Episode 2 | August 4, 2025
Jemar Tisby uncovers the deep spiritual and historical meaning of place, memory, and justice. From the haunting beauty of the Mississippi Delta’s cotton fields to the riverbank where Emmett Till's body was found, Tisby shows how place carries history—and how Christians are called to remember truthfully, confront complicity, and pursue justice with courage.
Ep. 2 | Jemar Tisby on History, Courage, and Place
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"Are you willing to make the sacrifices, to confront your fear and push through it, to risk losing community, straining relationships, changing jobs, losing money—all of that stuff that goes with the work of justice?"
What does it mean to be a credible witness to Christ in a world marked by racism, silence, and historical amnesia? In this profound and emotionally gripping conversation, historian and advocate Dr. Jemar Tisby joins host Nikki Toyama-Szeto to explore the intersection of faith, race, and historical memory.
From the haunting beauty of the Mississippi Delta’s cotton fields to the riverbank where Emmett Till’s body was found, Tisby shows how place carries history—and how Christians are called to remember truthfully. He challenges a truncated vision of racial reconciliation and calls for courageous, justice-oriented discipleship rooted in history and community.
Tisby shares his personal journey through white evangelicalism, the Black church tradition, and a deeper encounter with Jesus that sustains his work. This episode is a call to courageous presence, anti-racist action, and radical hospitality. It’s a vision for church not just as a place of belonging, but of bold and truthful healing.
Racism persists not because of extremists—but because of the people who tolerate it.
Jemar Tisby is the author of The Color of Compromise and How to Fight Racism, and founder of The Witness: A Black Christian Collective. He is the host of Pass the Mic.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto is the host of Credible Witness, and is executive director of Christians for Social Action, equipping the church to pursue justice and follow Jesus in the tension of our times.
Listen to Jemar, Nikki, and Mark Labberton in the Introduction episode of Credible Witness, “Staying with Jesus When the Church’s Credibility Is at Stake.”
Jemar Tisby says: “We don’t have a how-to problem, we have a want-to problem. That’s it. Because I tell people all the time, listen, if I gave you five minutes, you could come up with a list of a dozen things, really helpful things that we could do to fight racism and create more equity. That’s not the issue of how. How to is not the issue. The issue is: Will you do that? Are you willing to do that? Are you willing to make the sacrifices, to confront your fear and push through it, to risk losing community, straining relationships, changing jobs, losing money—all of that stuff that goes with the work of justice?”
Credible Witness is brought to you by the Rethinking Church Initiative. Hosted by Nikki Toyama-Szeto. Produced by Mark Labberton, Sarey Martin Concepción, and Evan Rosa
Jemar Tisby: I didn’t realize the importance of place, I don’t think until I moved to the deep south. I grew up north of Chicago, so Midwest kid born and raised. You can never talk me down from saying Michael Jordan is the greatest of all time the GOAT.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: the greatest—fellow Chicagoan.
Jemar Tisby: So that is deeply, deeply embedded in my psyche.
Place was important in that sense. Then join Teach for America, and that’s how I got to the Mississippi Delta on the Arkansas side Play. Called Phillips County. I was in Helena, Arkansas, and there’s racism everywhere. I say Bigotry has no boundaries. It doesn’t stop at the Mason Dixon line.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Dr. Jemar Tisby’s historical perspectives on race in the south help us understand the significance of place, but more than just geographic location or planning your next long drive, more than just sticking pins in a map or your favorite places to go.
Jemar Tisby: There, there are many different Souths. There’s not one south, it’s plural, and the Delta one author called it the most Southern Place on Earth.
It, it is just the United States in concentrated form everything that’s present everywhere else. You see it in stark relief there. We’re talking about place, the delta is cotton country.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Yes.
Jemar Tisby: I had only seen pictures of cotton before I moved down south. But you go down there and what I didn’t know is cotton blooms late.
It it, it’s late summer into the fall. They’re, they might be harvesting up until early November. And when the fields are in full bloom, it’s acres and acres and acres of these white, fluffy fields.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Wow.
Jemar Tisby: It’s actually beautiful, but it’s also haunted. Because you remember that not that long ago, people who look like me, people of African descent in particular, are picking that cotton and enslaved, or after that it’s sharecropping.
But it is a site unlike any I’ve ever seen, and it is. A crop, a plant that tells so much of our nation’s history. So there’s just, I, I can go on and on about how these parts of the south these places shaped me, but it is truly crucial to both my racial and religious development.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Jemar shows us that places have meaning, and of course we know this in our bones.
Thinking back to the house you grew up in, where you were standing when you met the love of your life, the gravestone of a lost dear one, and on from there to places of. Public memory. The holy ground of the 9/11 Memorial in New York City, the Lorraine Motel, where Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Was murdered.
A deep meaning permeates the ground, fills the atmosphere, calls us back to these places to remember the past rightly, to do justice in the present and to walk forward humbly into a hopeful future. Your experience in the Mississippi Delta, what’s one way that. You continue to carry some of that place with you
Jemar Tisby: on the positive front.
