SNL's "Black Jeopardy" Is On Point

I watched SNL's skit "Black Jeopardy" last night. The one with Tom Hanks as a Donald Trump supporter? Of course I watched it three days after it aired because I have never once in my life stayed up to actually watch SNL on the air. Who stays up that late anyway?

The skit got a good deal of coverage because it asserts in a hilarious way that Trump supporters and Black folks actually have a great deal in common.

I suggest you watch the skit before reading on:


Basically all of the characters are surprised when the Donald Trump supporter seems to "get" Black culture as if it is his own.
The main joke of the skit comes toward the end when the double jeopardy category is revealed as "What Lives Matter," and it's obvious that these folks, who have all responded similarly so far, will reveal completely disparate views on the phrase Black Lives Matter.

It shouldn't surprise us, though, that poor Black folks and poor white folks have so much in common, because they DO.
And that's the remarkable point SNL is making with their skit.

Whiteness was created as a means of empowering one group at the expense of the other, specifically making white folks feel superior to Black and brown folks, no matter their socio-economic status.

The idea of whiteness did not exist prior to Black slavery and whiteness was not popularized until the existence of these colonies and this country built on slave labor.

Whiteness was created as a means of cementing a system of oppression for wealthy folks' economic gain.

The idea adopted by many poor white folks that Black and brown folks are the cause of all their problems, has been taught to poor white folks for centuries by rich white folks.

Tim Wise puts it well that "whiteness was created to divide and conquer, to create the notion that even though you might not have much, at least you're not Black, at least you're not indigenous . . . . . You may not have much, but at least you have as W.E.B. Dubois said 'the psychological wage of whiteness'" (Wise).

Historically speaking poor people have much in common with other poor people.
And yet poor white folks are tricked by rich white folks that the reason they're suffering is because of poor Black and brown folks, furthering the divide between groups of people who can be united.

SNL's "Black Jeopardy" skit is hilarious.
But it's also saying something very important about humanity and how much more we have in common than we might think.


My mom has made an observation a few times to me that when she reads the books or articles I've recommended on racial justice and healing, she's reminded how much of her childhood as a poor child of poor Norwegian farmers in Wisconsin looks like that of poor Black folks' experiences in the South post-reconstruction.
Share-cropping; abuse by land owners; land stolen by banks; biased wages and treatment; her childhood was marked by these experiences and they scarred her father's mind and body in ways she can't forget.
In her pocket of the US in the 40's and 50's, she encountered no Black folks. But by that point, if she had, I'm sure the widely disseminated narrative of her superior whiteness would have affected any interactions she would have with them as they affect any interactions white folks have with Black folks now (internal biases)
It's in reading stories now that she can see the same human experience from one poor person to the next, regardless of color.

She has agreed, however, that her life was never in danger because she was poor and white, whereas being poor and Black is often a death sentence.
It was then, and it is now.


In order for white folks to begin to say "Black Lives Matter," we need to unravel the centuries-long narrative of white supremacy that is based on nothing other than economic gain for the wealthy.
We need to see the humanity in the "other."
We need to read stories and find our similarities
We need to interact, for proximity breaks barriers.

Then white folks can maybe begin to believe the systemic violence perpetrated against Black bodies.

If we cannot see our own similarities, we cannot see humanity in the other. And our co-humanity is where we must start.

So Far To Go and Totally Worth It

I consider myself a reasonably “woke” white person. I’m still learning, yes, but I feel that I’ve come a long way in my understanding of the necessity of the Movement for Black Lives, the deep history of oppression of Black bodies that extends into every sphere of our current lives, and the importance of white people talking to other white people about systemic racism and white supremacy.

But just the other day in a racial justice dialogue group organized by the UMC Baltimore-Washington Conference, I found myself slipping into an old narrative of Black experiences during a role-playing exercise.

I was supposed to be an applicant for a job with an interviewer who had my fictional criminal record in hand that included, among other small offenses, a drug charge. When asked to explain my fictional record, I immediately went for the poor-relationship-with-my-father-and-a-rough-childhood-on-the-streets story with an image of a Black man in my mind the entire time. I didn’t require my brain to consider the fact that the majority of drug users and sellers in the US are white.

I told the story as I had been told for many years, consciously and unconsciously, that Black men sell drugs and they do so because their culture and leadership is lacking.

When confronted with my blatantly racist thinking, I was so disheartened yet not surprised.

The layers of my own racism are deep. They are so. very. deep. And I realized anew in this dialogue group that my own self-understanding is only just beginning.

And yet, I could not come to this conclusion on my own. It was only in facilitated conversation with white and Black folks that I could begin to peel back the layers of the racist narrative I have been taught. I can read a great deal on my own, yes, but self-understanding does not come easily and it often cannot come through reading in isolation.

