Drawing Strength from the Past —The Spirit of Justice & True Stories of Faith, Race, and Resistance with Dr. Jemar Tisby
Episode Notes
It was an absolute honor to sit down with New York Times bestselling author & public historian Dr. Jemar Tisby, for an incredibly rich conversation about his brand new book, The Spirit of Justice. We discuss his own story of coming to faith and what led him to explore stories of Black Christians who tirelessly pursued healing, goodness, and justice against impossible odds.
Here’s what we cover:
1. The impact of culture on mental & emotional health
2. The double-edged sword of religion
3. The dissonance Jemar felt as a Black Christian in predominantly white settings
4. The lifelines who helped him shore up his faith
5. What is the spirit of justice?
6. Jemar’s thoughts on therapy
7. What stories of resistance teach us about following Jesus
Resources:
- The Spirit of Justice: True Stories of Faith, Race, and Resistance by Dr. Jemar Tisby
- The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism by Dr. Jemar Tisby
- On Being Black and Reformed by Anthony Carter
- How to Fight Racism: Courageous Christianity and the Journey Toward Racial Justice by Dr. Jemar Tisby
- @JemarTisby on social media
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 79: Surviving Trauma & A Path to Forgiveness—Finding God In the Hardest Parts of Your Story With Esau McCaulley
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Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison Cook: Hey, everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so thrilled you're here with me today. I love creating these episodes that provoke thought and inspire our healing journeys. Today I'm especially excited as we launch a brand new series all about the intersection of culture and mental health.
This series is a little bit different from what we've done in the past. Over the summer, I was deeply moved by several books I read that explored how our cultural realities impact our emotional, mental, and spiritual health. In this new series, I'm excited to feature some incredible experts to talk with us about some of these topics.
In fact, after reading some of these books, I reached out directly to the authors and said, hey, would you come talk to me on the podcast? And I'm so thrilled to say that so many of them are going to join us this fall. We're going to tackle some of the hot topics in the culture around us, including systemic inequalities, celebrity culture and the role of social media, as well as church cultures and what it means to practice the way of Jesus in our modern day.
While the experts for this series may not be from the field of mental health, I believe their insights have profound implications for all of us. The cultural context we live in profoundly shapes our mental and emotional well-being, whether it's discrimination that certain groups face, whether it's the narratives we're told about our worth, whether it's our church cultures or the societal pressures to conform to certain standards.
In considering mental health through the lens of culture, we start to see how our personal struggles are often linked with broader social realities. In my own life, I'm keenly aware that what's going on in the news or what's going on in the political climate around me can affect the way I'm thinking and feeling even about myself or about my environment.
When we talk about these realities and name some of these realities with open minds and curious hearts, we can help lead each of us to deeper, more holistic healing. This communal aspect of healing is something deeply rooted in the teachings of Jesus, as we seek to be curious and compassionate and connect with the world around us, even as we seek to bring some of those same qualities into the parts of our own souls that need care.
Today I am honored to welcome a guest whose work has profoundly impacted me. Dr. Jemar Tisby is a New York Times bestselling author, historian, and a leading voice on issues of racial justice. His brand new book, The Spirit of Justice: True Stories of Faith, Race, and Resistance, is out this week. The Spirit of Justice dives into powerful stories from America's history of individuals who fought against racism and agitated for justice. People who suffered at times in their quest to bring more healing and more goodness to those around them. Reading their stories reminded me of how much we can learn from their perseverance, their suffering, their methods, and even their hope and their resilience.
I loved this conversation with Dr. Tisby. Toward the end of it, we both experienced a Holy Spirit led moment, a moment of clarity of what it really means to follow in the way of Jesus and how so often that takes us into deep learning from those who have suffered and persevered and shown courage through impossible circumstances.
Please enjoy my conversation with Dr. JemarTisby.
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Alison Cook: I'm so thrilled to get to meet you. I've followed your work for a while. So by way of background, to give you a little bit of how I came to you, my doctoral degree is actually in the psychology of religion. I'm a therapist, but that's my background. I was actually a history major. So I really resonated with this book.