Living in the Delta reinforced or introduced to me anew the importance of history. Honestly, I was so ignorant. It wasn’t until I moved down to the delta that I ever heard. Of a woman like Fannie Lou Hamer, who has now become one of my historical heroes. She was born into a sharecropping family, the 20th of 20 children.
She married a sharecropper. She would’ve lived and died in obscurity, had not. She volunteered to go register to vote after she heard a presentation. At her church, William Chapel Missionary Baptist Church in in Ruleville, Mississippi. And then she goes on to this illustrious, remarkable, courageous career of racial justice, activism, voting rights, anti-poverty, all of that stuff.
I was like, I should have known this. I feel like. I needed to know this long ago, and so that started me on the journey that eventually led me to getting a PhD in history at the University of Mississippi. I don’t know if I would’ve placed that much importance on history if I wasn’t living in a place where it was so physically present.
Everywhere you went.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: I’m Nikki Toyama-Szeto, and this is Credible Witness, A collection of stories and wisdom from faithful people, wrestling with and bearing witness to the credibility of Christian life today. Each episode is an invitation to listen generously and courageously. To one person, navigating social tension and moral complexity, negotiating doubts, struggles and fears, overcoming obstacles, and pursuing justice and living out the convictions of their faith.
And every voice reminds us that the church is called to be a credible witness to Christ, a living reality of hope, justice. Truth and love.
What is the place of meaning that shows you the meaning of place? For me, it’s a journey to a place like Manzanar, where the Japanese were turned during World War ii. It’s a journey to my grandmother’s backyard, these places that feel almost sacred, places of memory, of significance. These places are complicated places.
Or sometimes they’re profoundly simple, but are steeped thick with meaning, memory, and sometimes love. In this interview with Jemar Tisby, we talk about race and about history and how places speak to us, and one of the things that it called to mind was the way that places can change in their meaning, and we might not even recognize that.
In 2017, when the Unite the Right Rally happened in Charlottesville, it was a moment where the border moved over the people. I have this friend who lives in New Mexico and people ask her, when did you come to America? And often she’ll say, I didn’t come to America. The border for the country moved over us.
That’s something of what happened in that moment in our cultural history. With that rally that happened in Charlottesville, churches stayed in the same places. They did the same things, but their understanding of race, the border had moved over them and the place where they always were was suddenly a different place.
The American is sometimes seen as being a church that is ahistorical a church with a short-term memory. But how much rich history there is for us to discover. In this episode with Jemar Tisby, we talk about his experiences growing up, black and white churches, the history of racial justice through the lens of Christian culture, how racism persists to this day in Christian America.
And what we might become collectively. He talks to us about what happens when we allow the power of history to pull out empathy into human communities and how places aren’t neutral, that they shape who we are individually. What is that place of meaning? That shows us the meaning of place. Dr. Jemar Tisby, thank you so much for joining us in this conversation.
Jemar Tisby: Of course. I’m excited to talk with you
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: to really highlight the significance of place and telling the truth about the meaning of place in our racial history. Jemar told me the story of Emmett Till. When I first went to the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture, I was struck because the only place.
That you can’t take a picture, and the only place where silence is requested is at that memorial for Emmett Till in 1955. At just 14 years old, Emmett was abducted, tortured, and ultimately lynched for whistling at a woman passing by.
Jemar Tisby: So Nikki, again, I mean, I love that you asked about place because. One of the clearest examples for me about the importance of place is when I went to the River Bank, where they pulled Emmett Till’s bloated body out of the river.
And of course, Emmett Till was lynched in 1955 for the cardinal sin of, uh, whistling at a white woman, uh, supposedly. So, you know, he was kidnapped from his, uh, relative’s house and he was taken and tortured. Mm-hmm. Uh, severely beaten and ended up getting shot and killed. And then they attached a, uh, cotton gin fan.
Mm-hmm. Cotton gins where they process cotton and they have these heavy, heavy fans. They, they wrapped that around him with barbed wire, dumped his body in the river, hopefully never to be found. But it was found a few days later, unrecognizable
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: after he was found. His mother Mamie till, called for an open casket.
She wanted people to see what they had done to her boy. That open casket exposed so much more than just the brutality of lynching. As tens of thousands walked past Emmett’s body, it also exposed the core of racism and violence in America.
Jemar Tisby: I got to go to the place where they found the body and, and they pull, and it’s just, it.
It seems like there’s a spirit haunting these places. Hmm. These are places that are forever marked forever scarred by the horrific event that happened there. Right? Mm. And so that,
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: mm-hmm.
Jemar Tisby: We can read about that. I’ve talked about that. But until you’re there in that place, it doesn’t impact you the same way and.
What I try to do is take these experiences, whether it’s the experience of being in a physical place like that riverbank, or the experience of learning all this history that most people don’t know, and I try to apply myself to the task of truth telling. Mm-hmm.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Mm-hmm.
Jemar Tisby: Particularly historical truth telling.
This is what I love about history. History, it’s just what happened. Mm-hmm. Like I don’t have to embellish anything. I can just say. The story and the story has a weight to it because truth has a weight to it. Yeah. I think that’s what was so compelling about Jesus to many people, said, I’m the way, the truth.
