Faith-led movements in the US have catalyzed some of our greatest expansions of civil rights. But, at the same time, Christianity has also been used as justification for some of the worst evils in American history. How do people of faith reckon with this tension? And what will it take for Americans of all racial backgrounds, ethnic origins, and faith traditions to commit to dismantling faith-cloaked racism? Jemar Tisby joins host Alex Lovit to discuss how to protect the progress toward racial equity, while continuing to take steps forward toward an inclusive democracy. Jemar Tisby is a historian, author, and the founder and CEO of Tisby Media. He studies and writes about history, race, and faith in the United States. He’s a New York Times bestselling author, and his popular Substack, Footnotes, is one of the most read in its category. https://jemartisby.substack.com/ https://www.youtube.com/@JTisby
Jemar Tisby: What we see in US politics is downstream of what happens in religion. From the nation's founding, you have Christians who were not only enslaving other people, but developing a pro-slavery theology based on the Bible, and it's like, what the heck is going on?
Alex Lovit: White nationalists claim that they're the true holders of American identity and Christian identity, that God and country belong to them, but our nation's traditions of anti-racist Christian movements are just as long. So how do Christians in America reconcile these contradictions? And how can we learn from successful faith-led social movements of the past to fight Christian nationalism today? You're listening to The Context. It's a show from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation about how to get democracy to work for everyone and why that's so hard to do. I'm your host, Alex Lovit.
My guest today is Jemar Tisby. He's a historian, author, and the founder and CEO of Tisby Media. Jemar's experience as a person of faith and scholar of religion has brought him face to face with racism in the name of Christianity. He'll tell us where he sees opportunities to reclaim the church and civil society from recent white supremacist attacks. Jemar Tisby, welcome to The Context.
Jemar Tisby: Thank you for having me.
Alex Lovit: How old are you?
Jemar Tisby: I am in my 40s.
Alex Lovit: Well, I'm 45 and you make me feel like I have accomplished little in my 45 years on this planet. So you've been a school teacher, school principal, you've been through a history PhD program, you've been to seminary, you're an author, you've been a professor, now you run a media company. I don't know if you sleep.
Jemar Tisby: Yeah, that's just the ADHD.
Alex Lovit: Well, tell me a little bit about Tisby Media and what you're trying to accomplish there.
Jemar Tisby: We are a multimedia studio, and what we are doing is forming a counter-narrative to the voices of authoritarianism and really bad forms of religion. We know that side has not helpful stories to tell, but the problem is they're really good at telling those stories. They have podcasters, they have social media influencers, they even have films and television. They have an infrastructure and ecosystem to do it. Do we have on another side in terms of a counter-narrative that kind of ecosystem and infrastructure? I would argue not enough. So Tisby Media comes in, and what we are doing is informing, equipping, and inspiring people to courageous action through truth-telling at the intersection specifically of faith, history and justice.
What that involves is multiple media forms. Tisby Media encompasses four vehicles, namely writing, which is my Footnotes Substack and my books. It encompasses educating, so we have the Tisby Justice Academy with online, live and self-paced courses. Then we have podcasting. My main podcast outlet right now is called The Justice Briefing, your weekly guide to current events at the intersection of faith history and justice. And then lastly, we have our filmmaking, which is super exciting, Tisby Studios. We've already got our first production out. It's a short documentary called Jesus Was a Migrant talking about the crisis of immigration law enforcement right now. So we got a lot going on, but we're sort of living in times that require it.
Alex Lovit: Yeah, well, you are doing a lot. We're on the pro-democracy side here at the Kettering Foundation, and I'd like to think myself on the side of justice and racial justice. I am not religious and I live in a pretty secular world. Two-thirds of Americans identify as Christian, one-third of Americans attend church weekly or nearly weekly, and I think I don't have a great insight into that side of America. What should I understand about the role that faith plays in people's lives if I want to shift people towards democracy and towards racial justice?
Jemar Tisby: What I keep saying is that what we see in US politics is downstream of what happens in religion. Pete Hegseth is a rampaging white Christian nationalist down to his tattoos. He's downstream of a phenomenon I saw more than 10 years ago with Doug Wilson. He's talking about, "Is the 19th Amendment a good idea? We should probably have household voting. You don't need women voting independently." He wrote a book where he's like, "These stories of enslavers abusing the enslaved, they happened, but are they overblown? How frequently did it happen?" So we saw these things in Christian circles long before they made a national appearance on the political stage.