Jemar: I knew there was something I liked about you!
Alison Cook: Oh my gosh. The history part of me was like, wow. It was so rich, this new book of yours, The Spirit of Justice. My doctoral dissertation was on the relationship between religion and prejudice, because in psychology, especially social psychology, research is fraught and there's all sorts of bias and everything in it.
But there is a very clearly established link: the more religious someone is, the more prejudiced they tend to be in the field. As a Christian, this was driving me crazy. I was like, how can this come out time and time again? So my dissertation was my effort to try to create a nuanced variable for how we could tease that out.
And one of the things I was trying to argue is that religion can be used for great harm, to oppress, for violence, for racism, to rip us apart, and it can be used for great good. That power of Christianity can be harnessed. Talking about Christianity specifically, it can be harnessed for great good.
Your book, The Color of Compromise, really dives into how American Christianity in particular has been part of the problem when it comes to racism and many of the problems in our country. Then this next book, The Spirit of Justice, when I saw you start to talk about it, I was like, oh, you're going to go through and trace the history.
I finished reading it last night, and the history of black Christians in particular, it brought tears to my eyes time and time again. You trace the history, the whole history in this country of how black Christians, empowered by their faith, fortified by their deep faith, have been moving these rocks toward freedom and justice for all, consistently against impossible odds.
It popped that part of my brain that's always looking for this double edged sword, of where is it doing harm? I see it in my work with clients–where is it doing harm? And where's our faith coming alongside and bringing more healing, more goodness, more justice? So that's the backdrop of why I wanted to invite you on.
Jemar: I'm so excited. First, I got to say, I am going to take everything you said and rip the audio and play that everywhere I go, because you did a perfect encapsulation of my work, of my views, even on Christianity as it relates to race and racism and prejudice. It can be used for ill, as we've seen so often, but it is also a force for liberation and uplift and equity.
And the way you explained that, I was like, let me take notes on my own work coming from you because it's so beautifully encapsulated. Thank you for that.
Alison Cook: That was my big question all throughout my doctoral work. I'm such a big fan of your work. Tell me a little bit, Dr. Tisby, you have a really unique story of faith. I've listened to a couple of your other interviews. I read your bio on your website. You come at this experience of Christianity through various strands.
And I'm curious, looking back to your younger self, when you first encountered Christianity, were you as aware of this sort of double-edged sword as you are now? And how did that play itself out for you in your own life and your own relationship with faith?
Jemar: I've talked many times about not growing up Christian and then coming to faith in high school through the ministry of a white evangelical youth group. What I'm beginning to understand decades later is that my passion for reducing racism as a barrier to authentic community and belonging comes not from having negative experiences in church–it comes from having some very positive ones.
So if we go back to high school, that youth group…it's high school, you're learning what it means to be your own person, and the high school cafeteria is a perfect microcosm. You've got the tables separated by activity and identity.
The football players are over here. The skaters are over there. The drama kids are over there. If you can picture that, and I think all of us have had this experience of kind of standing at the doorway with our tray and saying, where do I belong. Where do I fit? And that is what this youth group did for me.
It finally gave me a place to belong. It gave me a friend group. It embraced me in so many ways. That is the positive part. The negative part was that to the extent I ever felt separated, distant, excluded, it always had to do with race. So whether that was the dating scene, whether that was going to church on Sunday and hearing not the style of preaching, but what they were talking about, and what they weren't talking about was often louder than what they were talking about, what they left out.
Never addressing issues of race, never addressing issues of justice, all personal holiness, almost self-help kind of stuff. So all of that was there. I didn't have categories for it. I didn't have language for it, but I felt it. I knew it was there, and race and religion have always been part of the way I've thought and developed in terms of my faith.
Alison Cook: The word that comes to mind as I'm listening to you is there, I imagine there was some dissonance inside of you. Is that right? And probably at that young age, you don't know how to make sense of that. You know, I like this, but I also don't feel quite like I belong here.
