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- [00:01]
Monty
Today we're stepping into the tension between history and hope, between the past the church won't fully confront, and the future we have the power to shape. Our guest is a man who's become one of the leading voices at the intersection of race, faith and American history. He's a historian, incredible author and speaker, and an unwavering truth teller. His name is Jamar Tisby, and you may know him as the author of the Color of Compromise, a groundbreaking book that unmasks how American Christianity has often been more committed to the status quo than to the Gospel's call for justice. Or perhaps you've heard him speak on how silence, moderation, and cheap reconciliation have kept racism alive inside the very institutions meant to embody love and liberation. I met Jamar at one of these speaking engagements, which was the Summit for Religious Freedom this past April. Tisby doesn't just offer critique, he offers a path forward in his book how to Fight His Arc of Racial justice, which is awareness, radio relationships and commitment, challenges us to move forward beyond performative allyship into real, sustainable change. Today we're diving into his work, his story, and the radical invitation he extends to all of us to tell the truth about the past of our country so that we can finally build a better future. It's not just a history lesson, it's a reckoning today on flipping tables. And before we bring Jamar on, I again just want to say a huge thank you to everyone who sent me such kind messages regarding my great niece, Lucy. I'm back in Nashville. As you can see, the sound and the video is much better than my mobile kit, but I was very happy to have that time with family to just support my niece Maddie, Lucy's mom, and just be there with them and for them. I haven't actually spent time with family in about two years, so it was great. But I'm also happy to be home and be getting back into a routine. Stay posted this Aug, we're going to have a lot of new things coming out. My website is going to launch in a few days. There'll be a new contact email as well as some slight changes to Patreon and new merch coming. I say all that to say just stay posted on my Instagram My stories. The newsletter is going to resume the week of August 4th, and that will be a weekly newsletter just to keep you up to date with everything and I'm so deeply appreciative of your support. I have some really fun announcements coming that I can't make yet, but I will very soon so just stay tuned for some new changes and some updates. I've been teasing some of those on Instagram as well as Patreon and Substack, but we're going to jump in. So I'm going to invite Jamar on and we're going to dive into the color of compromise. Jamar, welcome to Flipping Tables, and thank you for being here.
- [02:52]
Jamar Tisby
I am so glad to be here. Thank you, Monty.
- [02:55]
Monty
So I mentioned in my intro that we met at the Summit for Religious Freedom, and I made a comment then that I was going to have to talk to you, and I finally made it happen. Where are you, where are you living right now? I don't think I ever asked you that.
- [03:08]
Jamar Tisby
Yeah, my headquarters and home base at the moment is Louisville, Kentucky.
- [03:13]
Monty
Oh, you're close. You're closer than I thought. I don't know why I didn't know that.
- [03:16]
Jamar Tisby
Yeah, yeah. You're a quick drive. Yeah.
- [03:17]
Monty
Okay. I'm our next door neighbors, and so we're gonna talk a lot today about racism in America, specifically in the church, and get a little uncomfortable and deal with a little bit of historical conflict. But before I dive into that, I would love for you, to my listeners, a little bit about your story and how you got here in this topic.
- [03:42]
Jamar Tisby
Well, in case folks aren't watching or you didn't notice, I am black. And step one, I've been black my whole life, which, which has a lot to do with my story and my journey, particularly within white evangelicalism. So I didn't grow up Christian. We weren't, it wasn't hostile or anything. I went to Catholic grade school. It was, it was sort of in the air. But I wouldn't say I had a quote unquote personal faith until high school when I got invited to a youth group which happened to be a white evangelical youth group, and that it is there. I said the sinner's prayer, became a Christian, all that stuff. It was just like a textbook conversion. If you could, if you could just write it down how you want a high schooler to come to faith. That was me, but it was real. It stuck. And one of the later realizations I've had around race and religion is that I'm passionate about racial justice today. Not because I had such a bad experience of community in those spaces. It's because I had a good experience. But to the extent that I ever felt excluded, it was around race, and a lot of it wasn't overt. So it's not like somebody's looking at me saying, oh, you're Brown. You can't be with our group. Right. Like, it's nothing like that. Yeah. It's not that overt. It's not that obvious, it's not that conscious. What it. What I came to realize was in a lot of these spaces, it's not what they said, it's what they didn't say. And it's not what they did, it's what they didn't do. So it was as if when I walk through the. The doors to the gym for the youth group or. Or the church, that I was going to. Race and racism and all that came with it didn't exist because you never heard about it. You never heard about it, preached from the pulpit, you never saw it in the materials. It was this unconsciously completely white centered globe in orbit. Right. Like everything was around white preachers, theologians, all of that stuff. And. And there was only the barest nod. This is in the racial reconciliation day. So I'm a historian as well, and that's part of my story. I have a PhD in history and I study race, religion, and social movements. In my view as a historian, from the early 90s up to about the early 2010s was the first time in the history of the church that on a broad scale, racial and ethnic diversity within a congregation was seen as a positive thing. Like. Like that. That is embarrassing. Like you got to get all the way.
- [06:28]
Monty
And also not surprising.
- [06:31]
Jamar Tisby
True enough. You know the history.
- [06:33]
Monty
Surprising. And growing up. So I am the inverse of you, where if you haven't seen me yet, I am also white. And I have also been white my whole life. And I grew up in white evangelicalism, like Christian nationalist evangelicalism. And I also was only allowed to go to all Christian schools, private Christian schools. I graduated from Liberty University. Part of that, I studied theology abroad in Israel.
- [06:59]
Jamar Tisby
Wow.
- [06:59]
Monty
Like the whole thing.
- [07:01]
Jamar Tisby
Yeah.
- [07:01]
Monty
And when I started deconstructing and taking a really honest look at what I would call white theology, because it's a specific brand of theology and it's not based on scholarship. And when I started looking at American history, what I realized was growing up within the church and in these Christian schools that were church affiliated, that they never talked about slavery, like, not really they mentioned it. Oh, this happened. Skip right over it. And now it's all better now. Yay, Emancipation Proclamation. There was no problems after that. I didn't know anything in my 20s. And when I first started reading about Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. I didn't know anything because it was conspicuously never mentioned. And I grew up in Wyoming. So we didn't have black people in church because there weren't many living in town. So it was even more conspicuous. And there was no reason for them. There was no one holding them to account to have those discussions because it was all white congregations. And the more I learned, the sadder it gets.
- [08:08]
Jamar Tisby
Yeah.
- [08:09]
Monty
And so being in that white evangelical church in the 90s, and when I would travel, as I got a little bit older, I would see these churches that were, like, had diversity, and I was so impressed with it. And that was just an anomaly to me, because where I grew up, they were all white churches. And then you had one or two Spanish churches, and everything was very segregated. And I remember my first. I'm gonna. I just thought of this. What is the very famous. I'm gonna feel embarrassed for not remembering it right now. The very famous black church in Alexandria.
- [08:45]
Jamar Tisby
13Th Street Baptist in Alexandria, Virginia.
- [08:49]
Monty
Yeah.
- [08:49]
Jamar Tisby
Oh, well, I know Alfred Street Baptist. I'm not sure what's going on.
- [08:56]
Monty
I don't know. We're have to look that up.
- [08:57]
Jamar Tisby
What?
- [09:02]
Monty
It must be Alfred Street. I was young, but we took a trip to D.C. and my dad took me to this church, and it was my first black church experience. There was four white dots sitting in the very back, and it was the best experience ever. I walked out and I was like, dad, their services are way better than ours. The music was so good and it was so lively, and I. I had never seen people participate in service because ours was the stand up, stand still, sing the song, close the book, sit down. And I remember walking out and asking my dad, why is there a black.
- [09:41]
Jamar Tisby
Church and a white church in the mouth of babes?
