Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[APPLAUSE]

NARRATOR: November 2008-- this was

the night many people in the United States

believed that our nation's long history of racial division

had come to an end.

We were entering what was optimistically

called post-racial America.

[CHEERING]

But in the decades since the American people elected

the country's first black president,

most of our nation's most complex social issues

continue to revolve around race.

Why is this such a stumbling block for us?

What will it take for us to finally come together?

Can the issues of race ever truly be overcome?

Or is it just human nature to divide ourselves

along racial lines?

There are a lot of people who believe that racism is there

it's always going to be there.

There's nothing you could do about it.

You are the race you are, blah, blah, blah.

And I say, no, this is something we made up.

NARRATOR: Wait, what?

DEBRA L. LEIGH: This is something we made up.

NARRATOR: So if we made race up, what's the story?

A closer look at history reveals that the story of race

is a story of labor.

Most of us were taught that North America was initially

colonized by those seeking religious freedom.

But in fact, most Europeans, including the Pilgrims,

came for land and economic opportunity.

At that time, there was no concept of race as we know it.

No one identified by the color of their skin,

but by their country of origin--

French, English, Dutch, Spanish.

By the early 17th century, the colony's plantation economy

was booming.

This created a massive need for cheap labor,

a need largely filled by poor European immigrants.

Some land owners also used enslaved people

from African nations.

But at the time, an enslaved person's status

was not lifelong.

One could gain their freedom.

However, in 1676, enslaved Africans

joined with European indentured servants in a large rebellion

against the colonial government in Virginia.

Alarmed by the natural alliance between

the indentured and enslaved, the ruling class

passed a series of laws that segregated and permanently

enslaved those of African descent,

while also giving their European counterparts

new rights and status.

This divide and conquer strategy paved the way

for what would become an organized

system of racial chattel--

slavery.

And that was how you kept a system in place

and why you had white people who were poor not challenging

the system, because they were sold a bill of goods

that somehow whiteness was going to include them

in all the benefits of society.

NARRATOR: The first legal use of the term "white"

appeared in 1691 in a document created

by the colonial government of Virginia, used intentionally

to differentiate people by the color of their skin

rather than their nation of origin.

In 1790, Thomas Jefferson put forth

the first US national census, which placed the population

into the categories of free white males,

free white females, and all other free persons.

Enslaved black people were counted as well, but only

as 3/5 of a person.

Native Americans weren't counted at all.

And at its first seating, Congress

passed the Naturalization Act, which

stated that only free whites could become United States

citizens.

You have to be white.

That was the first thing they said.

The very first thing.

You have to be white.

What humans have done is ascribe meaning and difference

to skin colors and then use those meanings

to create hierarchies.

And so when we say race is socially constructed,

it's about the ways in which humans have created hierarchies

related to racial difference.

NARRATOR: The construct of race as a way

to assign value to human beings became

woven into the structures of this new nation,

with white people valued above all others.

This ideology has been upheld and reinforced

throughout our country's history,

continually seeking legitimization

through pseudoscience, civil policy, and bad theology,

all examined through a white lens.

White supremacy is the idea that not only is it great

to be white, but it's better than anybody else.

It's better than any other color.

It is the best.

The way that white folks do things,

the way that white folks think, the way that white folks do

church, the way that white folks write and talk about God

is better than anybody else.

As a person of color, I notice this

when I walk into denominational headquarters

or I walk into seminaries and Christian colleges

and I look at all the important people of that denomination,

and they're old white men.

And it's telling me that for the history of this denomination

or for the history of this Christian college

or university, they believe that the only important people

to put up on the walls are old white men.

That implicitly is affirming or asserting white superiority.

NARRATOR: Whiteness became a culture in and of itself

to be defended at all costs.

In the 19th century, Chinese immigrants

became another target of racially biased policies.

And because there was this fear

that these Chinese laborers were stealing "good white man jobs,"

as if those jobs belonged to them,

this sentiment kind of emerged and swelled

and ultimately led to the Chinese Exclusionary

Act, the one and only time we excluded

an entire group of people from being

able to immigrate into our country just based

on their ethnicity.

The Exclusionary Act starts as a 10-year act,

but ultimately is extended for 60 years.

NARRATOR: European immigrants, such as the Irish, Italians,

and Germans, were also initially viewed as a threat

and were often persecuted.

But they had one distinct advantage--

they were light-skinned.

So over time, by stripping away or hiding

their ethnic heritage, eventually they

could assimilate and become white.

The United States has been referred to as the melting pot,

a metaphor for the fusion of nationalities, cultures,

and ethnicities.

I've never really liked the term "melting pot"

because it just means that it's going to become one thing,

and so who decides what the one thing is?

When you're the minority, that means that everything of yours

is lost.

NARRATOR: It seems the metaphor of the melting pot in truth

is a push for white homogeny rather than

an embrace of diversity.

My own children are way lighter-skinned than I am.

What's happened I think even with my children

is that our celebrations and our language

are slowly dissipating and disappearing,

and I wonder what my grandchildren will be like.