Yes. In the life. Right. And Jesus spoke truth. Mm-hmm. To whomever and whatever he was dealing with. And that was, I mean, love it or hate it, people are gonna respond differently, but you gotta respond to truth. So I think a lot about history is just about honesty and about truth telling.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Jemar’s first book, the Color of Compromise came out on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, which in its first months saw the murders of Ahmed Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. The book went on to become a bestseller, tapping into a deeply felt need for how America, particularly Christian America, needed to understand and reckon with racism.
Jemar Tisby: The genesis of that book is it actually grew out of a talk that I gave and I was in the first couple of years of, of PhD work. I was taking these classes and I was reading a book a week per class, and so I’m reading literally dozens of books about US history. All of it’s new to me, basically. And whenever we talked about race, whenever we would read about it or it was almost always negative, and then whenever Christians were in the picture, it was also almost always negative when it came to race.
This burdened me. It also angered me. So I kind of started to put together some of the stories that that had stood out to me most, and the one I always refer to. Is I was in Williamsburg, Virginia on a family vacation and history nerd that I am. We had to go to the colonial Williamsburg in the museum, and I remember coming across this one placard that said in 1667, the Virginia Assembly, this group of white Anglican men, so Christians passed a law that said baptism would not emancipate an indigenous person, a mixed race person or person of African descent.
And I froze.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Wow.
Jemar Tisby: Because the implications of them,
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: the book takes a hard look at the history of the church, a history that is far more complex and confusing as it relates to race than we may have imagined or understood, and helps us to recognize some of the socio and religious. Implications of the choices and decisions of the church and how those reverberate today in the racial relationships that we see playing out in the broader society.
Jemar Tisby: So first of all, this is showing how race, religion, and politics are all connected, right? So you have this political body, the Virginia Assembly, creating a law about religion that’s based on race. And then you have the timing of it. It’s 1667. This is almost a century before the Declaration of Independence, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness more than a century before the ratification of the Constitution.
Right? So, so this actually predates the political entity known as the United States. So there’s never not a time. When race wasn’t salient, when it wasn’t wrapped up in religion and politics, there is no era where America was great in that sense that we can go back to. So, you know, those are the stories that you just tell them and, and, and, and the story itself does the work of building in open-minded, humble people, the sense of empathy and the burden to, to change the present and the future because of our past.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: You know, in, in your book, I think you’re sort of revealing the church’s role in our racialized history in in America, in the American Church, what’s one or two things you think every Christian should understand about the American Church’s history?
Jemar Tisby: The very frustrating resilience of racism comes not from. The extremists, which by definition are a very small minority, five 10% of the total population, the persistence of racism comes from the much larger group of people who tolerate it. This is what the thesis of the book is, is that. The most egregious acts of racism happened within a context of compromise.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Hmm.
Jemar Tisby: And complicity. So I opened the book with this, the, the story of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing where four little girls are killed. There’s a handful of people who are actively involved in the planning and execution of that act of racial terrorism, but by that time, the city of Birmingham was already known as Bombingham.
So another, there, there, there was a black neighborhood that was nicknamed Dynamite Hill. So it wasn’t the first time something like this had happened, and the question is, why after the first time wasn’t there such an outcry that it never happened again? What, what, what happens is there are people in the mushy middle who are not actively, you know, committing these racial terrorist acts, but they’re also not actively fighting against them.
And that’s, that’s the problem that we have. There’s always gonna be the, the folks on the extreme who do the worst acts. The question for the rest of us is, will we tolerate it? Will we actively push against it, or will we try to absolve ourselves and say, oh, well that was awful, but that’s not me.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Oh, wow.
Jemar Tisby: And I don’t have any responsibility or anything to do with that. So that’s, that’s the argument I try to make in the book, is that there are a lot of horrendous things that go down, but maybe even worse, is how people who think of themselves as good upstanding people, how we let it happen.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Jemar suggests that the persistence of racism comes. From those who are willing to tolerate it. He’s agitating for a movement to engage and connect and enliven the moral senses of good people who, despite their goodness historically, have done nothing in response to the moral atrocities of racism. He’s trying to help people who might be tempted to do nothing to do something.
This phenomenon isn’t new and it isn’t unique to Christianity, but neither are Christians impervious. To it, and social psychologists have a term for this. It’s called the bystander effect. It’s the same phenomenon that led to a nation of German Christians standing by, while Jews were persecuted and murdered during World War ii.
It’s the belief based on the perceived lack of concern in others. If everyone around me seems to be okay with it, then what reason do I have to resist it? But it’s also based on a fallacy that Jemar explained to me the no true Scotsman fallacy. The idea that we can distance ourselves from the perpetrators of racism, they’re not really Christians, and explain away the need to resist.
To reform or to change.
Jemar Tisby: What I see a lot, particularly in the church, is a distancing. So, okay. Uh, you know, I think in philosophy or logic, they call it the no true Scotsman fallacy, where they’ll say those types of Christians who are clearly racist at the extremes. Uhhuh, they’re not really Christians. Ah, yes, yes. Uhhuh. So there’s a distancing because if they’re not really Christians, then it’s not our problem.
We don’t have to deal with it in our churches or our communities or our circles. Right? That those are, those are the outliers, the lone wolves, the whatevers, right? The, the other form of distancing is simply to say, well, you know, I don’t use racial slurs. I have cordial relationships with, you know, people of cross racism, ethnicities.
