Dr. Christine Jeske | Learning to Hope Differently: Racial Justice for the Long Haul

What kind of hope can actually sustain racial justice work over decades—not just months? In this episode of Thinking Christian, Dr. James Spencer is joined by anthropologist and author Dr. Christine Jeske to talk about her new book, Racial Justice for the Long Haul: How White Christian Advocates Persevere and Why.

Christine explains how anthropological research actually works—long interviews, deep listening, and time spent in “ordinary” spaces—and how she used it to study white Christians commended by leaders of color as faithful, long-term advocates. From there, the conversation dives into:

• Delusional vs. resilient hope – why optimism that avoids suffering inevitably collapses, and how Christians can cultivate a cruciform hope forged in hardship.

• Incremental change without complacency – how to celebrate small wins without pretending the deeper injustices are solved.

• Privilege as undeserved gifts – not just a slogan, but a way of naming what we’ve received and how grace calls us to respond, not just feel guilty.

• Habitus and formation – how our environments, narratives, and “moving walkways” of culture quietly shape us toward either withdrawal or engagement.

• Perseverance in practice – from Sisyphus and his “muscles” to Beverly Daniel Tatum’s moving walkway, to concrete next steps for listeners who feel overwhelmed and don’t know where to begin.

If you’re a Christian who feels the weight of racial injustice but wrestles with burnout, defensiveness, or simply not knowing what to do next, this conversation offers a theologically rich, practical vision for persevering in hope—without denial, without despair, and with your eyes fixed on Christ.

You can purchase Racial Justice for the Long Haul at ivpress.com (use code IVPPOD20 for a 20% discount) 

You can also read more from Christine Jeske at christinejeske.com.

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🔗 Download a free resource "Making Everyday Decisions So That God Gets the Glory" from Useful to God: www.usefultogod.com

To read James's article on this topic, check out his author page on Christianity.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everyone, Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm
doctor James Spencer and I'm joined today by doctor Christine Jeski.
She is the Associate professor of anthropology at Wheaton College
and Wheaton, Illinois, and she's written a book called Racial
Justice for the Long Haul, How White Christian Advocates Persevere
and Why, and so we're going to be talking about
the book and some of her research today on the podcast.

(00:23):
Welcome Christine, how are you doing?

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Well, I thought, first maybe what would be helpful is
to understand how anthropological research works and what specifically you
did as the baseline research for this work. So I
kind of want to start there, but maybe before we
get there, it'd be good to hear a little bit
about your history and why this topic even was of
interest to you.

Speaker 3 (00:51):
Perfect community development work, and during that time I got
interested in writing. I wrote for a number of different magazines.
It actually kind of started because I got asked to

(01:14):
write a tiny little column for a small newspaper in Wisconsin,
and I was writing like these, like one hundred word
I mean, I just felt ridiculously small little pieces to
this newspaper about life in South Africa, which was super cool,
But I had all these stories that were so much
bigger than what I could in a newspaper, and I
got hooked on this process of interviewing people and telling

(01:37):
their stories. And after I had been in South America,
basically I was working with a seminary that closed, and
I went back to the US and I was like,
now what do I do? Like, what do I actually
want to be when I grow up? And my husband
had a job in the United States, and I was like, Okay,
I gotta settle here for some time and do something.
What's I going to be? And I realized what ran

(01:59):
through so much of my life was I love teaching,
and I was like, what can I teach? How do
I teach adults? Well, I could get a PhD in something,
and what on earth would it be? And discovered that
anthropology really pulled together international work thinking about culture. But
then also the research methods for anthropology really depend on
interviewing people and spending time with ordinary people in their

(02:23):
ordinary life. So that's kind of what I had been
doing already for some previous books that I wrote, and
then I realized I could I could do that in
a more professional and academic way. And I love it.
It gives me a lot of life.

Speaker 2 (02:36):
Very cool.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
So talk a little bit about because this or this
book has a lot of interviews with people, you use
stories from people all over the place, But you did
have an interesting hierarchy to the way you perform the research.

Speaker 3 (02:48):
Yes. Yeah, So I had written this previous book in
South Africa about racism, and I felt like one of
the unanswered questions in that book was what do white
people actually do about it? Like a lot of studies
of race focus on the felt hurt of racism and
the history behind it, which is really important, but because

(03:10):
those books have been written, there's this this question that
is like okay, so what now what do people do
about it? And so I was like, I want to
research white people who are doing something about racism? But
how do you How do you find those people? Like
do you just ask them like, hey, are you a
white person who's really good at telling racism? And they
volunteer right, or you to like have a survey they

(03:30):
fill out as like you know, a test to check
about all the right answers. None of those really felt
like the right answer, and I realized what I needed
was for people in their life to know them well
enough to say that they are doing something and they're
not just doing it for a short term thing. And
specifically people of color, right, because that's you know, who's
who's feeling the effects of racism. So I started with

(03:53):
interviewing thirty people of color who were faith leaders, typically
leaders of churches or nonprofit organizations working with racism in
some way, and talk to them, usually at least an
hour long interview, talking about like what does racism look like,
what does it look like to deal with racism, how
do you end it? And what does justice look like?

(04:14):
And then who do you see who is a white
Christian who's been dealing with that for a long time
And I usually say a few years or decades or
more for somebody that you would recommend as kind of
a mentor to other people. So yeah, it's based on
those interviews, and then I interviewed forty more white people
who are recommended for the study, and also spent one

(04:34):
hundred or more hours in places where they hang out,
so churches and trainings for dealing with racism and organizations
like that, to just see how people interact with each other.

Speaker 1 (04:47):
And you've found one of the big sections in your
book is on hope, and so this different sort of
hope that can be cultivated when you're hanging around with
communities that are dealing with offering or inequities and those
kind of things.

Speaker 2 (05:03):
Can you just describe that difference that.

Speaker 1 (05:04):
You found and kind of help give people a clean
grid for what that hope looks like.