And I keep thinking they'll be the next white generation.

NARRATOR: Today, the concept of race and the structures

that hold up whiteness as the norm have become so embedded

in our culture that it's extraordinarily

difficult for most white people to see the ways they influence

life in this country.

Because being white is what's normal,

and it's normal for everybody.

It's just what it means to be human.

We don't think of it in racial terms.

And so my question's always been, what is white culture?

Let's talk about that.

And that's hard to define because really

what they might be alluding to is white supremacy.

We don't see the advantages, and we usually only recognize

it when we are with persons of color

and they get treated differently than us.

What we think as normal is really an advantage.

NARRATOR: And the advantages are often stark.

A 2016 national study of household wealth

found that the median net worth of white families

was eight times higher than that of Hispanic families

and 10 times higher than that of black families.

Another 2016 study revealed that black, Hispanic, and Native

American children are more than twice

as likely as white children to be living in low income homes.

When we focus on what makes us, quote,

"the same," it denies the fact that our lives are not the same

and we live in different worlds with different realities.

And so when we focus on the things that make us the same,

we can't agree on humanity.

I think what we have done with race is evil.

I mean, I'm of the belief that difference is not evil.

NARRATOR: You and I did not start this system of race

in white supremacy, but if we do not actively

work at uncovering our own inherent bias

and tearing down the system, we are guilty still

of supporting it.

We need to recognize that we do live

in a society that is oppressive to people of color

and has had a long history of white supremacy.

This has always been who America

is, the dissolution of the American exceptionalism

dream, where we're realizing sort

of in our collective consciousness

that we're no better than any empire that's ever come before.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NARRATOR: We've been taught that the United States was founded

on religious liberty, which means

the history of the American church

is tightly bound to the history of American culture,

including colonialism, racism, and white supremacy.

But how is it possible that a religion founded

in the boundless love and compassion of Christ

could ever align itself with the ideologies that

have only brought harm?

It's all in the interpretation.

KRISTOFER DALE COFFMAN: There is no concept of race in the Bible

because race is a thoroughly modern construction.

There are, though, a lot of things

that look like race in the Bible.

NARRATOR: In the Old Testament, a great deal of focus

is placed upon a concept of people, translated

from the Hebrew word "am."

People, in this instance, are God's chosen people,

the Israelites.

Those who were not a part of Israel

are referred to as the Nations.

The Nations shared a common ancestry with Israel,

but worshiped different gods.

It does not involve facial features, skin tone,

things that are physical characteristics.

NARRATOR: In the New Testament, we

find a similar divide between Jewish people

and non-Jewish people, who are called Gentiles.

And so while there are components

of national identity, components of cultural identity,

they're all subsumed under this question of,

what's your religious identity?

NARRATOR: The white church in the US

would often interpret these passages

about ancient religious divides as parallels

to the racial divides that were deemed

essential to the success of the American experiment.

In American theology, that divide then

gets applied white versus other--

Israel equals white Americans, the Nations equals the others.

NARRATOR: In the Book of Joshua, we

see the Israelites invading and eradicating many nations--

the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites,

the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites--

all in order to claim the land God had promised them.

In the age of colonization and westward expansion,

North America became the promised land.

The Pilgrims, the Puritans, and the Pioneers

became God's chosen people, and the nations they were subduing

were the many Indigenous tribes--

the Seminoles, the Algonquin, the Cherokee, the Choctaw,

the Iroquois, the Chickasaw, and many, many more.

In the case of slavery, we can trace

the progression of this race-based theology

through colonial law.

In 1656, an enslaved woman of African descent

named Elizabeth Key won her and her infant son's freedom

in court partly on the grounds that she

was a baptized Christian.

At that time, it was English law that a baptized Christian

could not be enslaved.

Shortly after Key was freed, a new colonial law

was passed that eliminated this loophole clearly stating

that baptism did not equate freedom

from the bonds of slavery.

If you already think that slavery is an institution that

needs to continue for your economic survival,

you go to Ephesians and you say, Paul says,

slaves, obey your masters.

And the problem with this is it's an incredibly

decontextualized reading.

It was the Christian church that baptized Africans

as they left the shores of Africa into slavery

and gave them Christian names, or English names,

to replace their African names.

The ability to be a Christian and still

be a slave owner, which I think most of us today would say

is completely contrary to the scripture

that we read, that foundation was

built by white theologians who, in a sense,

manipulated the text.

NARRATOR: Even as slave owners used the Bible to justify

and sanctify the ownership and oppression

of other human beings, the slaved Africans

embraced biblical narratives of justice and freedom,

finding hope in the story of God's promise

to deliver an oppressed people.

And so we see enslaved Africans

taking Old Testament stories of Israelites

and using that to connect with, to understand

that there were enslaved people in the Bible and God

freed them.

We also see enslaved people contesting

the ways in which masters used the Bible to subject them

and saying, this is morally wrong and morally corrupt.