- [09:45]
Monty
Well, and I just had. I had these moments of, like, revelation when I was young. And it was the same kind of conversation. My dad got into it a little bit more. My dad was an amateur historian, but it was still this very surface level conversation about, well, it's related to slavery and segregation. And, you know. And he did acknowledge that the white church wouldn't treat black parishioners with equality and in some cases, wouldn't allow them to attend. But that was really where the conversation ended. And the older I get, the more I realize that the black church exists because of sins that the white church has yet to repent for.
- [10:25]
Jamar Tisby
You said it. Yes.
- [10:27]
Monty
And that. I think one of my hopes for this conversation with you and I today is like, what does that repentance look like? And how can Christians who are believers start to move the needle within those congregations to say, hey, we can't pretend this isn't real. We have to face this and acknowledge it. How do we start creating that?
- [10:52]
Jamar Tisby
I really appreciate that and I really appreciate you making space for this conversation because honestly, my little soapbox and I will have several in this conversation is we still, as a nation and a church in particular, don't want it to be about race. Yeah, we don't want ICE abductions to be about race. But I put out on social media the other day, what if we had listened to black people when they were talking about anti black police brutality and draconian measures of law enforcement all the way back in the 60s when the black Panther Party was started. And we never say the full name. The Black Panther Party for self defense. Self defense against what? Against law enforcement coming into black communities in California and brutalizing the local population. Right. So. So what if we had defunded the police? What if we had reimagined public safety? Perhaps we wouldn't have had an ICE paramilitary that could so quickly be mobilized against mainly brown people. But anyone deemed other. Right. So we still don't really want to have the conversation that says fundamentally this is a theocratic regime that is trying to reinscribe white supremacy in all kinds of ways and it does always in some way, shape or form come back to race. But a lot of people don't want to have that conversation. So the first thing to do is talk about it, which is why I thank you for making space for this. Second thing to do is to learn the history of it, to tell the truth. So that my first book, the Color of Compromise, the subtitle is the truth about the American Church's Complicity and Racism. Let me tell you how far back it goes. So Mark, Charles, Sung Chan Ra, they wrote the book Unsettling Truths. It's a great book because it talks about the doctrine of discovery. So we're going all the way back to Columbus and the colonial era and the operating ideology behind this so called age of exploration, which was really a profit seeking venture. Right. The way I try to explain it to people is like Columbus. Like sailing a ship across the ocean would be an equivalent of expense of sending a rocket into space. Yeah, like an individual couldn't do it, so they had to get sponsorship. So they get the King and Queen and they sponsor Columbus and they go out. Why? What is their investment? They want to get new land and extract natural resources from this area. Right. So it's not about, oh, religious freedom, not about, you know, exploration and finding, you know, new civilizations and all that stuff. It's about money, you know, some of the, you know, whatever. All that to say 1667. This is one of the facts that stuck out to me. The Virginia assembly was a group of white, wealthy Christian men, Episcopalians. You had to be to be governing in that time. And they passed a law in 1667 that said that baptism would not emancipate an enslaved black person, indigenous person, or mixed race person. And that is so significant because right there, you get race, religion, and politics all intertwined, and you've got a. A political body passing a law around a religious right baptism that had contours around race. Right. And then the timing is important. Like, this is where. This is why the work of historians is significant, because we study change and continuity over time. So 1667 is more than a century before the Declaration of Independence, more than a century before the ratification of the US Constitution, which means you had this unholy alliance of race, religion, and politics together before there was even a political entity known as the United States. So when you try to say, make America great again, it was already off the rails before there even was an America.
- [15:05]
Monty
Yeah.
- [15:05]
Jamar Tisby
And so this is one of the things that we have to understand because the root determines the fruit.
- [15:10]
Monty
Ooh, that's a good. That's a good one.
- [15:12]
Jamar Tisby
Black church, baby.
- [15:13]
Monty
Yeah, there it is. I was like.
- [15:15]
Jamar Tisby
That was.
- [15:15]
Monty
I was like, I'm gonna write that. I don't have my notebook. I need to write it down. And what, like you. You bring up, like, 1667. So this, like, colonial period where we're colonizing Central South America, North America. I wanted to talk about this idea white settlers have around where theology got kind of morphed into this white is right idea where they were spiritually superior, religiously superior, and the kind of parallel idea of inherited heathenism. And I just want to talk about that and how that. How that one influenced the laws, but how that impacted what would come later in the 1800s.
- [15:55]
Jamar Tisby
That's so important. Thank you for pointing that out. So a historian named Rebecca Ann Getz wrote a book called the Baptism of Early Modern Virginia. And in that book, she uses the phrase hereditary heathenism. Hereditary heathenism. So just as physical traits could be passed on from one generation to the next, she's saying that in the colonial era, Europeans essentially thought that your religion or your spirituality would be passed on from one generation to the next. And what hereditary hedonism was about was the formation of an unspoken subtext that European meant Christian, and that indigenous or African meant pagan. And you were born into that, and you were destined for that. And it was up to the European Christian to evangelize these pagan Africans and indigenous people, which completely ignores. You can go all the way back to Columbus's journal. He writes of the indigenous people he encounters on his first visit that they seem intelligent enough to make good servants. And it also appears they don't have any religion. So we can teach them our religion, completely ignoring the vast, complex cosmology that indigenous people already had, and then doing the same thing with Africans. Never mind the fact Christianity was in Africa long before it was in Europe. Right. That there is some evidence that even some of the very earliest enslaved people may have been Catholic. Right. So basically saying even if they had religion, which we are assuming they're pagan anyway because of hereditary heathenism, our form of Christianity from Europe is better, and that's the one they need to learn. But we're going to pass these laws that assuage the missionary impulse to baptize people, but won't emancipate them. So what they're saying there is a couple of things. Number one, Christianity is coded as white. Christianity is coded as Europe. Pagan is coded as people of color. Number two, they're saying they're. They're creating an artificial separation between the material and the physical and the spiritual. So with these baptismal vows. Francis Lajaw was a missionary with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts is the full name. And he had these baptism vows that says essentially when. On the rare occasion when indigenous or African people actually converted, he would make them say these vows that said, you do this purely for your own spiritual edification and not out of any desire for freedom. In other words, you can't. You can't. You can't go and get baptized, claim you're a Christian equal standing in the spiritual household of God, and then say on that basis that you should be emancipated. He's like, no, no, no, no, no. That's. That's not part of the deal here. And that was to assuage plantation owners, because plantation owners were like, don't let missionaries come in. They're going to preach the gospel. They're going to preach equality. They're going to preach image of God, and then we won't have good slaves anymore. So that was a compromise between white people, that plantation owners said, okay, missionaries, you can go in. But you got to make it clear, if they convert, they're not going to be emancipated. They Won't be equal.
- [19:01]
Monty
And how does that. So that line of thinking carries us into, you know, we have the Revolutionary War and then we have like the revival of the Great Awakening periods. So how did that theology kind of develop further in that period? Because during the first and second Great Awakening you do have a lot more conversions start to happen. What was the, like the theological and social foundations that they were using to continue that justification? Because you're preaching the gospel of Christ, which is love your neighbor, love your enemy, serve one another, go the extra mile, give them your tunic, give them your robe. But you're still, you have this system that's built on, on slave labor. How did, how did they maintain that system and develop it further during that revolutionary and revival period?
- [19:52]
Jamar Tisby
So I think what's going on on an intellectual, ideological level is they're legitimately in their minds thinking that enslaved people are a different category. They are not like us white people, us European descended people. And therefore different strokes for different folks, different sets of rules apply. Because what I'm trying to figure out is how can they exist within this blatant hypocrisy? Yeah, but to them it wasn't hypocrisy because they didn't consider Africans or any non Europeans really as in the same people group, the same human category, therefore subject to the same law. So that's how you get a declaration of independence that says, we hold these truths to be self evident. All men are created equal, endowed by their creator with these certain unalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. It's no contradiction to them to say that because they're only thinking about people like them, namely European moneyed men, everyone else. What are you talking about? Of course it doesn't apply. They're in a different category. So how does it evolve? That mindset gets increasingly applied to increasingly rigid racial categories. So one of the things about history is that everything is contingent. There is no inevitability. It didn't have to turn out that race based chattel slavery became the order of the day. There was a time in the colonial era when it could have gone another way. It could have gone the way of indentured servitude. They could have treated Africans the same way they treated Europeans who were working off a debt or a sentence for a crime where it was term limited. It still sucked. It was horrible. It was unfree labor, but it was not for a lifetime. And it wasn't based on your skin color like that could have applied. And I wonder if we Ever think about that?