Speaker 3 (05:10):
Yeah, So I can go back to a story from
my own life. This is long before I wrote this book,
but when I was living in South Africa, this seminary
like mansion was running out of money and there was
a strong, strong evidence that it was going to need
to close. And there's a particular day when the students
at this seminary called a day of prayer. And I

(05:34):
was in this room in like a hundred year old
building in South Africa, packed with people shoulder to shoulder,
and everybody is praying, and in South Africa, what that
means is like shouting and simultaneously. That's how we prayed together.
And I knew things were dire, like we had done

(05:55):
everything we could to raise money. And these are people
from all over the African continent, many of whom had
like planned for years or decades to try to get
this kind of training and set aside two years of
their life. They had scholarships to be there. They had
just been told that their scholarships were just continued, so
if they could afford any college at all, they didn't
know if it would continue, right, And we're praying, and

(06:16):
I am like doing the thing I'm supposed to do
of like you know, saying God, you are just you know, majestic,
you're powerful, You're wonderful, like God save us, kind of
like words. And I hit this point where I was
just like I'm out of words, and I just went silent,
and and it was like I could I could feel

(06:38):
what it's like to run out of hope, Like I
just didn't expect God to do anything anymore in that situation.
And I could sort of see, like this is so big.
It's not just that our seminary is running out of
money for scholarships. It's like I knew part of why
the seminary was ending was that they had hired their
first lack president, and some of the donors so that

(07:00):
seminary had decided they no longer wanted to support the
seminary now they had a black president instead of this
white president. Before that I knew that there was a
global financial crisis. This is two thousand and eight, and
so like our donors didn't have money, and it's like
this is deep. This is like the whole history of
colonialism and global capitalism and racism and just like everyday life,
all of it here, and so I go silent, and

(07:23):
in that moment, I just listen, and I am hearing
this woman on my left who's like come out of
the genocide in Rwanda, and she's there and you know,
she's lost relatives who have died in a genocide. And
then on my right there's like a man from Zambia
who has survived a heart attack where there's no health care,
and there's you know, people who have come out of

(07:45):
the war and deer Congo, and they're all around me
and they're praying and they just keep going. And I realized, like,
this is hope that I have not grown up with,
and I want to know how to hope let that.
And what also struck me is the irony or sort
of the naive ignorance of so many Christian organizations from

(08:08):
North America that come to places like South Africa. There
was literally one that had come down the street to
another organization very near where we were that was called
something like New Hope, Bringing Hope, you know, Global Hope.
We have the hope, right, Americans, we got it for you.
We're going to teach you how to hope. And I'm like,
what are we doing? How ignorant? And and so I

(08:29):
you know, that was in my background of thinking about
hope and what does it mean to hope. I did
not go into this project again I'm going to research hope.
But very early on, as I started asking people questions
about like how has your life changed in addressing racism
or decades or more, people would be like, I don't hope.
How I used to hope? And I'd be like, what
does that mean? And often the first response was like,

(08:52):
no one's asked me that before, and so purt it
ended up being like trying to figure out how do
you describe hope? You know? Often I think when we
think hope, we just talk about like get more of it.
You just like it's like a scale from less to more,
and everybody just like try to get more of it,
because if you have lots of it, you'll be great.
But what I realized is like it's not just more
it's a different kind of hope. So specifically, I talk

(09:15):
about like a delusional hope that I think a lot
of people at privilege are trained into through their lifetimes,
which is based on an idea of like, well, life
has always gone pretty well for me, and as long
as it keeps going pretty well, I can hope that
the future will go pretty well. But that's really fragile.
Like what happens when life doesn't go pretty well for
you or you meet somebody who's never had that storyline

(09:38):
to their life? Do you give up? And I've seen
so many people who start dealing with injustice with that
kind of hope and it ends right you give up
and there's not a perseverance in it. So so part
of what I'm tracing in this book is how people
learn to have a resilient hope and what that looks
like in practice.

Speaker 1 (09:59):
Would you say when you say people sort of just
give up? In other words, there's because there isn't this
persistent hope, a hope that is forged and suffering. I
think you talk about in the book as like sort
of a cruciform hope at some level is that the
hope is so overly and this is a word to
use optimistic that when that optimism isn't realized in the

(10:21):
short term, people are just saying, well, this is now,
this is a feudal situation. Nothing's going to be fixed,
and I don't know, maybe push it off to the esketon, right,
and so you just kind of say, well, I can't
fix this, I'm going to go live my life elsewhere.
Is that sort of what happens when they give up?
Or is that just you know, one one too narrow

(10:43):
instance of how they give up.

Speaker 3 (10:45):
Yeah, I think there's a lot of pieces to how
people give up, but I think that's one thread that
runs through so much of it. When I talk about optimism,
the definition that I've been using for it is it's
psychologically distancing oneself from the bad. So it's saying, I'm
going to look to the future, to this the future
that I cannot understand and I cannot predict, and I'm

(11:07):
going to choose to do that by denying what could
go wrong, for ignoring what has gone wrong in the past.
And and you know that again, it's a fragile thing,
right when you when you encounter what is bad, it
breaks that kind of a hope. It also like the
practices that come out of that I think are often
physically distancing yourself from the bad. I had a person

(11:30):
tell me a story about how their family had moved.
This is a white family that had moved into an
under resource, predominantly black neighborhood, and their son was coming
back from a family gathering where they've been in sort
of a wealthier suburb or family gathering. They came back
to their neighborhood and they came back and the son

(11:53):
looks around the neighborhood and goes to mom, is there
are there robbers here? And this kid is like looking
aroun sort of noticing the physical space that I am
in is somehow different from this other physical space and
maybe there's danger here. And you know, these parents are like,
where did our son get that idea? But it was

(12:15):
like this moment of noticing. We are so seeped in
these narratives about what is safe and what is good
and what is right, and when we encounter things that
we think of as like bad, whether it's a bad
space or a bad story, we need to figure out, like,
what is our hope going to do in that moment?
Is it going to say this is exactly the moment,

(12:35):
the place, the time where God shows up, because God
is a God who interrupts and shows up in the bad.
Or are we going to rely on this narrative that's like,
well it's bad, and so I should get out of
here and get somewhere is good again, right, like find
God in the safe good places. And obviously we know
as Christians like God is a God who interrupts, who

(12:57):
shows up within the bad, who doesn't psychologically distance get
self from the bad.