NARRATOR: The Bible has long helped

fuel black peoples' fight against injustice in the United

States, from the abolition of slavery

to securing the right to vote to ending Jim Crow laws

and on into today.

When I think about the story of Jesus and connecting it

to enslavement, to the history of African-Americans,

it's always being on the side of those who are most marginalized

and trying to transform society to respond to those people.

So you look at the Bible and you

read the first century church and how the church was formed.

It was formed in Jewish communities,

and Jews in the first century were

an oppressed ethnic and religious minority.

So the church, though, that came to the United States came

from Europe, and it was a church built on colonialism

and white supremacy was interwoven.

And so what we received was a European form of Christianity

that was very different than what

you read about in the pages of the Bible.

NARRATOR: Even as our theological frameworks

have expanded to reflect the experiences and theologies

of Christians around the world, the bedrock of white supremacy

still shows through our language.

When we talk about Western theology,

we don't say this is actually Swiss theology

or German theology or specifically American theology.

We just say it's theology.

We centralize Western theology by just calling

it theology and all the others are on the periphery--

black theology, womanist theology, liberation theology.

And we've created an otherness because we're saying,

you're not the norm.

My entire experience in seminary, we're

going to assimilate you, we're going

to teach you good theology, we're

going to teach you the way that we do it,

and then we're going to send you out there, right?

It's the way we think about how

we're going to bring our good American or Western

progressive theology to a world that doesn't know any better.

To say, we're going to go to Africa

and fix their theology for them.

We're going to go to Asia and fix their theology for them.

I think that assumption of the superiority of one culture

or one people group over against the other

is much more common than we realize.

If you're not willing to submit

to the leadership of a local leader,

an Indigenous leader, a leader of color,

then you're not actually coming in to do ministry.

You're actually going to be manifesting colonization.

Just the way that I saw missions

being worked in our communities of color here in Chicago

as well, seeing how white churches that had money

would come in that thought that there wasn't Jesus here

until they came, that they were bringing Jesus into our city.

And I'm like, Jesus is already in this city.

Jesus is already working through plenty of us

that are doing this work.

NARRATOR: The Eurocentric roots of the American church

have created structures that focus on the experiences

and perspectives of white people, a focus that creates

all kinds of unseen biases.

I'll be honest, I know I have plenty of bias.

I have plenty of things that I assume about other people.

And so I think it's not a question

of not having assumptions.

I think it's a question of, what do you do with them,

and are you aware of them?

I think the most important thing that we can do

is to get out of the way in the sense

that there are people in the United States

and people around the world in immigrant communities,

in global Christianity, who are reading the Bible very

differently than we are.

And by having folks speaking for their own communities,

speaking of how they interpret the scripture,

we now have a counternarrative that

can be put in conversation with our traditional narrative.

NARRATOR: The diversity of voices around the world serve

to remind us that the word of God carries a core message

of inclusion and that God cannot be limited to one cultural

expression.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

There is a popular story of race in the United States

that goes something like this.

SEAN HANNITY: The United States of America

is the land of opportunity, a melting pot, where

people from all over the world come to live in freedom,

to escape repression, to share in the American dream.

NARRATOR: This is a familiar story,

one we've all heard many times.

It is the story of American exceptionalism.

This story is about a noble war to end

slavery in the United States and extending

the right to vote to formerly enslaved peoples, of banding

together to win a world war twice, a story of civil rights

earned, equality before the law and equality at the ballot box.

This is a story of progress.

In this story, there is no organized effort

to harm black people by white people.

BILL O'REILLY: The truth is, there is no organized effort

to harm black people by white people.

That doesn't exist here.

NARRATOR: See?

There is, however, a counternarrative

of our nation's history.

There are these huge gaping holes

in what we call US history because it's not

told from the perspective of people of color

because it's not written or institutionally affirmed

by people of color.

NARRATOR: Filling in the gaping holes of US history paints

a very different picture of what it means

to celebrate the United States.

This story includes the beginning

of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the growth of slavery

across the English colonies.

This story recognizes the resistance

to evil among those who were enslaved

and the commitment to slavery among white people.

This story is characterized by the violence

against black and brown bodies, and born out

of white supremest theology, racist laws,

and cultural oppression, one that

celebrates black achievement in the face of such oppression

and confronts violence always.

White Americans have never needed

to tell this other story.

The narrative of white supremacy makes

it possible to see only the story of progress.

I think white folks don't need to imagine it,

or thought they didn't.

If you're not thinking about black folks 24/7--

and by black, I mean people of color--

you can spare yourself.

You can read books.

You can watch TV shows.

But at the end of the day, you can go back to being white

and be spared.

ANGELA KHABEB: When I served in rural Ohio,

we were the only black family in the town that we lived in.

And it was about as challenging as you can imagine.

I just had another baby.

That was our youngest.

So I'm at home and getting ready to nurse,

and Benhi, my husband, goes for a walk,

takes the two other kids in the double stroller.

And as he's going for a walk, he comes right back.

