Subversive Witness

Scripture's Call to Leverage Privilege

Dominique DuBois Gilliard

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780310124047
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Learn to leverage privilege.

Privilege is a social consequence of our unwillingness to reckon with and turn from sin. But properly stewarded, it can help us see and participate in God's inbreaking kingdom. Scripture repeatedly affirms that privilege is real and declares that, rather than exploiting it for selfish gain or feeling immobilized by it, Christians have a responsibility to leverage it.

Subversive Witness asks us to grapple with privilege, indifference, and systemic sin in new ways by using biblical examples to reveal the complex nature of privilege and Christians' responsibility in stewarding it well.

Dominique DuBois Gilliard highlights several people in the Bible who understood this kingdom call. Through their stories, you will discover how to leverage privilege to:

• Resist Sin
• Stand in Solidarity with the Oppressed
• Birth Liberation
• Create Systemic Change
• Proclaim the Good News
• Generate Social Transformation

By embodying Scripture's subversive call to leverage--and at times forsake--privilege, readers will learn to love their neighbors sacrificially, enact systemic change, and grow more Christlike as citizens of God's kingdom.

CHAPTER 1

UNDERSTANDING PRIVILEGE
AND ITS POWER

I lead an immersive discipleship experience called Sankofa. This racial justice pilgrimage connects the civil rights movement to today’s fight for freedom. We sojourn to sacred places where my ancestors’ blood cries out from the ground. We explore the robust history of domestic terrorism, systemic racism, and institutional sin, and then unpack the church’s complicity. Some of our pilgrimage destinations include a home that was part of the Underground Railroad; the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where four Black little girls were killed on a Sunday morning by a bomb planted at the base of the church’s sanctuary; and the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, Alabama, the site of Bloody Sunday, where on March 7, 1965, state troopers assaulted and brutalized nonviolent protesters advocating for Black voting rights.¹ This march was led by civil rights icons like Diane Nash, Prathia Hall, Amelia Boynton (who invited Martin Luther King Jr. to come to Selma), Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Hosea Williams, and the late congressman John Lewis, who had his skull fractured by officers instigating violence during this peaceful protest.

The Edmund Pettus Bridge, however, is not just significant because of the brutality of Bloody Sunday. The bridge is important because of its location and contentious name. Edmund Pettus is regarded as a hero by many Alabamians. He was a lawyer, decorated general in the Confederate Army, and US senator for eleven years. Alabama historian Wayne Flynt describes Pettus as a man who grew up and lived “in an area full of people who oppose secession. He is going against the grain. He’s not a reluctant pragmatist, brought to secession to go along with the people. He’s a true believer.”² In the months prior to the Civil War, Pettus encouraged his older brother, John, who was the governor of Mississippi, to have the state leave the Union and join the Confederacy. Pettus’s ardent support of white supremacy gave rise to his political career and climaxed with him being appointed the Grand Dragon of the Alabama Klan—its highest-ranking official.

The Edmund Pettus Bridge was constructed over the Alabama River, a vitally important route for Alabama’s slave economy. The bridge was dedicated to Pettus in 1940, thirty-three years after his death. Naming the bridge after Pettus was not just an act of veneration memorializing a Civil War hero; it was an intentional act of violence intended to further the Lost Cause myth and remind Black people of their subordinate place.

Selma is and has been a mostly Black city, and Flynt says naming the bridge after Pettus was a “sort of in-your-face reminder of who runs this place.”³ Flynt says Selma “would’ve been a place where place names [like the name of this prominent bridge] were about [Black people’s] degradation.”⁴ John Giggie, a history professor at the University of Alabama, affirms Flynt’s conclusion, explaining, “The bridge was named for him, in part, to memorialize his history, of restraining and imprisoning African-Americans in their quest for freedom after the Civil War.”⁵

