Bible Gateway Blog

This guest post is by Bryan Loritts, author of the book, Insider Outsider: My Journey as a Stranger in White Evangelicalism and My Hope for Us All (Zondervan, 2018).

Guest Post by Bryan Loritts

“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” These words written by James Baldwin, the pen of the civil rights movement, hit a little too close to home. It has been my experience as a black man in America, that just about all of my ethnic kin run a low-grade fever in matters of race relations. On May 25th, 2020, that fever spiked when George Floyd was pinned prostrate on a Minneapolis street, hands shackled behind his back, with a white knee leading to his slow, eight-minute-and-46-second demise.

In the aftermath of this tragedy my phone and direct messages lit up by our well-intentioned white siblings asking me how can they help? What books should they be reading? As a pastor what should they say to their people? I don’t do well assigning homework when I’m grieving. Even more so, the dilemma of systemic racism in America is not black people’s problem to fix. That’s like the close friends of the battered wife’s husband asking what should they be reading when it comes to solving her abuse? A jolting analogy I know, but black people in America have been in an abusive relationship with whites for four hundred years. And like Farrah Fawcett in, The Burning Bed, there comes a moment when Baldwin’s prophetic words manifest in an immoral eruption of rage, as we have tragically seen in far too many of our cities.

Continue reading →