Professor: "White Christians" Must Repent for Privilege by Paying Reparations to Blacks

iOTW Report ^ | 11/21/15 | Aurelius

[rightistight]

Jennifer Harvey, a Professor of Religion at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, is calling on "white Christians" to repent for their forefathers' sins and their current privilege by paying reparations.

Speaking at Drew Theological School, Dr. Harvey said that calling all races "equal" is "a morally incoherent paradigm" that cannot solve the racial injustices that are in the United States. Instead, white Christians need to "repent" by paying reparations to African Americans.

"Reconciliation rests on the assumption that all of our differences can be similarly celebrated and embraced," she explained. "I can come to better love and appreciate your blackness, your native-ness, your Latino-ness, and you need to come to better love my whiteness?

"It's a morally incoherent paradigm. It doesn't work."

Racial identities in the United States are not equal and treating people equally will not fix the US's problems, she continues: "Even when we add attention to white privilege- which we must- even when we talk about justice needing to be present for reconciliation to happen- which of course we should- at its core, the reconciliation paradigm presumes a kind of moral, spiritual, cultural parallel in our racial identities, and my friends, it's just not so. And we've got to stop pretending it's so, or we'll keep having these same conversations over and over."

Instead, Dr. Harvey suggests that white Christians need to repent by paying African Americans reparations for their ill-gotten money.

White Christians have profited from "white supremacy" in the United States and black people still face discrimination similar to that of the 1960s and before, according to Harvey. Therefore, the "reparations paradigm" is the logical next step.

"Right now the prophetic fire of movements like the Black Lives Matter movement, the work that Dreamers are doing, is creating spaces within which white Christians might make that new choice," Harvey declared. "Repentance and repair is not easy work. But it doesn't mean that it can't flow into obvious, pragmatic solutions. It's uncertain and difficult, but it is sacred work."

In a separate speech given in June in Minnesota, Dr. Harvey further stated, "A reparations paradigm can help us identify more clearly, and utterly necessary pathways for responding to our actual racial situation; pathways far more productive, truth-full, and life-giving than any that reconciliation has been able to open up so far."

Dr. Harvey is the author of Whiteness and Morality: Pursuing Racial Justice through Reparations and Sovereignty and a co-editor of Disrupting White Supremacy: White People on What We Need To Do.

[rbg81]

These people have no idea how “wealth” is created—or why. While some wealth is created by manual labor, that pails in comparison to the amount of wealth created by invention and innovation. Those that save labor & enhance productivity are especially valuable. For example, the invention of the Cotton Gin, made picking cotton economical. That is why all this noise about a $15/hr minimum wage will only hasten the elimination of those jobs.

In the end, most wealth is created by the mind, not by the muscles or back.

[Genoa]

Dr. Jennifer Harvey. In the religion department? That Dr. Harvey?

[CASchack]

Deinstitutionalization of the insane has done this country a disservice. Years ago, lunatics as this “professor” would be convalescing at an asylum.

Funny how many of these crackpots have found their way to colleges and universities.

[digger48]

Prof. Harvey's most recent book Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation has led to her engagement as a speaker and workshop leader with faith communities and academic audiences around the nation. She is also the author of Whiteness and Morality: Pursuing Racial Justice through Reparations and Sovereignty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and a co-editor of Disrupting White Supremacy: White People on What We Need To Do (Pilgrim Press, 2004). Her recent publications include work on contemporary reparations movements in Protestant traditions, queer articulations of Christian traditions, and Native-Colonial dialogues on issues of environmental justice.

In addition to her academic publications, Prof. Harvey is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post, an author for the Feminist Studies in Religion blog and keeps her own blog

[MortMan]

Are 30 pieces of silver enough?

[NativeSon]

THAT’s a Man, Baby!

[Snickering Hound]

Or the professor could pay Gary Busey for looking like him.

[blackdog]

Should get her plenty of paid speech gigs to radical organizations, universities, and white house dinners.

She's not ugly and stupid, just profit driven and ugly. That being said, nobody cares if you are rich and ugly. Smart is as smart does.

She's a SJOW. (Social Justice Opportunist Warrior)

[SunkenCiv]

"Right now the prophetic fire of movements like the Black Lives Matter movement, the work that Dreamers are doing, is creating spaces within which white Christians might make that new choice," Harvey declared. "Repentance and repair is not easy work. But it doesn't mean that it can't flow into obvious, pragmatic solutions. It's uncertain and difficult, but it is sacred work." In a separate speech given in June in Minnesota, Dr. Harvey further stated, "A reparations paradigm can help us identify more clearly, and utterly necessary pathways for responding to our actual racial situation; pathways far more productive, truth-full, and life-giving than any that reconciliation has been able to open up so far."

Oh, there will be reparations, and the bill has been going up since early 2009...

[Do the math]

How about paying for all the men who died so that they could be free.

[thesharkboy]

At what point do we start talking about separation? This relationship just isn’t working out, and I didn’t enter into it willingly it in the first place.

[glennaro]

The old adage applies here: “Give ‘em an inch ...”

[CodeToad]

Blacks have everything they need to succeed, except the courage to do so.

[AFret.]

Sounds like extortion to me.

“Paging Jesse Jackson, please pick up the white phone”...

[mountainlion]

Only a small percentage of whites owned slaves. The first black slave was owned by a black man so who started slavery anyway. What about the Irish that were brought over here in bondage. Why should they be expected to pay reparations?

[Georgia Girl 2]

White Christians need to just say no. :-)

[Patriot Babe]

Where is my reparations when I was bullied as a kid by a American African boy and was ignored because it was African vs. Hispanic.

[Menehune56]

[Autonomous User]

Dr Harvey looks like HE is gonna put the hot dog in the bun! Or maybe he partner will be taking the skin boat to tuna-town..

[theoilpainter]

OK - I’ll bite. I owe a debt because of the misdeeds of all white people? Now, do I get royalties for all the good things that white people had done as payment for white contributions to the world - like democracy, the vast majority of our medicine and science, religion, art and music and the like? Not to be a race snob, because I believe this race-responsibility is absurd and we are all individuals and only responsible for what we do and control - but, on balance, where would the world be if there never had been a white race?

Time for the Royalties Movement.