(upbeat music) - [Announcer] A Slice of the Community is made possible by the support of the First Horizon Foundation.

(audience applauds) - Hello, and welcome to another episode of "A Slice of the Community."

I'm your host, Jerome Moore, and today I have in studio, live, joined by an audience of New York Times best-selling author and historian, Dr. Jemar Tisby.

Welcome, Dr. Jemar Tisby.

- Thank you for the invitation.

I'm glad to be here.

- I'm glad that you're here.

It's not too often that you get to sit down with a New York Times best-selling author, that's a black man, you know.

- True enough, true enough.

- And so now I appreciate your presence and appreciate you making the trip down here to Nashville.

- Absolutely.

Anytime you call, I'm gonna come down.

- Y'all heard that.

Anytime I call, he gonna come down here.

And so, let's get straight into it, you know.

I wanna go a little bit into your background.

So people just know that, you know, you're an author, you're also a PhD in history.

How would you describe yourself, just for the viewers, before we get into the topics of tonight?

- Yeah, so in terms of my roles and what I do day-to-day, I'm an author, I'm a historian, I'm a professor at a HBCU called Simmons College of Kentucky, and I'm a national speaker.

But all of that is under the umbrella of what I really consider my mission and my calling, which is to help people become lifelong advocates for racial justice.

- Okay, wow.

We all should be striving to be lifelong advocates of racial justice.

Now, let's get into some of your work in the historical context around religion and race.

I'm curious, paint us a picture, as far as historically, around Christianity and racial issues and how it's shaped in America currently and people's interactions with church or just places of worship in general.

- So you're trying to get me, like, put people to sleep by starting with history.

Look, look, look.

- You gotta get people in historical context and give them a foundation.

- I 100% agree.

And, you know, woe to us history teachers who ever make it boring.

Because history is just stories.

The reason why I love history is you can say whatever you want, you can profess whatever beliefs you want, but history has the receipts.

History says what you actually did, what you actually said.

So it deals with these facts.

So when it comes to religion and race, which is what I look at, unfortunately, there is a long history of the construction of race being tied to the construction of religion in the United States.

I'll give you an example.

I was in Virginia, Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, a couple of years ago with my family.

And, of course, being the history nerd I am, not only do we go to the museum, I'm reading every plaque.

So I go to one of these plaques and I just freeze.

And it was a plaque talking about the Virginia Assembly, which was the governing body in colonial Virginia.

It's comprised of all white Christian men, and they were Christian.

You had to be a member of a church to be on this assembly.

And they had passed a law saying, in 1667, saying that baptism would not emancipate an enslaved African person, Native American, or mixed race person.

And I froze there because think of the implications.

Right there, you have race, religion, and politics all tied up in one.

Now, you can talk about them distinctly, but you can't separate them.

So you have this legislative body, political body, making a law about religion, baptism, around race, wouldn't emancipate.

And what they were essentially saying with that law is that God can have your soul, but we own your body.

(audience exclaims) So these are, this is back, think of the timing.

This is almost a century before the Declaration of Independence, more than a century before the ratification of the Constitution.

So there was never a point at which America was great and these things were not true.

You know what I'm saying?

Where race and religion and politics weren't wrapped up.

- So from a theological education standpoint, as you're a professor, how do you incorporate this balance of religion and race and fighting racial issues in the future of faith leaders to create a more just and diverse ministry?

- Yeah, well, that's the great part about history.

You just tell the story.

Like I don't have to do a whole lot more work than tell you about the Virginia Assembly.

We can go back to 1493 and the papal bull, inter cetera, which talks about the doctrine of discovery and how the Pope basically blessed colonial and imperialistic efforts in the name of religion, which were really extractive enterprises to pull out the natural resources or exploit the labors of indigenous or African people.

All I had to do is tell a story.

I don't have to really press it.

And if you're a person of conscience, it's there.

Now the question is, how do we incorporate that into our education?

Specifically around theological education, I went to a very theologically conservative, almost fundamentalist seminary.

The only time I heard about something like black liberation theology was in the context of what not to do.

We didn't even read this stuff.

Because it was considered far left, heretical, liberal, whatever you wanna call it.

And so A, that has to go.

A lot of seminaries are revising their curriculum.

They're looking through, they're ensuring that they have people of color, women, other perspectives included.

That's a start.

The last thing I'll say about this in terms of a theological education is we need to cultivate what I call a priestly proximity.

A priestly proximity.

By which I mean, think of a good pastor, a good one.

They are close to the people they serve.

They know what their needs are.

