Berkley Center

Racism and race thinking continue through every aspect of American society. Christian antiracist thinking has shown just how problematically the church epitomizes and enables this sad state of affairs. Yet running through those discourses are modes of thinking that hurt as much as help the cause of liberation. Four axioms challenge this prevailing account of antiracism discourse (circulated through notions of “whiteness”): 

1. Slavery precedes racism; 
2. Race is philosophically uninteresting; 
3. There are no individual racists; and 
4. God is not done with the church.

For this Religion, Culture, and Politics Worship, Jonathan Tran, associate professor of theology and ethics and the George W. Baines Professor of Religion at Baylor University, presented these ideas as drawn from his forthcoming book, Yellow Christianity: An Intervention on Antiracism Discourse.