board, added: “We are equally excited to welcome Damien Durr as our new General Secretary. His commitment to faith-rooted justice and his innovative leadership will guide SDPC into a strong future. This transition reflects both continuity and growth, ensuring that our mission to mobilize the moral voice of the Black Church remains strong and vibrant for generations to come.”

Rev. Dr. Forrest E. Harris, Sr., Trustee of SDPC’s Board, said: “Dr. Carruthers has been a prophetic leader whose vision and scholarship have elevated SDPC to a global platform. We are deeply grateful for her years of faithful service, and we celebrate her continued presence in strengthening the organization.”

Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. added that he and Dr. Frederick D. Haynes III, co-founders of the organization are pleased that “The Board unanimously affirmed this leadership transition. Damien brings seasoned program, partnership, and organizational leadership, and Dr. Carruthers’ continued engagement in strategy and fundraising ensures SDPC’s values and vision remain at the center of everything we do.”

A Strategic Next Chapter

Continuity of Mission: SDPC will continue to convene clergy, scholars, organizers, and youth to advance faith-rooted solutions on civic engagement, health equity, caregiving, and community well-being.
Strengthened Fundraising & Partnerships: Dr. Carruthers will focus on cultivating philanthropic partnerships supporting SDPC’s programmatic innovation, leadership development, and archival storytelling.
Organizational Capacity: Under Durr’s leadership, SDPC will scale internal infrastructure, and elevate SDPC’s theology of sufficiency for pastoral supports and congregational and community impact.

Iva E. Carruthers Innovation Fund Established

As part of this transition, SDPC is launching the Iva E. Carruthers Innovation Fund, created to honor Dr. Carruthers’ visionary tenure while securing the organization’s future. At its core, the Fund embodies a commitment to faith-rooted justice advocacy, underwriting program innovation, leadership development, and storytelling initiatives that sustain SDPC’s mission at the intersection of faith, justice, and community resilience.

The Carruthers Innovation Fund provides partners, congregations, and the public with meaningful ways to honor Dr. Carruthers while advancing SDPC’s next chapter of growth and impact.

Honoring Legacy: The Enstoolment Ceremony of Queen Mother Iva E. Carruthers

L. Julie — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 01:44:38 +0000

The Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference is honored to announce a historic moment in our global journey of faith, justice, and cultural reclamation: the Enstoolment Ceremony of Dr. Iva E. Carruthers as Queen Mother in Ghana, West Africa. This sacred event will take place during the God Box Tours Pilgrimage and PANAFEST 2025, between July 19th and August 4th, across Cape Coast, Elmina, Kumasi, and Accra.

As General Secretary of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, Dr. Carruthers has been a steadfast voice for justice, liberation theology, and spiritual empowerment. Her enstoolment recognizes decades of leadership and vision, bridging the African Diaspora with ancestral heritage through a ceremonial act deeply rooted in Akan tradition.

What is an Enstoolment Ceremony?

An enstoolment is a revered cultural ritual in which a person is installed as a chief or queen mother, symbolically seated on the ancestral stool of leadership. The stool represents not only authority, but the spiritual lineage and soul of the people. Through this sacred rite, Mama Iva will be formally recognized as a guardian of wisdom, tradition, and community upliftment—charged with preserving the cultural memory and continuing the work of liberation.

This enstoolment is more than a ceremony—it is a calling forward of ancestral legacy, diasporic connection, and spiritual sovereignty. Join us as we honor Queen Mother Iva Carruthers, and walk a path toward wholeness, memory, and truth.

BEYOND REPARATORY JUSTICE: REPENTANCE, REPAIR AND RECONCILIATION

TS Design Studio — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 22:08:53 +0000

In late June, our General Secretary, Dr. Iva Carruthers, shared with our network that she would be embarking on trip to Zimbabwe in late July to present a reflection, “Beyond Reparatory Justice: Repentance, Repair and Reconciliation,” for the Theology of Reparations Convening as invited by the Council of World Missions to a roundtable. Here is her actual presentation, along with photos of her journey to Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Zanzibar and other African nations.

I AM TRULY grateful for the opportunity to be here and share in this process of intellectual reimagining and spiritual renewal. I thank God for traveling mercies and grace for this time shared as well as the vision for our convening. I am mindful that we gather on ancient lands from which emanated the Zulu Declaration, an early written philosophical and ethical document on what it means to be human

I am mindful we gather on the ancestral lands of the San, the oldest known community of humans, considered to be the first homo sapiens. I honor two people of African descent whom I consider as sheroes and heroes of resistance to the oppression for which reparations are due, Chaka Zulu and Queen Nzingha.

I imagine that like most of you, this was an assignment where many ideas on what you might say is on the editing floor, often really good stuff. I struggled to discern what and how God was preparing me as a contributing conversational partner in this work. With possibilities for multiple themes, frameworks, concept notes, stories and case studies going off in my head, I was led to organize this reflection around three related challenges of constructing a theology of reparations from my context. Consider this reflection a heuristic concept note at the intersection of sociological and theological studies, but, as well, shaped by my lived experiences, born into a family of activists, a woman of African descent in the US an activist and organizer of the reparations movement in the US and beyond.

I am privileged to be here today as General Secretary of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, Inc. and Executive Director of the Center for Reparatory Justice Transformation and Reconciliation at McCormick Theological Seminary. I am remembering this place where my friend and colleague from University of Chicago, who had been in exile in Chicago, welcomed me and my family 43 years ago, as we – as young scholars – sought to make sense of the harm done from the Transatlantic Slave Trade System and colonialism and the potential role of reparations; and him, having been appointed in the first post-colonial government to explore workable solutions for reparatory justice around land ownership and agricultural development This is personal.

Doctor of Law, Maxine Burkett argues that “Of the three essential elements of a successful reparations campaign – apology, award and non-repetition through reconciliation – the most vital is nonrepetitional,” too often ignored in the conversations.” Oregon Law Review V. 86, 99

In fact it is the inexplicable incredulous scandalous manifestation of centuries of non-repentances and on-going violations, in words and deeds of the US to acknowledge the death and destruction, legacy and ongoing harm to native peoples and POAD, that informs my second point.

During the pre-Civil Rights movement in the US, things were so oppressive for POAD that in 1951,

The National Negro Congress (NNC) under the leadership of Max Yergen and John Davis who submitted A Petition to the UN on behalf of 13 million Oppressed Negro Citizens of the US of A in 1946; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples(NAACP), under the leadership of Walter White and Roy Wilkens who submitted An Appeal to the World in 1947 and the Civil Rights Council (CRC) We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations For Relief From a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People, Under the leadership of William Patterson in 1951.

In the apex of the civil rights movement in the US., circa 1960s, American psychiatry had serious discourse on the categorization of racism as a psychiatric clinical condition.

“nobody was more vulnerable to the projection of evil or psychological exploitation than the black man…Racism is a low-level defense and adjustment mechanism utilized by groups to deal with psychosocial and social insecurities…a given society may promote and reward racism to enable members of the group in control to obtain a sense of personal adequacy and security at the expense of the group with less control…its roots related to… personality structure. [Racism and Psychiatry p. 114]

Most recently, the field of epigenetics and genocide studies have grown sufficiently to justify examination of the way physiological genetic factors play into the psychology of those who are victims of the harm done, over generations. Likewise, questions of impact upon the psychosocial physio-genetic factors obtain for those who perpetrate the harm or are unable to even see the harm has been studied.

A demand for reparations for the harm, much less a theology of reparations, is beyond what many can conceive. The harm and the remedy are imprisoned by the transgenerational interests of those who have benefited. Succinctly said by Joseph Evans, p. 100 – “Reparation claims for people of African descent have an inherent blockade: empire is our opponent.” The uniqueness of this gathering is not that reparations is on the table, but that God-talk, theologizing and theology is on the table. We must do all we can to center the acts of reparatory justice as acts of systemic and moral ethical transactions. Without transformation, we will only leave the systems of Empire in place. In my current context, the working agenda of Empire is embodied in Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership – The Conservative Promise – is in the words of Bishop Tolton, “a 21st Century Document of Discovery.” This document represents a reset by the United States.

government and corporate interests for a global shift in Western Empire, further away from principles of justice and human rights.

