Listen Growth Plan | Part 1 | 2/19/21

Wimberly’s Personal Myths: Stories that Empower Us or Leave Us Vulnerable stirred a desire to produce a Genogram (26) focused on the racist myths cultivated and implemented into my own being by my parents. What you’re witnessing are occurrences primarily in my adolescences that planted seeds of my own racist myths.

Listen Growth Plan | Part 2

Gustavus Stadler On Whiteness & Sound provoked a deep dive on the sounds of racial division I have heard since childhood (see genogram above). It is fascinating to me just how deeply rooted racial narratives can be buried in our person that we think have been disrupted but still lurks into our bone marrow. In my own whiteness this lurking is a reminder that at life’s own disruptions that there is work to be done to separate racial narratives from the truth of harm. It is always an ongoing work to be human and to undo the sounds my whiteness has heard.

The trauma lightly shared in this piece is deeply committed to therapy and community. This reading provoked thought around such events. View with care.

Listening Growth Plan Part 3

The Prophets by Roberts Jones Jr. is a difficult read and one that provokes so much thought and rumination on what was before us, what is of us and what is still possible. Jones novel starts with “You do not yet know us” and then dives into the narratives of so many characters from “the empty” - a plantation of cruelty and theological toxicity for the sake of product over humanity. With the recent shootings in Atlanta in mind, I completed this listening growth plan questioning and re-entering the what was before me, what is of me and what is still possible. Religion plays a heavy role in Jones novel. But not in the “good news” way that the characters plantation “master” would claim. Religion has a front row seat to white supremacy and the actions of before us and today. Christianity, as my parents know it, would inform their racist behavior with the same misconstrued Hebrew Bible texts of “the empty place’s” owner. Lifelong narratives become permanent parts when they are never questioned or heard from a new angle. Jones gives that new angle in his novel.

Faith formed by supremacy is not good news.

So what lies ahead and beyond this project is the choice to participate in discovering what good news is for the oppressed. Not just the kind I know, but the kind of good news that liberates across social categories. As a pastor and a care giver, I cannot simply read the names of the dead in newspapers and moan at the continued nature of nation under one white God. This same white God has whispered in the ears of my family and thus in the ears of my own being who to be, how to be, and who to not be amongst. I thank God for queerness that continues to liberate me from such whispers. But my queerness will not free me from my whiteness. It is true as Jones writes at the beginning of The Prophets…”I do not yet understand…” but I shall listen and I shall act.