Flynt explains that even if Pettus never enacted violence himself, “there’s really no way of excluding Edmund Pettus of responsibility from the violence. He helps organize it, he helps protect it, and he does not seek to prosecute anyone who did it.”⁶ And Giggie writes, “Pettus became for Alabama’s white citizens in the decades after the Civil War, a living testament to the power of whites to sculpt a society modeled after slave society.”⁷

The fact that someone with this immoral legacy has had a monument standing in his honor for more than eighty years illuminates the indelible link between privilege and power. Those with privilege have the authority to tell, alter, and erase history. Privilege affords those who possess it the ability to recast narratives, nations, and false gods in their own image. While I firmly believe that no person should be forever defined by their worst deed, I also know that the Bible calls us to confess, lament over, and repent of our sins.

At an event honoring John Lewis in Alabama, Caroline Randall Williams, a direct descendent of Pettus, said,

We name things after honorable Americans to commemorate their legacies. That bridge is named after a treasonous American who cultivated and prospered from systems of degradation and oppression before and after the Civil War. We need to rename the bridge because we need to honor an American hero, a man who made that bridge a place worth remembering. John Lewis secured that bridge’s place on the right side of history. We are not a people that were made to cling to relics of the past at the cost of our hope for the future. Renaming the bridge in John Lewis’s honor would be a testament to the capacity for progress, the right-mindedness and striving toward freedom that are at the heart of what’s best about the American spirit.⁸

Unchecked, privilege fosters mythology, emboldening an ahistorical theology and worldview. It allows whitewashed history to be canonized and institutionalized, immoral men to be venerated and revered, and nations to live in denial and unrepentant sin. Bryan Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, explains how this has played out in the US.

In Rwanda, no one who comes there is allowed to spend time there without hearing about the genocide. In Germany, there is a commitment to remind people about the pain and suffering of the Holocaust. In the United States, it is the opposite. Not only are we not committed to telling [the] truth about slavery, lynching, and segregation, we have actually erected an iconography about a false story: how grand and glorious the 19th century was; how honorable the architects and defenders of slavery were; how fantastic it was to live in the first half of the 20th century; and how noble these elected leaders were while preaching segregation forever, or war.⁹

Unbridled privilege emboldens immaturity, trivializes oppression, and derails our pursuit of shalom. When we are not honest about what divides us, reconciliation becomes a facade for sustaining the status quo, and the body of Christ becomes a place where “Peace, peace,” is proclaimed when there is no peace.

Stevenson expounds on the relationship between truth and reconciliation.

I think we all want reconciliation. We want peace, we want understanding, we want redemption—all of these wonderful things. But we haven’t committed ourselves to truth-telling. Truth and reconciliation are not simultaneous. They are sequential. Tell the truth first, and it’s the truth that motivates you to understand what it will take to recover, repair, endure—to reconcile.¹⁰

The body of Christ is called to be a signpost of God’s love, mercy, and justice in the world. We cannot fulfill this calling if we continue to live in denial and unrepentant sin. We need truth to live into our created purpose and to move forward together.

Jesus said in John 8:32, “The truth will set you free.” Truth empowers the church to establish a common memory and helps us realize how we have conformed to the patterns of this world. Georges Erasmus, a First Nations leader from Canada, explained why establishing a common memory is so important. He said, “Where common memory is lacking, where people do not share in the same past, there can be no real community. Where community is to be formed, common memory must be created.”¹¹ As a covenant people, memory roots us in God’s promises, prompts us to remember God’s sovereignty, and reminds us of our identity in Christ. We were created for a purpose: to worship God, making our Creator’s name known and love shown throughout the world; fulfilling the Great Commission and the Greatest Commandment.

Legislative, Economic, and Educational Privilege

Privilege comes in many forms, and not every manifestation holds the same social currency. In the United States, race, gender, citizenship, class, education, sexual orientation, and able-bodiedness have been the chief expressions of privilege, with race, gender, citizenship, and class historically holding the most weight. Privilege is also stackable, meaning a person can possess multiple privileges at once. For example, initially only free, landowning, white men could be US citizens. Individuals who possessed five privileges—status (freedom), class, race, gender, and citizenship—were politically valued and socioeconomically subsidized over and against all others. That means that from its inception the US gave wealthy white men access to property, power, resources, and wealth that all other people were denied for nearly 144 years.