Speaker 2 (13:04):
The other aspect of hope.

Speaker 1 (13:06):
So that's really helpful with optimism, I think you know
you can be it's almost like a mental escapism. You
don't want to think about the bad things that could happen.
You only think about the good things, and then when
the bad things come, you're almost not prepared for them.
You just don't ever think they're going to happen, and
maybe you distance yourself, like you said, physically from them
and just avoid them altogether. But I think the other aspect,

(13:28):
and this was one that I when I read through it,
I was kind of struggling with it a little bit,
the incrementalism, and so the way I understood the incrementalism
and you can correct me if I'm wrong. There's almost
like a combined incrementalism that says these incremental steps are
the best we can do, or there's an optimism around

(13:51):
the incrementalism.

Speaker 2 (13:52):
Right. These two almost form like a two headed monster,
right versus.

Speaker 1 (13:58):
We've made progress that is necessary but insufficient, and so
we still feel the frictions and the tensions and recognize
the suffering. We're not viewing these as something that is
completely finished. I almost think of it as like when
you know, Ezra and Nehmiah come back from the exile
and they rebuild some of the temple walls and some

(14:21):
people there's actually a line in Ezra says and the
people some people were crying, weeping, some people were cheering,
and when you stood back, you couldn't distinguish who was
crying and who was cheering. Right, It's this like deep
tension of this is great, this is horrible, all mixed
up in one bag. So there is an incrementalism, but
it's not an optimistic incrementalism. It's a very realistic, like

(14:45):
we've done something good here, but that good is nowhere
near what we need to be.

Speaker 2 (14:50):
Is that a fair way of understanding it.

Speaker 3 (14:52):
I love that. Yeah, I had never thought about that
passage of the idea of like weeping and crying being
totally intertwined. Yeah, it reminds me. Actually, I want to
just reaview a quote from a woman in this book
and she said, you mind it. This is a pastor.
I was talking to a woman of color, and she said,

(15:14):
I'm leaning into joy I think it's an act of
resistance to play, to practice joyful things in the midst
of it, in the midst of like working for racial justice.
That's exactly what we need to do, in the midst
of all the horrible things. Joyfully gather and not in denial,
but as an act of resistance. We play, we eat,

(15:35):
we celebrate, we do all these things. But it's only
hopeful to me to actually be honest about what is
also really happening both and so yeah, thinking about that incrementalism.
I hadn't really thought about how like, so early in
the book, I have a chapter that I called Delusional
Health Hope that's like on what goes wrong. And then

(15:56):
later in the book, after we sort of walk through
how do white Chris just get to the point of
having this kind of hope, Like what does the resilient
hope look like. And there is this common throad that
I think both of them have an idea of looking
at what is small. So I was struck by how
many people what I'd ask, like, what is your hope? Like, now,

(16:17):
how do you hope? People will be like, it's tiny,
you can hardly see it. It's small. It focuses on
the little things. But at the same time, then people
would also talk about like, but while I'm focused on
the small, I also have this vision of like the
big and part of something that's big that needs to change.
And I think maybe that's part of what's missing in

(16:37):
the sort of delusional ways that we go about trying
to approach justice, is it is forgetting that there is
a big thing that needs to change too. So I
talk about like conventional hope, and by that I mean
like trying to hold on to just keeping things as
they have been. And like, if you think about the

(16:58):
history of say, you know, Black Americans, to take just
one group that we could talk about, right, like what
does it mean to say keep things as they are?
And there's so much writing in sort of Black liberation
and Christian black writing about the idea of like hope
being not just keep things as they are. We have

(17:19):
to hold onto a vision or a radical and a
pathetic different society. And and if you're the person who's
like had had privileged over your history, and I don't
know if there's a word I need to unpack for
your listeners too, but like your your incentive is just
to say, like, let's keep things mostly the same, let's
just change them a little bit. You know, we'll keep

(17:42):
doing the thing that we're doing, but we'll do a
little bit more of it, versus like, let's reconsider what
maybe needs to be entirely strapped in what we're doing
right now.

Speaker 1 (17:52):
It's interesting, I mean I would be. I'm interested in
hearing you sort of talk through privilege. But one comment
I'll make is one of the I've done a lot
of research on Christian nationalism and early American origins at
this point, like Christians and politics and all that kind
of fun stuff. And one of my theses that I
haven't really run down much yet is that much of

(18:13):
the early American theology that we see that sort of
feeds a Christian nationalism or feeds the idea that America
was found out as a Christian nation is actually has
a lot of commonalities with liberation theology. They're coming out
of the Great Britain, you know, they're trying to sort
of free themselves from this tyrant. They're leveraging the Exodus
in a very similar way as you see in almost

(18:35):
every other liberation theology and a lot of the same
texts and images and thought process around. We are the
new whatever, the new Israel, the new people. We've got
this new freedom. And where I see a lot of
that falling down is that it's a it's a freedom,
but not a freedom to serve the lord. It's a
freedom to do as we please. And so I think

(18:58):
there's some unwinding them from a theological perspective. It needs
to happen as we look at sort of the psyche
and mythos of America, because I think a lot of
this has been baked in now and what we're running
into is we're running into sort of these quasi theological
hopes for the nation that condition us to maintain a

(19:19):
status quo. Yeah, and so privilege, yes, I think I'm
interested here you talk about that, But just to add
in that sort of theological flavor, I think that there's
a sense in which many people feel like they've achieved something,
that something has been given to them that they shouldn't
give up. It's an odd mix of things, but anyway,
just that's my yeah aside.