As many here know, the US officially disavowed support the 2001 UN Conference in Durban, especially any claim for the declaration of the Transatlantic Slave Trade System (TASTS) as a “crime against humanity.” As we entered this century at the Durban Conference, a 400-strong delegation of People of African Descent from the US organized with others; and, despite, serious diplomatic threats from the US to Caribbean and African nations, they voted to support the declaration; history will reflect that the African American delegation successfully and diplomatically organized, resulting in the declaration of the TAST as “a crime against humanity” finally being officially proclaimed. As a delegate and conferee, I presented on the role of the Church and reparations.

[At the time, there were a few scant flirtations of church related agendas around the issue, including my denomination UCC, under the leadership of Rev. Bernice Powell Jackson, former asst to Bishop Tutu.]

Language began to emerge of the TAST and racism as a “sin” and warranting repentance. This included, for example, The Kairos Document (1985); ACCRA Confession, (2005) and Belhar Confession World Alliance of Reformed Churches; Episcopal Church to Study Responsibility for Reparations (2006)

And we should note that the construction of Afrophobia, its affirmation by the World Council of Churches network has been quite helpful in furthering faith based reflection upon reparatory justice and reparations globally.

I further submit for your attention and consideration that the psychosocial behaviors of those unable to even admit to harm done, much less repent, as a sin or an act of harm and national remorse, warrants, deeper examination for constructing a theology of reparations. Consider that our pathway to positioning a theology of reparations ought to include not just Afrophobia but what I call the Identity Delusion and Denial Syndrome (IDDS) to which we are all subject.

My construct of IDDS is shared as an appropriate and relevant framework at this time.

IDDS is defined as a cluster of explicit and implicit beliefs, memes, images, articulations and behaviors around race that are based on exaggerated, distorted, unfounded interpretations of the external historical facts or current reality to justify and promulgate a situation of white dominion, racial hierarchy, racism and unjust and inequitable public policies. IDDS, as a syndrome, has impacted and affected all of America as a part of collective, individual and institutional identity and consciousness.

From IDDS emanates collective and individual narratives of America’s exceptionalism, its claim of being “leader of the greatest democracy in the world” and the fulfillment of its foundational principles of “liberty and justice for all.” The unresolved issue of “race” in America brings us to this urgent moment of contestation and holding on to this delusional narrative.

Clearly, the eye of an unprecedented storm hovers over the United States. And at its center is the issue of truth-telling around the presence and history of People of African Descent and

indigenous peoples in the nation. In short, America confronts a crisis of Identity Delusion and Denial Syndrome (IDDS).

In this urgent moment of Reparations Now, advocates of reparations and reparatory justice, must furiously engage the battle over truth-telling, the fields of metaphorical meaning and simulacra. We are living in an era in which IDDS has unleashed and manifested a new level of national “dis-ease of anti-blackness and Afrophobia.” More than 30 state legislative houses are debating the educational value and legality of teaching Black history to America’s children.

For white people, IDDS serves to psychologically insulate against a changing world which no longer centers their dominion.

For Black people in the US, IDDS often results in a temporary escape from the pain and suffering from daily micro aggressions, gross physical harm and agony over where is God in all of this as well as an acquiescence to self-negation.

Another construct that implicates the role of faith religion and the institutional church includes the studies in the decline of empathy within the US, if not western culture.

What we cannot afford to ignore is the extent to which US national and global racial hatred, xenophobia etc. is growing. Racial contestation in the US is heating up by the day, including state sponsored erasure of the history of People of African Descent, as an additional sign of cultural and educational genocide, a point not to be minimized or overlooked.

In 2008, year of the 60th anniversary of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the Madeline Albright (former US Sec. of State) and William Cohen Report said

“genocide, a crime that threatens not only our values, but our national interests…The world agrees that genocide is unacceptable and yet genocide and mass killings continue. Our challenge is to match words to deeds and stop allowing the unacceptable. (ix)We have a duty to find the answer before the vow of “never again” is once again betrayed…(ix)… efforts to illuminate imminent or ongoing atrocities can stem from a desire to avoid becoming entangled in complex situations or simply a natural desire to turn away from hard choices…it is easier to deflect charges that one should have known but was never informed than that one knew and yet chose not to act… [22]

Just 10 years later, in 2018, the former Secretary of State, Madeline Albright warned America against its evolving culture of fascism.

“I believe that Fascism and Fascist policies pose a more virulent threat to international freedom, prosperity, and peace than at any time since World War II…( Trump is the first anti-democratic president in modern U.S. history…he flaunts his disdain for democratic institutions, the ideals of equality and social justice, civil discourse, civic virtues, and America itself.”

Secretary Albright’s specific observation and warning foregrounds what we also know about the evolution of genocide and evil.

There is a Mongo African proverb which says: He who has not repented has not yet seen evil. [IEC – if you can’t confess, can’t be contrite, can’t apologize; you can only reconcile with evil.]

James Waller, scholar expert on the Nazi holocaust and author of the book, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, notes:

“…rank and file killers, the soldiers, police, militia (paramilitary) and civilians at the bottom of the hierarchy… personally carried out the millions of executions. These people were so ordinary that, with few exceptions, they were readily absorbed into civil society after the killings and peacefully lived out their otherwise unremarkable lives – attesting to the unsettling reality that genocide overwhelms justice.”

So, as People of African Descent in the US experience the resistance to any discussion of reparations; in fact, witnesses a reversal and cooptation of the discussion as one of reverse racism against white males; and issues a mandate for erasure of racial metrics and histories, sees the advances made towards justice being undone by the highest court of the land and witnesses the criminalization of teaching black history, I want to go on record that like the blood of Jesus can never be erased, nor can the blood, sacrifices and tears of People of African Descent on US soil be erased in the annals of the nation’s history.

I submit it was/is the Afrophobia and IDDS, which in the end, confounded Bishop Tutu as he contemplated the successes and failures of the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa. As we consider this topic hear his voice.

…it is not at all surprising that those accused of horrendous deeds and the communities they come from, for whom they believed they were committing these atrocities, almost always try to find ways out of even admitting that they were indeed capable of such deeds. They adopt the denial mode, asserting that such and such has not happened. When the evidence is incontrovertible, they take refuge in feigned ignorance.

But like the three monkeys, they chose neither to hear nor see, nor speak of evil… if the process of forgiveness and healing is to succeed, ultimately acknowledgement by the culprit is indispensable – not completely so but nearly so. Acknowledgment of the truth and of having wronged someone is important in getting to the root of the breach. They will have done what the prophet calls healing the hurt lightly by crying, “Peace, peace where there is not peace.” They will have only papered over the cracks and not worked out why the fell out in the first place. True reconciliation is not cheap. It cost God the death of His only begotten Son. [269 – 270, No Future Without Forgiveness Desmond Tutu]

This brings me to my third and final observation.

An African worldview and my existential reality have guided my theologizing as a process of theopraxis. That is, for me, and I dare say womanist theologians, the value of theology or God talk, detached from the lived experiences and context of fellow humankind is limited, non-reciprocal and antithetical to community. [life of monk and isolate prayer is good, however].

In an effort to dissuade this table from concluding my observations being viewed as hyperbole (and I’m tired of even having to say that as it may be further indication of the problem), please consider what I confront when I return to the US.

Over half of Americans support Trump; that is one of two whites you see may actually support his insanity and principles of human hierarchy. His recent bounce back from the assassination attempt has him seriously self-proclaiming himself as God’s anointed and a martyr. There is already a plan in place called Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership – the conservative promise that orchestrates the turn of the country to an authoritarian nation. The Supreme Court of the US has dismantled women’s reproductive rights, suggested a president has nearly full immunity, which could mean including killing named enemies. When I return, Evanston, IL – which had effectively modeled a Zacchaeus tax reparatory justice program – will have to defend itself from a conservative claim that it is reverse racism; the same with an African American foundation seeking to give entrepreneurial grants to black women, as the state of California prepares for a slew of legal challenges to its reparations agenda.