I mean, just a matter of two minutes, he's right back home.

And I said, what happened?

And he said, this parishioner, he said,

he just tried to kill us.

I said, what are you talking about?

I'm thinking he's exaggerating.

He said, he tried to run us over.

He drove up onto the curb and he said--

it was right after President Obama was re-elected--

he said, "that fucking nigger president

is trying to ruin my country, and I'm

going to run you fucking niggers out of this town,"

and proceeded to drive up onto the curb

to kill my husband and our two small children.

The American mistake is believing that we

are exceptional and different.

This is a country that's built on the genocide of Indigenous

people, that an entire economy is built

on the black backs of people who've never been given

reparations, and has continued to reinforce

those racist structures and systems for its own benefit.

And that fault line runs through the entire American experience.

This has always been who America is.

NARRATOR: It's easy to think that the story of violence

against black bodies belongs to the country's past,

but white supremacy is still on the march.

Enabled by the lack of understanding

of how society reinforces racial prejudice across legal,

educational, professional, and social metrics,

racist systems are failing black Americans.

One example is home ownership--

[DOORBELL RINGS]

--The centerpiece of the American dream.

What we understand and what historically we can see with

African-Americans is that the way that you become a citizen

is through ownership.

Because what happens when you own a home?

You have say not only of your own domicile,

but then you get to be a part of a community that

can take political action.

NARRATOR: The benefits of home ownership in the US

are enormous, from tax breaks and credit benefits

to building equity and passing it to our descendants.

These benefits have been systematically denied

to a majority of black Americans.

In the 1930s, as part of the New Deal,

loan programs were created to help Americans purchase homes.

In order to determine who received a loan,

the government created color-coded maps,

where green neighborhoods indicated low risk and red

neighborhoods were high risk.

This practice, now known as redlining,

heavily favored white communities.

Homeownership for African-Americans has been

racially contested because of the ways in which the federal

government colluded with mortgage companies to red line

and to blockbust African-American neighborhoods.

Neighborhoods that were predominately African-American

were automatically deemed high risk,

which meant they were less likely to get

loans to purchase, right?

Right after World War II, we had this huge endowment

or investment in the suburbs that came from the Federal

Housing Authority.

Of the $120 billion that was invested in suburban housing,

less than 2% of that went to non-white families.

ANNOUNCER (ON VIDEO): This is Levittown, Pennsylvania,

a new suburban community of 60,000 people midway

between Philadelphia and Trenton, New Jersey.

With its giant shopping center, winding

lanes named for flowers and trees,

it is fairly typical of communities all over America,

where families are pursuing the American dream

to give their children a better chance in life.

Why did you select Levittown to live?

We were looking for a place to buy a home.

We looked at Levittown, and we liked the homes here.

We liked the advantages that Levittown

seemed to offer in comparison to other cities.

And we understood that it was going to be all white,

and we were very happy to buy a home here.

NARRATOR: In the 19th century, the US government

claimed that people of African descent were property.

In the 20th century, the same government

worked to ensure black Americans couldn't own property.

Predatory and biased lending practices

have been exposed over and over in the United States,

revealing a continuing systemic effort

to withhold economic benefits from black families

that are readily available to white families.

So what is a white homeowner to do?

Give up their home?

We're not asking you to sell your home.

We're not asking you to even move.

But we're asking you to think about the structures

that we all implicitly buy into that create and replicate

inequality and how we can think about dismantling those.

The answer to the problem is eventually

when you find that there are no more areas

to which a white person can move without having a Negro

family in, well, that would be the best end

that there could be to segregation and is probably

something that will happen in the future,

perhaps in the near future.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MAN: [INAUDIBLE]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NARRATOR: When Christopher Columbus

arrived on the shores of a new world in 1492,

he brought with him a belief in his God-given right

to take over any lands he found in the name of Spain

and Christianity.

This right was given to Columbus and all European explorers

by various papal edicts that would

come to be known as the Doctrine of Discovery.

It's hard to overstate the impact

the Doctrine of Discovery has had

on the world in the last 500 years.

So the Doctrine of Discovery is basically

an agreement between the European nations

in the 15th century.

Whoever discovers it first and lays claim to the land,

they own that.

If Portugal goes out and discovers some land in Western

Africa, and 15 years later, France

goes out and discovers the same land,

who does this land belong to?

NARRATOR: With the Doctrine of Discovery,

such questions are easily dispensed of.

It essentially starts out as this peace agreement between

European nations, but really what it becomes is

the theological authority to enslave non-Christian people

and also just to strip their land of all the resources.

Any movable or immovable good now belongs to the crown.

NARRATOR: The earliest edict of this kind

was the Dum Diversas issued by Pope Nicholas V in 1452, which

gave colonizing Europeans permission directly from God

to, quote, "capture, vanquish, and subdue

the enemies of Christ, to put them into perpetual slavery

and to take all their possessions and property."

That papal bull is kind of the birth

of white Christian relationship to Native people,

to Indigenous people.