Speaker 3 (19:41):
Too, it struck me how often people referred when I
was interviewing them, but then also like you start to
hear it all over the place, how people use the
phrase in Christianity and maybe all over from Martin Luther
King Junior of the moral arc at the universe is long,
but itens for justice, and he actually voting that from
someone else for him. But how that gets used is

(20:05):
really revealing, right, Like is that being used to say
the moral arc of the universe is long, and it
bends toward justice, and therefore we can let it just
bend and we can sort of let it do its
own work and it'll get there on its own versus
like if you read kings writing, he was very clear
over and over again. Part of again why this seam

(20:26):
of hope came up for me was I was reading
a book of his essays with students and was just
struck by how much he writes about hope and how
resonant that was with my students. I think people desperately
want to know how to hope with an active hope.
And he was so clear over and over again, that
does not mean you get to sit by and let

(20:46):
it roll in like you are actively involved in that.
Like if you read the letter from the Birmingham Jail,
it is all about his response to a bunch of
white pastors who were saying, you should just calm down,
stop doing this whole protesting, just let it roll and
it's going to be fine. And he's like that hope
is not okay, Like we have to do an active hope.

(21:08):
I mean, like we have to act. You have to
make society bend toward justice in the way that God
is bending it also say that, do you find so.

Speaker 2 (21:17):
I want to come back to privilege. So no longer
forget that.

Speaker 1 (21:19):
But this seems like a good time to get into
at the topic that I mentioned before that we started
recording The Habitist.

Speaker 2 (21:26):
So it seems to me like that habitist.

Speaker 1 (21:29):
That Pierre Bordia talks about and the way I sort
of I think you used dancing if I remember right,
sort of illustrate habitists, and I think that's a really
great analogy.

Speaker 2 (21:40):
The way I try to usually give it to people.

Speaker 1 (21:42):
Is like, imagine the difference between a ballerine and a
football aligneman right. They both have to be coordinated, they
both have to be relatively athletic, they both have to
have a level of muscular endurance and coordination and all
these different things. But you're not going to catch usually
alignment being a ballerina and a ballot in it being alignment, right,
because the space that they occupy, the way that the economics,

(22:07):
let's call it, of that situation actually work, would never
really support a three hundred and fifty pound ballerina nor
a one hundred pound alignment.

Speaker 2 (22:16):
It just won't work.

Speaker 1 (22:17):
It doesn't matter how athletic you are, that's not going
to work. And so as we think about that, habitists, do.

Speaker 2 (22:24):
You think that there's a.

Speaker 1 (22:28):
Is part of what you're saying that there's almost like
a reward system baked in that conditions. One sort of
habitist to say it's all going to be okay, And
one sort of habit is to say, you know what,
it may not always be okay, but we're going to
work toward something better regardless, Because I'm not sure even

(22:48):
as you say that, you know the arc of the
universe spends towards justice. I'm not sure I actually believe that. Yeah,
I think it's a much more you know, it may
be a more punctuated. Yes, do I believe God will
bring justice? Absolutely, Like I think there is going to
be a punctuated justice at the end, I'm not sure
it bends toward it. And even as we you know,
even as we perform our efforts, I'm not sure that

(23:09):
we affect justice, you know often, and so there has
to be some sort of a like I said, that
habitist that says no, no, no, we're going to work
at this and.

Speaker 2 (23:20):
It doesn't matter whether we win or not. The actual
process for going through is the wind.

Speaker 3 (23:26):
Yeah. Yeah, there's a one that I interviewed one of
the few people that I do keep her name because
she's a prominent researcher in addition to just being a
member of a church that I attend, Gloria Lads and Billions.
And she was telling me about how she teaches students
she teaches in the University of Wisconsin in education, and

(23:48):
she's saying, I use the analogy of Sissibus with my students,
and how this is a person who is just pushing
a boulder up a hill, and he knows that boulder
is going to roll back down because gosh darn it,
and she's gonna roll back down. And she said she's
like white people focused on the bowlder and the top

(24:12):
of the hill. And she said, black people, we learn
to focus on Sissyphis and the muscles on Sissifus, Like
you look at him and you see, like, look at
who he is becoming through that process. And I found
that really challenging just to even think about discipleship in
that way, right, Like it doesn't mean stop pushing the boulder,

(24:32):
but it means, like my relationship with God is is
about what is that process of who I'm becoming as
I push in the right direction with whatever is in
front of me that you know that needs to be
pushed for God's kingdom, for Shaloam to come. And and
I love, Yeah, that ballerina versus football player analogy, I

(24:55):
think is really great. And I like how you put
it as like the economy around them or like the
forces around them shape them, because it's not just about
like we can all make ourselves into the kind of
person we want to be, which is often the narrative
we hear, right, it's just like as a Christian, like
just you know, do the right thing and pray every
morning and you become what you want to be. But

(25:16):
we we discount and this is like what anthropologists say.
I feel like every single day is like forget like
don't forget culture, don't forget social structures. Like society is big,
big forces pushing on you that shapes who you are.
Doesn't mean you have no agency, doesn't mean you can't
also like push the boulder and become something in that setting.
But but those forces are big. And you know, back

(25:39):
to your question too of like what causes people to
give up? I think a big part of it is
this what does it mean to be formed in an
embodied way? I talk about how well, So I've kind
of written most of the whole book and I had
a whole outline for it, and then I looked at
it one day and I was like, oh, like, actually

(26:00):
the sections of this book kind of walk through how
to love the Lord your God with your heart and
mind and soul and strength, not the order exactly that
Jesus says it in, right, but that is like the
core of like the thing Jesus says we should do
is love the Lord your God that way, and then
he says the command to love your neighbor is like that.
So we can think about how do we love our
neighbor with heart and soul and mind and strength and

(26:23):
with that strength part, like it's an embodied thing. And
I run into this when I try to teach students
about racism is in a classroom, we often focus so
much energy on the mind part of it, right, like
just get a bunch of information in the students, like
plug them with history and like here's what redlining is,
and here's the history of colonialism, and then then you're fine, Right,