But still, we rise! The Reparatory justice movement is gaining momentum. The shroud of secrecy surrounded Project 2025 has been removed, resulting in Trump disassociating from it though 31 of the 38 authors were in his administration. I am delighted that I will go home with the benefit of this gathering and to let you know that our seminary, organization and the Minneapolis Council of Churches, the home of George Floyd, will be co-sponsoring a National Truth Telling Commission as a collaboration between indigenous and African Americans.

A white American novelist, Wendell Berry, published a personal memoir that accounted for his family history as a former owner of enslaved Black people. In the 1970s, in Hidden Wound, he forthtold of the soul of America,

At a time when the stupidity and destructiveness of racism is more apparent than ever, people seem to be more racially conscious than ever. The blacks know harsh truths about the whites than the whites have ever admitted to themselves — and the whites know it. [HIDDEN WOUND p.123] …As soon as we have fulfilled the hollow in our culture, the silence in our speech, with the fully realized humanity of the black man — and it follows, of the American Indian — then there will appear over the horizon of our consciousness another figure as well: that of the American white man, our own humanity, lost to us these three and a half centuries, the time of all our life on this continent. [HIDDEN WOUND 144-45

In the words of Allan Boesak, “so dare we speak of Hope? Only if we speak of Hope’s daughters: Divine Anger and Courage. “Only if we see the world and its systems of domination, oppression and exploitation through the eyes of those who suffer…the eyes of Jesus” [64, 65]”

And know, that I remain inspired and emboldened by the words of womanist theologian, Rev. Dr. Katie Cannon:

“Even when people call your truth a lie, tell it anyway.”

The theological harm of the Onesimus narrative was its instruction to “Christian” slave owners to use it to make better slaves. In How to Make a Negro Christian: the Religious Instruction of the Negroes and Other Works by Charles Colcock Jones,

“the Apostle Paul commands Ministers to “Exhort Servants to be obedient unto their own Masters and to please them well in all things… see for himself by consulting the NT; particularly the Epistle to Philemon, where it appears that the Apostle Paul sends back Onesimus, a runaway slave to his Master. It will be noticed that obedience is inculcated as a Christian duty, binding on the Servants, and thus the authority of masters is supported by considerations drawn from eternity… [ref Eph 6:5,6; Col 3:22; 1 Tim 6:1; Titus 2:9] p 53

Page 60 and 61 is coming from typing of Jordan

…Finally, Men and Brethren-The cry of our perishing servants comes up to us from the sultry plains, as they bend at their toil. It comes up to us from their humble cottages when they return in the evening. to rest their weary limbs. It comes up to us from the midst of their ignorance, and superstition and adultery, and lewdness. Shall we disregard it? The cry is passing up to God and Ele will hear it. In a little while our opportunity of doing good to our servants will be gone forever. In a little while we shall have done with the artificial distinctions of this world. We shall sleep in the ground, side by side, with them, and return to dust as soon as they. In a little while we shall meet them before Christ the Judge, the Great Master of all, with whom there is no respect for persons. He will say to us “These were your servants on earth. They labored for you ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years. They wore out their eyes to supply you with the food, and raiment, and conveniences, and luxuries, of your mortal life. You had them wholly at your disposal. You had my Gospel in your hands. I made you the almoners of my grace to them. Did you remember their never-dying souls? – While they communicated to you temporal things, did you communicate to them spiritual things? Did you urge and entreat them to come to me, who alone could give the weary and heavy-laden rest? Did you allow them time to seek my face? Or did you neglect their eternal interests? Did you treat them like the beasts that perish? Were they merely the instruments of your profit or of your pleasure? Did you forget that they were your fellow creatures! Did you forget the price that I paid for their redemption? Did you leave them to perish eternally?” Every owner of slaves has an account to render to God for his treatment of them. O, how fearful will be his account, who, knowingly and willfully, will permit them to go down from his fields, and from his very dwelling into the bottomless pit, without making a solitary effort to save them? “He that has ears to hear, let him hear!”

To the contrary, the Zacchaeus narrative, though also a set-up for reconciliation, by narrative and design, centers the harm done to those violated and the repentance of the agent of harm. It supports evidence of contrition by acts of making amends in the form of reparations as a desire and pledge for a new way forward – i.e., pledge of non-repeat of the harm. [i.e. Did and how did Zacchaeus come down from the tree?]

The story of Zacchaeus is clearly more in alignment with the existential demands and needs of People of African Descent. By implication and direct narrative, the Zacchaeus text acknowledges the harm done. Thus, humanity of People of African Descent is affirmed through the efforts at reparatory or restorative justice. Furthermore, the Zacchaeus narrative evidences the humanity of the offender over and above the inexplicable, calcified, narcissistic heart and soul that People of African Descent are experiencing today at the hands of those unable to even acknowledge the wrongdoing, much less to apologize for it.

“Zacchaeus Tax” Panel Brings Faith-based Lens to Tax Justice, Gender Justice

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From the left: Rev. Dora Arce Valentin, general secretary of the Reformed-Presbyterian Church in Cuba, Dr Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Professor of Theological and Social Ethics at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Rev. Dr Iva Carruthers, general secretary of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, and Rev. Dr Angelique Walker-Smith, WCC President from North America.

Photo: Rebekka Read/WCC

Dr. Iva Carruthers participates in a panel discussion, “Zacchaeus Tax: Transforming the Global Economic System and Advancing Gender Justice,” on the 19th of March that explored the intersections between tax justice and gender justice—and why this is a matter of faith.

The event was held parallel with the 68th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women, which has the theme “Accelerating the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls by addressing poverty and strengthening institutions and financing with a gender perspective.”

The panel explored how proposals for global and national wealth and taxes, as well as reparations—as called for in the ecumenical Zacchaeus Tax (ZacTax) campaign—can help build a more just and sustainable planet including for women and girls.

WHAT WILL EXPOSITORS DO ABOUT THIS JESUS?

TS Design Studio — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 22:27:23 +0000

What will theologians, pastors, religious educators, and other expositors of the religion of Jesus do about the Jesus who strolled in Jericho on his final trip to Jerusalem to observe Passover and invited himself to dine at the home of a fellow named Zacchaeus? Before you answer, allow me to put my question in a context you may find interesting and, hopefully, challenging.

In her preface to The 1619 Project, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones observed that historian and journalist Lerone Bennett, Jr. documented that African people had lived “on the land that in 1776 would become the United States” since 1619, when a ship named the White Lion arrived at Jamestown, Virginia a year before the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth Rock.

For the next 246 years, Black people in this society were enslaved, kidnapped, transported, sold, whipped, raped, castrated, terrorized, and abused in other ways. Their descendants have received nothing to repay. repair, or otherwise account for the legion of wrongs they suffered. That is a colossal moral, ethical, social, political, economic, and humanitarian issue. Yet, it is one about which theologians, pastors, preachers, and other commentators about the religion of Jesus have seldom commented.

I have been a follower of the religion of Jesus since my parents and other Black elders introduced me to it during my childhood. My faith, like that of my Black parents, elders, ancestors, was forged by the religion of Jesus taught and preached from the Bible, set to music in Negro Spirituals and gospel songs, and pondered in Black congregations.

I turned away from Eurocentric Christianity almost forty years ago when I dropped out of seminary extension studies sponsored by Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The prospect of being credentialed by the religious system that gave moral, ecclesial, and ethical approval to invasion of indigenous societies, land theft, genocide, chattel slavery, imperialism, white supremacy, militarism, wealth privilege, patriarchy, sexism, bigotry, and terrorism of LGBTQI persons, techno-centrism, and xenophobia was intellectually, morally, and ethically disgusting to me.

