R&P: Was the situation in the South markedly different from that in the North? It’s that they must have had some investment in maintaining the status quo, or that they had some fear of what other people would say or what they would risk if they stood up for racial equality. So it’s not as though Christians-particularly white Christians-didn’t know there were alternatives. But I would respond that the abolitionists and civil rights activists and others who struggled for black freedom were also men and women of their time. JT: I think some would argue that most of those who I am identifying as complicit in racism were merely men and women of their time. To what extent are we free to judge that, and to what extent do we have to accept them as products of their time? It’s that when they had opportunity to intervene in everyday ways, they chose complicity over confrontation, and this enabled a larger atmosphere of racial compromise.ĮCM: Though some American Christians were enthusiastically racist and others were anti-racist, most just accepted racist institutions. It’s not that every Christian was a foaming-at-the-mouth racist hurling racial slurs and burning crosses on peoples’ lawns. He went on to explain that every time that the white community-especially Christians-failed to confront racism in its everyday, mundane forms, they created a context of compromise that allowed for an extreme act of racial terror like planting dynamite at a church. In answer to his own question, he said, “We all are.” got up in front of an all-white business club and gave an address in which he asked who was responsible for throwing that bomb. Shortly after that event, a white lawyer named Charles Morgan Jr. JT: The book opens with the story of four girls who died when the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963.
To your mind, what constitutes complicity? Together, these trace seemingly ancient atrocities straight into today’s headlines.ĮCM: As the subtitle states, your book is a sweeping survey of the American Church’s complicity in racism. In his new book, The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism, Tisby surveys American history with an eye toward the innumerable moments when white Christians could have interceded on behalf of racial justice, but did not.
candidate in the Department of History at the University of Mississippi.
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