- [21:50]
Monty
Like we had other options.
- [21:52]
Jamar Tisby
Yeah, we had other options. We could have. We could have said, as Christians in a church, you know what? This. This gospel is so profound that, yeah, it really does mean neither slave nor Greek, male nor female, rich or poor. Yeah, the Galatians 3. 28. And so we do need to emancipate people and we do need to treat them equally. It could have gone another way, but it didn't. Mainly because of the money.
- [22:19]
Monty
Yeah, it's always money. Money and power. It's always money.
- [22:22]
Jamar Tisby
The billionaire getting land in Tennessee.
- [22:24]
Monty
Oh, yeah. We were just talking about this before we got on here. I attended a special subcommittee meeting here in Tennessee because Governor Bill Lee has just gifted public land to Musk to build a 10 mile tunnel from downtown Nashville to the airport. They're claiming it'll reduce traffic, but it's a single lane tunnel that is only available to Tesla taxi drivers. And the government is housing those Tesla taxis. And they. The mayor wasn't notified. The elected representatives representing those districts were not notified. The public was brought in for comment as a formality. And everyone got up for an hour and said how much they did not want it, how unsafe it was because Nashville is on a bedrock of limestone and we get 40 inches of rain a year and were prone to flooding and it didn't matter. Those men sent it right through. And all of the elected officials who were part of that committee didn't show up. Only the appointed ones who can't lose their position by their vote.
- [23:25]
Jamar Tisby
Whoa.
- [23:26]
Monty
Yeah. So it is always about money. And this on the back end of Musk is already in Memphis, in BoxTown with his AI supercomputer that he started operating without a permit. When they got the permit, he said, I'm only gonna run 15 of these turbines that are belching pollution into the sky. He's running 35. And now in less than a year, Boxtown has become the number one place. And of course, Boxtown and Memphis as a whole is a very African American dominant community. It has now become the number one place for emergency ambulance calls related to asthma.
- [24:01]
Jamar Tisby
Whoa. In less than a year.
- [24:03]
Monty
In the country. Not in the state. In the country.
- [24:05]
Jamar Tisby
Goodness.
- [24:06]
Monty
And the next one that they're building is next to a K through 8.
- [24:09]
Jamar Tisby
School.
- [24:12]
Monty
And we're just being sold. And Governor Bill Lee has allowed for Tennessee to be the testing ground for all of these policies, school vouchers, you know, all of these dramatic cuts. And they've known about this deal for over a year because as I told you before, we got on. My building that I live in, that I own a condo in, is being sold from under my feet without my choice or consent to give them a new parking lot so that they can house these Teslas they've known for over a year, but they're letting people know now because next month in August, they are. All the committees are meeting to discuss the budget cuts to Medicare and SNAP and Medicaid that are coming down. So in order to kind of push those under the rug a little bit, because people are reasonably very upset, they're making the tunnel issue public as a diversion because it's already done deal. There was no way to sway the vote today. We were there as a performative practice. And those four men sat up there and smirked the whole time. One of them in particular.
- [25:15]
Jamar Tisby
Wow.
- [25:16]
Monty
And it was incredibly dismissive. But it's. I mean, it was about money back then, and it's about money now.
- [25:25]
Jamar Tisby
This is why I want. You know, when you're really serious, your parent won't just say your first name. They say your first, middle and last name.
- [25:34]
Monty
Yes, they do. The whole.
- [25:36]
Jamar Tisby
The whole name.
- [25:37]
Monty
And I, I hate my middle name. When my dad would do that, I was like.
- [25:42]
Jamar Tisby
Well, now we gotta know. What's the middle name?
- [25:44]
Monty
Oh, no, don't tell anyone. Don't tell the 10,000 people that listen to the podcast. It's Lynette. Yikes on a bike. You're being nice about it, but I can see you. I'm not even from the South. I'm from Wyoming. My dad was like, it was just a distinctly feminine name. And I'm like, well, you nailed it there, I guess.
- [26:06]
Jamar Tisby
Wow. Okay. All right. Yeah. Well, you know, when I'm really seriously trying to convey the depth of depravity, I don't just call it slavery. I call it us race based chattel slavery.
- [26:26]
Monty
Yes.
- [26:27]
Jamar Tisby
Because all of those elements are important. Number one, the United States innovated in a diabolical way in terms of slavery. So, you know, if you go online, a lot of people say, well, every. Every society has had slavery. It's actually true there's always been forms of unfree labor. But what the US did was made it race based and chattel based. So there may have been ethnic contours to enslavement in other places, but it certainly wasn't as rigid as the way race developed in the United States. Such that we had black codes. Such that anti miscegenation laws dedicated designated what percentage non white you would have to be in order to be considered non. White like they got it down to a diabolical science there. And it was based on your, your lineage. And they also made it matrilineal, not patrilineal in general. The child inherits the status of a father. It's a patriarchal society. Right. With race based chattel slavery. They switched it. The child inherited the status of the mother. Why? Because the plantation owners who would sexually assault enslaved women and had children by them, well under patrilineal law, that child would have to be within the plantation owner's household.
- [27:56]
Monty
Yeah.
- [27:57]
Jamar Tisby
Because inherited the free status and the wealth of the father. But they were like, no, no, no, we can't have that. All these caramel children walking around. No, no, Thomas. Yes. Sally Hemings and, and the kids, they, you know, the, the, the offspring from that were enslaved. And that's because it was matrilineal and it was lifelong.
- [28:18]
Monty
Yes.
- [28:18]
Jamar Tisby
You were born into it, you died in it. Only if you self emancipated, meaning ran away or on the rare occasion you bought your own freedom. So that's the chattel part.
- [28:31]
Monty
Yeah.
- [28:32]
Jamar Tisby
People were not people. People were property. And that's where the profit motive comes in, such that you would, you could leave an enslaved human being to a child in your will or to a spouse. If the plantation owner like, like passing down an antique tea set.
- [28:54]
Monty
Yeah. Like this is grandma's ring that she had. Here you go.
- [28:58]
Jamar Tisby
And, and, and here's, here's, you know, here's Junia, 13 year old girl who you now get like that's what we're dealing with here. That's how serious it is. And then the other thing people say is, well, that was so long ago. Like you mentioned the way like then the Emancipation Proclamation happened or then the civil rights movement happened. And yeah, there was all this bad stuff, but now we're past it. Right? Let's move on. Stop talking about it. So long ago as we record, it would have been Emmett Till's 84th, 85th birthday.
- [29:37]
Monty
Yeah. So like Ruby Bridge is still alive. She's 70.
- [29:41]
Jamar Tisby
Ruby Bridge is still alive. Merlee Evers, the widow of Medgar Evers, she's still alive. Like this, this is not that long ago. And nevertheless, I say history doesn't repeat itself because it's never an exact thing, but history does echo and we can hear echoes of the past and the present. So, so who we are today is a tapestry of the history we've inherited. So it's absolutely nonsensical to say, well that was so long ago, it no longer has an impact on us. Oh, yeah, it does, because the root determines the fruit.