I’m not a racist. And distancing. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, particularly white people, right? Let’s just be honest. Particularly distancing themselves from the fact that you can participate and benefit from the privileges of whiteness without yourself. Mm-hmm. Saying or doing, uh, these overt acts of racism. This is why the, the, the term anti-racist, I think has currency even though it’s been vilified and, you know, commodified, even Beverly, Daniel Tatum in her book, why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria uses the, the ped way analogy.
So, I mean, airports all the time, and they have these pedways mm-hmm. Which are these, you know, human conveyor belts, right? Yes. And, and, and when you get on the ped way, you can walk with the conveyor belt and get to where you’re going faster. That’s the equivalent of being an active racist.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Mm-hmm.
Jemar Tisby: Or you can get on the ped way and not move at all.
But the, the, the pedway’s still moving. You’re still heading in the same direction. Yes. Those are the passive racists. They’re not actively going with it. But they’re not resisting it. Yes. And the momentum of society is a racist, white supremacist. It’s still going with the status quo. What we need are people who actually not go with it, not stand still, but turn around and walk the opposite direction, and that’s an anti-racist.
Mm-hmm. So, so that’s where we are. My ministry is trying to get those folks who think they’re being good people because they’re, they’re not actively taking steps to promote racism, but they’re actually not actually mm-hmm. Taking steps to dismantle racism either. How can we get them to turn around and walk the other direction?
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: You know, as I’m hearing your story, I’m not sure what to make of the fact that the early seeds of your faith. We’re in the context of a white evangelical church.
Jemar Tisby: I don’t know what to make of it either, Nikki. The one thing I can say, God doesn’t write a boring story. That’s all. That’s all I can say. Yeah.
My, my sort of Christian origin story or my conversion story, number one, my family wasn’t all that religious went to church on and off, but really more off than on, and it, it just wasn’t a priority in our household. There was no hostility to it. It just wasn’t on the radar. That being said. Uh huh. I went to school kindergarten through eighth grade at a Catholic school, and so I’m used to seeing crucifixes.
I had nuns for teachers and administrators, so Uhhuh, we had religion class. We went to mass. There’s God talk all around. So I was, I was acquainted with the divine, yes. But I didn’t really make my faith my own until high school. And there was this dude named TOF and white guy, and he, he befriended me and, and he always stuck out to me because.
He, he, he was very, very assiduous and conscientious about not cheating on his homework, and he was also uhhuh one of the very few high school kids who didn’t curse or swear. And I was like, man, this guy, this sounds right. He sounds like Ned Flanders. Uhhuh. And I come to find out that it’s ’cause he’s a Christian and he’s taking his faith seriously.
And eventually he invites me to youth group, which they did. Youth group, well they had food, they had sports, they had girls like everything a high school kid wants. And then they would have these sermonettes that you would would’ve to sit down and listen to for a little while before you went back to the games of Chubby Bunny and you stuff, all these marshmallows in your mouth.
Yes. Um, but, but somewhere along the line it made sense. And what I was looking for was a sense of identity. Mm. And I found that in the Bible, in Jesus and this, you know, way to live, right? So I I, it was a classic evangelical conversion. I prayed the sinner’s prayer, Nikki, they, they, they sat me down and I, I confessed my sins and I gave my life to Christ.
And it was textbook. But thank God it was real. It was real. And, and, and here’s my recent revelation. The work that I do for racial justice doesn’t come from a place of having such negative experience of Christian community. It comes from a place of having such a positive experience of Christian community.
When I first became a Christian in high school and in that youth group, it was the first time, you know, when you’re in high school you, you like the cafeteria is the perfect. Like microcosm, you’ve got the table four, the jocks and the theater kids, and the popular kids, and the skaters and all that. I did.
If I wandered into that proverbial cafeteria, I didn’t know where to sit. I did not know my place. I didn’t know where I fit. This white Evangelical youth group is the first place where I felt welcomed and accepted and like I had a place. But here’s the twist. To the extent that I ever felt not welcomed, accepted, or, or had a place, it was because of race.
Ah, so my mission is to make sure that that racism is never a barrier to authentic community and belonging.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Jemar described his mission in a beautiful way that I wanted to highlight. To make sure racism is never a barrier to community and belonging. I love his expression of this, but I also find it a place of grief and of mourning.
Racism just is. That barrier to community and belonging that has infected so much of human history and still haunts us today. And that word haunting, it really is important. It’s often in the ways that people can’t talk about racism, that it does its most damage.
Jemar Tisby: Here’s how race showed up. It didn’t show up.
That’s how race showed up. Mm-hmm. So, so it wasn’t like people were saying, Ew, we don’t wanna play with you, you’re black. No, that’s not, that’s not happening. All right. Yeah. It’s, it’s more like we don’t talk about it. We don’t pay. It’s, it’s as if it doesn’t exist. But it was very real for me because you’re in a very social situation.
Right. It, it was way worse for the black women in our group. The handful that there were only ever lasted a few weeks because it was just such a, it just such not an affirming kind of environment, not through any overt action, but again, through the compromise, through the complicity, through the, the way we’re gonna address racism is to be colorblind and pretend like none of these issues exist.