Jemar: Exactly. Yeah, there were some cultural touch points there. Some of it from not being a Christian. Like they would reference books of the Bible or Bible verses, and I'm a baby Christian. I don't know any of this stuff. But there were also cultural differences. So many of them went to a different high school that was in a wealthier area and had cars or swimming pools.
It was like, okay, this is a different world. And then also, relationally speaking, number one being feeling at both times hypervisible and almost invisible. So hypervisible, being one of the only people of color ever in the room. Feeling like oh, I got to speak for all black people, or I got to do stereotypical black things, whether that's play basketball or rap or whatever.
And at the same time, feeling invisible, because my concerns of me and my community were not part of the conversation there. To this day, I say this because when people hear me talk about racism in the church, often our minds go to the most extreme examples. Somebody calling you the n-word, shutting the doors of the church, saying you can't be a man.
That's not what was happening. To this day, the person who led me to Christ and first brought me to that youth group, we are very good friends. To this day, that youth pastor that led the group, we are friends. So it was much more of a kind of soft racism, if you will. That is what is most pernicious because it's harder to see and it's harder to do stuff about.
Alison Cook: Can you talk to us a little bit about how you began to more intentionally address some of that dissonance? What were some key moments where you began to go, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I’m imagining there's this deep spiritual connection that developed out of a deep faith in Jesus. There's also this, where do I fit here in this group?
I think there might be a time at which you might walk away altogether. Oh, this isn't for me. In your story, what strikes me is that you wrestled with, I want to keep the essence of what I received here, which is this faith, but I've got to disentangle myself from some of the cultural overlays of it. Am I understanding that right?
Jemar: Right. So as I recall, my struggle wasn't whether God was real, whether this religion thing would work out. It wasn't that kind of crisis of faith for me. I was a teenager when I became a Christian, but there was something real in that commitment to Jesus. And that's always been true.
So my wrestling was more along the lines of, as you say, finding your place within this thing. My trajectory was, one, not really being aware when I first became a Christian, but sensing that dissonance even if I couldn't name it. Two, becoming much more aware that, oh, there are these different streams and strands and traditions of Christianity.
That was college, where I'm at a Catholic University at the University of Notre Dame. I'm a Protestant, non-denominational evangelical by background from that high school youth group, and I'm starting to discover this thing called Reformed Theology, which is a whole other branch of the church that's even whiter than the environments that I was in.
So now I'm becoming even more aware that the trajectory from there after college is, first, can we as black people have a seat at the table of reformed white evangelicalism as it stood then? From there, with Trayvon Martin, Black Lives Matter, the 2016 election, and more, how can we build our own tables?
Alison Cook: You speak to a lot of components. Because there are so many strands of American Christianity, let alone white/black church. I'm wondering in your own life, in your own kind of struggle and wrestle, who were some folks who stood out to you or what were some breakthrough moments?
I like to ask this question by way of background because we talk a lot about folks' stories and recognizing they've been experiencing trauma, and a lot of times they go ask for help or they go try to have conversations with people and they get varying kinds of response. Sometimes, especially folks in the church, the responses they get are not helpful. We talk a lot on the podcast about spiritual bypassing. They spiritually bypass it. Oh, trust the Lord. Don't enter into this.
Sometimes folks will have an encounter where someone will really name and validate you. Yes, what you're experiencing is real. Here's why you're experiencing it. I'm curious, were there moments like that for you where a pastor, a therapist, a friend, a loved one really came alongside you and said, I see you in this, I see you in what's happening.
Or did the inverse of that happen where you were really constantly fighting against the voices in your life?
Jemar: I love that question. There have been people who have been lifelines to me. They've been buoys when I was adrift out to sea that I could cling to. I thank God that along the way, there have been these people. So when I was in college, Chandra Johnson was the first black woman to be this basically advisor to the university president and was in the president's office, had a very high and influential position there.
And she took it as her ministry to take all of the black students, and there weren't a ton of us, under her wing and make sure that we had what we needed. She was one of the ones who was an early encourager of my writing and that was not a skill that I recognized as a gift or a contribution to the church at the time.