One of the things it did was it allowed people, white people

or non-Native people, non-Indigenous people,

to put themselves on a higher level of their relationship

with God.

NARRATOR: 40 years and numerous additional edicts

reinforcing these beliefs would pass before Columbus set foot

in the new world.

By the time Columbus arrives in the Western hemisphere

in 1492, the thought that these people he's encountering

are made in the image of God doesn't even

enter into his consciousness at that point

because for 40 years now, the church

and these European nations have been

operating under the understanding

that these are not people.

It's like any other resource.

You can do what you will with it.

And we, as Natives, kind of point

to this as the foundation for all of the atrocities that

takes place with so-called discovery and imperialism

because we were not seen as human.

We were seen as barbarians.

We were resources to either be enslaved and utilized

or removed entirely.

NARRATOR: The Doctrine of Discovery

was both a political and religious document sanctioning

centuries of slavery, genocide, and other atrocities worldwide.

Even now, its tenets remain embedded in modern society.

The very fact that I have a piece of paper

that says that I own this house and the lot that it's on,

my right to own that is rooted in the Doctrine of Discovery.

NARRATOR: In the 19th century, a series of Supreme Court cases

updated the Doctrine of Discovery

from the age of exploration to the time of westward expansion.

In the 1823 case of "Johnson versus M'Intosh,"

the court ruled unanimously that Natives did not

own the land that they occupied, as it

belonged to the European nation that discovered it.

That ruling provided the groundwork

for westward colonial expansion via the land rush, the pioneer

spirit, and the belief in Manifest Destiny--

Manifest Destiny being the belief that white settlers had

a right imbued by God to claim all the lands of the continent,

from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[GRUNTS]

This land is mine!

Mine by destiny!

The value for Native people has always been our land.

That's what they wanted.

They always wanted our land.

NARRATOR: The hunger for land required policies

for the removal or eradication of Native communities.

These included forced relocation to reservations,

forced conversion to Christianity,

outlying native spiritual practice, and child removal

to boarding schools.

Well, I guess I can start out with my own story.

I was sent to a boarding school when I was a child,

and it was called St. Mary School for Indian Girls,

and it was run by the church.

And when we got to the school, we were isolated or separated

from our families.

We went to school, of course.

We took our classes.

But before we did that, we worked.

We were the maintenance crew for the school.

So we took care of the grounds, we took care of the buildings.

We did all of the work.

That is the Doctrine of Discovery on the church side

because they took our family away,

they took our identity away.

We really became non-children.

NARRATOR: The boarding school system

aspired to nothing less than the total annihilation

of Native identity.

As Brigadier General Richard Henry

Pratt, founder of Carlisle Indian Industrial School,

wrote, "Kill the Indian, save the man."

Quite literally, boarding schools

are where Indians went to die.

You don't know who you are anymore because your family

traditions are gone, your cultural traditions are gone,

your pride is gone.

You aren't Indian or Native American anymore

and you're not white.

The voice that screams from the shadows of these boarding

schools is that these were horrible places.

These were places of trauma, abuse, of death.

NARRATOR: The goal of eradicating Native identity

has allowed white people to ignore the very existence

of modern Native people.

People don't bring Native Americans

into their collective imagination

and collective consciousness into the 20th century

and certainly not into the 21st century.

People say, well, you say you're Indian,

but you don't look Indian.

NARRATOR: What does it mean to look Indian?

For many, it means a romanticized pop culture

cliche.

A noble chief on horseback wearing

a headdress or an Indian maiden at the sight of a babbling

brook doing her daily tasks.

NARRATOR: The failure to imagine contemporary Native people has

left American culture dangerously uninformed.

Now listen up, these are our seats now,

and there ain't a damn thing you can do about it.

So why don't you and Super Injun there find yourself someplace

else to have a powwow, OK?

I would say it probably happens twice a year where

someone will say, I seriously thought

that the Native people had all died out,

that there were no Native people anymore.

NARRATOR: The erasure of Native identity in America

and in Christianity has left all of us

looking at an incomplete image of the world.

When we ignore cultures, erase authentic identities,

we ignore part of God's creation.

What is missing when you completely other Native people

and you shut them out and you don't allow the wisdoms from

their ceremonial practices and their spirituality,

you don't even give it audience, you don't even give it a good

face-to-face, you're missing so much.

You're missing rootedness.

You're missing connection.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ALL: This is what a feminist looks like!

This is what a feminist looks like!

[CHEERING]

NARRATOR: By some accounts, the Women's March

in January of 2017 was the biggest single day

protest in the history of the United States.

In response to the election of President Donald Trump,

an estimated 4.5 million people marched in the streets

across the nation.

But not everyone felt welcome at the marches that day.

Many women of color, in particular,

felt excluded from the organizing efforts

and unwelcome at the event.

The critique was of the Women's March

was that it only represented a narrow portion of women.

NARRATOR: The event's original name, the Million Women March,

was the same as the historic March in 1997

organized by black women to protest the feminist movement's

history of ignoring women of color.