Alex Lovit: We've talked about Christian nationalism on this show a bit, and I think it can be difficult to talk about because obviously not all Christians are Christian nationalists, not all white evangelical Christians are Christian nationalists. So how do you define that and how do you think of its place within the larger Christian church in America?
Jemar Tisby: I'm a Senior Democracy Fellow with the Public Religion Research Institute. According to their polling, about two-thirds of white evangelicals are adherents or sympathizers with white Christian nationalism. So not all, but most, and here's where it gets really critical: even though all told white Christian nationalists are about 30% of the total population, they vote as an almost lockstep political block. These folks are voting, and they're voting for very bad actors when it comes to democracy.
If we can establish that we should all care about it because it's affecting how our nation is working or not working, then what is it? Because it's not. "I'm a Christian and I'm a patriot." That's what a lot of people assume white Christian nationalists mean, especially on the right. It ain't that. It's an inordinate love for country. It's nationalism. It's an idolatry in a religious frame where they're putting a political system and a political figure in the place of God to the extent that they don't act anything like Jesus when it comes to loving your neighbor.
They have all the trappings of Christianity. They go to church, they read the Bible, they sing the same songs, they pray in Jesus' name. It is a permission structure for their true goal: the acquisition of political power and social control. They see a highly regulated, regimented world and they want to impose that on people no matter what your religion or your race or your background, and they feel they have a divine right and responsibility to do so.
Alex Lovit: Yeah, well, does that bother you? I mean, I'm not a Christian, but from what I understand of Jesus' teachings, do unto others is pretty central. I mean, there's no Christian that's not going to be aware of that. Do words have no meaning? How can people hear that and act almost contrary to it?
Jemar Tisby: It's an age-old question. I mean, from the nation's founding, there was that contradiction. You have Christians who were not only enslaving other people, but developing a pro-slavery theology based on the Bible, and it's like, what the heck is going on? When they are reading Bible passages about loving your neighbor as yourself, about welcoming the stranger, they understand and apply that to other people like them, but other people unlike them are in such a different category, that's not even in the frame. It doesn't even come into the context of maybe I should be treating these other people who don't look like me or speak a different language the way the Bible says.
At the same time, though, my research ping-pongs between white Christian nationalism and what I would call its polar opposite, the Black Christian tradition. Black Christian tradition is far from perfect, but when it comes to things like racial justice and democracy, Black churches often led the way. It's really interesting because they read the same Bible. They profess the same religion and yet they come to very different conclusions, and I think one of the fundamental differences is reading the Bible from top down versus from the bottom up of society.
Alex Lovit: Let's talk a little bit about that other side of it. Let's give Jesus his due. He hasn't only been invoked for harmful things in American history, he's also been invoked for some pretty positive movements, including the Civil Rights Movement. Could you talk a little bit about the importance of the Christian Church in the Civil Rights Movement, in the '50s and '60s and today?
Jemar Tisby: The Civil Rights tradition was part of a much longer tradition of Christian activism in service of democracy and justice. You can go all the way back to the founding of the United States. There were Black Christians who said, "Hey, this language around everyone being created equal and endowed by their creator with unalienable rights, that sounds kind of good. Can we get some of that liberty stuff? And by the way, we're also Christians. The Bible has some stuff to say about how we treat each other, that we're all created equal. So let's act like it." And then the Civil Rights tradition comes in. We got to talk about the existence of the Black church. A lot of people who think they're saying something like racially enlightened say, "There should be no Black church or no white church." Maybe theoretically, right? But in the real world, what I say and what I wrote in my first book, The Color of Compromise, is there would be no Black church without racism in the white church.
The Black church didn't arise out of some church council. The African Methodist Episcopal Church, for example, which is the oldest continuously operating Black denomination in the country, it formed because a group of Black worshipers who already had been going to St. George's Episcopal Church in Philadelphia were dragged off of their knees during prayer because they were sitting accidentally in a whites-only section. Now you tell me, are you going to keep going there? No. So what did they do? They walked down the street and they started their own churches. That's all foundational to what happens in the Civil Rights Movement, because now you're in the Jim Crow era, which as bad as we think it is, it was so much worse than you realize.