(26:45):
But it doesn't work that way because it's also a
matter of heart of like we are emotional beings. We
have like feelings about this process and loves that are
attached to it. There's a soul portion of it, like
what do we do with the harm, how do we
deal with the guilts, how do we deal with the
healing at a soul level? How do we respond to

(27:07):
God about this whole issue? And then there's this strength
and body part that like you know, you can read
every book about racism that you can find on the
shelf and I had there was a Latino man who
was talking about this man that he was like, you know,
in this phase of like who do you recommend for
the study, He's like, well, you could talk to the
certain man. But he's like, well, but just just know that,

(27:28):
Like I forget how he said it exactly, but it
was sort of like, but he'll make some mistakes, like
he'll be a little awkward. And just as a sort
of overall thing about the white people who are recommended
for this study, I realized there's this pattern of often
when they got recommended, it wasn't because they did things
really totally right. It was more so how they recovered

(27:48):
from what they didn't do right. And so like back
to that analogy of like how you learn a hobby toost,
you just got to get in there and you got
to start doing things, like you learn to dance, like
getting on the dance floor. You read all the books
about it first, so you've got to try it and
you're going to look foolish. And it's not just like
there's stakes involved to it too. Like I was talking

(28:11):
to somebody the other day and I was like, maybe
I should have written in that section like there's also
like knives in your hands sometimes, like when you're dancing,
you can hurt the people around you, which is important
to know, right, But it doesn't mean don't learn. You
got to still learn.

Speaker 1 (28:26):
Right, you're going to stub on people's toes, but at
the end of the day, you're still learning to dance.
And so, just to underscore something you mentioned, I mean
the embodiment that strength. When you look at the Hebrew
of this, Dan Blocks done some really good work on
the Shemah, and so the word for that's usually translated
strength is actually ode. It's the same word that's used

(28:47):
for very in the phrase very good during the creation narrative.

Speaker 2 (28:51):
And so it conveys this idea of muchness.

Speaker 1 (28:54):
And so a lot of Old Testament commentators, including myself,
would say, this doesn't just refer to how much you
can bench brass squad or deadlift or something like that.
It's not your physical strength. It includes all of your
material strength. Like everything that you have belongs to the Lord,
and that's what you're to love him with. None of
these things that he's given you, your herds, your your

(29:15):
cattle or whatever, right like, this is all dedicated to
him and so there's an expanded embodiment almost of what
we see in that love for God and the resources
we would muster then to also love our neighbor.

Speaker 3 (29:29):
Yeah, I love that. I have not heard that, but
it makes me think about to this idea of perseverance
and like the muchness of moving, like the long obedience
in the long direction for yeah, and thinking about how
One thing I noticed in analyzing what I had heard
from people is that very much writing in sort of

(29:51):
academic spaces around racial justice focuses on the scope of it,
like sort of what is systemic? What is like how
do you don't just focus on the person in front
of you? Focus on the system. And that's a message
that I think people really needed to hear and still
continue to need to hear. But what I realized is
there's also a longitudinal aspect of it that I think

(30:14):
it's under mentioned in academic spaces. But if you are
trying to address the entire scope of injustice in the
world like all at once, you're probably going to quickly
discover how limited you are, and it can actually detract

(30:35):
from people having the longitudinal perseverance in that form of muchness.
So because thinking about how muchness is both wide and
it's long.

Speaker 2 (30:43):
Also, Yeah, I think that's helpful. Yeah, I like that
a lot.

Speaker 1 (30:48):
Well, let's dip in a little bit to privilege. This
is a term that I hear an awful lot, and
I know what I want to do with it, but
I have a hard time explaining it. And so I'd
be interested in hearing your explanation and then we can
have a conversation about it and maybe I can get
some clarity on it.

Speaker 3 (31:08):
Yeah. I know I got myself into this. I offer
to give you an explanation. You did.

Speaker 2 (31:13):
Yeah, yeah, you're fault.

Speaker 3 (31:17):
Here's what I probably say to students that every one
of us has everything that we have. Life itself is
a gift. Uh. That's the starting point. We are, at
our most basic, we are recipients from God. There's nothing
that starts from us. It all starts from God, right,

(31:37):
And then what we do is live with those gifts,
and we're all given gifts that we don't deserve us
the baseline, we are given gifts, different kinds of gifts.
But some of what we also do during our lifetime
is kind of take what we don't what we shouldn't have,
And so the things that we've received from our lifetime
include both gifts that are given in love and gifts

(32:00):
given out of goodness and gifts that are given out
of like a history of hurts and harm, and often
those are so intertwined that it's not like we can
just like parse them out. Let me just give an example.
I love music. My undergrad major was piano and English,
and I own a banjo. Okay, if you trace back

(32:20):
through my history of my family, if you go back
about three generations, I had a great grandfather who played
banjo in a minstrel show, which is an extremely offensive
way of appropriating and disrespecting African American music and the
time period of people wearing like black face. What do
I do with that? Right, Like, there's a gift that

(32:42):
I have from my family which is a love of music,
and there's also a stolenness to it, like a harm
and an insult that's part of that history. So like
a big part of what I often am thinking about
is like what do you do with those legacies that
we are all walking around with? These histories of having

(33:03):
received through harm and having received through stolenness and also
through loving gifts. So what is privilege? Maybe in one sense,
you can just think of it as having a certain
abundance of gifts that other people around you don't have.
And that doesn't necessarily mean that there's always sin involved

(33:23):
in how you got those privileges, but it just means
that you have you have gifts, right, And when we
look at that as social scientists, often we're trying to
look like, what are patterns to how people end up
with an abundance of abilities, of stuff, of material goods,
of wealth and power, all the things that we end
up with. And there's patterns right across history because we

(33:47):
humans make those patterns. We make patterns of like colonialism,
who had war capacities to conquer other nations, who enslaved whom,
who wrote laws to say that whom was powerful? Or
who we get a vote who wouldn't write So those
those patterns are what we inherit, and then what do
we do with them as Christians is a huge question.