Yes. So none of my world seemed to exist in this world and that’s how. I was like, I don’t feel seen.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: That’s so interesting. So you had a sense of belonging in that place. And at the same time, you’re very much feeling unseat. Yes, yes, yes.
In the 1990s and early two thousands, there was a bloom of new churches that branded themselves multiethnic churches. But what exactly did that mean? It definitely depends on the church, but usually it meant a commitment to inclusion and shared space. An effort to reach across the aisle from one culture to another, from one neighborhood to another.
To look for commonality, but Jemar points out one of the pitfalls, a truncated version of reconciliation.
Jemar Tisby: Never in the history of this country did we have a sort of mass movement that celebrated multi-ethnic churches. Right, like there was toleration. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. At different points. Mm-hmm. And there were experiments here and there. Yes. But it wasn’t until, yeah, kind of the mid nineties where it became. A, a mission and a goal.
And you remember you would have church planters Yes. And church planting groups that was set out to be a multi-ethnic, multiracial, multicultural church, whatever word they wanted to do. That’s right. That, that hadn’t happened before. Yeah. Um, not on a large and consistent scale. And so it’s from the, the, the nineties to Uhhuh, the early 2000 tens is when you get a tripling.
Of the number of churches designated multi-ethnic, where no single ethnic group has more than 80%. Right. Is that right? That is new and novel. So I’m, I’m swept up in this, right. This people are talking about racial reconciliation. Mid nineties is when the Southern Baptist finally repent of their pro-slavery roots 150 years later.
Mm-hmm. Um. You have the, the, the so-called Memphis Miracle where Pentecostals White and black come together and you have a, this dramatic moment on stage where a white pastor washes the feet of a black pastor in, in repentance and an attempt at at, at reunification and reconciliation. So all of this is happening in, in that era.
The approach though. Is purely relational. Hey, if we just get people of different hues in the pews, then racism will go away.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Oh, yes.
Jemar Tisby: Without addressing any of the deeper systemic or structural issues, right? There’s no awareness of that. So that’s where this approach of many white evangelicals has come from.
I haven’t given up on the word reconciliation properly. Understood. And reconciliation is a Bible word, so I haven’t given up on that. But evangelical racial reconciliation was a truncated definition of reconciliation. By which I mean they thought that, and still many do think that the primary problem of racism is interpersonal and tud.
Mm. It’s one person not liking someone else. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Of what they look like or their background. Right. And so how does that manifest? Mm-hmm. It’s, it’s, you know, you use the n word or you segregate or you say bad things about them. Right. And so what’s the solution if that’s the problem? Mm-hmm. Well, I’m nice to black people and some of my best friends are black, and I don’t, I, you know, I don’t have any hate in my heart for, for different people.
And that means I’m not racist, and that’s all we need to do. Well. I would say keep that because I don’t want you calling me names and I don’t want you being mean to me, so let’s keep that, but we also need to add to it. The fact that racism, uhhuh is embedded in policies and laws and the ways we interact with one another.
So just one example. Mm. I’m at a historically black college. Mm-hmm. Historically, black colleges are only 3% of total, uh, colleges and universities, and yet we produce 20% of all. Graduates and the proportions are massively higher in the 80%. Is that right? For black engineers, doctors and lawyers? Right.
They’re, they’re coming from HBCUs, but we’ve also historically been underfunded to the point where there are. More predominantly white colleges and universities that have a, an endowment of a billion dollars or more than there are HBCU total. So there’s 142 PWIs that have billion dollar or more endowments.
There are zero HBCUs that have billion dollar or more endowments, and that’s a lifeblood. Of a higher ed institution. Right. Oh wow. So, um, yes, what do we do about that? Because your sermon’s not addressing that, you know, racial reconciliation Sunday’s not addressing that. Your bible study’s not addressing that.
That’s why I switched. Yes. From using racial reconciliation nomenclature to racial justice. Mm-hmm. Because to me, racial justice speaks one to the structural aspect of racism, and two, it speaks to what is owed. Mm. This is not charity. Mm, this is not, you know, just mm-hmm. Out of the kindness and generosity of our hearts, we’re going to give people of color this, we’re going to give black people that.
No, it is what is owed because an injustice has occurred, uh, due to racism and white supremacy.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: The ways this truncated reconciliation impacts the world is to allow the systems of injustice to persist this thin surface level reconciliation person to person. Jemar thinks needs to mature into a robust sense of restorative justice.
He narrated for me some of the steps that revealed the shallowness of the multi-ethnic reconciliation movements by highlighting some of the flashbulb memories. So many of us can now remember over the past two decades of racially inflected cultural moments.
Jemar Tisby: So as a historian, uh, you know, basically all we look at is change over time and continuity over time as well.
I, I think it’s really significant because. Like I said, I don’t think historically in the United States there’s ever been a movement, like the Evangelical Racial Reconciliation Movement and the multi-ethnic church movement, which only lasted I, in my view, about 20, 25 years or so, but it just doesn’t seem to have the same energy behind it because there’s been so much disillusionment.