And because of that, they can respond accordingly.

I think as people who are concerned about racial justice, we need to develop a priestly proximity to those who are most adversely affected by racism.

And so within a seminary or educational context, I am a huge proponent of hands-on, in the field, not just the church, like being out among the folk and letting that guide our education.

So how do we, in churches or wherever you may worship, entities of worship, give folks active, practical things to do to combat systemic racism?

Because I've been in places of worship where they don't even touch social justice issues or racism issues.

And these leaders, they look just like me and you.

And it's like, man, how can we not talk about this and that at the same time?

Some people just stay away from it.

And so how can we get more of those leaders to embrace it and understand like they're all one in the same?

- How do we get them to embrace it?

I don't know.

But I know- - That's why you can, this is your moment.

This is your moment to tell 'em.

- All I know is people of conscience, we need to model it.

One of the big words to me is witness.

I think our most persuasive act is action.

And so if we want to persuade, if we want to bring more people along, we have to live it.

Now, that is a question I address, how do we live it?

And my second book is called "How to Fight Racism."

I give dozens of like practical, actionable steps, but really I think the value of the book is a framework I developed called the ARC of racial justice.

ARC is an acronym.

It stands for awareness, relationships, commitment.

Like the three legs of a stool, you need all of them.

All right, so awareness.

That's all of the information, the data, the facts that we have to learn about racism.

'Cause one of the things I say as a historian, history has just changed over time.

So if we think about racism, racism never goes away, it just adapts.

That's why we're still dealing with it, not just in 1667, but in 2024.

So we gotta learn how it adapts and what it looks like.

That is watching the documentaries, visiting museums, talking to people, attending talks like this.

That's awareness.

We also need relationships.

And especially, I mean, can we talk this bluntly?

Especially white folk.

For white folks, they really struggle to understand the systemic and the communal aspect of race.

Because they're often treated in society as individuals.

If I'm in seminary, when I was in seminary, if I did poorly on a paper, which I didn't, I mean, I was on it, I was on it.

(laughs) But hypothetically, if I did poorly on a paper, it wouldn't just be, oh, Jemar did a bad job on that.

It was like, see, we knew black people couldn't really keep up.

It would, they would extrapolate it to my entire group.

But if a white classmate of mine did poorly, oh, that's just John.

You know, he had a bad day.

So white people really have a tough time understanding the systemic and institutional aspects of racism, but they do tend to get it if they have relationships with people who are different.

And so that's critical for black folks and other people.

We need relationships too, particularly with other people of color, having solidarity as oppressed people.

And then the last area is commitment, by which I don't just mean stay the course.

I mean a commitment to dismantling systemic and institutional manifestations of racism.

We gotta change the laws, we gotta change the policies.

We gotta do stuff that's more than, hey, brother, let's grab a cup of coffee.

You tell me your life story and I'll be sensitive.

That's, okay, there's a place for that, but that's not where we start.

- I wanna revisit another book of yours, the best-selling, you know, New York Times, if y'all don't have it, you need to go get it, support it, The Color Compromise.

And in that book, you really break down the complicity that Christianity played in racial injustice.

Can you unpack that a little bit about what you found in that research and when you was writing that and the impact that had on you?

- So I was struck that when people talk about racism, typically they're thinking of the extremes.

Think about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, September 1963.

When they think of racism or a racist, they're thinking of the person who planted the dynamite, right, or strung up the noose, or put on the robe, or is spewing racial epithets.

The problem with that is if that's your only category for what racism is or looks like, then honestly, numerically, it's a very small group.

So why we got all these problems?

It's because there was a much larger group willing to stand by and not do anything, not get involved.

So I mentioned the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.

There was a man named Charles Morgan Jr. who the day or two afterwards gave a talk to a young men's business group in Birmingham, Alabama.

All white men, up and coming in the cities, movers and shakers.

But he was really affected by that bombing.

And he asked them, "Who did it?

"Who threw that bomb?"

And he said, "The answer is we all did it.

"And we're responsible for that bombing, "and the one before, and the one before."

By the time that bombing happened, Birmingham had already earned the nickname Bombingham.

So that mean it happened again and again.

So that's the idea of complicity.

You don't have to be the one who's actively doing the racist acts.

You just have to be the one who's not doing anything about it.

It's what MLK called in "Letter from Birmingham Jail," the white moderate, who he said was a bigger obstacle oftentimes than the Klan.

- So just even the complicity of just staying silent.

- Exactly, exactly.

- Not saying anything and watching.

- That's why I always wear this shirt, Justice Takes Sides.

