Race and Justice

We are committed to our Biblical calling to “do justice, love, kindness, and walk humbly with God”, as outlined in Micah 6:8. As a church, our obligation is not just to speak about justice, loving kindness and humility, but also to live out these values. In order to explore how exactly we as a congregation can live into the faithful requirement to do justice,
we offer these resources.

We are joining many other Presbyterian congregations across our nation in a 21-Day Race Equity challenge adapted from original work by Dr. Eddie Moores’ “21 Day Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge.” 21 days is the time it takes to build or break a habit. This is a starting place for our church to build a base of shared understanding.

The idea is to take a few minutes each day to learn or reflect on racial justice. 
Select from the menu of options below. There are podcasts to listen to, videos to watch, articles to read, or things to notice in your daily life. 

Click a button below to see the list of resources for each category
of things to watch, listen to, read, or notice:

If you are a parent or guardian, we also compiled some resources for children here:

HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST by Ibram Kendi
Book Recommendation by Phyllis & Ellis Finger

We have thoroughly valued our reading of Dr. Kendi’s thoughtful assessment of racism in America – its roots, its shifting manifestations since the Civil Rights movement, and it is still pervasive presence in our communities today.

It flows as an autobiographical narrative, with pithy discussions of race relations, Black struggles for autonomy in a White world, and insidious biases and struggles within our most fundamental relationships, within the family, the workplace, the community, and the nation. He helps us rethink such fundamental topics as assimilation, educational and economic opportunities (and lack thereof), even the inequities between Black descendants of slavery and recent immigrants to the U.S. who have successfully established citizenship and socio-economic prosperity in our country.

His story begins with his college aged parents (both New Yorkers, settled there from other Parts of the country), meeting at a Black conference in Illinois in 1970, on the cusp of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Their consciousness-building then foreshadow his own earliest experiencing of racism and shame in private Lutheran academies in Queens and Long Island. His story hits upon countless challenges of a young Black adolescent adjusting to schools and social environments that encumber his growth. A big breakthrough was as a senior in high school, when - despite a poor academic record - he won a Martin Luther King oral speaking award. His continuing journey leads him to Florida, where his deepening understanding of learning and living in an all-Black community is a revelation, then to Ph.D. studies at Temple University’s distinguished African Studies program. These Temple chapters are among the most interesting in the book. He describes his deliberate choice of living quarters in a blighted neighborhood near the Temple campus, to experience solidarity with the hardships of Philadelphia’s most challenged inner-city dwellers. He also discovers and confronts his own “invisible” prejudices toward the such new phenomena as the women’s movement, LGBTQ denizens, and political activists, who are his fellow graduate students, drawn together by intellectual prowess, socio-economic engagement, and passions for equity, civility, and social justice in our country.

The final chapters encompass his academic journey (SUNY Albany, Brown, University of Florida, and American University), his marriage and fatherhood, and successful struggles with cancer by both him and his wife, as resonances of his earlier considerations of the social cancer of racism in our country. Dr. Kendi, now 38 years old, recently moved from the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, which he established, to the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University.

Antiracism Book Recommendation
by Kim Beyer Rausch, Micah 6 Team Member

To be antiracist, I’ve learned it’s not enough to just look at the world around us; we must also look within. The book Me And White Supremacy by Layla Saad is a humbling challenge to unpack the covert aspects of white supremacy that we have all inherited from our society. Each section of the book has journal prompts to help you dig deeper into your own unconscious bias. As Layla Saad writes, “You cannot dismantle what you cannot see. You cannot challenge what you do not understand.” I also recommend learning from these antiracist experts too: Austin Channing Brown, Ijeoma Oluo, Rachel Cargle, & Ibram X Kendi.

“People often think that white supremacy is a term that is only used to describe far-right extremists and neo-Nazis. However, this idea that white supremacy only applies to the so-called “bad ones” is both incorrect and dangerous, because it reinforces the idea that white supremacy is an ideology that is only upheld by a fringe group of white people. White supremacy is far from fringe. In white-centered societies and communities, it is the dominant paradigm that forms the foundation from which norms, rules, and laws are created.” - Layla Saad

Thank you to Central Presbyterian Church of Downingtown, PA
for letting us pull from their 21-day challenge as a resource.