To this day, decades later, we're in touch every now and again. As I mentioned, going into reformed theology, there's different branches. This was about as conservative theologically as you can get. Like I said, there were even more white people. It was even less diverse, but there were a few: Thabiti Anyabwile, who's now a pastor in Washington, DC.
Tony Carter, who's a pastor in Georgia and wrote a book called On Being Black and Reformed. That was my first signal that there are other black people here. I'm not the only one. Anthony Bradley was in the same denomination as I was. So it was like, ok, one can exist in this universe, and there are others who do.
Another lifeline was, after college, I joined Teach for America, and I became a middle school teacher. They placed me in the Mississippi Delta, on the Arkansas side. That's where I got my first in-depth, ongoing experience of the Black Church. New Light Missionary Baptist Church, it was a historic church whose actual building had fallen into disrepair.
We were meeting in what was basically a warehouse with exposed concrete floors and folding metal chairs and an average age of about 65 in the congregation. But it was as authentic and historic of a Black church experience I could get. It was encouraging to me to see how Christianity is practiced among other groups.
So I could go on and on, but yes, I'm very thankful that there have been representatives. And then further along, as I got into historical studies, there have been people from history and from the past who stand out, many of whom are in this book, The Spirit of Justice.
Alison Cook: These figures that come into our lives mirror what you write about in your book–when we look back through history, we're looking for those light bearers, those folks who bring us touchstones of hope. And that's what you've done in this book.
In The Spirit of Justice, you're really tracing this incredible history. It's fascinating. It's hard. It's beautiful. It's compelling. It's empowering in the sense of, oh my gosh, these folks are fighting for the kinds of things they're fighting for without necessarily seeing a lot of fruit in so many cases for this fight for what's right and good and true and in the world.
I'm curious what prompted you to write The Spirit of Justice? I can think of a million reasons after reading it, but I wanted to ask you personally, what was your personal interest in bringing this to us?
Jemar: Thank you for asking that. I would say at least two major motivations. Number one, I've honestly gotten a bit weary of the assertion or even the question, is Christianity the white man's religion? Now I'm weary of it, but I totally understand it. I've asked it myself, because as we said at the top of the show, Christianity or religion in general can be used for very harmful purposes and to oppress others.
And in the US it has been the moral religious framework for racism, for US race-based slavery, for segregation, and all of that. So the question is totally legit. But what I have grown weary of is constantly responding, have you looked at the black church? To say nothing of the global church.
But this book is essentially a book length response to that question, is Christianity the white man's religion? And the resounding answer is no. Black people and oppressed people worldwide have understood the liberatory impulses of the gospel. They have understood it truly as good news to the poor. Good news for those who are in bondage.
I wanted to give examples of black people throughout our nation's history who did understand their force, their faith, not as the white man's religion, but as Jesus’ teaching that can lead to true equality. So that was one motivation. The other motivation was simply, I sensed in my spirit as I was contemplating a next book, that we were going to need some encouragement.
I didn't know the exact contours of what we would face, but I think 2024 has made a lot of that really clear. We're not simply polarized politically. We're looking at whether democracy as we know it will survive. We're looking at an extensive plan in Project 2025 to gum up the levers of democracy, enshrine the rule of a few over the the will of the people, and it's as serious as anyone has said, if not more, and in those situations when the odds look very stacked against you, it would be understandable to be deflated, demoralized, and even fall into cynicism and apathy.
So I want this book to be a cheerleader, the friend and the fan clapping on the side as you run this marathon and encouraging you, giving you that drink of water to refresh you and keep you going, because here we learn about people from throughout our history who faced even more daunting odds in the forms of slavery and lynching and segregation and degradation and beating and even murder, yet they still found a way to tap into something that I call the spirit of justice to resist and persist.
Alison Cook: The way you write about it is so compelling. It invites us to participate in that work of the spirit of justice. Tell me a little bit about how you conceptualize that spirit. You speak about it really beautifully in the book.
