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Hooray! You've made it to Week 3! You are continuing to build a habit of learning about and reflecting on identity, equity, and justice in our community. Please continue to use the tracking chart provided to stay on course. Attend all scheduled zoom calls (Sundays at 9am) for more activities and debrief opportunities. Zoom link will be emailed separately.This 21-day plan includes suggestions for readings, podcasts, videos, observations, and ways to form and deepen community connections. Understanding white privilege is a powerful lens into the complexities of doing social justice work, so we’ve focused our resources on that specific issue. Make a commitment to continue the conversation. Got questions? Email Rev. Gina or Laura Cooper.

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Hooray! You've made it to Week 3! You are continuing to build a habit of learning about and reflecting on identity, equity, and justice in our community. Please continue to use the tracking chart provided to stay on course. Attend all scheduled zoom calls (Sundays at 9am) for more activities and debrief opportunities. Zoom link will be emailed separately.This 21-day plan includes suggestions for readings, podcasts, videos, observations, and ways to form and deepen community connections. Understanding white privilege is a powerful lens into the complexities of doing social justice work, so we’ve focused our resources on that specific issue. Make a commitment to continue the conversation. Got questions? Email Rev. Gina or Laura Cooper.

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“We have to be willing to have proactive conversations
about race with honesty and understanding and
courage – not because it’s the right thing to do, but
because it’s the smart thing to do.”
- Mellody Hobson

It used to be that the vernacular was to insist on colorblindness, to treat everyone the same. This would work great in a world where everyone began life at the same starting line. So what if instead of being colorblind, we started being color brave?

What one or two messages from the video had the most personal resonance
for you? Why?

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Color blind or color brave? | Mellody Hobson

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How to start to address our own implicit biases

Want to understand more about your own implicit biases? Head over to Project Implicit, a study run by Harvard University, and take the Implicit Association Test for Race. Then listen to this Code Switch podcast for how to better understand why addressing implicit biases in ourselves takes more than just 21 days.

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subscribe to Code Switch podcast

subscribe to Code Switch podcast

A week after two black men were arrested at a Starbucks store in Philadelphia, the company announced plans to close 8,000 stores across the country on May 29 for an afternoon of racial bias education.

Many people remain skeptical if such training will actually work and prevent further incidents like this, and it's not entirely known what the afternoon of training will include.

In an interview with Morning Edition host Noel King, Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, said the company was in the beginning stages of planning what the entire afternoon would entail.

"You know, we see these incidents happen, and they are incredibly disturbing and troubling," Ifill says. "And I think some people want to believe that there's some magic bullet, and there is not."

Ifill continued saying that, "Racism is deeply entrenched in our society, and any real effort to confront it means you have to be in it for the long haul. It means you have to be in it seriously. It means not just training. It means monitoring the effectiveness of that training."

Starbucks hopes to address part of that by including discussion about implicit bias in its training.

Alexis McGill Johnson is the executive director of the Perception Institute and runs racial bias workshops.

She says, "implicit bias is our brains' automatic processing of negative stereotypes that have become embedded in our brains over time about particular groups of people oftentimes without our conscious awareness."

"Essentially associations that we've come to link with particular groups' traits and characteristics that help us navigate and make quick decisions about who those people are."

On whether people can learn about their implicit bias and retrain their brains to see others differently, McGill Johnson says it's possible, but not when it's done over a short period of time.

"It's taken centuries for our brains to create these negative schemas about particular groups of people that have been marginalized in society," she says. "And so it will take a really concerted, intentional effort to develop the counter-stereotypes that are required to move them out of our brains and replace them with others."

At the workshops she runs, McGill Johnson says she starts with the idea that most people believe that they are fundamentally fair and believe in the egalitarian of all races and genders.

It's when behaviors such as those that led to the arrest of the two men in Philadelphia arise that people can't account for the disparity in outcomes between what they say they believe and how they react.

McGill Johnson says that raises the question that maybe the way people practice fairness is flawed.

"We've been taught to be colorblind. We've been taught that we can be objective when it comes to evaluating people, and the science suggests that sometimes our values aren't sufficient for us to actually practice those pieces because our brains see race very quickly," she says.

And what contributes to how brains process race and other identifiers is based on just about every other experience a person has had, watched or read.

"We develop, derive bias from just seeing certain pairings of words together over time. And those bits of information help us navigate our unconscious processes," she says.

This means that in order to address people's implicit bias, a lot of fundamental processes in the brain have to be changed.

While Starbucks is addressing a flaw in the company's previous training, McGill Johnson says it will take more than one afternoon to completely address implicit bias.

"I think at best it will spark curiosity and an awareness that biases do not make us bad people - they actually make us human - but that we do have a capacity to override them," she says. "And it's really important for us to build in systems and practices that help us do that."
Miguel Perez, Andrea Hsu and Courtney Dorning produced the audio for this story. Wynne Davis adapted it for Web.