So, you know, you asked about why, why, why was significant in these decades? Well, it was. We thought we were really making progress and
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: mm-hmm. Yes. We
Jemar Tisby: thought we had this thing not licked, but at least we were, we were moving in the right direction. But what it was, I’ve heard people say, like Andre Henry has said, um, these past several years have been apocalyptic.
In the classic sense apocalypse means to reveal. Mm-hmm. Right. So. These past few years have been revelatory in that racial reconciliation, multi-ethnic church movement was really surface level. Mm-hmm. It was, it was very mm-hmm. Aesthetic. I would say it was about the visual. Yes. Yes. In and, and, and I’m not, yes, I’m not casting dispersions on the motives of people, but I think our understanding Sure.
And our practice wasn’t, it couldn’t match the level of, of our hopes and aspirations. For? For racial reconciliation or justice. Yes. And that was revealed in things like for me, the first rumblings were the election of President Obama. Yes. Yes. Because now you have a biracial black man in the highest office, highest elected office.
Something that certain white people never thought could happen, and were absolutely terrified when it did. Yes. Like what is happening? This is when you get the rise of what was the tea party? And then that tea party morphs into the white Christian nationalists of today, in my view. And then the next rumbling was Trayvon Martin.
This was one of the first modern, I’ll say in the 2010s instances of, you know, a really clear, unjust murder of a black person because of racial profiling. Mm-hmm. Then, and, and you get these callous responses from, uh, many white Christians’, just like, well, he deserved it, or, you know, it was an isolated incident or whatever it was.
Minimizing black pain is what it amounted to. Then you get Mike Brown. Yes. In August, 2014 and Black Lives Matter. And then, oh man, we, we have lived through some stuff y’all, because right on the heels of that 2015 June is when Trump announces his intention to run for the Republican nomination for President.
So we always. Peg that historically as November, 2016, but we had a year and a half of that leading up to the election. All of that leads to this revelation that what we thought of as racial reconciliation was only an inch deep and a mile wide, and that when it came to actual issues of justice, which would affect our politics, which would affect our pocketbooks, we hadn’t done the work we needed to do.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: It said that history belongs to those who win. But what could that possibly mean? Seen through the gospel? What is the significance of history in the subversive kingdom that Jesus lived and taught? I asked Jemar about the battle for history and who gets to tell the story. Usually history can be commonly understood, but I’ve been surprised in our wider society and also I think within our churches that history has now become contentious.
Yep. What does that mean to a historian and what does that be to Christian churches about this sort of, this fight over history and and whose narrative prevails.
Jemar Tisby: Thank you. ’cause I think that’s just such an important topic that, that we understand history again, the study of history is studying change in continuity over time.
So there’s actually continuity in these battles for history. And one of the clearest examples is after the Civil War, you get the rise of these ideology called the lost cause. Basically picture gone with the wind. So Gone With The Wind, the movie okay, is a great example of Lost cause mythology because what is it?
It’s this beautiful plantation mansion. There’s this, there’s Scarlett O’Hara, yes. As this sacred white woman, right? Who’s the pinnacle of beauty and yes, elegance and grace and all of that. You also have. The plantation economy filled with happy black slaves. Mm. You have, um, Hattie McDaniel’s character who is, you know, sort of mm-hmm.
Comic relief, simple minded, wise in a folksy kind of way. And everyone’s cared for, even though they’re enslaved, right. That’s how the Lost Cause depicts the Antebellum South. So what the Lost cause was, was. A revisionist history to sanitize history and to elevate the cause of the south as we reluctantly entered the Civil War because of these invasive, authoritarian, intrusive, intrusive northerners, and we nobly went to battle to protect our way of life.
And that’s what the Civil War was about. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That’s the cause that we lost and, and this was taught in schools. There’s something called the Dunning School named after a professor of history at Columbia University and Ivy League School, who’s promulgating this teaching. Right. So this is actually what’s being taught in textbooks and in schools and to this day.
Is being taught in certain circles. So it’s, it’s not novel in that sense that, that, that, that we argue over the accuracy of history and that there’s an intentional obfuscating and reworking and distortion of history. But what we are seeing is another iteration of that, and it’s novel because of technology.
Where you have social media, you have video, you have all of these ways to get this false information out there. That’s much harder for people who aren’t trained in or well-versed in history to discern and cut through. And so you have misinformation being able to replicate at exponential rates that we’ve never before seen in history.
So in many ways it’s harder to deal with. Than previous Obfuscations of the past.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Jemar is in such a unique position and authority bringing American history, a history for better or worse that is intertwined with Christianity to bear on a movement to pursue racial justice. Today as an educator and storyteller, he hopes to instill a new stalwart and grounded sense of courage to lay bare the failures of the past.
To pursue an accountable justice and an active intentional approach to public faith. But that history that draws out empathy isn’t meant to stay an idea or an emotion. It’s meant to move out into public action, a plan that can reach down into individual lives. To impact a collective system,
Jemar Tisby: courage.
Courage is the invitation at this moment. The theologians and bible scholars out there can, can, can give the accurate, uh, stats on this, but I believe I’ve heard it said the most often repeated command in the Bible is don’t be afraid.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Mm.