I don't want to get too graphic on the show, but what is lynching? It's racial terrorism. Terrorism by nature has to be public because you can't instill fear unless people know about it. So what did that look like? It looked like cutting off body parts and displaying them. All I say for that is, we're in the Jim Crow era, Black people are fleeing the South as internal refugees. We should use that term more often. They are being forced from their place of dwelling because of terrorism, and the Black church is the arc of refuge, and the Black church becomes the site of organizing. If it wasn't for that site of organizing that offered both spiritual resources and community resources, we could not have had the Civil Rights Movement as we know it.
Alex Lovit: Well, I want to pull on a couple of threads there, but since you mentioned history and some of the most grotesque parts of American history, we are in this moment of the history wars where there's a conservative movement that says we can't teach our children to hate themselves, to feel shame, so they want to tell basically a false version of American history that kind of leaves all that stuff out. How do you see your role? I mean, you are a public historian. You are trying to help the public understand America's past. How do you see the role of understanding the America's past in getting toward a better future?
Jemar Tisby: The question you're asking is so important because it's saying, why should we care about history? Why should we care what the White House is doing, how it's attacking the Smithsonian and other institutions that tell our stories? Because history is about identity. History makes claims about who we were, who we are, and who we might be. The stories we tell shape our imagination for what's possible in our country. What's happening now on the right is so tragic because, to be as generous as possible, what they want is some sort of unifying national story, and they want people to be proud to be an American, as the song says, and one of the specific things they're doing, just so folks understand what I'm talking about, is they are really, really working hard to credit the framers of the declaration for abolishing slavery.
They really want to give credit to powerful white men for laying the groundwork for abolition, and I'm like, "Really, y'all?" Misattribution at its highest level, to the extent that they did change laws or move toward emancipation, it was because there was pressure put upon them by the enslaved and their allies to change. It wasn't because out of the kindness of their hearts or the enlightenment of their minds that they said, "You know what? We shouldn't treat people like property. Let's change the law."
Alex Lovit: Going back to the Black church, and you sort of mentioned a couple of things that were important that made it a fount of the civil rights movement, one was the theology, that you can find stories of freedom and equality there. The other is sort of the community, that the Black church had to exist because the white church made it exist. We've talked a little bit about the sort of theology side of how Christian nationalists can, the Bible's a long book, they can find what parts of it to identify with. What about the community side of it? How do you see the church as building that sort of community side in white nationalism?
Jemar Tisby: In white Christian nationalist churches, so you're asking how do they form community, they're around people who look like them, who talk like them, who live like them, and who believe like them. So they're not frequently challenged, at least in a religious space with other ideas and interpretations about how to do religion. But I honestly think in the current context, the media ecosystem is perhaps an even bigger factor. How does community form? They are getting the same kinds of input relentlessly without any other dissenting voice in their ears or in front of their eyes. What is absolutely terrifying to me is how people can inhabit such completely different epistemological ecosystems based on the media they consume, and that's what we're seeing amplifying and accelerating white Christian nationalism to a large degree.
Alex Lovit: Well, you've just mentioned there one of the biggest problems in American society, let alone politics. Do you have a solution for it? How do we get out of that?
Jemar Tisby: I've looked at some of the research on this and the good news is, if you do diversify someone's media diet in terms of ideology, the cracks show up. The problem is, they don't move a ton, they're probably not going to vote differently, and the effects don't last long. But one of the practical things that I tell people, and I would say this mostly for white folks, not Black folks because we're dealing with a lot around race right now, but if you can stomach it, do a resource or media exchange. Say, "I'll listen to an hour of your preferred outlet. You listen to an hour of mine and let's come back and let's compare notes, and let's have a discussion."
There has to be some sort of relational element. But on a systemic level, it's corporate greed that we're coming up against. It's late-stage capitalism we're coming up against. There's profit to be made in keeping people in these echo chambers, and I don't know how you get out of that.
Alex Lovit: I like a solution that listeners can actually do. This is a big problem and you can be a part of solving it. I got to think about my Uncle Joe.