Speaker 1 (34:08):
Yeah, there's because it feels like what I don't hear
you're saying is that there won't always be asymmetries. So
the giftedness is the different giftedness.

Speaker 2 (34:19):
Is always going to be there.

Speaker 3 (34:21):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (34:22):
Is that correct?

Speaker 3 (34:23):
Am I?

Speaker 2 (34:23):
Hearing that, I don't know like the like I approach this.

Speaker 1 (34:28):
So if I'm thinking about the differentiation within the body
of Christ and Paul's call like be unified, but recognize difference,
an apostle is never going to be an evangelist. These
are two different gifts that God has given in so
there's difference there. There's asymmetry, is the way I'm phrasing it, right,
And so it just feels to me like one body
of many members there's going to be in asymmetry. A

(34:51):
right hand is never going to be a left foot,
that kind of idea, and so there's a valuing of that.

Speaker 2 (34:57):
But am I hearing you right?

Speaker 1 (35:00):
Are we trying to get rid of those asymmetries, get
rid of those differences like level or are we trying
to navigate those differences in a way that is loving
and respectful to the entire to every member of the community.

Speaker 3 (35:15):
That's a great question. Yeah, difference is good, Like I
think that's a starting point for us. Right, even if
you start from the creation narrative, it's like God separated differences.
Every single c of it is like there's light, there's dark,
there's sky, there's sea, there's differences. There's like bird and
fish and are different. There's man woman different, right, and

(35:37):
it's good. It's always like, here's a difference and it's good.
And so difference is not going away. We definitely don't
want that, right, that's part of God's creativity and joyful,
delightful existence of the world. Right, asymmetry I think of
as a slightly different word and right. You know, it
depends on what's asymmetrical, I guess, but usually when we

(35:58):
talk about that, we think about like a symmetric power
of who has the right or the privilege or even
like the dignity in a situation. And that's where I
think we take difference and we make it into our
own sinful, flawed version of it. I explain to students,
like there's a difference between race and other kinds of

(36:21):
differences between human groups. When we use the word race
in social sciences, we're talking about specific way of differentiating
human beings, and that is a hierarchical way and a
way that like basically one group of people in our
Western racial system that was historically European white people from
Protestant like a specific area of Europe that said, we

(36:46):
think we are better than the rest of the world.
And they also at that time in history, had the
power to start to enact systems that would last, so
to conquer nations, to write laws, you know, to enslave
human beings, to make that system of hierarchy lasting and enduring.
And it was that group who was saying like, I

(37:08):
will tell all the rest of you what your groups are,
Like you will be red, you will be black, you
will be yellow, right, like putting terms on other groups
of people, you know, taking all of the African continent
and saying like, oh, now you are black people, and
they're like, we don't speak the same language, we don't
know each other. We are people, right. Yeah, So there's
I think where that kind of like sin enters into

(37:29):
what we do with difference of that house it does.

Speaker 2 (37:33):
Yeah, that's really helpful.

Speaker 1 (37:35):
And so then my other question on privilege, to sort
of piggyback on some of this, is you do have
different layers of privilege. So it seems to me at
least and this you can you can interact with this.
So I'm not trying to assert this, I guess I'm
trying to state a thesis. Right, So when I look
at Bordia for instance, right, semi autonomous fields of interaction.

(37:59):
So think about again, maybe the lineman in the ballerina. Right,
if if you're born and you're in a you're born,
let's say in a Texas town where football is just
you know everything, right, and you grew up playing football, right,
and you're just playing football all the time. But there's
no ballerina studio, ballet studio, it's not a balerius, no

(38:22):
ballet's studio. Right, you have a certain degree. There's a
differentiation of that privilege there, right, just through access, right,
And so that's what I guess I'm saying there. It
seems to me like there are different layers of privilege
that go way deep. And so I'm wondering a lot

(38:43):
of times when I have discussions about privilege, it stays
sort of up here, right, like everybody of a certain
color has this privilege.

Speaker 2 (38:52):
And I don't know. I mean, I grew up in
rural Illinois.

Speaker 1 (38:56):
There are a lot of white guys who just didn't
have any privilege at all, you know what I mean.
And so it seems to me like there's something And
I know people are a little skittish about intersectionality, right.
But it seems to me that there are all these
different characteristics that we have to take into account, and
so a descriptive model appear may not necessarily hit the

(39:16):
ground in the same way with every single person along
the way. Not trying to give an excuse, but just
trying to say, where does the theory meet the concept
meet the concrete.

Speaker 3 (39:30):
Yeah, great questions. Yeah, so I you know, you said,
like the white man in.

Speaker 2 (39:38):
Rural Yeah, rural Illinois, Illinois.

Speaker 3 (39:41):
Right, Yeah, there's there's huge like lack of privilege in
living in say like a rural area in the United States.
They want to look at like patterns in life, sectancy, violence,
like rural urban. It's rural is where it's like where
the struggle is, right, So, like that's another aspect of
privilege in the United States. Like you can make these

(40:03):
different categories. I was thinking one way to maybe explain
this is I think sometimes we there's sort of like
popular conversations about privilege that want to simplify things, and
we all want to see I want to sub sometimes, right,
But I think one of the shortcuts we sometimes use

(40:24):
is thinking it is all about just these categories that
have names to them, right, Like it's about your race,
your ableism, like as if there is like a clear
line between like who is disabled, who is abled able bodied? Sure,
or like you know, it's gender sexuality. Like we have
these terms which I see as like a starting point

(40:47):
for understanding concept, but the concept is so much more
complicated than that. Like there's this kind of you can
think of it as like a watercolor drawing of like
the layers of privilege are not neat little boxes with
black lines around them, but they blur together. So so yeah,
like what privilege I have, Like, yeah, it depends partly