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A Lesson In How To Overcome Implicit Bias

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subscribe to Code Switch podcast subscribe to Code Switch podcast A week after two black men were arrested at a Starbucks store in Philadelphia, the company announced plans to close 8,000 stores across the country on May 29 for an afternoon of racial bias education.

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How people judge physical characteristics has shaped history. At times it has sparked oppression, violence, and heartache. Some say racism is in the process of being consigned to history—after all, in the United States, institutionalized slavery is a thing of the past. The law guarantees racial equality, and people from minority groups occupy positions of power and influence. But research conducted at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business suggests racism is still a powerful force in society.

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The scholarly consensus is actually that Jesus was, like most first-century Jews, probably a dark-skinned man. The myth of a white Jesus is one with deep roots throughout Christian history. As early as the Middle Ages and particularly during the Renaissance, popular Western artists depicted Jesus as a white man, often with blue eyes and blondish hair.

The only problem was that the representations were historically inaccurate.

Reflection: How does my perspective change by this article, if at all?

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The only problem was that the representations were historically inaccurate.

Modern Western Christians have carried these images over into their own depictions of Jesus. Pick up a one of those bright blue "Bible Story" books in a Sunday School classroom and you'll find white Jesus waiting for you, rosy cheeks and all. Or you could survey the light-skinned Jesus in any number of modern TV or film portrayals, including History Channel's hit series The Bible.

Interestingly, the Bible is far less descriptive on the matter of Jesus' skin color than we are. Christian scriptures say very little about Jesus' physical appearance. They do not comment on his nose, eye color, skin pigmentation, or hair. The glaring exception is Isaiah 53:2, which prophesies that the messiah won't be much to look at, another fact that places the Bible at odds with the "well-groomed surfer-dude Jesus" who's often put forth.

If the Bible is silent on the matter of Jesus' skin color, does it really matter that Megyn Kelly says Jesus is white?

Yes, actually.

As some historians and theologians have posited, the silence of the Scriptures on the issue of Jesus' skin color is critical to Christianity's broad appeal with people of various ethnicities. In a world where race often divides communities and even churches, the Biblical depictions of God's son positions him as one who can bridge those divides.

For this reason, one American Presbyterian minister in the 1880s warned his flock not to trust popular images of Christ:

If He were particularised and localised-if, for example, He were made a man with a pale face-then the man of the ebony face would feel that there was a greater distance between Christ and him than between Christ and his white brother.' Instead, because the Bible refused to describe Jesus in terms of racial features, his gospel could appeal to all. Only in this way could the Church be a place where the 'Caucasian and Mongolian and African sit together at the Lord's table, and we all think alike of Jesus, and we all feel that He is alike our brother'.

In Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Advice for Living" column for Ebony in 1957, the civil-rights leader was asked, "Why did God make Jesus white, when the majority of peoples in the world are non-white?" King replied, "The color of Jesus' skin is of little or no consequence" because what made Jesus exceptional "His willingness to surrender His will to God's will." His point, as historian Edward Blum has noted, is that Jesus transcends race.

Those warnings hold just as true for believers today. Within the church, eschewing a Jesus who looks more like a Scandinavian supermodel than the sinless Son of God in the scriptures is critical to maintaining a faith in which all can give praise to one who became like them in an effort to save them from sins like racism and prejudice. It's important for Christians who want to expand the church, too, in allowing the creation of communities that are able to worship a Jesus who builds bridges rather than barriers. And it is essential to enabling those who bear the name of Christ to look forward to that day when, according to the book of Revelation, those " from every nation, tribe, people, and language " can worship God together.

Until that day arrives, though, can someone please tell Megyn Kelly that Jesus is not white?

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

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Insisting Jesus Was White Is Bad History and Bad Theology

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The only problem was that the representations were historically inaccurate. Modern Western Christians have carried these images over into their own depictions of Jesus. Pick up a one of those bright blue "Bible Story" books in a Sunday School classroom and you'll find white Jesus waiting for you, rosy cheeks and all.

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Day 15: Are you a non-racist or an anti-racist?

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Day 15: Are you a non-racist or an anti-racist?

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Video: Are you non, or are you anti?

Detour-Spotting for White Anti-Racist

This article explores 18 common detours people make to deviate from an anti-racist path, and how to keep ourselves and others on the path to equity and anti-racism.

Reflection: What detours have you taken? How did that impact the situation/your conversation/the relationship?

Our challenge to you: turn a detour into an active step forward!

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Bonus Lesson: The Construction of Race in America

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Bonus Lesson: The Construction of Race in America

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Why are people angry? Why so upset? Didn't we elect a black president? Pass civil rights laws? Isn't racism illegal now?  The idea of post-racial America is so appealing. Why isn't it the truth? Veggie Tales creator Phil Vischer's video goes viral - see why.

Watch the video and read this related article: https://religionnews.com/2020/06/19/veggie-tales-creator-phil-vischer-releases-viral-video-on-race-in-america/