Jemar Tisby: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's where it starts. This is what's so frustrating to me as a racial justice advocate is I'm all about systems and institutions because one of the main in particular evangelical misunderstandings of racism is that it's all individual and interpersonal. The problem is racism in your heart, and so the solution is you're nice to people. You approach it on an individual basis, but it does nothing about mass incarceration, anti-Black police brutality, the racial wealth gap, big social issues like that.
I'm all about, okay, how do we move beyond the interpersonal to the institutional, to the systemic? But here's the reality: if you want to get people to care about those bigger disparities, those bigger injustices, often it comes through the relational. I know someone who I had a conversation with this person about this topic. So we can never get around that personal aspect, but it should be with a point and a purpose. Not just that that individual is nicer, but that they would come to understand that these issues go beyond an individual action, and we have to deal with the way we've decided to arrange society. If we chose to arrange it this particular way that disadvantages a lot of people, we can choose to arrange it in a different way that is more helpful.
Alex Lovit: Yeah, and I think that's a place that history can be helpful to say, "Here's how we got where we are." There's a couple of myths of American history that I think tend to perpetuate systems of oppression. Like, okay, we had a race problem, but that was a long time ago. And then the other myth is like, "Oh, well, we fixed it. We had the Voting Rights Act and everything's done and dusted." I guess, how do you think about telling the story of the Civil Rights Movement in a way that honors it, that says progress is possible without saying, "Okay, we've reached the mountaintop. We've achieved what needed to be achieved"?
Jemar Tisby: Yeah. The one word I think that describes it is vigilance. The thing that I think we all need to be reminded of is that progress made is not permanent. It has to be preserved. It can be pulled back at any time, which is exactly what we're seeing right now. So the way I would think about the Civil Rights Movement is definitive, particularly legal progress was made, but from the moment those bills were signed into law, they have been contested. Voting Rights Act is a perfect example. 1965, it gets passed. It's this crowning achievement of the Civil Rights Movement. Then what happens just this past April, I think it was, the Supreme Court effectively guts key provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
A lot of people don't understand what happened or the magnitude of it. What happened was they said racial gerrymandering has been and is still wrong, but partisan gerrymandering, that's cool. It's a distinction without a difference, particularly in the South, because most Black people vote Democratic. So if you want to redraw a district and you say, "Well, this is just about Republicans and Democrats," you're also still effectively saying this is about white and Black voters. If you pack them all into one district where they can only possibly elect one representative statewide, that's diluting Black political power.
The other thing they did was move from impact to intent. How do you prove racial gerrymandering? You can't just look at disparate impact. You can't just look at the effects of how a congressional map is drawn, which is what has been the tradition. Now, you have to prove they intended to disenfranchise people based on race.
Alex Lovit: They have to be dumb enough to say it out loud.
Jemar Tisby: Exactly. You got to get in their hearts, you got to get in their minds. You got to get them to say it out loud or catch them in an email, which they're not going to do. So it's an almost impossible standard. That progress that we made with the Voting Rights Act in 1965 has to be constantly protected, so we can hold both of those intention. We can say there was real progress made and is being made in certain areas, but the work is not finished because whatever progress there is, there's going to be people who push back, and so we have to constantly protect that progress.
John Roberts, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, all the way back in the '80s was on a mission, a crusade to dismantle the Voting Rights Act. His argument was we shouldn't be taking race into account at all, and if you take race into account, even to remedy racism, that's racist. That's a little rhetorical judo they want to throw in there. But the other thing they're saying is racism was bad, but we've progressed far enough that we don't need these guardrails in place.
So back in, I think it was 2013 or so, they gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act as well, which was the preclearance portion, which said, in a state or a jurisdiction that historically had disenfranchised people based on race, if you wanted to make any major changes, you had to get permission to do so that you wouldn't go back to your old racist voting patterns. They rescinded that, and then guess what happened? People started doing the same thing again. So we can make progress, but that progress always has to be protected.
Alex Lovit: We've been talking about white Christian nationalism and its role in politics, and I think one realm that the religious right has often been involved in is the Supreme Court, which we usually think of as being about abortion and reproductive rights. Do you think that this attack on the Voting Rights Act, was that also an intent? Is that just collateral damage?