There was this focus on what the general understanding

of women's rights and equality would be.

And for some, that's what white women's interests are.

NARRATOR: Because some considered the Women's March

to be primarily an expression of white interests,

it places the event in a long history of tension

between the efforts for women's equality

and advancing rights for people of color,

a tension perhaps best illustrated

in the person of Susan B. Anthony.

Anthony was a Quaker born in 1820 in Massachusetts.

She spent her life tirelessly fighting for women's rights,

particularly the right to vote.

A founding member of the American Equal Rights

Association and the National Women's Suffrage Association,

Susan B. Anthony is perhaps the most well-known figure

from the women's suffrage movement.

She is a towering figure in the fight

for women's equality in the United States,

more specifically equality for white women.

Susan B. Anthony's legacy in the feminist movement

stands and should, but it should not

be divorced from her legacy on race.

Anthony was close friends with abolitionist Frederick Douglass

and active in the anti-slavery movement.

But upon the passage of the 14th Amendment, which

gave voting rights to black men and not white women,

she responded thus.

WOMAN: "We say, if you will not give the whole loaf of suffrage

to the entire people, give it to the most intelligent first.

If intelligence, justice, and morality

are to have precedence in the government,

let the question of the woman be brought up first,

and that of the Negro, last."

NARRATOR: Words like these established

the women's equality movement in the United States

as one primarily motivated by white women

seeking power comparable to white men, interests that

alienated women of color from the feminist movement

for over a century.

I never thought of myself as a feminist

because the way it was portrayed in the world

is it felt like a very white movement.

You know, burn the bra.

No one's going to burn their bra.

Their bra costs 10.99 or whatever.

So it was always this kind of, where

do I belong in this movement?

Am I a part of this movement at all?

NARRATOR: Excluded from the women's movement due to racism,

women of color also faced oppression from men

in the civil rights movement.

Consider the story of Ella Baker.

I am here to represent the struggle that

has gone on for 300 or more years, a struggle

to be recognized as citizens in a country in which we were

born.

I would call her a leader.

She probably wouldn't call herself

that because she was a person who

liked to be behind the scenes.

NARRATOR: Throughout her work, Baker

argued for truly shared power among a network of leaders

rather than relying on charismatic individuals.

This opinion was not popular with many of the prominent men

in the movement.

And what she noticed among the black ministers there

was their extreme sexism, and she was not

afraid to call that out.

And so Ella Baker had these difficult relationships,

particularly with folks like Dr. King

and with black ministers because they did not

want to see black women in positions

of leadership and power because of the gender

dynamics at the time.

NARRATOR: Baker is remembered as a crucial organizer and voice

for black women in the civil rights

movement, someone who stood up to sexism when she saw it.

And she was not alone.

Ella Baker's life becomes kind of a mirror through which we

could see the lives of other women.

The fact that we have many black women working

behind the scenes doing all types of work for the movement,

and yet we know very little about them.

And Ella Baker really caused us to redefine and rethink

leadership and the democratic potential of civil rights.

NARRATOR: There is a word for the combined experience

of oppression that women of color

have faced in the United States.

It's a word that has become very popular in recent years,

but is often misunderstood.

Intersectionality.

Intersectionality.

Intersectionality.

NARRATOR: The word "intersectionality"

was coined by civil rights activist and professor Kimberlé

Crenshaw in 1989, calling attention to the reality that

an individual can experience compounding oppression from

multiple directions for different aspects

of their identity.

Usually we think of race, class, gender, sexuality, et

cetera.

What parts of a person's identity kind

of come together to create their specific form of oppression?

NARRATOR: Attention to intersecting

identities began to emerge in the 1970s

with groups like the Combahee River Collective,

which formed to address the needs of not

only black feminists, but also black lesbians.

One member of the Combahee River Collective,

poet and activist Audre Lorde, succinctly

captured the importance of intersectional feminism.

WOMAN: "I simply do not believe that one aspect of myself

can possibly profit from the oppression of any other part

of my identity.

Within the lesbian community, I am black,

and within the black community, I am a lesbian.

I cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression

only."

NARRATOR: The influence of women like Ella Baker,

the Combahee River Collective, and Kimberlé Crenshaw is

evident in the more recent creation of a powerful

contemporary political movement--

Black Lives Matter.

Black Lives Matter was created by Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi,

and Patrisse Cullors after George Zimmerman

was acquitted for the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

In the past 10 years, Black Lives Matter

has grown into an international organization comprised

of dozens of chapters fighting on behalf

of racial profiling, police abuse, transgender rights,

and many other injustices.

I really like the organizational structure

of Black Lives Matter in the sense that it's decentralized,

that the way they think about leadership is different.

Instead of having one particular charismatic leader,

they don't have that.

They call their movement a "leaderful" movement.