When I place myself in the sometimes uncomfortable position of connecting with others, of building sinew between us in conversational relationship, I open my heart up to immense change.

And isn’t that really what Jesus has called me to, anyway? Changing my own heart to build the Kingdom?

My Notes and Thoughts Following "What the White Church Must Do", a Panel Discussion on Racial Justice Held at the National Cathedral

I attended the 2016 March on Washington Film Festival panel discussion on racial justice and "What The White Church Must Do" on Sunday, July 17th at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The panel was facilitated by the Rev. Professor Kelly Brown Douglas, author of the recently published book Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God.

I walked away with some solid amen moments, ways of seeing issues or ideas through a new lens. A few of those follow here: 

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Jim Wallis, Editor-in-Chief of Sojourners Magazine and author of multiple books on race and racism in the US and in Christianity, discussed how white Christianity is an idolatry that separates white Christians from God. 

If we truly believe in Imago Dei - that all humans bear the image of God - yet hold onto our identification as white and the privileges and power that go along with whiteness, then we do not actually believe in Imago Dei. 

We therefore believe that only some people bear the image of God, which TOTALLY GOES AGAINST everything the church and the scriptures have taught. 

The construct of whiteness argues the opposite of Imago Dei, that non-white races are less-than human (therefore cannot bear the image of God), and therefore through our holding onto whiteness (not identifying our power and privilege and how that power and privilege has worked systematically historically and currently to oppress non-white persons) we have created an idol out of our whiteness and a chasm between us and the Holy. 

We cannot be close to God without identifying our whiteness and the privilege and power that comes along with it as an idol that has separated us from God. 

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Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, diocesan bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, spoke with so much empathy for her white congregants (as most mainline denominations, hers is majority white) and yet pushed them to a deeper understanding of the issues surrounding racial justice in this country. 

She said that when it comes to police killings of Black folk, most well-meaning white people don't condone these killings. 

We're not cheering on the police when they shoot Philando Castile in front of his girlfriend and her four year old daughter. 

But overall white folks think that these incidents are isolated ones. 

When white folks see the police murder a Black man, we don't see another murder in a long history of murders. We see one incident and we talk about it as such and we remember to look at all the facts and we hem and haw over whether or not this person could be at any fault in their own murder. 

What we don't see is the system and history that makes these incidents normative. 

What we choose not to see is the thousand-year narrative into which these murders fit. 

What we choose not to see is the use and abuse of Black bodies throughout this nation's founding and history. 

We have so much that we have chosen not to know. 

We have unconsciously worked so hard not to see violence against Black bodies and therefore when we do see it, we're shocked at first but overall within hours we're unburdened by its very existence and history. 

And Jim Wallis chimed in with a startling statistic: following publicized police killings of Black persons, 75 percent of white folks say this is an isolated incident and 82 percent of Black folks say this is a normal experience in their life. 

How are we even to begin to understand Black pain if we have chosen to plug our ears to their stories?

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I absolutely loved when Rev. Delman Coates of Mt. Ennon Baptist Church provided concrete advice for clergy in the white church. 

He said that clergy must provide a counter narrative for white Christians. 

Piggybacking off of the discussion about how easy it is for white folks to see police killings of Black folks as isolated incidents, Rev. Coates pushed clergy especially to contextualize these killings in the long history of violence against Black bodies. 

It is easy to de-contextualize these issues and see each incident as an individual killing. Then we can justify the police's use of violence based on that one situation. 

But these incidents are not isolated. 

They are not to be seen alone; they must be understood in this country's long history. 

The white church and the clergy in the white church must contextualize these incidents so that they are not seen in isolation. 

Coates said that, "Black rage is a function of African Americans contextualizing these moments." When African Americans see another Black man shot in the streets for nothing other than being Black, what response other than rage is appropriate? 

Coates implores white clergy especially to help provide the counter narrative by contextualizing these moments. 

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Rev. Amy Stapleton of the UMC General Commission on Religion and Race brought the entire discussion back to the fundamentals of our faith in a way that I hadn't considered before. 

As a United Methodist and raised evangelical, I resonated with her idea that the personalization of our faith is problematic.

 I grew up in a church that preached a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, that focused on my individual sins and God's grace for me as an invidual.

 I prayed the prayer to liberate my own soul and God saved me. Alone. 

Rev. Stapleton pointed out, though, that our liberation cannot be individual. That God calls us to see the gospel and our liberation as communal. 

And if our brother and sister are not free, then we also cannot be free. 

It is this personalization of Christianity that causes us as white folks to feel offended individually when a person of color or a white ally says something like we're all complicit in the racism of this country. 

As white folks, we feel offended because we've been taught by the church and our national ideologies that all aspects of my life are about me. 

It's about my sin, my relationship with God, my work ethic, my accomplishments. 