Instead, my theological perspective is bottomed on how the religion of Jesus has been interpreted by Negro Spirituals and gospel songs. My theological luminaries are Howard Thurman, James H. Cone, and South African liberation theologian Allan Boesak.

My ethics is inspired by Henry Highland Garnett, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Nat Turner, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Katie Cannon, Emilie Townes, Kelly Brown Douglas, and Cornel West.

My pastoral theology is guided by writings from Peter Paris and the examples of Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., J. Alfred Smith, and Amos Brown.

My hermeneutics and homiletics are built on the writings by Walter Bruggemann, Walter Rauschenbusch, William Sloan Coffin, William Augustus Jones, and by the work of Gardner Taylor, Samuel DeWitt Proctor, and Henry and Ella Mitchell.

These people rescued my faith in the religion of Jesus from Eurocentric Christianity with its devotion to personal, commercial, social, and geopolitical empire. I mention their names to emphasize that my exposure to their work and ministries happened outside any seminary context.

In Scripture, “righteous” and “righteousness” are words about honesty, truth, and justice. So, when Jesus pronounced a blessing on people who “hunger and thirst for righteousness” at Matthew 5:6 he was commending people who have a passion for honesty, truth, and justice. He was not commending people who cheat, steal, lie, and misuse power to oppress others.

The encounter between Jesus and the chief revenue commissioner of Jericho named Zacchaeus recorded at Luke 19 clearly makes this point. People remember Luke’s account of that encounter for different reasons. Some people are impressed by the fact that Zacchaeus wanted to see Jesus so much that he – a wealthy man – went to the trouble (and humility) of climbing a tree. Allan Boesak has written that Zacchaeus was so despised that being in a tree was probably the one place he felt safe.

It was not just because he was a man of small stature. The people knew him. He knew he would not be welcomed by them. Why would anyone give up their place in the crowd, and their chance to see Jesus, for someone like him? Amongst the crowd, the hostility would have been palpable and perhaps physical. That tree was the safest place for him. It is also a symbol of his isolation. Amongst the poor and oppressed, those extorted by men like Zacchaeus every day of their lives, but expectant and hopeful that day, Zacchaeus would not have been made to feel welcome.i

Some people point to the fact that Jesus addressed Zacchaeus by name, invited himself to dine with Zacchaeus, and was welcomed into the home of this rich fellow. How did Jesus know Zacchaeus? The narrative is silent on those points. We also don’t know how long the encounter between Jesus and Zacchaeus lasted.

But Luke’s narrative indicates that Jesus and Zacchaeus talked long enough and deeply enough for Zacchaeus to reconsider how he became so wealthy. Zacchaeus promised to refund four times the value of any of his wealth obtained through fraud – meaning through dishonest means. And Zacchaeus promised to give half of his possessions to the poor. Zacchaeus committed to transfer half of his wealth to impoverished people. The result of the encounter between Jesus and Zacchaeus was that the rich man voluntarily pledged to divest himself of half of his wealth and redistributed it to people who were poor.

Zacchaeus wasn’t talking about making a charitable donation to the Salvation Army. He wasn’t talking about setting up a Zacchaeus Foundation for the study of poverty. He was talking about giving away half of what he owned so that he and his poor neighbors would know income security.

The pledge to give half his wealth to the poor demonstrates what Bryan Stevenson (founder of the Equal Justice Institute) has said about poverty. According to Stevenson, the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.

Justice always is about the fair use and distribution of power and resources. A society where some people are extraordinarily wealthy while others are poor is unjust because resources – including but not limited to money and other possessions – are unfairly withheld by the wealthy few and not redistributed for the numerous poor.

It is unjust for wealthy people to have much more than they need while poor people suffer because they do not have what they need.

It is unjust for wealthy people to use their extraordinary wealth to enrich themselves rather than redistribute wealth to benefit their impoverished neighbors. It is unjust for wealthy people to control land and refuse to share land with poor people who need housing.

But that was not all. Zacchaeus also pledged to refund four times the value of anything he obtained by dishonest means. In doing so, Zacchaeus demonstrated another truth: Wealth obtained through injustice can never be justly retained; instead, it produces damage that must be repaired and wrong that must be remedied. Zacchaeus admitted that some of his wealth – including the comfortable lifestyle and the lavish hospitality he could extend to Jesus – was based on dishonest gain. To hold onto that wealth was to persist in dishonesty. To trade that wealth for more wealth amounted to earning a profit on dishonesty.

When Zacchaeus pledged to pay back four times the value of anything he had obtained through fraudulent (meaning dishonest) means, he was pledging to make reparations! Both the pledge to divest and the pledge to make reparations resulted from the deliberate encounter Jesus had with Zacchaeus.

Jesus did not go to Jericho on a whim. Jesus did not invite himself to dine with Zacchaeus for personal privilege. Jesus did not invite himself to dine with Zacchaeus to be featured in the society section of the Jericho News. Jesus went to Jericho and invited himself to dine with Zacchaeus – the chief revenue commissioner in the prosperous Jericho region – because Jesus was hungry and thirsty for justice!

Jesus shows that hunger and thirst for justice requires that we challenge the ways that wealthy people have come to control so much. What unjust conduct, policies, and practices are in place that produced the land holdings of a few and the homelessness of so many? What unjust labor practices result in so many people working so hard and remaining in poverty while a few people live in luxury without lifting a finger?

What labor was stolen? What land was obtained through oppressive methods? What water rights are held because people were cheated, or because wealthy people preyed on the vulnerability of their less fortunate neighbors? How much should be returned because it should never have been taken? How much should be restored?

What Zacchaeus said about restoring four times what he had obtained through dishonest means was based on principles of restitution and reparation. Consider these passages from the Hebrew Testament.

Exodus 22:1

22When someone steals an ox or a sheep, and slaughters it or sells it, the thief shall pay five oxen for an ox, and four sheep for a sheep. The thief shall make restitution, but if unable to do so, shall be sold for the theft.

Leviticus 6:5

5or anything else about which you have sworn falsely, you shall repay the principal amount and shall add one-fifth to it. You shall pay it to its owner when you realize your guilt.

Numbers 5:6-7

6Speak to the Israelites: When a man or a woman wrongs another, breaking faith with the LORD, that person incurs guilt 7and shall confess the sin that has been committed. The person shall make full restitution for the wrong, adding one fifth to it, and giving it to the one who was wronged.

We are finally witnessing people wrestling with racial injustice in ways they have not done before. However, Zacchaeus shows that, like people in a desert, they need help. They need prophetic people to show up like Jesus did and challenge them.

Jesus, the itinerant preacher from Galilee, showed up in Jericho to confront the chief revenue commissioner about being unjustly wealthy. Jesus showed up to confront Zacchaeus about having twice as much as he needed to have aplenty. Jesus showed up to confront Zacchaeus about being wealthy through dishonest gain. Jesus showed up to challenge Zacchaeus to take on a life of economic repentance that involved downsizing, restitution, and wealth redistribution.

This shows that people who are hungry and thirsty for righteousness, like Jesus, should confront the holders of unjust wealth. In obedience to the example of Jesus, we should challenge people like Zacchaeus to divest themselves of wealth obtained wealth through dishonest means. That includes challenging Zacchaeus people to understand that holding onto unjustly obtained wealth is a sign of moral and ethical depravity, not financial health.

In the racial justice context, this means that people who hunger and thirst for righteousness will challenge Zacchaeus people with the imperatives of restitution and reparation. That requires admitting that the wealth of our society was built on racial injustice, the original sin of this society that is embedded in its moral, ethical, religious, commercial, political, and social DNA.

It also requires that prophetic people be forthright – whether they are clergy or not – about the debt created by that injustice. Relief and rescue from the moral desert of racial injustice will not come without the kind of prophetic intervention and interaction Jesus had with Zacchaeus. It is up to prophetic people to recognize this truth and live into it.

II

First, we should understand the difference between “restitution” and “reparation.”