(41:07):
on like being in a female body, right, but it's
also like I grew up in a family where my
dad was a professor and my mom was a teacher,
and so like I got a great education, so you know,
it's never just like a yes no answer to whether
you have a privileged So where I go with this
in my book and how you deal with this? What

(41:31):
I really saw, like going to American Anthological Association kind
of meetings and hearing people in the academy talk about racism,
is you know, we are very good at talking about
the problem, but we are afraid to talk about the solutions.
And I think Christians actually offer a concept that is

(41:51):
excellent for trying to get from the problem of like
the harm that is done in our history and in
our current world around racism to a solution. And that
concept is grace. Like this is the word that we
have how we deal with undeserved gifts. And and I realize,
you know, it's a helpful word because it's undeserved gifts

(42:13):
of all sorts, like God's gifts of grace to us
is goodness, you know, it just like given us life.
But it's also for like the harm aspect of it,
like God gives us grace to deal with our debt
of sin and what we've done wrong. And and when
I started reading like John Barclay's work on grace, he emphasizes,

(42:36):
like so much of writing about Christian grace forgets that
there's a response anticipated to it. And I see that
happen in how Christians deal with racism sometimes like so, uh,
I'll just like name white people when we talk about racism. Historically,
often white Christians have said, well, the solution to this

(42:59):
is that people of color should forgive right, because that's
what we're called to do as Christians is forgive, get
over it, move on, let's not talk about it. But
there's there's a part of grace also which is responding
to it and healing the wrong and creating actively creating shalone,
creating a community where God's justice is threaded throughout all

(43:22):
of society. So what I realized, you know, and hearing
people talk about how they came to be like long
term advocates or justice as white people, is that was
a shift that also happened. Like it wasn't just learning
about hope, it was grounding hope in a response to grace.
It was like being able to name like I don't
deserve what I have in life, not you know, not

(43:45):
any of it really from God, but also like specifically
the privileges that come through through racial privilege, and so
like you know, I can't pay back slavery, I can't
like pay it back, but I can respond to those
undeserved gifts that I received over my lifetime. So that,
you know, I could talk about that for a very
long time, because it's messy. I think that's one of

(44:07):
the hardest way right things for me to wrap my
head around.

Speaker 1 (44:11):
No, I appreciate it though the way you said it here,
I mean I love the section of the book as well,
because what you're doing is you're basically calling us to
respond differently than we have in the past, and that
to recognize that what we have has been given and
therefore we didn't really earn it, right. I mean, I
think we get so caught up in earning things. This

(44:32):
is the whole meritocracy conversation, And whenever I've gotten into
those conversations, I'm kind of like, I remember how I
got my first job. I wasn't I could not have
been the most qualified guy on that list, no chance.
I knew some people at the school that I got
the job at, and so they advocated for me, and
that was fantastic.

Speaker 2 (44:52):
And it's like, do I feel bad about that?

Speaker 1 (44:55):
Not particularly bad, but you do start to recognize that
talent doesn't necessarily equate with success, right, Like there is
a networked effect that we're all dealing with, and there
are other factors that are in there. So I mean,
even just to look at those kind of things in
the past and go, no, this was a gift. This

(45:16):
was something that I was given. It doesn't mean that
I didn't do something to earn that, right, but it
does mean that I didn't exactly deserve it either, Like,
if you Iraq and stack me against everybody else, how
do I compare up? I'm betting it wasn't just that
I was so uber qualified that I got this job.
And I think it's really important for us to recognize that.

(45:36):
And so how we respond to that then, is I
appreciate in the chapter in the emphasis on forgiveness, but
I also recognize like there is some sort of way
of doing this. I kept going back to Ephesians four,
and it's not exactly about grace, but let the thief
no longer steal, let him labor so that he cay

(45:57):
share with those who have need.

Speaker 2 (46:00):
In the community. It's a butchering of that passage, but
that's essentially the paraphrase.

Speaker 1 (46:03):
And so you have this orientation to even what you've
earned through labor, you're now not detracting or taking away
from the community as a thief. You're actually contributing back
to the community as a laborer, as someone who is
being productive with the community. And so so I was
reading through that chapter of Grace, that verse kept coming

(46:25):
to mind, and I was like, this is the dynamic.
I think maybe at least I connected that dynamic to
what you were saying about grace, like this should be
there should be an emphasis of our contribution back to
the community because we have this gift.

Speaker 3 (46:41):
Yeah, I love that. I'd never thought about that, but
that makes so much sense. Yeah that like the thief
should labor. Yeah, you know, I think about like Jesus
and the key is too, and like what does the
key iss do? Is like I will pay it back.
That's a starting point for following Christ trying to find

(47:02):
the way to pay it back and like how does
he do that? I don't know, Like what is the
keys do with his money? And you walk around to
like all the people passes from and just like you
get ten dollars, you get four? Like I don't know.
It's messy, right, Like how do you actually live that out?
But it's more like a posture like I talk about.
It's not it's never a checklist of things that you
do that like repair racism. It's more a lifetime of

(47:24):
posture and practices that you put into place over your lifetime,
like being on the lookout for like how do I
how do I give back? And something I'll say too
that really clicked for me and hearing people tell these
stories about it is that if your motivation for trying
to deal with racism is a sense of guilt for

(47:44):
like the need that is out there, that's really that's fragile.
Also like again in the way of like hope being
like you know, if you think it's only going to
be when things are going well, well, I think often
people also try to adjust racism out of like, well,
I'm only there when it's forrid like and I feel
so bad and like, oh this story is terrible, right, yeah,

(48:07):
But the people who have it as a long term posture,
it's just like, well, I know every single day of
my life, I have undeserved gifts that I have, and
so this whole lifetime is a bonus, Like, you know,
why would I not give back for me? Like one
story in my life that I go back to along
those lines, when I was six, I had heart surgery
and my heart actually stopped beating, and my my parents

(48:30):
got this message from the doctors that like, we had
some trouble restarting her heart and stopped in the middle
of surgery, and she might have some brain damage and
we don't know she's gonna be okay. And then I'm okay, right, Like,
I like, you know, I can joke about like I
forget people's names maybe because of that or whatever, but like,
I have this life and I look back at that

(48:53):
now and I just I consistently have to tell myself,
like every single moment of my life is a bonus.
I could have been just swept away to the hereafter
in that moment, but instead I'm alive. And I think
approaching justice out of that mindset of the abundance of
what we've been given, rather than the like the world
is a mess and if I don't do something it's good,

(49:16):
it's gonna a burn. Right, Like that's too much. We
can't bear that. I had a woman who put it
this way, like I'm part of the bruck bucket brigade,
but I'm not the whole thing. Like just get in
the line, carry your bucket.