Moreover, after this period of exclusive access, white people were democratically endowed with unique access to important resources until at least 1965. This unique access has endowed most white children with the privilege of growing up in secure neighborhoods with premium amenities, matriculating in superior schools, and having access to more lucrative vocational opportunities. It has also included a criminal justice system that has legislated with a white bias. The vestiges of this history of systemic injustice linger and continue to undermine our proclamation of “liberty and justice for all.”

For example, school funding in the US derives from three sources. While the percentages vary from state to state, generally 45 percent of a local school’s funding comes from local property taxes, 45 percent comes from state funding, and 10 percent comes from federal funding.¹² Property values vary immensely from neighborhood to neighborhood and district to district. With that variance come vacillating tax revenues. These economic disparities create inequalities regarding access to quality education nationwide. Consequently, since the early 1970s, nearly every state has seen at least one lawsuit concerning school funding and equity.

A recent study examined the 13,000 traditional public school districts in the US and found about 7,600 where more than 75 percent of students were white and about 1,200 where more than 75 percent of students were nonwhite. While the nonwhite school districts were much larger (usually located in large cities) than the white districts, the two groups had nearly the same number of students: 12.8 million children in nonwhite districts and 12.5 million in white districts.¹³

However, in 2016 nonwhite districts received nearly $54 billion in local tax dollars—or about $4,500 per student—while white school districts, which had higher incomes and lower poverty rates, collected more than $77 billion—or just over $7,000 per student.¹⁴ On average, states added another $6,900 per student to white districts and almost $7,200 per student in nonwhite districts. The comprehensive gap in state and local funding was $23 billion. White districts, on average, had more than $2,000 more in funding per student than nonwhite districts.¹⁵

The report found the following:

Despite more than a half-century of integration efforts, the majority of America’s school children still attend racially concentrated school systems. This is reflective of the long history of segregation—policies related to everything from voting to housing—that have drawn lines and divided our communities.

Race and class are inextricably linked in the U.S. When comparing the poverty level of racially concentrated systems, a clear divide emerges. Predominantly white districts are far better off than their heavily nonwhite peers. These statistics confirm what we know about income inequality and the effects of segregation.

In the United States, 20% of students are enrolled in districts that are both poor and nonwhite,¹⁶ but just 5% of students live in white districts that are equally financially challenged.¹⁷

This is only one example of how white students have continued to enjoy unique access post–1965. This unique access continues to order society.

How Privilege Shapes Society

We will never learn to leverage privilege to further the kingdom and love our neighbors if we continue to deny the existence of privilege. Acknowledging privilege is not about condemnation, shaming, or guilting one another into coerced actions. Christians are called to acknowledge privilege because it is real and because doing so liberates us from its power. Confronting and addressing privilege liberates us to live into our created purpose fully and freely.

Acknowledging privilege should not be contentious. Privilege exists because of our unwillingness to deal soberly with structural sin and the legacy of inequity it has bred. Fundamentally, privilege is the by-product of our ancestors’ sins and the rotten fruit of the church’s indifference to systemic oppression and complicity wi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Understanding Privilege and Its Power
• 2. Pharaoh’s Daughter: Leveraging Privilege to Resist Systemic Sin
• 3. Esther: Leveraging Privilege to Stand In Solidarity
• 4. Moses: Leveraging Privilege to Birth Liberation
• 5. Paul and Silas: Leveraging Privilege to Create Systemic Change
• 6. Jesus: Abandoning and Leveraging Privilege to Proclaim the Good News
• 7. Zacchaeus: Leveraging Privilege to Foster Social Transformation
• 8. Scripture’s Call to Repentance
• 9. Producing Fruit In Keeping With Repentance
• Acknowledgments
• Notes