Juliet Liu

“The prevailing models of racial reconciliation within largely White evangelical and mainline Christian communities fall far short of what is needed to adequately address racism and repair its legacy. Having been disproportionately articulated and advocated by White Christians, racial reconciliation has heavily emphasized the importance of proximity, dialogue, bridge building, forgiveness, and friendship, while largely excluding issues of liberation, justice, and transformation. Much of what passes for racial reconciliation feels like an interracial playdate. Whites leave the playground feeling good about their new friend of color, but the material realities of people of color are unchanged.”
― Chanequa Walker-Barnes, I Bring the Voices of My People: A Womanist Vision for Racial Reconciliation

“In a meta-analysis of studies on loneliness, researchers Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy B. Smith, and J. Bradley Layton found the following: Living with air pollution increases your odds of dying early by 5 percent. Living with obesity, 20 percent. Excessive drinking, 30 percent. And living with loneliness? It increases our odds of dying early by 45 percent.”
― Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone

“Over the past two decades, there has been growing scholarly and clinical attentiveness to the psychospiritual impact of participating in the subjugation, abuse, and murder of other human beings. Even when these acts come as a result of one’s adherence to social norms or duty to governmental authorities, they violate core beliefs about what it means to be human, to be moral, and to be Christian. To return to Tom DeWolf’s statement in Traces of the Trade, the question that White Americans must ask themselves is: What does it mean to know that a system is evil and to participate in it anyway? Moral injury, further, asks the question: How does it affect a person to participate in a system that that person knows or believes to be evil? The term “moral injury” has emerged to describe this phenomenon, which can be distinct from posttraumatic stress.”
― Chanequa Walker-Barnes, I Bring the Voices of My People: A Womanist Vision for Racial Reconciliation

“Black religious scholars have astutely analyzed how the experiences of slavery and dehumanization shaped African American Christianity in nearly every aspect, including biblical interpretation, preaching, hymnody, worship, and social ethics. Little attention, however, has been given to the impact of slavery upon the cultures, identities, and functioning of White people. The underlying assumption has been that White people—including White Christianity—have remained more or less unaffected by their participation in or compliance with a system that brutalized millions of Africans. This assumption has remained intact despite the fact that the construction of whiteness itself was dependent upon slavery and other White supremacist institutions.”
― Chanequa Walker-Barnes, I Bring the Voices of My People: A Womanist Vision for Racial Reconciliation