Jemar Tisby: Some version of that, I often go back to Joshua chapter one, where three times in the first nine verses God begins by, by telling Joshua, he just states the facts.
Moses, my servant is dead. Now it’s on you Joshua. And Joshua is understandably intimidated mm-hmm. By the prospect mm-hmm. Of leading all of Israel, not just around the desert like Moses did, but into the promised land. He’s gotta literally cross over the Jordan. And, and, and then three times in those first nine verse, God says to Joshua, uh, strong and courageous.
Be strong and very courageous. Be strong and courageous. And that is the refrain. That I find myself, uh, founding again and again among the church, among Christians when it comes to any issue of justice, but particularly this issue of racial justice, which I focus on the call, is courage. And so I wrote a whole book called How to Fight Racism.
But the punchline is this, I give dozens of practical suggestions. So when people ask, well what do we do? Here’s a whole book. Here’s a whole framework of the arc of racial, the arc of racial justice that you can use. But here’s the thing, we don’t have a how to problem. We have a want to problem. That’s it.
’cause I tell people all the time, listen, if I gave you five minutes, you could come up with a list of a dozen things. Really helpful things that we could do to fight racism and create more equity. That’s not the issue of how, that’s not how to, is not the issue. The issue is is will you do that? Are you willing to do that?
Are you, are you, are you willing to make the sacrifices to confront your fear and push through it? To risk, uh, losing community, straining relationships, uh, changing jobs, losing money, all of that stuff that goes with the work of justice. And so mm-hmm. The charge, the call, the message, the refrain to the church, and this is to the coalition of the willing, obviously.
The people who recognize racism is a problem. Yes. That it’s not just a problem of the past, that is a problem right now. Yes. The call to myself and to us as the people of God is a call to courage.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Mm. What would be the three or four things that you would write about what you could do to fight racism today?
Jemar Tisby: To boil it down. Make a plan. So one of the things that I I say is the difference between a dream and a goal is a plan.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Mm mm.
Jemar Tisby: Why does it feel for many people like MLK’s Dream is still just a dream. Well, have we planned around it? Mm. I tend not to offer specific suggestions, but I offer this framework, which I referenced, the Arc of Racial Justice, and that is an acronym that stands for awareness, relationships, commitment.
So those will be the three things I write down. And then as far as a plan in the next I, I like thinking short term, I would say under the awareness category in the next three months. What books are you gonna read? What documentaries are you gonna watch? What you know conference? Are you gonna go to? What?
What are you gonna do? Specific concrete actions you’re gonna do to build your awareness about race, racism, and white supremacy. Then under relationships, this is the beating heart of racial justice. I think one of the things that activists might lose sight of is in their zeal to change laws and policies, which need to happen to, to attack the structural inequities.
We sort of forget that it’s ultimately about. People, individuals made in the image of God and in the relational aspects. So, so the call to people of color is solidarity with one another. Oh, I love getting together with people of, of Asian descent because statistically in a hundred friends scenario, black people have zero Asian friends.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Hmm.
Jemar Tisby: Sociologically speaking, we are not together. Um, the same with people of Latin American descent, indigenous folks, like when people of color get together. We are. It’s a force multiplier, right? Yes. So that’s relational for us. Yes. How do we do that though? Yes. You know, how do we organize that and structure that for white folks?
It’s, you all spent centuries building walls. Now you’ve gotta break those walls down and build bridges, and you have to actually be in meaningful relationship with people who are different. Yes. But how do you do that? Where are you gonna shop? Where are you gonna send your kids to school? Where are you gonna live?
How are you gonna put yourself in the way of that day? Mm-hmm. And then the third thing is, mm-hmm. Commitment, by which I mean not just staying the course, but committing to changing the laws and policies and structures that create and perpetuate racial inequality. So. These are voting campaigns I’m working with.
Mm-hmm. Equal Justice, USA, which we’re trying to abolish the death penalty nationwide. You know, it’s, it’s the things that affect groups of people. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But you can’t do everything. But what, what will you do? What can you do locally, nationally, wherever. Yes. That’s what I would. Put down,
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: you know, um, you had so many opportunities to give up or to not press in, um, but of an extraordinary resilience to your moving forward and the work that you’re doing. Can you tell us a little bit about where that comes from?
Jemar Tisby: It, the Holy Spirit, it’s all of God is a couple things. One, because the black Christian tradition.
Informs my outlook. Mm. So the black church is historically speaking, the Christian tradition that arose in direct opposition to white supremacy. Uh, one of the things that I say is there would be no black church without racism in the white church.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Wow.
Jemar Tisby: Uh, the reason we needed black churches is because we didn’t want to be second class citizens in the household of God, which is how we were being treated.
So we had to go form our own churches and denominations and fellowships specifically because of racism. Right. So guess what that means? There is a rich Yes. Theological ecclesiastical Sermonic tradition of anti-racism embedded in the black Christian tradition. So I always had, as you do a wider aperture of what constitutes Christianity.
I’m very, very saddened by people who get burned in white churches, whether mainline Catholic, Protestant, and then walk away from Jesus altogether, because guess what? There are. So many more expressions of Christianity out there that go beyond this, this literally whitewashed world of, of what it means to follow Jesus.