- Take a side.

- Because in issues of justice, what frustrates me to no end is this false equivalency.

Oh, both sides have their issues.

Oh, everybody's equally responsible.

No, in nearly every instance I can find, there's an oppressed and there's an oppressor.

A lot of people don't like that language today.

They call it CRT or woke or whatever.

That's Bible.

Go to the Old Testament.

They talk about oppressed and oppressor.

And when we talk about issues of justice, you're either on the side of justice or you're on the side of complicity.

That doesn't leave a lot of room in the middle to just be silent.

- Can't be lukewarm.

- Yeah, can't be lukewarm, yeah.

- Don't be lukewarm out there.

I wanna dig into something personal for you.

We all have our own personal struggles and battles.

When it comes to trying to balance what we go through every day.

And I'm curious on how you use your faith, your personal faith and your personal walk of life to maybe handle a situation where you faced racial injustice, to maybe do something that was more Christ-like than do something that maybe there wasn't in your personal journey to just Christianity, religion, and worship.

- We actually have immense resources in our history to understand the link between faith and justice.

So I'll talk about two of my historical heroes.

One is a woman named Fannie Lou Hamer.

I had never heard of her before my 20s and I joined a two-year teaching program and they placed me down in the Mississippi Delta on the Arkansas side.

Fannie Lou Hamer is a black woman who was born in 1919 to a sharecropping family.

She was the 20th of 20 children.

Good Lord, bless that mama.

- The whole family.

- The whole family.

But she would have lived and died in obscurity except for one day early in 1962, she went to church and heard a presentation about voting rights.

And when they asked for volunteers, she said, "I raised my hand as high as it could go."

And so started her career in activism.

And what I love about Fannie Lou Hamer is she was a vocal, outspoken Christian woman.

She was explicit about her faith, she sang gospel songs, and she was one of the most courageous people I've ever come across.

This is, if you remember in the Bible, the story of the widow's mite.

They're standing by and they're watching people offer donations and there's a wealthy person who gives some and there's a widow who just has a fraction of a penny and she gives it.

And Jesus said, "Who gave more?"

And he said, "The widow, because she gave all she had."

Fannie Lou Hamer gave all she had.

She was a poor sharecropper, she had next to nothing.

And what she did have, she lost the day she went to try to register to vote, she was fired from her job as a sharecropper, she became unemployed.

She's one of the ones I look to and I say, "If she had the courage, "and she had way less than I do, "then I can step up."

The other person I'll talk about is a man named Tom Skinner.

Not a lot of people know Tom Skinner, but he was a black evangelist, born in Harlem and he was active, especially in the '60s and the '70s.

At one point, he was called the Black Billy Graham.

They loved it when all he was doing was preaching the gospel to black audiences because white evangelicals in that time didn't wanna go there.

So they're like, "We're glad somebody's doing."

And the problem came when he started talking about racism and social justice.

So he gave this historic speech at the Urbana Missions Conference in 1970, called The U.S.

Racial Crisis and World Evangelism.

But it's better known by its last line, "The liberator has come."

So he reframed the ideas of revolution, black power, liberation in a theological lens, ticked off all the powers that be, but inspired a whole generation of young people to say, "You know what?

"My faith does speak to justice "and I can be about this work.

"I can follow Jesus and justice "and one is not mutually exclusive."

- I wanna go into the intersectionality, I think, that plays into race and racism, especially when you talk about places of worship and just church in general, of how do we get also just beyond race into other aspects such as gender, identity, and class?

What is those topics and those things looking like from your ends, from a social justice, from a social justice lens, and also just embracing it in places of worship and understanding this is part of the conversation as well?

- A lot of people demonize that word, intersectionality.

Again, labeling it woke or critical race theory or something.

It's purely logical.

It's simply the intersection of multiple oppressions.

Black women have pioneered this and they've been talking about this for a long time.

I was just editing a piece that I've been writing and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, notice I said jobs and freedom, 'cause the economic aspect, everybody wants to forget about it and just talk about content of their character, not the color of their skin, but it was an economic-focused event as well.

But it was very patriarchal and male-centered.

No woman gave a speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

And so black women got together and after the event, they put on their own event with black women called After the March dot, dot, dot, what?

(audience laughing) After the March what?

And the point of that meeting was to say, okay, we had this wonderful big event and we were shut out, even by our own black men.

And so what we have to do now, black women, is gather collective power and solidarity and make sure that our issues both as black people and as women, both in terms of race and in terms of the sexism we've experienced, that that is on the radar.