- [30:18]
Monty
Yeah, well, and also that completely negates the idea because we know about generational impact. And beyond slavery, when you get into Jim Crow and redlining and the white flight and then basically financially motivating white families to move into certain areas while you don't offer that same status, we're talking about generational wealth, the destruction of the nuclear family in African American communities because they weren't allowed to get married. I mean, they had their own practices, you know, jumping the broom in, like, private practices. But then your spouse would just get stripped from you and sold whenever they felt like it. Your kids were sold, your siblings were sold. So like we're talking. These are like catastrophic generational traumas. And on the white side of the fence, you have generations of just not really talking about it. And so we're seeing now, you know, I don't know if you saw the most recent jubilee episode where it was a bunch of white guys saying, yeah, I'm fascist and riding off the Holocaust. And when Obama was president, I remember I was in the middle of my. I was in the beginning of my deconstruction. Excuse me. And I remember hearing so many people saying, well, he's making race relations worse. If you just don't talk about it, it won't be a problem. And it's this, it's like, no, because we now see these young men coming up even in Gen Z, even though Gen Z tends to be a little bit more progressive on the whole, that these, these attitudes did not go anywhere because they have not been addressed. They got passed down. And we're, we're seeing those echoes and like a resurgence we now have in Arkansas and outside of Springfield, Missouri, whites only communities being built that are being called return to the land even though their land is Europe. It's like.
- [32:14]
Jamar Tisby
It is, it is. It is so infuriating because we're losing ground that we thought we gained.
- [32:19]
Monty
Yeah. That we thought for sure was like in the past.
- [32:22]
Jamar Tisby
Yes.
- [32:23]
Monty
And it's just, it's. I mean, obviously being in the South, I think we have, in Tennessee, I want to say there's 33 active white supremacist groups, many of which are violent, that have not been checked in any way whatsoever. Last summer, again, I live downtown Nashville, so whenever there's a march or a protest, things go by my door. There was eight Nazi marches.
- [32:47]
Jamar Tisby
Good night.
- [32:48]
Monty
Many of them fully armed and of course, wearing masks because nothing says you're proud of what you believe. Like covering up your face when you support it. And so I find it when I lean into this topic and even like reading through, like your work, it doesn't feel like things have changed that much like we have. We don't have the same legal system, but the attitude is the same.
- [33:16]
Jamar Tisby
That's right. That's right. Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, said the north won the Civil War, but the south won the narrative war, meaning that the Union won the military battle and legal emancipation from slavery. But the south, and that's representative not just of a region but of a mentality, they won the ideological battle that enshrined and preserved white supremacy. So the relationship between white supremacy and racism, we often use them interchangeably. White supremacy is the ideology, racism is the practice.
- [33:52]
Monty
Yeah.
- [33:53]
Jamar Tisby
So what Stevenson and others would argue is the practices remain because the ideology remains, the narrative remains. The story of white centrality, white and now masked, slash, unmasked white superiority is still there. So what's happening now is not an exact replica, but history is echoing. What's happening now reminds me of the period after the Civil War. Thankfully, more and more people are becoming aware of the Reconstruction era. This is an incredibly vigorous period of black, civic, ecclesiastical, all sectors of society, participation. I mean, imagine it, imagine it. Imagine your people have been enslaved for centuries and you finally get emancipation. And what do you do? You take advantage of it to the fullest extent possible. So you run for and win elected office. You start your own churches and denominations, you start your own schools, your own hospitals. Black fraternities and sororities come into being at this time. It's this incredible flourishing of this pent up creative energy among black people that lasts just over a decade from 1865 to about 1877 and the Compromise of 1877 that put President Hayes in office. And as the compromise, they pulled out federal troops from the south and effectively ended federal reconstruction, which led to the states rights thing, which is the state's right to impose segregation and illegal measures against populations it doesn't like. Right. So we, we know the name Reconstruction era. We don't. We aren't as familiar with the name of the era that came after it, which was called Redemption. Now, in Bible terms, you know, redemption is supposed to be a good thing. It's supposed to be, you know, Christ redeeming the people and restoring a right relationship with God. Right. Well, that's not what redemption means in terms of the US historical era. That means taking back the country for white people.
- [36:08]
Monty
Yeah.
- [36:10]
Jamar Tisby
So what it this is the rise of The Ku Klux Klan. What? They're a Christian organization. A Christian organization.
- [36:17]
Monty
Like you had to be a practicing active church member to qualify.
- [36:22]
Jamar Tisby
Yes. And that's not a coincidence. It's not a coincidence that all this stuff is happening in Tennessee with Nashville as the, the evangelical Rome. You know, it's like the, the, the juxtaposition of those is not a contradiction. It's coherence in a lot of ways and it's historical continuity. So that Redemption era saw the rise of lynchings, saw even the rise of formal law enforcement. Prior to the Civil War, not a lot of cities or municipalities even had a standing police force. They would have posses.
- [36:55]
Monty
Yep.
- [36:55]
Jamar Tisby
And if there was an issue, you got everybody together, they would go get their rifles and their revolvers and they go take care of the problems, which most often was poor white people because black people were controlled through slavery. But after emancipation, oh, now we need a line item in the budget for standing law enforcement, standing police force, which by the way is essentially a copy and paste of slave patrols.
- [37:20]
Monty
Yep.
- [37:21]
Jamar Tisby
And. And then you get the policing of black bodies, mass incarceration. All this kind of, all of that has is as its real coalescing in the Redemption era. And the reason I bring that up is because now feels very similar to that. I think Barack Obama was the embodiment of all that this reactionary right wing white supremacist cadre feared.
- [37:49]
Monty
Yes.
- [37:51]
Jamar Tisby
Now you have this black man in the White House. We, we knew it was bad, but now it's a whole other. So then midterms of his first president, you get the rise of the Tea Party.
- [38:04]
Monty
Yep.
- [38:05]
Jamar Tisby
You get the alt right. You get this attack on critical race.
- [38:09]
Monty
Theory now and that which is a collegiate level course. It's not like people are acting like it's being taught in elementary school. I'm like, no, like acknowledging that slavery is real, like is not critical race theory. That's an upper level collegiate course specifically for law.
- [38:28]
Jamar Tisby
Law schools teach this. Yeah, absolutely.
- [38:30]
Monty
But then they took that title. And I truly believe in again being. Because when Obama became president, I was right on the toe edge, so I was still at liberty. So I was in this like very obviously hypocritical evangelical hub. Dominantly white. I was still very early in my deconstruction. I was just starting to have these questions. So I'm seeing the joy from like my black friends and what this means to them. And I'm starting to understand representation, like really, because when you're always represented, you never have to think about it. But I've also standing in front of this whole voice screaming behind me of how angry they are. And I think that people who didn't grow up in homes like this underestimate how truly angry they were when Obama became president. And I believe that Trump, all of this, I'm gonna call it Nazi shit, is a retaliation of Obama's presidency. The outrage that a black man was president for eight years. And I can tell you, cuz I was in the room while people had these conversations when all that racism leaked out, or they. Someone who wouldn't have been as openly had, you know, contained this kind of vitriol, suddenly skews very, very far right. All that we're experiencing right now, this crumbling of society. And it feels like that redemption era, in my opinion, because this whole make America great again is make America white again.
- [40:05]
Jamar Tisby
Yes.
- [40:06]
Monty
And so we are. We're it. It tastes the same because it's the same food. It just got pulled out of the freezer. And this is all vengeance. And Trump's the best representative for that because his whole life is vengeance. Taking it out on anyone that he feels has slighted him in any way.
- [40:26]
Jamar Tisby
Absolutely. And others have said this, but you take this exemplary black man in so many ways. Educated, family man, speaks intelligently, reads, relatable, charismatic.
- [40:41]
Monty
Scandals. No scandals, no porn stars. Like, right, the tan. Imagine that the tan suit was his scandal.
- [40:49]
Jamar Tisby
And then you follow his presidency up with literally the most mediocre white man ever. I mean, he's never even run for elected office. He absolutely doesn't want to serve. He doesn't know government even how it works, how it. That was the only saving grace in his first presidency is that he was clueless and there were few institutionalists left to hold back some of this stuff. But yeah, it is so much of a backlash, or as many would say, a white lash. And obviously nobody's arguing that the Democratic Party or Obama as president was perfect. That shouldn't even need to be said at this point. But I feel like I have to say it every time. But we are saying that there was such vitriol to the idea that a non white person could ascend to the highest elected office in the nation and what that meant by implication. So a lot of this connects back to white Christian nationalism.