Speaker 1 (49:28):
Yeah yeah, So, I mean, if you were given any
advice about this, I have a lot more questions, but
we're kind of running out of time. I don't want
to I want to respect the time, and there's only
so much time we can put a podcast out. So
for one, I've really appreciated the conversation, but I guess
if you were giving advice to someone who's you know,

(49:49):
kind of looking out at the state of the world
and saying, I don't it's so immense, I don't even
know how to get involved, right. I want to cultivate
this hope. I want to I want to respond to
the grace that I've been given. What any concrete step
you'd tell them to take, you know, find a collision
somewhere or something like that, I mean, what do you

(50:11):
what do you think?

Speaker 3 (50:12):
Yeah, this word collision I talk about is like these
moments when reality hits you so hard that you cannot
ignore the difference between reality and the way you imagine
reality to be. And I think that's part of what
I think a lot of us maybe are experiencing right
now as we read the news, and there's always news
stories that are going to make collisions for us or

(50:33):
are like, WHOA, I didn't know that bad thing could happen,
And no, don't go make those happen, right. But I
think one concrete thing that you can do is is
reflect on those moments in your life when you have
had a time that you were hit emotionally, like hit
in your heart with this thing is so wrong and

(50:57):
then ask yourself, what what is that prompt for me?
How has that changed me? Has it actually led to
anything long term? Or did I actually kind of like
shift away and say, like I want to go back
to optimism. I want to like turn away from that
bad thing and focus on the sort of happy present
moment or whatever I can sort of hould on to.
And that doesn't mean that you can't like hold onto joy.

(51:19):
We need joy in the present too, but I guess
maybe more in a concrete steps you can take kind
of way. I love an analogy that comes from Beverly
Daniels Tatum I believe her name is, and she talks
about like a moving walkway. If you imagine sort of

(51:42):
like being in an airport or wherever you have those
like conveyor belt things, right, you get on it and
you're just swept away in a certain direction. And the
history of racism in our country has created a certain
moving walkway. It's kind of like what you said of
like being in a town where there's lots of football players,

(52:02):
like you're going to you're going to go through like
being trained to be a football player and not a ballerina,
and those kinds of systems surround us all the time
that are going to guide us in a certain way,
and and you can get on it and just not
pay attention. You can get on it actually like actively
walk in the same direction of the conveyor belt. Also,

(52:23):
but if the conveyor belt is going in the wrong direction,
like it is leading to injustice, then what do you do?
And and I tell students, like, there's multiple responses that
you can have when you realize you're on a conveyor
belt that is leading toward injustice. One thing you can
do is just stop walking, like just pause for a
second and be like I need to look around and

(52:44):
maybe like read a book or two or watch a
movie or two and understand how that where is this
conveyor belt going? How what's happening here? Asking why, questions.
So some people just need to do that, just start learning.
Other people have already done that, and they're like, oh,
this this conveyor belt is bad, to do something about it. Well,
then you can stop and actually walk in the opquisite direction,

(53:04):
and then you start telling other people on the conveyor belt, hey,
like maybe you could also stop and read this book
and question was going. So you're walking in the other direction.
But then there's also like jump off the conveyor belt
all together, and then there's like grab a sledgehammer and
start breaking the thing to pieces and dismantle it, and

(53:25):
so like, depending on where you're at in life. You
don't start dismantling from like far away. You start where
you're at. Like, if I'm teaching out a college, I
can start asking questions like what about students who come
into college and their first generation students are from underrepresentative
populations and college is going to be really hard. Well,
I can start by learning how to be the best

(53:45):
bestor I can possibly be so that they're going to
succeed the college. And you need to do that whether
you're in healthcare or law or accounting or whatever you're in. Right,
is just look at like how do you start understanding
why things are the way they are and is there
something that needs to get dismantled and how do you
do in that?

Speaker 2 (54:01):
That's really helpful. Yeah, I like that answer, really helpful.

Speaker 3 (54:06):
Yeah, go for it.

Speaker 1 (54:08):
Well, Christine, thanks so much for being here this. I like,
I enjoyed the book. I think I enjoyed the conversation
even more so. Really appreciate being on. Is there anywhere
that I could send people other than obviously to the book.
IVP gives us a twenty percent discount code if you
buy the book off IVP dot com, so I'll have
that link in the show description. But anywhere else, website,

(54:28):
anything like that where you'd send people do.

Speaker 3 (54:30):
Yeah. You can find the rest of our ready at
Christine Jeske dot com. And you can also subscribe to
my newsletter there on substack called Just Learning, and it
gives you sort of little snippets every couple of weeks
of things that you can do to practice justice in
everyday life. So check out the book and subscribe to
the newsletter if you want to.

Speaker 2 (54:47):
All right, we will.

Speaker 3 (54:48):
James, it was great talking to you too, that's great.

Speaker 2 (54:50):
Yeah, absolutely absolutely, and we'll.

Speaker 1 (54:53):
I'll put Christine Jeske dot com in the show notes
as well, so check all that out, everybody, if you're interested.

Speaker 2 (54:59):
I really arned you to pick up the book.

Speaker 1 (55:01):
I enjoyed it, and I think these conversations are really
necessary and just appreciate the work you're doing.

Speaker 2 (55:06):
So thanks very much. All right, everybody, we will catch
you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care