Reading While White in 2021: An Introductory Reflection on Howard Thurman

Howard Thurman in the classroom. Photo courtesy of the National Endowment for the Humanities. — *Howard Thurman in the classroom.* Photo courtesy of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In “the before times” of early 2020, as some have reckoned our lives before the COVID-19 pandemic, I first read the work of 20th century spiritual writer and pastor Howard Thurman. As the events of the pandemic unfolded, I gained fortitude from words like these in his 1953 classic Meditations of the Heart: “During these turbulent times we must remind ourselves repeatedly that life goes on . . . Birds still sing; the stars continue to cast their gentle gleam . . . and the heart is still inspired by the kind word and the gracious deed.” (1) If published today, many of his volumes might be shelved with the “inspirational” or “self-help” books that have become ubiquitous in our contemporary life. But as the coronavirus pandemic revealed the pandemic of racial injustice, I opened Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited, reading with my parish as part of the Episcopal Church’s Sacred Ground series on racial justice. It was only then that I began to see Thurman’s behind-the-scenes role within the wider pantheon of Civil Rights heroism. Thurman’s sensibilities remain especially prescient amid our greater struggle toward racial justice.

As a pastor and academic of historically Black churches and universities, Thurman traveled widely with missionary projects, encountering the breadth of the world’s social inequities, challenging and sharpening his own activist faith. Meeting with Mahatma Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hanh, Thurman became the bridge from Gandhi’s principles of nonviolent direct action to the African American Civil Rights Movement. With his cosmopolitan ideals, Thurman’s writing and preaching remained rooted in the tradition of the Black church and of the African American experience, often taking on the role of family storyteller to illustrate his message. Thurman’s maternal grandmother, Nancy Ambrose, who had been enslaved in Florida, looms large as Thurman’s greatest influence. A white woman was once outraged that Thurman’s grandmother had bought a house in the neighborhood. The white woman lashed out by dumping chicken manure into his grandmother’s garden at night. Ambrose went on gardening, turning the manure into the soil each morning, using it as fertilizer. Later when the white neighbor was sick, Ambrose visited her with flowers grown from her garden, fertilized by the white woman’s own malice. This story of turning manure into flowers is the classic example of an inspiring Thurman tale.

But Thurman is not a lemons-into-lemonade self-help writer who speaks with new relevance to the inconveniences of life during a pandemic. Thurman’s place at the spiritual center of the Civil Rights Movement a generation ago is prescient to our present pandemic of racial injustice. Jesus and the Disinherited (hereafter referred to as Disinherited) is touted as Thurman’s magnum opus, his manifesto of activist spirituality. A curious reader might be surprised then, not to find within its pages a scathing rebuke of the white patriarchy or a battle cry against it. The omission makes Disinherited all the more visionary. Understood within its true context, Thurman is tending to the inner life of those already steeped in the fight of nonviolent direct action against oppression with no need of a how-to activism guidebook. Dr. King turned to this text for spiritual nourishment, and Thurman’s words can be equally sustaining to the contemporary activist struggling to make ends meet in a world hardwired by the systemic racisms of housing, health, and educational inequities and held in check by mass incarceration and police brutality. Disinherited’s inspiration, advice even, is not for a white audience navigating our own casual interest in racial justice. Thurman continuously emphasizes that his thesis is not about what the privileged can do to help the oppressed: “It is utterly beside the point to examine here what the religion of Jesus suggests to those who would be helpful to the disinherited.” (2)

So what’s a white person to do with this text? What’s a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant church group to do with Thurman? We’ve all had our struggles. I’m gay, and I’ve borne witness to an unfinished revolution for LGBTQ acceptance during my lifetime. My family went through the financial ringer when I was a kid in a forgotten region of this country. I know hard times and navigating oppressive structures. But none of that negates the privilege of my whiteness founded on 400 years of the compounded effects of the slave trade, chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration that our implicit biases and systemic structures paint broadly across each human face today. Thurman was not writing to me. I read nonetheless. But I must read with awareness of the author’s real purpose and audience.