I think the fact that not only is it three women,

but three queer women starting Black Lives Matter,

I think that's really important for thinking

about the ways in which we can be

more intersectional in our approach to justice.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NARRATOR: In the late 1700s, Richard Allen,

a formerly enslaved devout Methodist and lay minister,

accepted an invitation to preach at St. George's Church

in Philadelphia.

Allen's preaching was very popular,

causing a rapid growth of black membership.

Soon the church had outgrown its seating capacity.

But when Allen requested the church create

a second congregation for black people,

the white elders refused.

Instead, they built a balcony to segregate black members

from white members.

In 1792, a fellow lay minister, Absalom Jones,

challenged this division by sitting downstairs.

He was then physically removed during the opening prayer.

In response, Richard Allen led the entire black membership out

of the building.

Later, Allen said of the incident,

"We all went out of the church in a body,

and they were no longer plagued by us."

Allen and Jones each went on to lead

their own black congregations.

Reverend Allen would eventually form

a new denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church,

the first independent denomination founded

by black people in the US.

Even after the Civil War and the end of slavery,

the divide between the white church and the black church

remained wide and kept getting wider.

In the early 20th century, facing rampant inequality,

voter suppression, persecution, and violence,

droves of black families moved out

of the rural southern United States

into urban areas of the Northeast, Midwest, and West

in what is called the Great Migration.

Millions of black people left and sometimes

had to escape from the South because

of the horrid conditions there, and they

came north for better opportunity, for better jobs,

for better education.

It changed the landscape of America.

NARRATOR: In 1890, around 90% of black people in the US

lived in southern states.

Over the next 80 years, nearly 50%

would leave the South in an exodus

of over 6 million people.

The growth of black populations in historically white

communities led to another kind of migration.

What we know that happened during the Great Migration is

this mass group of African-Americans moving

into these urban places creates housing problems.

And so instead of many cities firmly addressing

these housing problems, what typically happens

is overcrowding.

In conjunction with overcrowding,

what happens is that white folks also are leaving neighborhoods.

And that's when you see the growth of the megachurches

in the suburbs because a lot of the churches in the cities were

being abandoned by white Protestants,

moved to the suburbs, and created kind of these

communities in the suburbs that are white middle-,

upper-middle class communities, as well as white middle-,

upper-middle class churches.

And many of the urban centers became places

where ethnic minority churches were started.

NARRATOR: Despite the progress of the civil rights movement,

school desegregation, and policies like Affirmative

Action, Christian communities have

remained highly segregated.

As of 2014, nearly 80% of Christians

attend churches where they are among the overwhelming racial

majority.

Unlike most large US institutions,

the church is not required by law to integrate.

Congregations are made of individuals who intentionally

choose to come together, which means a majority of Christians

are choosing segregation, making church possibly the most

telling measure of where race relations in the United States

actually stands.

Even well-meaning white congregations

who might want to reflect the full diversity of the US

population struggle with the reality

that their theology and practices are

immersed in white cultural norms that alienate people of color.

Our liturgy is constructed a certain way

that feeds and fills white Christians.

The way that we choreograph our movement around the sanctuary

is also very white and very European.

The way that we talk, how we keep things

under 12 minutes in our sermons, how

we sing three verses of a hymn, how the hymns always

have to be played from the organ or from the piano,

those are constructs that make perfect sense

in our mind as being worshipful, but at the same time

are excluding.

[CONGREGATION SINGING]

JUAN PABLO HERRERA: Why are we singing songs by Germans?

Why don't they include any songs from authors and composers

that are not white?

Who decides that this is the way that we should worship

and this is the way that we should do things?

I remember sitting there when the service was over

and thinking, hmm, I came in, I sat down, I was prayed over,

I was sang to, I was preached at, and I was dismissed.

For me, there was no spiritual component

to the worship service, and I thought it was very sterile.

NARRATOR: Black churches, on the other hand, often focused

on Christ as a source of hope and rescue in the face

of ongoing oppression, a theology

shaped by the history and experience

of black lives in America.

When I have to be able to rise above the pain of the cuts

that I receive on a daily basis, when I just

need to let go and let God, connecting

with people on a much deeper level because of the pain

that we have experienced together,

it's different than what I could imagine a life where

I have everything that I need.

I'm not suffering at all.

It's just different.

It's a different place.

NARRATOR: Can black and white Christianity

find common ground?

Can the chasm between us created by racism and white supremacy

be overcome?

There is not enough diversity in our congregations

in our denomination because we refuse to make space

for that diversity.

And so when they talk about racial reconciliation,

they don't really want their congregation body to change.

They don't really want 50/50 white and people

of color, maybe one or two, because I

think people are comfortable where they're at.

When congregations become multiracial,

you will often see a group of white people leave the church.

And it's either a fear of change,

a fear of doing things differently,

a fear of losing power.

NARRATOR: Richard Allen and Absalom Jones

left St. George's Church because it was not,

in fact, their church, but a white church they

were being allowed to attend.

The persistent segregation of churches

today raises the question, how much has really changed?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Baptize me, John.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I think it's very hard for us to grasp

the depths of the racism inherent inside

of our own church.