Restitution refers to an obligation owed by a person or party to repay a debt owed to or repair a wrong inflicted on another person or party. Reparation refers to an obligation owed by a society or government to repay a debt owed or repair a wrong inflicted on persons or parties. At the heart of both ideas – restitution and reparation – is the fact that wrongful conduct has caused harm, loss, injury, or suffering to another person or party (restitution) or to a group of people (reparation). Then why has no reparation been made to Black people for slavery and the racial injustice that continues from it?

One reason is explained at Isaiah 59:1-11.

1See, the Lord’s hand is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear. 2Rather, your iniquities have been barriers between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear. 3For your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies, your tongue mutters wickedness.
4No one brings suit justly, no one goes to law honestly; they rely on empty pleas, they speak lies, conceiving mischief and begetting iniquity. 5They hatch adders’ eggs, and weave the spider’s web; whoever eats their eggs dies, and the crushed egg hatches out a viper.
6Their webs cannot serve as clothing; they cannot cover themselves with what they make. Their works are works of iniquity, and deeds of violence are in their hands. 7Their feet run to evil, and they rush to shed innocent blood; their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity, desolation and destruction are in their highways.
8The way of peace they do not know, and there is no justice in their paths. Their roads they have made crooked; no one who walks in them knows peace.
9Therefore justice is far from us, and righteousness does not reach us; we wait for light, and lo! there is darkness; and for brightness, but we walk in gloom. 10We grope like the blind along a wall, groping like those who have no eyes; we stumble at noon as in the twilight, among the vigorous as though we were dead.

White supremacy – the actual theology followed by this society – has shamelessly condoned and justified the greed, robbery, violence, deceit, and other injustices associated with slavery and racialized oppression of black people since its inception. When European colonizers cheated, lied, and robbed the indigenous people in this land of their land, water, and wages, white supremacy sacralized the operation. European governments set up colonial governments that licensed land theft, cheating, and murdering indigenous people. People who called themselves followers of Jesus condoned it and supported it.

Then the colonizers kidnapped Africans. They set up shipping companies to transport and trade enslaved Africans. Insurance companies and banks financed the whole operation. Slavery of black people was continued openly in this society for 246 years. People who called themselves followers of Jesus condoned it and supported it.

The cover story in the June 28, 2020, issue of The New York Times Magazine entitled, “What Is Owed,” is written by Nikole Hannah Jones. She begins the story with these words: “If true justice and equality are ever to be achieved in the United States, the country must take seriously what it owes black Americans.” With that introductory statement, Hannah-Jones argues that this nation must move beyond slogans and undertake deep conversation about reparations for black Americans and added this truth. “A truly great country does not ignore or excuse its sins. It confronts them and then works to make them right.”

One job of religion is to challenge society to confront its sins and work to do right by people who have been wronged. However, religious people have shown no interest in engaging in conversations about reparations. For example, the Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845. During its 150th anniversary meeting at Atlanta, Georgia in 1995 – almost 30 years ago – Southern Baptist messengers adopted an eloquent resolution admitting that slavery played a role in formation of the Convention. The resolution admits that Southern Baptists “defended the right to own slaves, and either participated in, supported, or acquiesced in the particularly inhumane nature of American slavery.” The resolution also laments that racism and “historic acts of evil such as slavery from which we continue to reap a bitter harvest … [have] separated us from our African American brothers and sisters” and resolves to apologize “to all African Americans for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime…”ii

Yet, the 1995 resolution, that was drafted and presented by some of the leading theologians of the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, was conspicuously – and suspiciously – silent about healing the damage, injury and harm African Americans suffered from 246 years of chattel slavery, another century of legalized segregation, and continued systemic practices and policies in every aspect of American society that are the legacy of that wicked history. The 1995 resolution did not contain a word about reparations to people whose ancestors were enslaved, dehumanized, defrauded, terrorized, and marginalized, and who continue to suffer from that blatant violation of divine love, truth, and justice.

Baylor University, the largest Baptist institution of higher education in the world, was also organized, founded, and funded in 1845 – almost 185 years ago – by white men who owned enslaved persons. Baylor is home to the George Truett Theological Seminary. But when the Baylor Board of Regents issued a unanimous resolution admitting its slaveholder sponsorship and purporting to apologize for it, the resolution did not mention anything about reparations.iii

Greed and robbery are root causes of racism and racial injustice. Slaveholder religion did not create the greed, robbery, and racism. Slaveholder religion, including religion practiced by white people who called themselves followers of Jesus, was developed to justify kidnapping, robbery, rape, torture, lynching, terrorism, human trafficking, and the other evils associated with slavery.

We will never have a serious conversation about racial justice in this society until we talk about reparation for the moral, ethical, political, and monetary debt this society owes descendants of African people who were enslaved, robbed, raped, cheated, terrorized, kept illiterate, and dehumanized. But we will not have that conversation about reparation until and unless prophetic people insist on it.

The second reason reparations have never been paid to the descendants of enslaved Black people is that we who are black have been timid about demanding reparations. Black deference to white privilege and fear of white terrorism has produced Black self-censorship about reparations.

Black people demonstrated, protested, preached, and engaged in active measures to desegregate schools, restaurants, hotels, theatres, and other establishments. Black religious leaders joined similar efforts concerning voting rights. But Black religious leaders have not talked, boycotted, protested, demonstrated, or otherwise made demands for reparation. Religious and fraternal organizations have not made reparations a subject at local, state, and national meetings. In the same way that white religious leaders deserve criticism for failing and refusing to address reparations, intellectual honesty requires that we charge Black religious leaders for being prophetically derelict on that subject.

Randall Robinson is a notable exception. In his book titled The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, Randall Robinson makes this point unmistakably clear.

The issue here is not whether we [Black people] can or will win reparations. The issue is whether we will fight for reparations, because we have decided for ourselves that they are our due…

…

Let me try to drive the point home here: through keloids of suffering, through coarse veils of damaged self-belief, lost direction, misplaced compass, shit-faced resignation, racial transmutation, black people worked long, hard, killing days, years, centuries—and they were never paid. The value of their labor went into others’ pockets—plantation owners, northern entrepreneurs, state treasuries, the United States government.

Where was the money?

Where is the money?

There is a debt here.

…Jews have asked this question of countries and banks and corporations and collectors and any who had been discovered at the end of the slimy line holding in secret places the gold, the art, the money that was the rightful property of European Jews before the Nazi terror. Jews have demanded what was their due and received a fair measure of it.

Clearly, how blacks respond to the challenge surrounding the simple demand for restitution[reparations] will say a lot more about us and do a lot more for us than the demand itself would suggest. We would show ourselves to be responding as any normal people would to victimization were we to assert in our demands for restitution that, for 246 years and with the complicity of the United States government, hundreds of millions of black people endured unimaginable cruelties—kidnapping, sale as livestock, deaths in the millions during terror-filled sea voyages, backbreaking toil, beatings, rapes, castrations, maimings, murders. We would begin a healing of our psyches were the most public case made that whole peoples lost religions, languages, customs, histories, cultures, children, mothers, fathers… And they were never made whole. And never compensated. Not one red cent. [Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, (Dutton, 2000, the Penguin Group, pp. 206-208)

That is what makes the encounter of Jesus with Zacchaeus so hermeneutically compelling. Jesus did not shirk his moral and ethical duty to confront Zacchaeus about his greed. Jesus was not afraid to call Zacchaeus out. Jesus refused to pass through Jericho without meeting Zacchaeus, confronting Zacchaeus, and calling on him to make restitution for anything he had obtained by dishonest means.

Jesus refused to practice a religion that turned a blind eye to robbery. What about us?

Jesus refused to practice a religion that condoned wage theft. What about us?

Jesus refused to back down. What about us?

What are followers of Jesus doing to confront this society about the unpaid and constantly mounting debt owed to the descendants of people whose lives and labor and culture and language and ancestry and religion was robbed?

What are the descendants of those robbed workers doing in God’s name to make this society face its moral and ethical duty to make reparations for 246 years of stolen labor, another 100 years of legalized segregation, and the ongoing harms and losses associated with racial injustice?