Jemar Tisby: When you talk about white Christian nationalism and the Supreme Court, abortion has been the single-issue voting policy for a lot of white Christians on the right, and that's where you get this push for Supreme Court justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade. That's been a crusade for 40-plus years. The historian Randall Ballmer, who wrote the book Bad Faith, he argues that the abortion issue came along later. He claims that what really mobilized evangelicals as a political block was segregation and the threat from literally the IRS to rescind nonprofit status of institutions that maintained racial segregation contrary to the law. Bob Jones University actually did lose their tax-exempt status because they were enforcing racial segregation. Evangelicals saw that and were like, "Oh, well, they're coming for our institution next." Ballmer argues that's what kind of got them to mobilize and start voting lockstep politically.
And then abortion comes along as this sort of moral high ground example of why they're doing what they're doing and why they're pursuing these justices. But as soon as you mention the Supreme Court, I'm like, we got to talk about how this narrative that abortion mobilized evangelicals is contested I think pretty credibly by historians like Ballmer, and to say it really does go back to race, which now has ripple effects for all of us because they did get the justices in to repeal Roe v. Wade and do those kinds of things.
Alex Lovit: I want to talk about the impact of the Voting Rights Act and the impact of the ways that it's being dismantled now.
Jemar Tisby: Yeah. God.
Alex Lovit: I guess from the start, let's tell the hopeful story first. What did the Voting Rights Act do? How did that change things?
Jemar Tisby: Oh, this is such a cool question because we can go all the way back to the Civil War. The 14th Amendment comes and says birthright citizenship. It didn't matter whether you were born enslaved. If you were born on US soil, you are a citizen and entitled to all the rights and privileges thereof. The 15th Amendment comes in and says, and specifically you have the right to vote, at least men, Black men. Immediately on the heels of Black men getting the right to vote, the Ku Klux Klan is established. Officially organized in 1866, Pulaski County, Tennessee. You're getting this racial terrorism. One of the main forms of racial terrorism was voter intimidation.
So when we're talking about the Voting Rights Act and its progress, understand what they were up against. People were lynched simply for trying to register to vote. Not even voting, just trying to register to vote. They're up against this racial terrorism. On paper, we had the right to vote, but because of voter intimidation and all of these mechanisms put in place to keep people from voting, they were just trying to exercise a right that they already had on paper. That's what the Voting Rights Act did. What it said was, to Black people, we have a say in our government. We have a say in how our nation treats us. We are real citizens because we have a voice, and our voice is the vote. That's what it meant on a deeper level than the words on the paper of the law.
Alex Lovit: There's a famous Martin Luther King speech from 1957 where he says, and I'll bridge a little here, but, "Give us the ballot and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights. Give us the ballot and we will fill our legislative halls with men of goodwill. Give us the ballot and we will place judges on the benches of the South who will do justice and love mercy." When he said that, Black registration in the South was about 20% and white registration was about 60%. A large gap. Today, Black registration, about 70% nationally, and white registration, about 75% nationally. There's still a gap there, a lot smaller than it was then.
When you look at the racial wealth gap, in the 1950s, the average white family had about seven times as much wealth as the average Black family. Today, that ratio is six to one rather than seven to one. I mean, it depends what source you look at. So a lot of closure of the voting rate gap, not as much closure of the wealth gap. How should we think about that? Was Martin Luther King wrong?
Jemar Tisby: Oh, that's so good. This is why history's so fascinating, folks. One of the things I write frequently is racism never goes away. It adapts. If you get a Voting Rights Act passed, it doesn't mean racism is gone. It just means we're going to adapt to a different climate. Just like when slavery was abolished with the 13th Amendment, took an amendment to the Constitution to say people are not property. When that happened, was racism over? Was white supremacy over? No. What happened was sharecropping. What happened was convict leasing. We shouldn't be surprised looking at history to know that whenever there is progress, there's a backlash to it.
That's how I interpret January 6th in the attempted insurrection. What happened in 2020 was this historic racial justice uprising based on a righteous outrage on the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and others. And then what happens? No sooner does the calendar change from 2020 to 2021 than people act on the current president's words, and they literally stormed the Capitol. The only time the Confederate flag was flown or carried in the US Capitol was on January 6th, 2021. The Confederates didn't even make it that far. So I think history helps us not be surprised that these things happen and understand that, as I've said, progress is always contested.
