Healing the wounds of racism
“We labor for a day that we may never see, and always in the face of opposition.”
Jemar Tisby is the founder of The Witness: A Black Christian Collective, the host of the Pass the Mic podcast, and the author of The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism. I caught up with him on the campus of the University of Mississippi, where he is completing his Ph.D. in history. A statue honoring James Meredith, whose enrollment in 1962 unleashed violent riots, depicts Meredith walking alone in the grass. Meanwhile, a tall statue of a Confederate soldier stands on guard at the entrance of campus. Those grounds felt like an appropriate place for a conversation about the tension of the already and the not yet when it comes to healing the wounds of racism.
You’ve been working for many years to name and dismantle racism. What led you to write The Color of Compromise?
I wrote this book because I love the church and I hate racism. The Color of Compromise names what many Christians have long felt, that there is something deeply wrong in the church when it comes to race. It aims to give people the tools to speak beyond personal frustration or discomfort, to point to a larger narrative.