III

In the summer of 2020, I preached about reparations to Black people for harms, losses, and injuries caused by this society, intentionally, persistently, and openly, because of 246 years of legalized chattel slavery, another 100 years of legalized segregation, and ongoing violations of God’s love and justice from effects of that injustice. Beginning with Luke’s account about the encounter between Jesus and Zacchaeus, the rich chief revenue commissioner of Jericho, I emphasized that the divine imperative that we love God with our whole being and love one another as neighbors requires that this society make reparation for the harms, losses, and injuries inflicted by this society upon Black people. And I argued that followers of Jesus have a moral and ethical duty to lead the call for reparations.

One sermon in that series pondered reparations by looking at Mark’s account about the encounter between an un-named wealthy man and Jesus that is found in the Gospels of Matthew (Mt. 19:16-30) and Luke (Lk. 18:18-30). People have termed this the story of Jesus and the rich young ruler.” However, one of the early Christian theologians (Origen of Alexandria) recorded in his commentary on Matthew that two rich men approached Jesus as he traveled.

The lesson has several remarkable features. The passage states that a man of wealth and influence (ruler) approached Jesus, humbly knelt before him, and addressed him as “Good Teacher” before asking “what must I do to inherit eternal life.” The man did not appear discouraged when Jesus rejected his flattery. When Jesus reminded him about the obligation to honor God in inter-personal relationships (“You shall not murder; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness; you shall not defraud; honor your father and mother”) the young man declared that he had faithfully kept those requirements from his youth.

Then Mark 10:21 reads, Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” Before that comment, the man seemed serious about being identified with Jesus. But when he heard that direction from Jesus, “he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions” (Mk. 10:22).

At that point, Jesus remarked to his disciples, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God.” The disciples were perplexed (the J.B. Phillips translation reads staggered, so Jesus repeated the point and drove it home with the proverb that “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Mk. 10:25).

Jesus told the young ruler to “go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor… then come, follow me.”Jesus did not welcome the man and “disciple him” to use his wealth to “sow” into his ministry. Origen of Alexandria wrote in his Commentary on Matthew that Jesus said to the perplexed rich man, “How can you say ‘I have fulfilled the Law and the Prophets when it is written in the Law: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’; and many of your brothers, sons of Abraham, are covered with filth, dying of hunger, and your house is full of many good things, none of which goes out to them?’”

What does this have to do with reparation and following Jesus? Jesus refused to allow flattery to blind him to the dramatic inequality between the rich ruler and the rest of society. He directed the man to “push back” from his wealth, to divest himself of it, and become one of the common people. Jesus directed this man to share his wealth with impoverished people. Instead, the man preferred to hold on to his possessions. The Gospels do not suggest that he ever returned to follow Jesus, despite having initially indicated he respected Jesus.

Like the rich young ruler, white Baptists who founded the Southern Baptist Convention were enthusiastic about “eternal life” and preaching the gospel of Jesus. But they refused to give up owning enslaved Africans. They refused to pay Africans for their work. They refused to treat Africans as neighbors.

To justify their greed, wage theft, human trafficking, kidnapping, rape, and the other violations of love and justice associated with chattel slavery, “rich rulers” in this society established the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845. That was also the year that slaveholding Bible quoting and preaching white Baptists who claimed to follow Jesus established Baylor University, the oldest and largest continually operating Baptist institution of higher education in the world.

Less than twenty years later, slaveholding, Bible quoting, and hymn singing white Baptists were at the forefront of what would become the deadliest war ever fought by the United States, and the last war waged on US soil, because they, like the rich young ruler, would not “push back” from slaveholder religion, slaveholder economics, and slaveholder social relationships. Let us be clear. Like the “rich ruler” who approached Jesus and called him “Good Teacher,” church folks stole the lives, labor, and livelihood of millions of their siblings for centuries.

Like the “rich ruler,” church folks were saddened about the thought of pushing back from that stolen wealth. Like the “rich ruler,” church folks since that time have tried to associate

themselves with Jesus without redressing the poverty, sickness, and other results of systemic racism, slavery, and ongoing discrimination. Sadly, people who call themselves followers of Jesus court favor from “rich ruler” types to the point that congregations would rather not do what Jesus did and tell people who trust in wealth to divest and share with those who are poor. Unlike Jesus, who taught that it is hard for people who trust in wealth “to enter the kingdom of God,” people who claim to follow Jesus in this nation do not tell wealthy people to “push back,” divest their wealth, re-distribute its value to those who are poor, and live in solidarity with those who are not affluent.

On April 16, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, a law that called for $1 million reparations to be paid for emancipated Africans who had been enslaved in the District of Columbia – but the money was to go to the white people who enslaved them, worked them without pay, and kept the proceeds from their work. I do not know how many slaveowners received “reparations” from the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862. However, I have no information that any of the emancipated Africans received a penny. The District of Columbia Emancipation Act included up to $100,000 to resettle formerly enslaved persons – but the resettlement was to be in Haiti and Liberia, not in the United States.

Then, as now, church people with “rich ruler” religion weren’t told to “push back” from the stolen wealth this nation and its institutions garnered from enslaved persons. Instead of following the example of Jesus, who confronted the unnamed “rich ruler” and later confronted the rich tax collector named Zacchaeus, church people who claim they are followers of Jesus refuse to challenge “rich ruler” religionists who do not “push back.”

Perhaps that is why church folks are not “stepping up” about reparations. Perhaps we have people with “rich ruler” religion that pretends to follow Jesus while trusting wealth – even when the wealth has been obtained and is being held because of theft, not thrift. And perhaps “rich ruler religion” explains why the religion of Jesus is associated with concern for the wealthy rather than concern for the poor.

“Rich ruler religion” – religion that does not push back from unjustly obtained and held wealth – should not be associated with Jesus. And unless followers of Jesus confront “rich ruler religion,” “rich rulers” like the unnamed man in this passage and like Zacchaeus will never become people who embrace the divine imperative of reparations for the stolen lives, stolen labor, and fraud that continue to haunt our society.

IV

I contend that the love and justice of God require that followers of Jesus join the demands for reparations for Black children of God who descended from enslaved Africans. Torah, the writings of the Hebrew prophets, and teachings of Jesus – especially the narrative in the Gospel of Luke about the encounter Jesus had with Zacchaeus, the chief revenue commissioner of Jericho – support the demand for racial reparations. I now must stress three things.

First, we must remember that reparation is a moral, ethical, and social requirement from God. Unpaid debts, unrepaired injuries, and unrequited harms and losses separate people from God and each other. That reality requires that we understand reparation for racial injustice to be a theological imperative.

Wealth, privilege, and status based on violence, theft, deceit, hate, hypocrisy, and fear is never based on justice and peace. When wealth, privilege, and status are grabbed by those means the people who grab it must always depend on and resort to more violence, deceit, hate, hypocrisy, and fear to hold onto it. The Biblical lesson about Cain and Abel in Genesis 3 and the lesson about Moses and the burning bush in Exodus 3 prove this point.

When Cain murdered Abel, he did not escape God. When the Egyptians enslaved and oppressed Hebrew workers, they did not escape God. In both instances, the Biblical message is that God witnessed the violence. God witnessed the theft of life and labor. God witnessed the willful disregard for God and others. And God confronted Cain and the Egyptian empire (through Moses) about that willful defiance of divine sovereignty, love, and justice.

Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said that the moral arc of the universe sweeps wide yet always bends towards justice. Justice requires that wrongs we inflict on others be made right. Justice requires that debts be repaid. Justice requires reparation. Because the universe “bends towards justice,” the universe bends toward reparation whether people like it or not.

And until reparation is made, the relationship between wrongdoers and their victims is skewed, unbalanced, and untrue. Until reparation is made, wrongdoers must constantly fear vengeance from victims who have been robbed, brutalized, deceived, and otherwise wronged. Until reparation is made, that fear drives wrongdoers to defend their wrongful privilege, status, and wealth by force. Violence begets more violence.