The book’s thesis is as direct as its title: Jesus is for the disinherited. But first Thurman establishes his argument by demonstrating that Jesus himself is disinherited. Thurman situates the historic and cultural status of Jesus parallel to African Americans’. Thurman frankly presents the “natural observation” that Jesus grew up undeniably influenced by “the surging currents of the common life that made up the climate of Palestine.” More specifically, “Jesus was a member of a minority group in the midst of a larger dominant and controlling group.” (3) He explores the exact details of the early life of Christ to designate him clearly in the lower class of a people themselves altogether subjugated under the foreign occupation of imperial oppression and the surrounding political turmoil. Throughout Jesus’ life, “There was no moment in all his years when he was free.” (4) Thurman repeatedly terms “the poor, the disinherited, the dispossessed” with the compelling description as those living with their “backs constantly against the wall.” (5) Like a Black man suffering from police brutality or a Black trans young person dying by suicide, Jesus lived with his back against the wall. This reality must inform our view of the Gospel.

Here, Thurman’s purpose and audience becomes so consequential. A white Protestant audience begins to debate an agenda: what policies to support, where to send a check, what candidates to endorse. But Thurman’s Black activist audience is already a step ahead. Their skin is in the game. They are boycotting. They are sitting-in. They are marching. And they are Thurman’s audience. Thurman cheers them on and comforts them with the Gospel, reminding them that Jesus too lived his life with his back against the wall, lived his life serving those with their backs against the wall, lived and died helping and saving those with their backs against the wall. Thurman’s refrain relentlessly focuses on those whose backs are against the wall. This, he argues, is itself part and parcel of the message of Jesus.

So what is Christianity to the disinherited? I can’t begin to say. It isn’t my place. I’ll leave that to Thurman, and to the other disinherited themselves, of whom Jesus is one. My reflections here are the introduction that must be made for well-meaning white folks, like myself, to begin to engage with the deeply personal, intra-community text of Disinherited. What I am certain of is that the conclusions of Black activist faith are not peripheral to the Gospel; they are the Gospel. Thurman asserts that “The basic fact is that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed.” (6) In which case, the security of the oppressor is antithetical to Christ. And yet, one final premise remains.

Jesus doesn’t deliver the disinherited by hating the inherited—he loves them. He heals the Roman centurion’s servant. He makes a model of the wealthy Samaritan. He consents to death on the empire’s cross. He forgives his mockers. Even the geopolitical foe must be loved; “It was upon the anvil of the Jewish community’s relations with Rome that Jesus hammered out the vital content of his concept of love for one’s enemy.” (7) Jesus is the disinherited. Jesus is for the disinherited. But he loves the oppressor anyhow. This is the totality of grace. A grace that Thurman even extends to us, to me. Reading Thurman, I feel anew, “How precious did that grace appear the hour I first believed!” (8)

Christ’s grace, and Thurman’s, however, calls us to repentance. It is a generous learning curve. To the woman caught in adultery spared a death sentence by Jesus’ intervention, Christ “placed a crown over her head which for the rest of her life she would keep trying to grow tall enough to wear.” Jesus offers us caught in white supremacy and privilege the same crown to grow into.

But Disinherited still leaves a white Christian reader on a cliffhanger. The text highlights the centrality of social justice to the Gospel, even equating the Gospel to social justice. But it stops short of addressing what white folks can do to be helpful. The silence is itself a ramification of the text. It shocks white privilege to discover that we are not the center of God’s kingdom—not even our do-good efforts to fix the systemic flaws of our society are in the foreground. We are not the point. That’s a different book that we must write ourselves, with our lips and with our lives. But in the margins of Thurman’s words, we might begin to infer what we must do:

Christianity has been almost sentimental in its effort to deal with hatred in human life. It has sought to get rid of hatred by preachments, by moralizing, by platitudinous judgments. It has hesitated to analyze the basis of hatred and to evaluate it in terms of its possible significance in the lives of the people possessed by it. This reluctance to examine hatred has taken on the character of a superstition. It is a subject that is taboo. (9)

We white Christians must return to first things. We must root out hate toward the disinherited. We must begin by rooting it out of ourselves. We must keep growing tall enough to wear that crown. It is the only vaccine.