- [41:51]
Monty
Yeah.
- [41:52]
Jamar Tisby
Which is a story about the United States that says it was founded as a Christian nation, meaning the leaders of this nation, and by and large the population of this nation were Christians. And because they followed this fundamentalist view of Christianity, the nation prospered. And by Prospered. It meant the nation got wealthy. And all of that's great. But now there's a threat, and that threat is the capital o other. And you can fill that category of other in with whomever you want. It could be black people, could be women, could be LGBTQ people, could be immigrants, and it's because of those others. Could even be other white people who don't tow the line because of those others. The nation is going down the tubes. And if we're going to save it, which by the way, we have a divine mandate and mission to save it, then we got to get back to these Christian principles and what made America great. And that means a retaliation, a white lash against a democratic liberal black man as president and all that represents. Right. Like, I just, I don't want people to fixate on just that individual. It's what he represents as a symbol of what this nation is and where it had fallen according to this white Christian nationalist narrative.
- [43:17]
Monty
Well, and there's, there's so many levels to that because on, on this podcast I've referenced a lot of times where it's, we were not supposed to be a Christian. Quote, Christian nation. Like the Treaty of Tripoli in 1797 says the United States is in no way founded on the Christian religion. Like the founding fathers, many of whom thought religion was a waste, and some who were staunch believers, but they understood that you have to have, in order to have freedom of religion, which was extremely valuable to them, you have to have freedom of religion. And the only time that religion is expressly mentioned in the Constitution is that you cannot free force a religious mandate to hold office. They were very, very clear on this. But you get into these phases in history where greatness is the same way that they tied Christianity to European and white greatness becomes tied with wealth and whiteness. So the era that I think of is the 1920s, where the Republican Party controlled, from 1920 till 1932, controlled all three branches of government, with the exception of a two year period where Democrats had the House. And they pushed through a lot of the same things we're seeing today. They rolled back regulation, they rolled back government involvement, they made the stock market more unstable so that they could profit more money off of it. During the Roaring Twenties, the wealthy were having a great time and children were dropping out in eighth grade to go work to feed their families because, you know, we know that the Great Depression was bad, but the 20s were not great for other as well. If you were not a rich white person, not great for you. And Those decisions, this kind of unregulated, rampant consumption of the 20s, led us directly into the Great Depression. And it's the exact same policies that we're seeing be pushed through right now. And FDR comes in, he infuses our economy with socialist programs that not only help get us out, but give us the best economy the world has ever seen from 1948 to 1972. But this idea of greatness, like, as soon as I saw that slogan, I was like, that's code for white. Like, that's a dog whistle. I know what that is. 100%. It has given. There is only. Only a white man could get away with being completely unqualified for a job, having no experience stealing campaign funds, lying publicly, joking about assaulting women, taking campaigns to pay off a porn star, cheating on all of his wives, like being best friends with Jeffrey Epstein and somehow still have support. There is a white woman couldn't get away with that. And no person of color could get away with that. Again, Obama's scandal was a tan suit. And I've never seen a clearer display of white male privilege. And that's just what. And I know that's kind of like people sometimes are like, oh, that's just like a token social media term. I'm like, it's accurate. Because no one else could get. Like, no one else could do that. And when we look at, like, reading your book and we go through the antebellum period and the slavery period, where you have all these churches using the Bible to justify slavery, and then we get into, you know, Jim Crow, segregation, civil rights, and they're still using the Bible as a justification to treat people with inequality. Even though the Bible very clearly states there is no Jew, there is no Greek, there is no male, there is no female. Like, very clearly, at least in the New Testament, lays out that there should be this equality. But how do you. When you're talking with people, especially being a Christian and working in this space, there is still so much theological conversation justifying these movements or saying things like, well, God allowed slavery in the Old Testament, so it must not be that bad, because I hear people saying that now, and I never thought I would hear that with my own ears.
- [47:26]
Jamar Tisby
It's increasingly hard to talk to folks who. Because by this time they're so far down that rabbit hole. I mean, a conversation, let alone a lone conversation, is not going to get you there. And to be quite honest, I'm not in contact with those folks a lot anymore. I'm radioactive to them. And I have no patience for their sort of BS justifications at this point. But if you are in contact, which a lot of white people are because you work with them, or they're in your family or they're in your churches, I recommend three steps. One, tell your personal story. Two, go to the Bible. Three, go to history. I say start with your personal story, your personal testimony of, like, you'll see online the phrase what radicalized you? And that's essentially like, you know, what made you woke, what made you conscious of, you know, social injustice, what got you ticked off to the point that you took action. Get really good at telling that story, not in a combative or confrontive way, but in an open, reflective, authentic way to say, listen, this is my experience because of this person I knew. It's because of this job I had working with this population. It's because of this book I read. It's because of when this happened in our country. Right. And connect that moment to a moment of awakening or transformation. Right. Like Luke 15, story of the prodigal son. I think the part I focus on most of is when the son said he came to himself.
- [49:00]
Monty
Yep.
- [49:00]
Jamar Tisby
Like a light bulb went, yeah, you wake up, you get what. So are we able to articulate that to the people who believe very differently from us and the reason why we start with our personal. It's a little bit harder to argue with. They may not agree with you, Right. But presumably, you know this person, they know you. And, you know, it's harder to argue with your own personal experience of transformation. Secondly, though, a lot of these folks are Christians. Go to the Bible, be like, okay, let's go to this text that we both say we share in common. And let's analyze. Why do you think Jesus quoted from the scroll of Isaiah 61 and talking about. The way I put it is he talks about all these marginalized groups of people, the orphan, the widow, the poor, the oppressed, the prisoner, all of those. And repeatedly does it. Matthew 25. Right. Why do you think of all of the text Jesus could have chosen, of everything he said when he announces his public ministry? Hey, I've been doing. I've been. I've been learning. I've been growing for 30 years now. I'm announcing, I'm on the scene. Why do you think Jesus chose that text and put the burden on them to explain it? We over talk. We over explain. The burden's not on us who want to protect people who want to work for justice. The burden is on you who say that these things are not part of the gospel. Show me how that works from the text, right? Which you do great, right? You break it down. I mean, so good. Like dad gum.
- [50:34]
Monty
It's my superpower.
- [50:37]
Jamar Tisby
And then lastly, go to history. The reason why I like history, because it's right there in the name. It's story. Woe to the history teacher who makes history boring because that means you can't tell a good story. So with the Color of Compromise, my first book, and it's not a happy subject. It's about white Christians behaving badly around race.
- [50:58]
Monty
It's hard. It's tough read.
- [50:59]
Jamar Tisby
It's very hard reading. And yet it becomes a New York Times bestseller. And I'm not overly didactic. I definitely have a point of view in it. But by and large, the stories have a weight and a gravity in and of themselves. So let me just. Let me just give you an example. Okay?
- [51:17]
Monty
So copy too. It's in my purse.
- [51:19]
Jamar Tisby
When we'll take a common example. By now, we should know that the Southern, in any denomination means pro slavery. So the Southern Baptist Convention. So we should know by now, Southern Baptist Convention splits with the national body in 1845 over the issue of slavery. First of all, the chronology is important. This is more than this. Fifteen years before the Civil War, Right? So this is like what's happening in the church is always a bellwether of what's going to happen politically in our society. But then it's not just that they split over slavery. They split specifically over whether a missionary could be in good standing while enslaving people. And to me, the dissonance of that. So you're saying that someone commissioned to go out and preach the gospel, presumably in nations and communities full of black and brown people, can they do that while enslaving black people in the United States? Northern Baptist said, no, I don't. I don't think that works. Southern Baptist said, yes, it does. And if you don't agree, we're gonna pick up our ball.
- [52:29]
Monty
You can't tell me sinful.