The moral and ethical history of what we today call policing and law enforcement towards indigenous people in this society, African Americans, and Latino children of God is rooted in centuries of sacralized and legalized violence perpetrated by White children of God against people of color and the stolen wealth obtained and distributed on racial grounds across generations. White violence, theft, deceit, hate, and hypocrisy against people of color produced the racial inequities that ravage our society and account for white privilege. White people sanction the use of violence by law enforcement to protect property more than black, brown, and red lives because white wealth is bottomed on violence against black, brown, and red children of God.

The messages that God confronted Cain about murdering Abel and sent Moses to confront the Egyptian Empire about enslaving and oppressing Hebrew immigrants teach that wrongdoers cannot escape divine scrutiny. And those messages teach that God knows the truth wrongdoers try to deny. God knows the debt owed for taking lives. God knows the debt owed by stealing labor and land. God knows and requires that the debts be repaid, the wrongs be remedied, and the injuries be healed. Reparation is a moral, ethical, and social imperative from God, not an elective. Those who deny that truth defy the sovereignty and justice of God.

People whose greed drives them to lust after and violently grab wealth, privilege, and status must use violence to hold onto it. In a moral universe, that means they must somehow manufacture explanations to justify that violence. Greed and lust are not morally justifiable explanations for premeditated and otherwise indefensible violence.

Hence, throughout history and in every society, humans have tried to justify premeditated and indefensible violence by claiming that religion, law, manifest destiny, science (including education), and commerce uphold it. Racism and white supremacy are perversions used to justify the greed and lust of perverted religion, perverted law, perverted science, perverted history, and perverted public policy.

We should remember these things whenever we confront racial inequities and white supremacy. Religion, law, commerce, science, and every other institution have been perverted and corrupted by greed and lust for power, wealth, and status. Perverted religion, science, law, and other institutions operate to maintain and expand racism and white supremacy across generations, across cultures, and across political players.

Perverted religion, science, law, and other institutions are the “principalities and powers of spiritual darkness in high places” that followers of Jesus have wrestled against in every era and place. In the context of racial justice (both in the US and across the world), perverted religion, law, education, science, politics, and economics have always been used to justify greed and covetousness for the lives, land, and other resources of people from Africa, Asia, America, and Australia and continue to be religiously blessed and sanctioned.

This not only gives wrongdoers a false sense of merit. It tempts oppressed people to question the goodness and justice of God.

When we speak of reparation being a requirement, we should also emphasize that it is morally, ethically, and socially required. This means there must be financial reparation, legal reparation, political reparation, educational reparation, cultural reparation, religious, medical, and emotional reparation for the harm, loss, and trauma inflicted across 400 years to Africans who were enslaved and their descendants. Remember that financial, legal, political, educational, cultural, religious, scientific, medical, and mental health institutions were complicit in and enabled the harm, loss, and trauma African Americans suffer. They must also repair the damage, harm, and loss associated with their premeditated and indefensible violations of divine love and justice.

But societal institutions will not meet, let alone fulfill, the moral, ethical, and public imperative for reparation without prophetic leadership. Notice that I said prophetic rather than religious leadership. Religious institutions and their leaders are so corrupted by idolatry to greed and empire that most pastors, religious educators, and religious bodies are morally, ethically, and institutionally compromised by white supremacy and racism. This is what Robert P. Jones meant when he wrote that White Christians are Cain and have been “White too long.”

We need look no further than Al Mohler and the trustees of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the president and regents of Baylor University to see that leaders of white religious institutions have served greed, covetousness, and white supremacy, racism, and empire too long

to speak prophetically about racism and white supremacy, let alone provide prophetic leadership about reparation for the harm, loss, and debt associated with it. When it comes to racial injustice, most white religious leaders (including pastors, religious educators, and denominational leaders) are “blind guides.” They should not be followed.

V

The so-called Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) and the passage involving Jesus and Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10) highlight that reparation is resisted and that prophetic efforts toward reparation are resented. In both passages, religious people who suffered from systemic wrongs perpetrated by the “tax collectors and sinners” “grumbled” because Jesus socialized with them. We should remember that Jesus did not dismiss those “sinners” as moral monsters beyond the reach and power of prophetic influence.

It is easy to criticize White people for being opposed to reparations, and we should do so. But it is somewhat disingenuous to criticize White people for opposing reparations by terming them moral monsters. Moral monsters should not be expected to tolerate demands for reparations, let alone consider themselves morally, ethically, and socially obligated to meet such demands. It is self-contradictory – if not unfair – to denounce people as inhuman and then blame them for not responding humanely to moral and ethical demands for justice.

Jesus illustrated in the Parable of the Gracious Father (Prodigal Son) and his encounter with Zacchaeus that God delights in restoring broken relationships. That was the point Jesus stressed in the lessons about the widow who swept her house to find one lost coin and the shepherd who left 99 sheep to find one lost sheep and the father who welcomed a wayward son back with a feast and party.

God is obsessed with Oneness. In the divine economy, all things add up to equal One. All things are part of the One. God is One wonderful Creator over all creation, One wonderful progenitor over all beings, and One who does not rest while anything violates the relationship of oneness between God and everything and everyone else. Jesus summed up this idea at Luke 19:10 in these words: “For the Son of Man came to seek out and save the lost.”

We should remember that reparation is about repairing a broken relationship. Something has happened to damage a relationship. In the Prodigal Son parable, a son broke ties with his family of origin. In the lesson about Jesus and Zacchaeus, the Jericho revenue commissioner had become the tool used by Roman colonizers to exact taxes from the indigenous Palestinians of Judea.

What chance did Zacchaeus have to come to his moral and ethical senses about reparations for the unjust wealth he gained from dishonest tax collecting if Jesus had not invited himself to dinner? What chance did the people who had been victimized by Zacchaeus have to get reparations if Jesus had joined the grumbling church folks who snubbed Zacchaeus? And, what chance did Jesus have to prophetically challenge Zacchaeus unless Jesus met Zacchaeus where Zacchaeus was both comfortable yet also vulnerable – in the house Zacchaeus occupied because of unjust tax collecting? Jesus did not treat Zacchaeus and other tax collectors as moral monsters beyond redemption. Instead, he included Matthew, a tax collector, among his first followers.

Reparation can be demanded from privileged people only by people willing to make the demand. However, we will not demand reparation so long as we think privileged people are moral monsters, incapable of realizing their wrongful conduct and making amends for it. Grumbling about privileged people will not present them with a moral and ethical demand for reparation.

This does prevent criticizing people who hold onto White privilege. Nor does it prevent us from denouncing White privileged people who refuse to support reparation demands. We should criticize and denounce White privileged people who pretend to be innocent or ignorant concerning racial inequities long suffered by Black and other people of color. But it is illogical to condemn white privileged people as moral monsters yet expect them to honor moral demands for reparations.

At Luke 15:1-2, we read that religious critic of Jesus “were grumbling” because Jesus socialized with “tax collectors and sinners….” In the Parable involving the Generous Father who welcomed a wayward son the elder brother grumbled and refused to join the feast and celebration the joyful father hosted for his returned son. And at Luke 19:7 we read that people “began to grumble and said, ‘He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner’” as they saw Jesus go have dinner with Zacchaeus.

Are prophetic people guilty of “grumbling” about the notion that the same love and justice of God that upholds the demand that reparations be paid to descendants of formerly enslaved persons also commands us to obey the example of Jesus regarding White people who enjoy undeserved privilege and the fruit of generations of societally approved oppression?

Are we guilty of writing them off as moral monsters? Are we the folks God must beg to rejoice when privileged people come to themselves and become agents of justice rather than hoarders of privilege? Are we following the example of Jesus or the “church folks” who grumbled about him socializing with “tax collectors and sinners?”