Alex Lovit: Well, let's talk about some backwards progress. You mentioned a couple of important ways that the Supreme Court has dismantled key parts of the Voting Rights Act.
So one in 2013, as you mentioned, Shelby County versus Holder, that decision was to remove preclearance so that basically the South had come up with all kinds of creative ways to prevent Black people from voting until the federal government was like, "All right, you guys just can't do nothing. You got to come to us and we'll decide whether what you're doing is going to prevent Black people from voting." The Supreme Court said, "We don't need to do that anymore," and as you said, a lot of those same states have now passed laws that do have disproportionate effects on voting. And then this year, Louisiana versus Callais, which got rid of the prohibition on racial gerrymandering. Effectively, that's what it did.
So I guess, how has our politics already been affected by that 2013 decision and this year's decision to what results should we expect from that?
Jemar Tisby: Such an important question, because I want people to give a darn about our political system and what's happening right under our noses. The Voting Rights Act is still on the books. It's still law, but they've chipped away at key provisions so that it can't really be enforced. It's one thing to pass a law, it's another thing to enforce it. What they're doing is they're taking away the sort of enforcement mechanisms, and that's the insidious part because someone who's not informed or misinformed will say, "What are you talking about? Black people can still vote. What's the problem?" The problem is we no longer have a mechanism to say when things go wrong, to appeal to the law when things go wrong. It's no coincidence that when preclearance was removed, when this racial gerrymandering stuff was all but removed, it's the states of the former Confederacy that have been the first to redraw their districts.
If I am in a district that's either been cracked, you've diluted the power or packed, you've concentrated it so it can't get larger, that means I have limited ability to elect a representative of my choosing and therefore have my voice heard in the places where decisions are made. That's what's happening, and it's affecting first folks like Black voters, but understand, if one group loses their rights, every group is going to be affected. So it may come for Black people first, but trust and believe, your ability to be represented in the halls of power where the laws and the policies are made is also being diminished as well. I mean, those are the stakes.
Alex Lovit: Yeah, well, I very much agree with that, and it's important to say that Black and minority voters are the ones that are losing the most from this. But white folks are also in gerrymander districts where they don't really have an effective voice. If you look at what happened when Jim Crow laws were first imposed, Black voting rights dropped almost to zero, white voting rights also dropped significantly because a lot of those same policies that excluded Black people also excluded poor white people, and the ruling classes of the South were just fine with that. So damage to democracy for any of us damages democracy for all of us, and I think that is a lesson of history.
Jemar Tisby: Yeah, exactly.
Alex Lovit: Well, all right, so you solved media bubbles for us earlier, or at least you gave us a thing we can do. This all feels pretty daunting to me right now. Do you have a thing we can do to push back against this dismantling of democracy?
Jemar Tisby: When I would get these questions like, what do we do about this, that or the other issue, my solution to that was to offer a framework for people. So if I can have a moment to just introduce that framework, maybe that'll help answer the question. The framework is called the ARC of Racial Justice. It's an acronym. The A stands for awareness, R is for relationships, and C is for commitment. For awareness, what does that mean? It means inform yourself. It's all the data, facts and information you need to understand a justice issue. In particular, I tell Black people all the time, "Being Black ain't enough for you to really understand racial dynamics. You know your own personal experience, but you also got to study this stuff." That's even more so for white people and others. You got to read the history, you got to go to the lecture, you got to listen to this podcast. So the awareness is all the things that you're doing to absorb information.
Then, relationships, what's that about? It's about a couple of things. Number one, I don't want us to forget that the point in the goal of justice is people. We can get all into the policies and the laws and the practices that we forget that the reason why we're trying to change those things is so that real people, their lives will be affected in positive ways. What I tell white people is, "Y'all have done an excellent job, white folks have done an excellent job at putting up walls such that diversity in your personal relationships will not just happen by itself. You have to now become experts at building bridges and intentionally seeking relationships with people who are different." Now you can get specific. Does that mean I'm going to shop somewhere else? Does that mean I'm going to get my haircut somewhere else? Does that mean my kids are going to go to a different school? So relationships, making a plan for that.