- [52:31]
Jamar Tisby
Yeah. So, like, I don't have to say anything else. Just sit with that. And there's so many stories like that from history. So that's why I say personal testimony, Bible history. Will it work? No. Maybe. I don't know. God willing. But here's the thing. We are not called to save the souls of other people. That's God's job. What we're called to do is be witnesses. So by saying these things, you have been a witness to the truth that you've seen When Jesus rose from the dead, not everybody believed that he did. But the job of the disciples at that moment was to go be witnesses of the truth they had seen.
- [53:20]
Monty
Yep.
- [53:20]
Jamar Tisby
Take it or leave it.
- [53:23]
Monty
And I will say, as a brief aside, with my platform and my Patreon, in the last several months, I've gotten a lot of messages from white people, various ages, who have messaged me saying, I just got out, I just got free. I finally understand. I'm ready to learn. Where do I start? Which is exactly. Asking the question is exactly where you start. But what I want to say to those people, just briefly, because I know you're in on this podcast listening, is that you have to speak because, like, what we're talking about in history with these churches that said nothing about lynchings, they said nothing about the kkk, they're saying nothing about ICE raids right now, is that your silence is complicity. And you can't. It is going to cost you family members, and it's going to cost you relationships. It may cost you your church community, and it is still required of you if you don't want to be complicit with these actions. And I just want to put that out there because I know there's a lot of people who are brand new to seeing things differently. And it does require a voice, and it does require learning. And that voice can simply be your story. It can be the moment that you're like, that was enough for me. I can't support treating people this way. Yes, that's. And it's just. So I just want to briefly mention that, because I've had several messages in the last few weeks of, you know, one woman in particular. She was. She's like, I'm 40, and it took me 40 years, but I see it now, and I'm angry and I don't know what to do.
- [54:57]
Jamar Tisby
Cage stage.
- [54:58]
Monty
Exactly. But just, you know, and I think that that's one of the things that has really been heartbreaking since 2016, is, you know, again we see Trump, and it's just. It's grotesque and the behavior is deplorable, and it's hateful, and it's cruel and it's vicious. And I remember looking around and watching all these people I grew up with that taught me God so loved the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight. And I am watching those people who taught me that engage with this and support it. And now I think it's even worse because, you know, right now we have Alligator Auschwitz in Florida. We have people being pulled out of their cars, stripped from their families, taken from schools, kindergarten graduations. And those churches are noticeably quiet.
- [55:57]
Jamar Tisby
Mm, conspicuously so. Yes.
- [56:00]
Monty
And I mean, and again, I've been deconstructing for a decade. It's been a work. But I don't know how you don't say something. Yeah, like, but I feel the same as. And maybe you have a more kind of a feedback on this. How did those churches stay silent during the KKK's reign in the South? And so many, you know, again, even police murders. We know why the police was founded, you know, and we have a history of it. We can prove it. There's data, you know. What are your thoughts on the silence that existed then and the silence that exists now?
- [56:44]
Jamar Tisby
It was ignorance, it was agreement or it was intimidation a lot of times. So the ignorance, which I would call culpable ignorance is we didn't know. Right. We just, we didn't learn the history. We weren't aware of the abuses, which in every age there have been people who claim ignorance. So in the abolitionist era, actually a lot of the cartoons and illustrations we have, like if you can picture in your mind, it's a diagram of a slave ship and it shows the bodies in the slave to show how closely packed they are. That's actually an abolitionist illustration to show the world how dehumanizing race based chattel slavery was. Here's how they pack them in to the hold of a ship like cargo. And we're going to publish that in the newspaper. Civil rights movement intentionally sought a public conflict because it dramatized the injustice. And journalists with cameras and photographs could show up, disseminate that. And that's how the north started to get fired up about southern segregation as they saw the abuses now in, in the 21st century, you know, during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, you're getting cell phone videos of black people being brutalized by law enforcement, all those things and why? Reason. I call it culpable ignorance because now you, you don't have an excuse not to know. So, so saying you don't know is not an excuse. But why do they remain silent? Partly ignorance. Secondly agreement. They, they wanted it to happen. They agreed with the racism, they agreed with the segregation today. They agree with the ICE abductions and the concentration camps and the dehumanization rate. So they're not going to be protesting against it. If they speak up, it's to support it. But the third reason also is something that probably should get more airtime, is intimidation. So Even white people who don't toe the line are threatened by the right wing extremist portions of their community, such that Fannie Lou Hamer, who's one of my historical heroes, she was born in 1917 in Sunflower County, Mississippi. She was a sharecropper. Her family was a sharecropper. She grew up broke, got a sixth grade education, becomes a civil rights activist. 1962, after hearing a presentation about voting rights in her church, and she goes to register the next week after she hears that presentation, just to register to vote, not to actually vote, gets turned away at gunpoint. Her plantation owner hears about it and confronts her that very day and says, if you don't stop this, you're going to be fired. Which meant you're also going to lose your home because they lived on the plantation. And she said, Mr. Marlowe, I didn't go down the register for you. I went down there to register for me. And took this bold, courageous stance because of her faith for it. Right. But why was the plantation owner so adamant about her withdrawing her name from trying to register to vote? Because not just because he was against it, but because if word got out.
- [59:52]
Monty
Yep.
- [59:53]
Jamar Tisby
That this white plantation owner allowed his sharecroppers to become involved in this voting rights stuff, this civil rights, he would face sanctions. So the intimidation of white people toward other white people is also a factor. None of it is a reason to stay silent. But as we're trying to understand why people did, it's the ignorance, it's the agreement, it's the intimidation.
- [60:18]
Monty
And that rings true again, particularly for how I grew up. That it was very much. And it was, again, I grew up in a very Christian nationalist mindset. Like, my family stockpiled arms against the government. And we were. We had repeated conversations about, you know, they're going to send the military to your door and kill you because you love Christ. Like, these were conversations that happened in my living room. And I was taught how to handle weapons from the time I could hold a gun. Like, it was a very specific mindset. But one of the things that my. I realize now that my deconstruct, my deconstruction started when I was very young. It just took me a long time to realize what I was feeling. Because you have this lifetime of programming that tells you you're inherently defective, you're broken, you're sinful. The preacher is sent to you by God as your emissary from God. And because he's a man, if you're a woman, because he's a man. He's superior to you. And so any doubts or questions you have about what you're being taught in church is sin against God and you're putting your salvation at risk. And I see that. I saw that intimidation in the church happen a lot with women, and not just for men, but from also they have a way of placing women in key positions to get the rest of white women to fall in line. That's what Kristi Noem is. Caroline Levitt. They are women who fit a specific esthetic because skinny and white is closer to God. It's so true. The skin like that was something that was taught, was that as a woman, your weight was related to your salvation. So when I was young, I was an overweight kid and that was a really big problem for me in the church and with my father. My father was my biggest bully about my weight because that was so ingrained with this thin white woman is a better Christian idea. But they would especially intimidate women. Well, if you leave your husband, you have to leave the church. Even if her husband was a cheating, abusive dirtbag. Well, if you vote this way, your husband's going to divorce you and then you have to leave the church because your husband's right and you need to follow his lead. Like all of these things where. And this happens to men too as well. But it's this threat of losing your community, it's the threat of losing your job. If you're somewhat how employed with the church, you can't have a different opinion. And there's the threat that they ingrain you with of losing your salvation because you question this very specific brand of evangelicalism. And the intimidation is very high in like, very conservative areas.
- [62:56]
Jamar Tisby
We are now at the point where we are going to have to have to likely suffer state violence for standing up for the principles of democracy and justice. Everything you said just reminded me of the fact that in order to counteract those forces, it's going to get worse before it gets better.
- [63:23]
Monty
And I have. Go ahead.
- [63:26]
Jamar Tisby
So 1850, they passed this Fugitive Slave act, which was a reactionary law because there were essentially sanctuary states that said if an enslaved person escapes and gets to our state, we are not going to help slave catchers get them. And in another compromise with Southern legislators, they passed the Fugitive Slave Act, 1850, which is very reminiscent of what ICE is doing now. So they're going into communities, they're going after your neighbors. You know, Old Joe, who's been there forever and may have escaped, you know, 30 years ago, but now they're Going back and capturing and say, you got to go back down south. And. And that actually activates northern white people. Not because they were so staunch ideological abolitionists, but because it was their neighbor.
