The raceless gospel is going to the Wild Goose Festival in Union Grove, North Carolina this summer. Described as a family reunion, the gathering is “a transformational community grounded in faith-inspired social justice.”

***

I consider myself a race abolitionist, a dignity advocate, a community- building protagonist, a baptism evangelist. Through the work and witness of the raceless gospel, I am taking the North American church to the waters of baptism and submerging a Christian faith, identity and practice that supports human hierarchies as well as the white supremacist ideology and theology that undergirds them. With both hands on their cross and following in the footsteps of Jesus, I believe that Christians should have no interest in power- grabbing identities and ways of being.

I don’t simply have a problem with race but believe that race is the problem with our shared human being and belonging. I have no interest in working with the word so don’t add this book to your antiracism reading list. I am anti- race.

Because there is no racial justice. Race was not created to be just.

There is no racial equality. Race was not created with the belief that human beings are created equal.

There is no racial unity. Race was created to divide us based on physical attributes like shape of skull, size of nose, texture of hair and pigment of skin.

There is no racial reconciliation. Race was not created to bring us all together after helping us reconcile our differences.

When I say race, I’m talking about power and how we were swindled out of authority over our bodies— not identity or nationality. Because race has no country, no culture but colonialism. As a Christian, I don’t believe that I am powerless against it. Instead, I believe in the water of baptism and its witness, its ability to draw out all our impurities and to drown out all the competing voices so that we can be our true selves.

The raceless gospel also encourages us to see race as it is— a sociopolitical construct, built from the tip of our tongues up, a human invention and what Brian Bantum describes as “a tragic incarnation.” In the end, it is an invitation so beautifully explained by mystic and theologian Howard Thurman, who says, “I have always wanted to be me without making it difficult for you to be you.”[i] This is my covenant, my promise to you as my next of kin.

This work will make a mess of things, starting with our boxes, categories, and containers for human identity, being and belonging. It will require us to wade in the water and wade into the shared drama and trauma of American society. Don’t worry. I’m here to walk alongside you but it won’t be easy.

*This is an excerpt from the introduction of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.

---

[i] Howard Thurman, The Search for Common Ground (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1986), xiii.