We do not have a transcript of what Jesus and Zacchaeus talked about when Zacchaeus hosted Jesus for dinner at his house. But judging from the pledge Zacchaeus made about giving half his wealth to the poor and restoring four times the value of anything he had obtained dishonestly it is fair to surmise that Jesus didn’t spend the day talking with Zacchaeus about sports. Jesus talked with Zacchaeus about justice, love, and the reason Zacchaeus was scorned and considered an outcast by the Palestinian community. Jesus talked with Zacchaeus about the “great chasm” that existed between his affluence and privilege and the oppression and suffering experienced by other Palestinian Jews.

Jesus went to dinner with Zacchaeus as a prophet, not to obtain a personal favor or advantage. From that moral and ethical vantage point, Jesus pressed Zacchaeus to “come to himself” to use the words in the Parable of the Gracious Father (Prodigal Son). And like the father in that parable who restored the wayward son, and the shepherd who found the lost sheep, and the widow who found the lost coin, Jesus pursued Zacchaeus in the spirit of seeking community.

But the grumbling “church folks” behaved like the pouting elder brother in the Parable of the Gracious Father. They grumbled as Jesus dined with tax collectors like Matthew and

Zacchaeus. They grumbled about Jesus. They grumbled about Zacchaeus. Their grumbling did not induce Zacchaeus to pledge to give half his wealth to the poor and restore four times what he had unjustly taken.

We do not know if people who are “lost” because of their idolatry to White supremacy and privilege will follow the example of Zacchaeus or not in any given instance. What Jesus teaches in these passages, however, is that we who live according to the love and justice of God have no excuse for treating them as if they are moral monsters and beyond redemption. They are children of God as we are. God wants them to be in right relationship with God, with people of color, and with themselves.

The “Son of Man” came to seek and to save those who are “lost” due to idolatry to white supremacy, racism, and white privilege. Followers of Jesus have no excuse for failing to follow his prophetic example. We have no excuse for behaving as if we cannot or should not behave towards white privileged people the way Jesus did with Zacchaeus. And we certainly have no reason to believe privileged people are going to behave as Zacchaeus did when we treat them as if they are moral monsters.

CONCLUSION

We should be encouraged by the Biblical lessons about God confronted Cain about murdering Abel, how God directed Moses to go to Egypt and lead the liberation of Hebrew immigrants from bondage, the Gracious Father who welcomed a wayward son in Luke 15, and Jesus who went out of his way to schedule a prophetic confrontation and dinner invitation with an oppressive Palestinian tax collector named Zacchaeus.

Taken together, these lessons teach us that God works on behalf of oppressed people. God works to confront oppressors like Cain and Zacchaeus. God treats them as moral beings, not monsters. And with God, they are not beyond redemption, restoration, and reclamation.

With God, reparation is not only possible, but also required. With God, the lost can be found. The wayward can return. And the wicked can be confronted.

God believes in reparation. Do we? God believes that prophetic people can make a reparatory difference by confronting privileged oppressors. Do we? God believes that suffering people can be reconciled with people like Zacchaeus when people like Zacchaeus engage in reparations. Do we believe? Do we believe God can do through us what God did through Jesus with Zacchaeus? Do we believe in God that much?

If so, we should follow the example of Jesus with Zacchaeus. We should make a prophetic demand for reparation to privileged people like Zacchaeus. Like Jesus, we should make reparations part of the conversation and then watch what God does with our faithfulness to the example of Jesus.

But if we don’t believe in God that much, we should stop calling ourselves followers of the Jesus who deliberately stopped in Jericho, invited himself to dine with Zacchaeus, and stayed until

Zacchaeus came to himself and resolved to make restitution for his wrongfully obtained and enjoyed wealth. If we are against reparations then we are against Jesus, and Zacchaeus, no matter what we call ourselves.

So, I ask you, what will expositors do about that Jesus?

i Allan Aubrey Boesak and Curtiss Paul DeYoung, Radical Reconciliation: Beyond Political Pietism and Christian Quietism (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2012), 66.

ii See, https://www.sbc.net/resource-library/resolutions/resolution-on-racial-reconciliation-on-the-150th-anniversary-of-the-southern-baptist-convention/,

iii See, https://www.baylor.edu/boardofregents/news.php?action=story&story=219403#:~:text=BE%20IT%20RESOLVED%20that%20the%20Baylor%20University%20Board,conversations%20about%20this%20aspect%20of%20the%20institution%E2%80%99s%20past

Wendell Griffen is pastor of New Millennium Church (www.newmillenniumchurch.us) in Little Rock, Arkansas, a recently retired state court trial judge, a trustee of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, and owner/CEO of Griffen Strategic Consulting, a consulting firm on cultural competency, equity, and inclusion (www.griffenstrategicconsulting.com). He is author of The Fierce Urgency of Prophetic Hope (Judson Press, 2017) and three blogs (Wendell Griffen on Cultural Competency, Justice is a Verb! and The Fierce Urgency of Prophetic Hope). Griffen contributes opinion columns about faith and justice for Baptist News Global, Good Faith Media, CounterPunch, and other outlets.

Dr. Carruthers at the U.N. in Geneva Switzerland

TS Design Studio — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 22:32:52 +0000

Dr. Iva Carruthers, General Secretary of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference

I am Dr. Iva Carruthers, General Secretary of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, a 20 year old ecumenical and global justice and faith policy and organizing NGO based in Chicago Il USA. I am also professor emeritus from Northeastern Il University and founding director of the Center for Reparatory Justice, Transformation and Remediation at McCormick Theological Seminary, Chicago. All roads lead to commitment to the human rights of people of Africa descent and on behalf of our global constituency and network, please accept our gratitude and full support for the exemplary leadership of our outgoing and presiding chair of this working group.

As we move from a declaration of an International Decade to a Permanent Forum for People of African Descent, we also acknowledge the long road ahead which will require vision, tenacity and unity. And it’s in the spirit of the Sankofa bird that I also submit this comment honoring the ancestral legacy and blessings of Callie House, mother of the US reparations movement, Dr. Conrad Worrill, my university colleague who was so effective organizing the US delegation at Durban and our beloved recent ancestor Atty. Randall Robinson.

Focusing on the theme of economic empowerment and rights of development for this 32nd session of the Working Group of Experts on POAD, I want to implore us to consider the impact of regenerative and emergent technologies and Afro futurism and the Right to Development. Given what we know and have lived related to global, transgenerational, systemic and institutionalized racism, the convergence of new technologies and cultural worldviews demand our scientific, ethical and spiritual considerations as POAD. We must assess and be prepared to navigate and mitigate the potential harm, unintentional and intentional, related to profound changes in the global economic landscape being shaped by innovations leading to 1) a metaverse and race to space with a business model based on a tiered privatization of knowledge creation and distribution 2) artificial intelligence (AI) which privileges and prioritizes norms of white cultural dominance and ways of knowing and being and 3) genomics, epigenetics and eugenics – based innovation in health care, pharmaceuticals and security systems that are changing the way we think of what it means to be human and live in community.

Lest we forget, during the COVID pandemic, the wealth gap expanded and unprecedented profits were made by many. The George Floyd murder, as exemplar of state sponsored violence against black bodies, further exposed what’s at stake. Therefore, no doubt, we must address the questions related to whose power structures and in whose interests will these technologies be deployed? How do these new ecosystems of economic growth impact development opportunity and sovereignty of POAD?

What do our experiences of increased Afrophobia, objectification, racialized hate speech, micro and macro aggressions portend for POAD in this period of dynamic global demographic shifts, environmental challenges and humanitarian demands? From a U.S. perspective, an informed, organized unity agenda of POAD could contribute greatly to impact outcomes for our future.

My comments argue for global ethical architecture of human rights of poad recognizing the tech sector as instrument of wealth creation and job development and technology as tools of weaponization including health, climate and environment and even development of alternative digital monetary systems.

As we think about Afrofuturism, these three areas of development will certainly shape new global growth economies and quality of life for all peoples. with focus on principles of self determination, pan-Africanism and human rights economy, As POAD, it is imperative that we, intentionally and with collective purpose, engage these areas as active agents of knowledge creation, economic beneficiaries and ethical standard bearers.