- [64:16]
Monty
Yeah, I know.
- [64:16]
Jamar Tisby
Because it was their community. Yes. And. And it's federalized at this point, so you can have, you know, federal enforcement of this, and they start getting daring. I mean, they go bust people out of prison in Boston. Right. Like, Boston is always bringing it, man. It's always the case where the worst human rights abuses also are the crucible that brings out the most refined activists for human rights. And they funnel these people away through the Underground Railroad up to Canada. And I think that's very quickly where we're probably going to have to be is we as neighbors and community members who see the brutality and the disruption in our own communities. There are going to be more and more people who get radicalized by that. It's going to result in more and more physical confrontation. We've seen this on phones where people are trying to block ICE agents from detaining people. I think that's going to happen more and more. And I advisedly say we subject ourselves to state violence because violence on the part of the oppressed almost. Almost never works. They got the guns is the basic story there. And the tanks and the body armor and 170 billion to fund all of this stuff. So. But we dramatize that. We subject ourselves to that. A, for the sake of our neighbor, B, because it's the moral, just right thing to do, and C, to dramatize the injustice that's happening and to stoke outrage around it. So we can stay silent for now, but that's not gonna protect us.
- [66:04]
Monty
Yeah.
- [66:04]
Jamar Tisby
So you may as well speak up.
- [66:05]
Monty
Exactly. And I feel like I have these moments, and I struggled last week with just what is the point? I feel like I'm screaming into the abyss, and every day it's 10 new fires. And, you know, I feel like I'm yelling sometimes until I turn blue. And then you look at my comments and it's, you know, everybody's like, oh, what is this tranny talking about? I get called trans a lot now, which is, like, such a indication of, like, when you enable hate, people take it and they run with it. And I'm like, listen, trans women are a lot prettier than I am most of the time, and they do their makeup better, so how dare you? But one of the things that I've thought about recently is that I think that one of the good things about where we are is that there's no pretense anymore. The gop, the Christian nationalist movement, the churches that are taking this path are being so clear. There is no pretense of righteousness or economic responsibility. Texas Republicans are announcing that they're gerrymandering the districts to take away Democratic seats because 42% of Texas voted for Kamala.
- [67:20]
Jamar Tisby
Can't have that.
- [67:21]
Monty
Texas is so gerrymandered that we don't think that. But that's the truth. And now they're just announcing it. Even what I witnessed today in Tennessee. But what I think the good thing is, is that we're forced to see it for what it is.
- [67:33]
Jamar Tisby
Yeah.
- [67:34]
Monty
You can't look away. You can't justify it. You can't excuse it. You're either against it or you're for it. And I believe that the fever's gonna break now. I don't know how long that will be. I do think it will get worse before it gets better, but the fever will break, and it will completely deflate this movement that no longer has a cover to hide under because they took the COVID off. They took the hood off. And that is one thing that I see as a positive, is I think in order to finally face these issues fully, we had to first admit what they are. And now we're being forced to. But the unfortunate part of that is that it is going to get messy.
- [68:17]
Jamar Tisby
So now is the time for people to count the cost. As a historian, I often think about the future, ironically, but I think about it in terms of, you know, 30, 40 years from now. Should we last that long? How will people look back on this era and my actions in this era? Because, you know, people today often would say, you know, if I was alive in the civil rights movement, I would have marched. I would have boycotted. I would have protested. I would have. I would have even subjected myself to arrest and beatings. And it's like, okay, cool. But what you're doing now is exactly what you would have done then. So let's be realistic. If you're silent now, you would have been silent then. If you are apathetic now, ignorant now, you would have been that way then. If you don't want that to be your story, then we have to be intentional about it. So my latest book is called the Spirit of Justice, and I'll just tell this one quick story. I was there in December 2017 at the grand opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, shrouded in controversy because, number one, is Mississippi going to be honest about the civil rights movement?
- [69:27]
Monty
Exactly.
- [69:28]
Jamar Tisby
I was like, ooh, are they going to whitewash this? Turns out he has a very good historian, some very good community members. They tell an accurate story. But the other controversy was this was Trump's first presidency. And the Republican governor at the time invites Trump to the grand opening of the Civil Rights Museum. This man who puts out a full page ad calling for the return of the death penalty for the Central Park Five, now the exonerated Five, and who, by the way, has never repudiated that action, who starts his national political campaign with the birtherism conspiracy, demanding Obama shows his birth certificate and proof he's not from Kenya originally, right? So invites him to the civil rights. All these dignitaries who were supposed to speak drop out, including Congressperson John Lewis. Benny Thompson, who is representing the district. He chaired the January 6 committee. They drop out. Merle Evers Williams, the widow of Medgar Evers. She stays and she gives this rousing speech. And afterwards, I was there in a press conference, very small deal. And a journalist asked her, how does now in the 21st century compare to the civil rights movement in terms of race relations? And she was very somber about it. And she said, I'm seeing things now I hoped I'd never see again. Like we mentioned, progress we thought we'd made, being pulled back. But then she said something that I didn't expect and that has stuck with me ever since. She said, but there's something about the spirit of justice. Oh, she says, it's like a horse that's been put out to pasture, but then it hears the bell of freedom and it remembers what battle was like. And it raises up and it becomes stiff, and then she ends, and you become determined all over again. And at this stage, Myrtle evers, in her mid-80s at this point, she. Her husband was not only killed, killed on their front step, she's the one who finds him bleeding, calls the ambulance, is there in the hospital room when he dies. She has to relocate her family from Mississippi to California. She has to revive the NAACP, the organization that got her husband killed in the 1990s. And she's raised a family. She's gone back and she's finished her college education, all of that. And here in 2017, she says, but there's something about the spirit of justice. And I'm saying to myself, if that is her spirit now, then that must be my spirit. If she can, in her ninth decade of life, say, you become determined all over again, then I don't have the choice or the right or the privilege to get up Give up. I don't have the luxury of despair. Not after all she's been through, not after the example she's still setting. And so that's what I say to us now. That spirit of justice isn't for a select few. It's not for just the merly evers of the world. It's not just for the people in history or antiquity. It's for you. And that same spirit of justice is available right now, today. If we will tap into it, if we will lean on a power beyond ourselves, we understand that we're here for a purpose and we have the power to do it.
- [72:47]
Monty
I'm trying not to cry. It's not good for the brand. I find myself sitting in those moments of like, I've never been married, I don't have kids, do I just move to Europe. I have those moments where I'm just like, man, I could just get out of here. But then I have. One of my favorite historical figures of all time is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And he, a white man born into privilege in Nazi Germany to a well respected family. He was well educated and he made a comment about Germany's fight is my fight. And if I do not, if I am not here to labor through her struggles, I do not deserve to celebrate her successes. And he was hung a few weeks before his concentration camp was liberated. And so whenever I feel that way, I come back to this moment of the two. Part of, if not me, then who again? I'm. I'm a single person with no kids, which enables me in a great degree to protest and to submit to state violence and to submit to those things because I don't have a child at home who's depending on me. But it's also this idea of this like, tiny little glimmer of hope that says what happens on the other side of this. How much better could it be if we finally break these things down, burn it to the ground and build the America that we've always claimed we are, but we've never been? And I don't know if that's going to happen. Obviously I have no sense of a timeline, but there's this hope of that that I just keep coming back to because it's the only thing that helps me keep going. And what are some like, actionable steps that people. Because again, a lot of listeners in my podcast and on my feed are they've never been to protest before. Many of them are just leaving Christian nationalism and these ideals that they were raised with. What are some. What are some of the very beginning steps they can start to take to like, participate in this spirit of justice, in this moment of standing up for what is good. Because it's good.