And I think that when people look at the tradition of justice in these other faith communities, it might actually encourage them, right? It might actually keep them, yes. In the faith. So that’s one thing. But the other thing. Is a, is a really mushy heart kind of a thing, and it’s gonna sound all like, holy, whatever.
But this is what I know from experience. My experience is this. After, uh, the, the, the people of Israel crossed over, uh, red Sea. Out of Egypt, they didn’t immediately get to promise. Mm-hmm. The promised land.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Mm-hmm.
Jemar Tisby: They had a wilderness wandering and it was hard. It was tough. You never knew from one day to the next where you were gonna be, you were living in tents, not permanent dwellings.
You had manna and, and you know, people are, uh, remembering the good old days when they had meat back in Egypt, even though they were enslaved. It was all of that. But also,
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: yes, you were
Jemar Tisby: with the assembly, you were with the community.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Huh.
Jemar Tisby: So what I found is there’s this really, really difficult process for Christians to realize.
And make a decision to leave a particular faith community, and I mean, a particular faith community, not leave Jesus, but mm-hmm. But a particular faith community. And, and when you get to that point, what’s often so difficult is, well, I don’t know what’s on the other side. I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know where I’ll, I feel like I’ll be adrift.
Mm.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: But
Jemar Tisby: when you do make that decision and you do decide to exit, and you’ll never understand it until you make this choice, is when you exit, you find other people. Who are exiting too. And the way we talk about it in the Bible is, yes, you find fellow souls, you find acts, calls us people of the way. We are also people on the way.
And so when you make that decision mm-hmm, mm-hmm. That Jesus and justice are not mutually exclusive, but are mutually constitutive. They, they, they go together. They cannot be separated. Yeah. Then you find other people with that same conviction who are also wilderness wanderers. And guess what? You are.
You’re wandering, you’re in the wilderness, but you can do it together. And it’s that togetherness that that has kept me in the faith. So for me, it was the witness and people in the witness. I was understanding that there were traditions outside of white evangelicalism, which had burned me so bad. And it was experiencing not just the community of people who followed Jesus, but it was experiencing the nearness of Jesus himself.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Hmm.
Jemar Tisby: So I mentioned before that the first chapter of Joshua in Joshua one, nine. It says Be strong and courageous, but there’s a promise attached to that for I will be with you wherever you go.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Hmm.
Jemar Tisby: And, and y’all that for I will be with you wherever you go, was always abstract and intellectual to me until I had to face this wandering.
Mm-hmm. Until I had to face this situation where I had to be strong and courageous, and then the way Jesus showed up.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Mm-hmm.
Jemar Tisby: In me and near me and ahead of me, and behind me and beside me, the, the presence of Jesus, where you really felt the power and the weight of that word, Emmanuel, which means God with us.
That’s all. Mm. I am. I am. Mm-hmm. I am. Mm-hmm. A Jesus addict. Because once you get a taste of, of that nearness of Jesus, nothing else satisfies and you just want more of it. Yes. And that’s what sort of. Pulls me and compels me and draws me into this work. In my best moments, I’m human. I, I fall and I falter.
But what I can say to those who are on the fence, should I stay? Should I go? What’s on the other side is the community of Jesus followers. And Jesus himself in a closeness and a nearness and an intimacy that you may never have experienced before.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Jim Artie, thank you so much for helping us to rethink church, helping us to look at God’s revelation through history and what it says for this moment. Thank you. Oh,
Jemar Tisby: it’s a wonderful conversation and a, a healing one, and I hope it is for, for listeners as well.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Jemar talked about how the reason that he does the anti-racist work he does is because he doesn’t want racism to be the reason that people don’t join the church. And in some ways, that’s part of the spark that started this project. Credible witness. I think I was really struck by Jemar’s comments about sticking with people and sticking with God, even when it has hurt.
As an Asian American woman, I’ve definitely received those signals. That told me I wasn’t welcome at the church, like the vacation Bible school curriculum that included racial stereotypes or walking in as an invisible person into a conference where I had been invited to speak. But Jemar’s words were an unwelcome nudge to stick with people and stick with God.
And I appreciated Jemar’s words because it helped me realize that for some who want to go deeper with God, for some who are earnestly seeking him, there are obstacles being placed. That don’t have to be there. This way of rethinking church is an act of radical hospitality. Jemar challenges us to rethink church as a place where we can practice and cultivate courage, a place of truth telling where accountability matters.
He imagines the American church as a spacious place where there’s room for history to live out in the open, not hidden. Where we wrestle with scary truths and we engage with painful and haunting memories. Because that spaciousness is built around Jesus. There is no space, no place where Jesus cannot go.
Credible witness is brought to you by the Rethinking Church Initiative. Produced and edited by Mark Labberton, Sarah Martin Concepcion, and Evan Rosa. And I’m your host, Nikki Toyama-Szeto. Thanks to Fuller Seminary, Christians for Social Action, and Brenda Salter McNeil for sharing her book title with our podcast.
Special thanks. To all of our conversation partners in the Rethinking Church Initiative and Network, both public and private, and above all, thank you for your own courageous listening and your own credible witness to the gospel. For more information, visit crediblewitness us.