As we work to resist racism in our lives and our world, our practice today is
Naming
. Among people of faith, those who exercise the practice of naming are called prophets. Prophets were not those who could see the future; they weren’t clairvoyant. Instead, they simply looked around at their lives and the lives of the society in which they lived, and they named the truth about what they saw. Then they named the divine truth about the inevitable consequences of such actions. We have such prophets in our time, too, who speak truthfully about what is happening in the world, and who bring God’s truth to bear on it. But each of us is called to some measure of such prophetic speech. We are called to speak aloud what we see—to identify racism at work in the world, and to name it as such. Robin D’Angelo writes, “Not naming the groups that face barriers only serves those who have access; the assumption is that the access enjoyed by the controlling group is universal.” Naming is an act of resisting evil and oppression in our midst.
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Pastor Taylor Fuerst