Internalized Anti-Blackness is a helluva drug

Especially when the Bible is your most faithful dealer. An excerpt from The Day God Saw Me as Black, by Danyelle Thomas

Evangelicals are waging a war on empathy. Conservative figures like Joe Rigney (The Sin of Empathy), Allie Beth Stuckey (Toxic Empathy), and even Elon Musk (who claims he wants to "save Western civilization from empathy") see compassion as a threat. Their fear is, ironically, quite justified. Because if we actually listen—if we truly enter into another person’s story—it will change us. It will unsettle the narratives that prop up exclusionary policies and systems of oppression.

For those of us who are white, male, or straight—or, like me, all three—this kind of listening isn’t optional. It’s salvation. Refusing to step outside of our own perspective is its own kind of damnation, a comfortable cocoon of privilege that numbs us to the realities of those who bear the weight of systemic injustice.

This is why Danyelle Thomas’s The Day God Saw Me as Black is so important. It’s not just a deconstruction memoir—it’s a prophetic witness. Reading it, I saw both my own story reflected back to me and perspectives that challenged me in ways I desperately needed. In particular, it exposed how much of evangelical spirituality is inextricably tied to anti-Blackness.

Danyelle graciously allowed me to share this excerpt. But I urge you—don’t stop here. Read the whole book. Sit with its discomfort. Let it move you.

From Chapter 5: Black & Ugly as Ever:

Internalized Anti-Blackness is a helluva drug, especially when the Bible is your most faithful dealer.

Anti-Blackness is the actions, verbiage, and/or behaviors that marginalize Black people. The spectrum of anti-Blackness is expansive, from the nuisance of workplace microaggressions to ten Black folks being murdered at a Tops Friendly Markets supermarket on the East Side of Buffalo, New York. Anti-Blackness is white people angry that The Little Mermaid, a fictional cartoon character, is cast by Black singer and actress Halle Bailey. Anti-Blackness is being aware of the differential success, advancement, and experience of Black people, not caring about it, and simultaneously taunting Black folks for their continued deficits because of it.

Anti-Blackness is no respecter of person, gender, or age. We spend lifetimes with the accumulated, negative impacts of these acts, where the constant robbery of our personhood is as American as apple pie. When we look to our faith for refuge and deliverance, we are too often met with affirmation that our suffering is par for the course of the cursed descendants of Canaan.

The inevitable Black American inheritance (and, subsequently, the whole of the African diaspora affected by colonialism) of this Christian God, then, is our Blackness being named the most egregious sin. Our inheritance of this faith paints us a picture of God who ordained our enslavement and diminished our humanity. Hearing the gospel of a conquered and colonized Christ has told us that our enslavement—and all subsequent indignities of Blackness in America—is divinely orchestrated. We are left, then, with a faith practice whose core intention is to pray for the transfiguration of ourselves into whiteness by this imagining of God. Our connection to divinity has been and continues to be disrupted by the vain pursuit of embodying the acceptance and value of whiteness. Our God’s image has always been both colonized and conquered.

This inherited theology—where we are passive participants helpless to the perfecting will of God—binds us to the demands of capitalism and its perpetual economy of desire for more. We are driven to work harder, faster, and longer in unnatural ways toward the pursuit of profit over happiness when acquiring material wealth is also seen as a sign of God’s favor in this life and the next. Even in a religion whose sacred text insists that the love of money is the root of all evil, we’ve inherited a theological ethic that insists upon measuring our devotion, salvation, and holiness through the litmus of our capitalist success. This ethic suggests that “if one is graced by God, among the elect, one’s ordinary pursuits will be coolly self-disciplined, restrained, non-hedonistic, and in that way amenable to capitalist requirements.”

Everyone reads themselves into the story as the hero. A white slave owner in the early colonies reading the Exodus text would see themselves as the Israelites resisting Egypt, the British. You know, even though they should probably see themselves as Egypt since they owned literal and not just politically figurative people. So by the time Whiteness™ gets to Jesus, it must ignore his entire life and focus on his last three days to have a Jesus that fits the requirements of subjugating a people. When they get to Jesus, they see suffering that can be amplified as an idyllic life for Black people. The only way they can do that is to ignore the work that Jesus did to free people. The faith that was forced on enslaved Africans rendered Jesus impotent in his work and magnificent in his suffering. This is how we inherit a Christianity that emphatically lands on a Suffering Jesus.

It’s reducing life to the equivalent of a snapshot. It’s like when a textbook features a picture of an enslaved foremother. What those Black people were in that photo at that time is the summation of their humanity: they were enslaved. We don’t know what brought them joy, hope, or the love that kept them living through hell. They just become symbolic of a suffering period. That’s what they do with Jesus. They take the moment when the state kills Him, and what follows that murder, and make it the most important thing about Him.

The death penalty of perpetual enslavement is that even when our bodies are free, we remain disinherited when we do not receive what is rightfully ours through birthright. By romanticizing the power of suffering, we have been given a faith that will never free us enough. Our inherent Blackness is not a cause for a life of suffering for atonement.

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Follow Danyelle Thomas (Unfit Christian) on IG and Substack.