- [75:25]
Jamar Tisby
That's good. So I'm gonna get real spiritual for a moment. First Corinthians 12, 7 talks about the spiritual gifts, and I think that's where we start. However you look at, you know, the act, the, the designations or what specific spiritual gifts there. The point is, the moment you said yes to Jesus, the Holy Spirit was like, bet I got something for you. And it's called a spiritual gift, and it is a supernatural enabling for the work. The first verse in that passage says, now to each one has been given a spiritual gift. And then there's a purpose clause for the common good. So that spiritual gift isn't just for you to feel good about yourself. It isn't just for you to show up at church. That spiritual gift is for the common good. So the first thing I would say is introspective. Figure out, what can you do at this time? For me, it's been like God has kept me in school my whole life. Whether as a student or a teacher or a principal or a professor. I've been in education constantly. And so I'm like, well, I can teach. That's a spiritual. So what I'm doing in this moment as my spiritual act, working for the common good. I'm teaching like my hair is on fire. I'm doing courses, I'm doing teach, ins, I'm doing podcast, whatever it looks like. So you got to find out what your thing is, right? So start there. But then in my second book, how to Fight Racism, I talk about this framework I developed. It's called the Arc of Racial justice and it's an acronym that stands for awareness, relationships, commitment. So here's my recommendation. You make a strategic action plan based on those three categories for the next three months. Don't overwhelm yourself with a three year plan or five year plan. You can do it by yourself, you can do it with your family, you can do it. Faith, community, whomever. Awareness is all the knowledge, data, information we need to understand injustice, whatever area that you want to look into. And so that's the books, that's the podcast, that's the documentaries, that's the book. Studies Any, any way you can absorb information, be strategic about it. What books are you going to read? What conferences are you going to attend? What people are you going to learn from? Who are you going to follow? Social. Be strategic about that so that you can Be intentional about adding to your awareness. Secondly, relationships. Now, if you're white, I have to compliment you. You've done an incredible job building walls between you and all kinds of other people, like just masterful wall builders now. Now you need to be bridge builders. And because those walls have been so diabolically and masterfully constructed, you're going to have to be extremely intentional down to the neighborhood you live in, the schools you send your kids to, the church you go to. You got to get out of your normal space in order to have meaningful relationships across racial, ethnic, class and cultural divides for black people and other people of color. I don't say we need more white friends. We got plenty of white friends that we got to deal with. What I say is we need to form communities of solidarity. So I need to go to the Manzanar incarceration camp in California and see what it was like for Japanese people who were incarcerated during World War II. I need to go to the border and see what it's like for immigrants coming across that border and understand that, like Fannie Lou Hamer said, nobody's free till everybody's free. And then on the commitment aspect, that doesn't mean just stay the course. It means commit to systemic institutional policy change that affect people on more than a one to one basis. And so that for us individually means what systemic policy, legal change, do I want to see? Is it around mass incarceration? Is it around these ICE detentions and abductions? Is it around the wealth gap? Is it around education, whatever it might be? How do you work toward broader society wide solutions, the common good solutions? You make a plan and you start there. Because activism is going to look different for everyone. It's going to look different between your age, your season in life, whether you have children, your level of health, your level of wealth, all of that. But everybody can do something. And all I'm saying is get strategic about it. Use the arc of racial justice, awareness, relationships, commitment to help you identify specific actions in each of those areas over a short period of time and make the plan and work the plan.
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Monty
And my last question kind of ending today. So we're in this space where with Christian nationalism, we've had Christianity, the faith, be weaponized into a political system for the suppression and the disadvantage of others. And when this fever breaks, we're going to be faced with the question again of what does actual religious liberty look like. You know, my guest last week was a satanic atheist, or my last guest two weeks ago, and we had this conversation of how do we all coexist without this kind of sense of religious domination. And as someone who is a devout Christian and the reason that you're so active and that you're passionate in your teaching is because of that faith. What does religious liberty look like to you through the lens of your faith?
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Jamar Tisby
Jesus never coerced people into believing he was who he said he was. He lived it. So what I would like to see is a world where people can live out their faith or no faith at all if they choose not to have it. A place where Christians aren't so, like, insecure that we think we have to force our religion on people through laws or putting the Ten Commandments up in classrooms or forcing people to pray like the God I believe in is not insecure that if we do what God tells us to do, no more, no less, that, you know, if we're passionate about our faith, if we want others to believe, that's how you. That's how you share it. That's how you spread it, is through integrity. You can articulate it. Right. But you don't have to. Christianity has been perverted and corrupted into a religion of empire, but it's not a religion of empire. It's a religion of mar. Of. Of the people on the margins. It's a religion of the people who are disempowered, or as Howard Thurman says, the disinherited. Right. So I just. I don't know. I'm not a legal expert in that sense. I just know the Jesus I follow doesn't need to force religion on anyone. And I am not. It doesn't take away from my faith or my dedication to Jesus for other people to practice other religions. And I think that actually makes. Is the substance, part of the substance of an actual pluralistic democracy. I just want. I know that the gospel is fundamentally a good news about freedom, and that freedom extends to religion, what religion you choose to practice or not practice. And that's what I want to see on the other side of this thing.
- [83:21]
Monty
And I hope we get there. And I really do believe that we will. And I believe that again, I think that the fever's gonna break. It's not sustainable. It's never been sustainable. The question is the fallout and picking up the pieces and actually picking them up together. And I like what you said about the walls that especially the white community has built and learning to build bridges, that that requires effort, that it's not going to naturally happen because of the way that we have underground segregated our lifestyles and our communities. And before we wrap up, what I would love to do is just tell everybody what you're working on, where to find your books, your courses, find you. The baby picture on your website is adorable. Nice touch, but just give people all of your information.
- [84:16]
Jamar Tisby
I would love for folks to subscribe to my substack@jamar tisby.substack.com. it's a top 10 publication in the history category. You get all my hot takes, all my latest thoughts there. You can find my books wherever you get your books. I'm super excited because with the latest book, the Spirit of Justice, I have a young reader's version for kids 8 to 12, and I have my first picture book for kids 4 to 7 years old. It's gorgeous. So you can. I call it justice for All Generations, so you can get this. This knowledge for kids of virtually any age. So my books, wherever books are sold. And then follow me on Instagram at Jamar Tisby. Right.
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Monty
And thank you so much again for being part of this conversation. I feel like we're gonna have to do a part two, because I literally notated each chapter of the Color of Compromise, and I'm like, I have 15 questions I didn't have time for, and also maybe do like an Instagram live and kind of have these conversations where people could come, because it's just. It's such a central topic to what we're facing right now. It comes back to race and money so often. And I'm just. I'm deeply appreciative of you and your work. Your books have taught me a lot. And I, as much as I try to be very diligent and integrous about study, I keep learning more and I keep coming to my man. I didn't. I didn't even know this thing about this law that was passed or these stories and your work. And I know that it's work because authorship is intense. Your work is changing lives. And for people like me who are always. I'm always gonna be deconstructing a lifetime of this, it's in. I can't put the right amount of words to express how valuable it is.
- [86:11]
Jamar Tisby
Thank you so much. I receive that. And I'll also say to you, thank you a for making space for this conversation, and thank you also for putting words to what so many of us are experiencing. I commented on a post you did the other day, you're so good at this. Just to. Just to articulate it in such a clear way, compelling way, and it takes courage. So I want to affirm the courage that it takes to do what you do and say that. I see it. There are many, many, many, many, many followers and people who listen to you see it. And we I deeply, deeply appreciate it. So glad that we met that night. Yeah.
- [86:58]
Monty
Yeah. Right outside the hotel waiting for the.
- [87:01]
Jamar Tisby
Summit for religious gorging on some dessert for like the third night in a row. But, yeah, it was good.
- [87:06]
Monty
I know. I was like, I haven't eaten all day. I'll take some. But, yeah. Thank you again, everyone. Please go follow Jamar on all social media platforms. Visit jamar tisby.com, but specifically, go check out his substack, which I am also subscribed to. And it is wonderful. And I will see you next week on Flipping Tables.