10 years ago when I was here, if you

were to walk into the sanctuary, front and center

at the top of the chancel would be this gorgeous painting

of a Norwegian Jesus, and it was beautiful and it was inspiring.

But any time anyone who didn't look Norwegian

looked at that painting, they never came back,

and we all scratched our heads wondering why.

I see a white Jesus, that's telling me

that whiteness is good, whiteness is holiness,

and that even the creator, the savior of the world

who came down to love us, in physical form is white.

Everything about kind of the history of Christianity

from Europe to the US has been built around whiteness.

It's just in the DNA of the US church.

The church feels very white.

The phrase "white Christianity," the phrase,

it's an idolatry.

Think about it.

White Christianity is an idolatry.

And what do idols do in the Bible?

Idols separate us from God.

NARRATOR: How can a church immersed in white supremacy

even begin to reconcile its ongoing legacy of exclusion,

oppression, and violence?

Is it even possible?

Reconciliation, take things that are out of balance

and bring them back into balance.

But the assumption is that there was a balance to begin with.

Reconciliation implies a prior healthy relationship,

which we don't have in the United States.

So you can really only speak of reconciliation

in theological terms.

There is a white Protestant obsession with reconciliation.

Stop.

Stop.

It's the scariest thing I've ever seen.

When do we get to the reconciliation?

When do I get to feel good?

I don't know.

I haven't felt good for 400 years

historically in this country.

I don't know when you get to feel good about this.

NARRATOR: Some Christians have looked

to foster unity by embracing the ideology of colorblindness,

that we should look past skin color and view

everyone as the same.

But this is problematic at best.

Colorblindness at a sort of very simplistic level

seems like what we should all embrace.

The reality is if I don't see someone's color

who is not white, then I don't see the fact

that they experience racism.

So I don't see color.

That's not reconciliation, that's denial.

But to say we don't see skin color automatically

makes me shake because I'm like, well, am I invisible?

It basically means, I see you as white.

I see you like me.

I've made you kind of into my own image.

And it strips away all difference of culture.

And so people take up their experience

and then just lay it over top of me.

Whiteness is going to create whiteness.

And white supremacy, once it's embedded in the culture

and in the culture of a church, it

doesn't give you the tools to dismantle itself.

NARRATOR: Try as the church might,

we cannot whitewash this issue.

White supremacy must be addressed directly,

with all the hard truths exposed.

Acknowledging our history and breaking down

the systems that have upheld whiteness

as the norm will be messy.

It will be controversial.

And above all, it will be painful.

When we talk about racial injustice,

when we talk about brokenness in our society,

when we talk about churches that are hurting, maybe some of us

need to realize it's a funeral service and not

a hospital visit.

We can't go into the room and say, hey,

we're going to just sing "Kumbaya"

and join hands and say, I love you,

man, and things are going to be OK.

We've got to deal with the dead body that is in the room.

Because to be blunt, most of the dead bodies in American history

are black and brown and red bodies.

And if we ignore the dead bodies and we

don't lament over the dead bodies,

we're just kind of playing the games of faith here.

We're just pretending that things

are OK when they're really not.

NARRATOR: In the Book of Lamentations,

the Israelites, after turning away from God,

were exiled into Babylon.

They had lost everything.

Yet, God does not offer them hope of deliverance

from their plight.

God doesn't call them to reclaim their strength

and to go back and make Jerusalem great again.

That's not the call.

The call is, enter into a space of lament.

ALL (SINGING): Make a joyful noise unto

the Lord all ye lands.

Come before His presence, come before His presence

with singing.

NARRATOR: But in the case of modern white Christianity,

there seems to be an aversion to lamentation.

The church in America is lousy at engaging suffering and pain

and lament.

And most churches, when they get to a lament psalm, a song that

talks about suffering or lament hymn

in their liturgical reading or in their liturgical worship,

they skip it.

They drop it.

We're talking about a pretty profound act of disobedience

to God to skip over the parts of the scriptures that

make us uncomfortable.

Reality is, there is no resurrection

without crucifixion, and we're going

to have to go to those painful places.

We're going to have to acknowledge

the things within us that have to die so that Christ can rise

and live in and through us.

In exposing issues, it gets really bad

because you're exposing this wound,

and the first thing is recognizing

that we have a wound.

And I think we're in that kind of messiness right now

of saying, we have a problem.

We have to let go of what we think is right.

We have to let go of what we believe we know.

We have to let go of the structures

that we thought were the right way to worship God.

NARRATOR: God calls us to stand together as a diverse body,

to humbly and courageously name and renounce the root

causes that divide us, confronting

white supremacy at every turn.

This is the lifelong commitment of racial justice and equity

in our churches, our communities, and the world.

This stuff is not happening in a vacuum.

The last four or five years is not

some anomaly in human history.

And there have been people who have been walking

this path for a long time, and you need to find them,

you need to listen to them, and you need to ask, what can I do?

And sometimes what can I do is just shut up.

[MUSIC PLAYING]