And then lastly is commitment, by which I don't just mean staying the course, perseverance. Yes, that's important, but what I mean by that is moving beyond the interpersonal to the institutional, moving beyond the individual to the systemic. What are the policy issues and what are the levers you're going to pull that if you change it here, it's going to affect not just one person at a time, but whole groups of people? You got to look at the institutional and the systemic ways to get at that and come up with a plan for it. So the ARC of justice and the awareness relationships commitment part, fill in the blank, put it on a timeline, write it down, share it with someone, and make it a plan.
Alex Lovit: Yeah, a lot of that is from your book, How to Fight Racism, which is a great title. Frankly, I found a lot of the suggestions of that book challenging in a good way. Racism's a pretty big thing and it's going to take some concerted effort to fight it. Also, I guess in this election year, people should vote.
Jemar Tisby: Absolutely.
Alex Lovit: People should vote in every election. But as we just discussed, in part because of the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, a lot of us don't live in districts that our vote in the general election is going to change the representative. So it's I think important for all of us to feel that we can have an impact and have ways to have an impact. It's great if you can have an impact voting and you should vote and try to have an impact that way, but there are other ways that we can try to influence our society. How should people prioritize those goals?
Jemar Tisby: Most of us don't have a direct link to Washington D.C. or the White House or the Senate or Congress aside from calling our representatives, right? But I will say the down-ballot counts, too. I'm looking at things like secretaries of state, state's attorney general, city council people, and mayors. That kind of voting is important and does make a difference even if at the national level we're not making as big a difference as we'd like. So I would still encourage voting in general, but also looking at the state and local level and the ways that your vote really, really, really does matter, but it does matter in other ways, too.
A lot of people have heard of these book bans targeting books that talk about race or sexuality. How did that become this national thing? Folks started showing up to committee meetings at libraries and board meetings at libraries, these teeny tiny events that you probably didn't even know were happening. But because so few people participated, it didn't take a lot of right-wing folks to get in there and say, "We don't like this. We don't like that. We want to change it." Well, guess what? We can have just as big of an impact in the opposite direction if we show up at those meetings, too.
School board meetings, same way. What are our policies at the local school level? In terms of changing people's minds, it really does go back to that information ecosystem. Even though it doesn't feel like you're doing much to retweet or to share or post on social media, that is part of the information ecosystem today. That's part of the public square today. So don't underestimate that.
The last thing I'll say is one of the most frustrating because it seems so obvious, money matters. The smaller the organization, the more the money matters. There are all these organizations that are not the big national orgs that are doing really good work and have proven their practices are effective for progress. Imagine what they could do with even more resources. Yours could be the resources that help them have an even greater impact. So there's a lot more besides voting, and some of it is frustratingly simple, but still impactful.
Alex Lovit: That's a lot of suggestions for things we can do to save democracy, so now all we got to do is do it.
Jemar Tisby: Just that part. One of the things I say in that book, How to Fight Racism, is we don't have a how-to problem, we have a want-to problem. Universally, I do this with groups I speak with all the time. I ask them to get out their Notes app or paper and pen, if they have it, and write down what they think we should do about X, Y, Z issue. You know what never happens? A blank page. No one ever is completely clueless about what we should do about racism or about our political environment. Everyone has ideas. If that's the case, it's not how-to that's the issue. It's the want-to. It's, do we have the will to do it? Do we have the will to look at our budget and shift some things so that we can donate to these organizations? That's the want-to.
Do we have the will to look up the library website, see when the board meeting is, put it on the calendar and attend the meeting? Do we have the will to do that? So it's not the how-to problem, it's the want-to problem. When you say all we have to do is do it, that's the crux. That's the whole ball game right there. We have no shortage of ideas of what to do. You listening right now, you can think of three things instantly that you think would help. The only question is not how to, it's will you.
Alex Lovit: Well, that is genuinely inspirational and I think a great place to end. Jemar Tisby, thank you for joining me on The Context.
Jemar Tisby: Thanks, Alex.
Alex Lovit: The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Our producers are George Drake Jr. and Emily Vaughn. Melinda Gilmore is our director of communications. The rest of our team includes Jamaal Bell, Tayo Clyburn, Jasmine Olaore, and Darla Minnich. We'll be back in two weeks with another conversation about democracy.
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I'm Alex Lovit. I'm a senior program officer and historian here at Kettering. Thanks for listening.
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