And this individualization of the gospel holes us up in our selves and never lets us see that my liberation is intertwined with yours. 

That if my Black sister in Christ is not free there's no way that I am free. 

Liberation must be communal. 

Rev Stapleton also pointed out that we UMC folks love our potlucks, but racial justice cannot just be about the gathering. This conversation has to start with communal white repentance. 

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The panel discussion ended with some remarks from Rev. Brown Douglas. 

She brought our attention back to Rev. Dr. King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in which he writes that lukewarm white folks are more harmful to the movement for racial justice than outright bigots.

 And her last words were that "No community should shout more loudly that Black lives matter than the church." 

I hope and work that the white church starts shouting it soon. 

Of Bias and Why It Matters That You Know Yours

In our church group on Racial Reconciliation today we discussed implicit biases. A few of us had taken the Harvard Implicit Bias Test this last week and we discussed our results. One white woman said that according to the test she had shown no preference for African American or European American persons. Another white woman shared that she was embarrassed to say she had shown moderate preference for European Americans according to the test.
I and another woman in the group quickly jumped in to say that we had the same test results: we showed moderate prejudice toward European Americans in the test. Then another member of the group, a young Black man said that his results showed that he has implicit prejudice toward African Americans.

Implicit bias exists in us all.
It's ingrained in us through our environment and our experiences. We can't blame one person or one experience for making us implicitly biased, for our biases are built over a lifetime.

It's the decisions we make ignorant of or knowing of that bias that are right or wrong.

Let me repeat myself: We are all biased. We all have implicit prejudices and studies have shown that changing those prejudices is extremely difficult.

But knowing that you're biased is the first step in the right direction to changing your decisions based on those biases.

Since we all have them, why are biases such a big deal? If we're all biased, who cares?

The trouble is not in the bias but in the power behind the bias, or as Jim Wallis says, "racism is prejudice plus power."

Racism is prejudice plus power.

Racism is bias plus power.

Add power to your bias and it can lead to systemized death.

The trouble comes when the unchecked bias leads to the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner,  Sandra Bland and millions of other Black folks.

I encourage you, white person, to take the Implicit bias test.
The link is right there. It doesn't take long.

Knowing ourselves and questioning ourselves and learning who we are and what we believe, even without thinking, is the first step toward trying to understand others.

Whiteness is...

never getting stared at when I open a package of cookies in the middle of a grocery store.

Whiteness is...

getting smiles from police officers all the time.

Our Racial Justice Group at Church

In the fall we started a book group at church discussing The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. We would meet in the church parlor once a month following the 11:00 service and discuss one or two of her enormous and complex chapters on how the current system of mass incarceration in the US is a means of proliferating white supremacy by creating a lower class of Black folk - a new form of segregation and oppression - a new Jim Crow.
In our first meeting, our Reverend asked us to chat with the folks next to us about our initial reaction to the content in the book, specifically to rate on a scale of 0-5 how much of this information was new to us and how much of it was old news, with zero being brand new information and five being common knowledge to us.
I turned to the three elderly Black women on my left and listened as they all gave fives - mass incarceration was not new. Targeting Black folks for petty crimes and labeling them as felons in order to keep them down was not new. The war on drugs as a means to create a lower class system of people of color was not new. Five.

Then I was to speak. To identify what I knew and what I didn't know. To reveal my knowledge or my ignorance.

I said one. And that might have been generous.

I said something along these lines: I've known that we have a huge prison population but that was it. I didn't know that our prison population does not whatsoever reflect our national demographic statistics - that black and brown folks make up a huge amount of our prison population. I didn't know that the war on drugs was a means of rounding up Black men and imprisoning them, even though statistically white folks are more likely to use and sell drugs as Black folks. I didn't know any statistics on the racism of stop-and-frisks.

I had a sense, but I didn't know. Which is why I said one.

These women were not surprised. Of course I didn't know. I didn't have to know. I didn't have to live this reality. For I am white and one of the perks of my whiteness is the privilege of ignorance.

This book group has been kind and patient with a learner.
I need to know. I need to listen. I need to learn.
For if I don't know that something exists, then it does not exist in my world.
If I don't choose to learn that their are extreme racial disparities in this country, then to me there are no racial disparities in this country.
They will not exist.

Probably in the second and third week of our meeting together, someone mentioned the dearth of white folks.
"Why aren't there more white people in this group?"

As one of the only white folks there, I responded "because we don't have to be here. To learn about race and racism is a choice we get to make, not a requirement. And since learning can be uncomfortable, we often choose not to do it."

I try not to talk at all in our discussion groups. I try to limit my comments to once or twice, and those only after listening for a good long while to the rest of the group.

As a white person, I approach this group as a learner and a listener. For it is through listening and learning that I can change myself. And in changing myself I can hopefully change my world, including my white folks.