And so again, we can learn from history and how people came together to push back against multiple forms of oppression.

- You know, you can be religious, but even religious folks have different views, even within the same religion.

And I know you do a lot of work interdenominationally to work with folks around justice.

How have you seen being able to harmonize activism and faith succinctly to be able to bring people to the table that may have different views, but also be able to say, hey, we might have different views about this, but justice takes sides.

And so what does that work look like?

And what impact have you seen from being able to harmonize activism and faith?

- There's been this movement since at least the late 1980s, early 1990s toward multiethnic or multiracial churches.

And that's good because in the history of the US, it's never really been championed.

There've been pockets here and there, but starting 30, 40 years ago, it started to be like, you know what?

This is something we should do.

But those efforts often fall short because they make diversity the goal.

I think diversity is the byproduct of pursuing justice.

So you talk about bringing people together across denominational lines, across belief lines.

I find it's just like a team of any sort.

When you have a goal, when you have an objective, that's when you bring the right team together because we need this skillset and that skillset and that skillset and we're different and that's actually helpful to achieve our goal.

And guess what?

Now that you're different from me and I'm different from you, and how are we gonna get along?

Not just for getting along sake, but to achieve this goal and this mission.

So when we talk about churches, we have to make justice the pursuit.

We have to make that prayer that Jesus taught, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

How do we bring about that kingdom in all kinds of ways, caring for people's material needs.

And when you gather around that mission, helping to ensure that your neighbor flourishes, that's when you get the diversity.

That's when you get people coming together across lines of differences.

But when we make it all about, well, let's just get together, then guess what?

We're all sort of in a circle focused inward and we make it the goal.

And then the detriment is you don't wanna break that up.

So you stray away from any topic that might be too polarizing, any truth that might be divisive.

But what if we weren't in a circle?

What if we were standing side by side, moving in a direction toward justice?

That's when we get it.

- I know we talked about this a little bit, but I gotta get you to break it down again because justice, the word justice can mean many different things to many different people.

And so I'm curious to hear what that word justice means to you and give the audience also a chance to hear your definition of that.

- The simplest definition I've heard of justice is people getting what they deserve.

People getting what they deserve.

So oftentimes when we're talking about justice, we're talking about a deficit, people not getting what they deserve.

So I talked earlier about working in the Mississippi Delta on the Arkansas side.

The county that I was in, Phillips County, there was an article in 2019 that looked at the median income of every county in the United States.

The county I was in was the fourth poorest county in the entire country.

That is not completely separate from the fact that the town I was in was 77% black 'cause the Delta's cotton country.

It goes all the way back to race-based chattel slavery.

Why are there so many black people there?

Why are they so poor?

Because you needed more laborers than plantation owners.

Then after slavery is abolished with the 13th Amendment, you get sharecropping, then you get mechanization, and you get all these people out of work, and you have a disinvestment.

And so justice is what about those people in the Delta?

Are they getting what they need?

We have food deserts, we have a lack of rural hospitals, we have a lack of solid education.

Justice is making sure they get what they deserve.

On the flip side, justice is also bringing people to justice who have done harm.

So them getting what they deserve, which is accountability.

- As we close, I want to give you a chance to give us some optimism for the future.

(laughing) What does the future of America look like when it comes to faith and justice, and what gives you hope in that we will be able to continue to strive towards that as a country?

- So the longer I'm in this work, the more I realize that the victories of justice may not be external, they're probably internal.

Many of them.

So I think we put ourselves in a position of despair and cynicism.

If we're only looking for external progress, by which I mean the law is changed, the policy is passed, this person is voted in or out of office, here's the reality, we don't always win.

We don't always get that.

Du Bois said of the reconstruction era following the Civil War, this period of incredible black advancement and institution building, he said, "The Negro stood for a brief moment in the sun "and then was put back in the shadows."

And the gains we've made are not guaranteed.

So if we pin our hopes on those external things, we're setting ourselves up for some deep disappointment and for defeatism, but I'm convinced that the work of justice is not simply how it changes the world, it's about how it changes you.

There is virtue in pursuing justice because it's about who you become in the process.

And I think from a faith standpoint, Jesus is very much concerned about the kind of people we are not just the changes that are enacted in the world.

- Y'all give it up for Dr. Tisby.

(audience applauding) And thank you for watching another episode of "Slice of the Community."

If you'd like to continue our conversation with Dr. Tisby and ask questions, please head over to our YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/wnpt.

See y'all next time.

Appreciate it.

(audience applauds) (upbeat music)