Jemar: So I opened the book with this. It's so powerful. This quote from Myrlie Evers Williams, the widow of Medgar Evers, at the grand opening of the Mississippi civil rights museum. It was shrouded in controversy. Could Mississippi tell the truth about civil rights and racism? Trump was president at the time and he was invited, and that totally flew against a lot of the truth-telling that this museum was supposed to be about.
There was all this controversy leading up to it, but Myrlie Evers still showed up. She still gave a talk, and then afterwards there was this press conference. I was in it, and somebody asked her how today in the 21st century compared to 50 years ago in the civil rights movement. She said, there's stuff that I'm seeing today that I hoped I'd never see again.
And she said she was weary, she was tired, but at the same time, she said, there's something about the spirit of justice that rises up within you and gets you ready to fight and resist all over again that stuck with me. I said, that's what we need. That's what we're going to need right now. So the book is a historical survey like The Color of Compromise.
It marches from the colonial era and really starts back in Africa up to the present day. What I do is highlight and spotlight certain figures who, because of their faith, resisted racism, resisted injustice, and fought for a better tomorrow.
Alison Cook: Yeah. It's an incredible piece of history that you've done, really excavating and mining all of these stories with such integrity to the original. There's also a pastoral spirit being called up through the book for all of us to participate, to be inspired by. One of the things I wanted to ask you, I noticed throughout the book and several of the stories, Harriet Tubman is someone we know a little bit more about.
There's so many others where, especially in evangelical or Protestant theology, there is a very individualized, I need my personal freedom. Jesus came to save me. And throughout the story, you're not preaching this, you're not necessarily didacting this, but in every story, what was really compelling to me was the communal focus.
It really struck me as so close to the heart of the gospel of what Jesus is trying to do. There's something wrong here, and I have to do what I can both for my own sake and for the sake of these others that I love, which might mean putting my own life at risk. It flies in the face of that individualistic notion and brings us into the more of the justice notion.
A lot of times we talk on the podcast about how that word salvation, which has so often been thought of as an individual rescue, really in many ways is translated as healing. The Greek word sozo can be translated as healing. It's about bringing healing and I think about the relationship between justice and healing.
It's not individual, it's bringing it for those who have been the most harmed, those who have been the most vulnerable, and it's so compelling in the book, how we're seeing the folks who are part of being oppressed at the front lines. They are the ones most committed to bringing healing and justice for others. It's very striking throughout the stories.
That's what continued to surface for me. It's flying in the face of this modern American individualistic gospel. I know there's a lot of thought behind that, because you're a scholar and you've thought about that, but I'm curious about how you see that. That's what spoke to me.
Jemar: I'm so glad you pulled out that thread. Speaking about the construction of race, what it does with white people who have historically been the numerical majority too, that plays into it, but white people are generally treated as individuals, and that is a sort of privilege of whiteness.
So the analogy I always use is when I was in seminary, I was a phenomenal student, not to brag, but let's say, okay. I did poorly. Let's say I did poorly on a paper or a test. It wouldn't be “Jemar did poorly on that paper or test”. It would be, oh, black people, they can't quite cut it. They may not quite have what it takes.
So my whole group, my whole category, my whole race, would be implicated in my individual behavior. If that happened to a white person, John failed the test. John didn't do well on the paper. That's John. It's not all white people. So the way we're socialized, it teaches us to think individually or collectively because of how race is constructed.
That's part of it. What you pull out as part of the book is, so many black people recognize that their behavior reflects on more than them. So you mentioned Harriet Tubman before, she's a perfect example. She escapes to freedom and could have lived her life as a free person who escaped forever, but she said, if I'm free, other people deserve to be free too.
So she went back and forth 12 or 13 times on the underground at literal risk to her life. I don't even focus on that in the book–I focus on Harriet Tubman, the Civil War hero, which less people know about. So it started with the Port Royal experiment. Her reputation's huge and government and military officials call her down to help with the Port Royal experiment, which is essentially, all of these recently freed black people, what do we do with them?
Can they have their own communities? Because this was still a question in the mid 19th century. The white people are like, can black people handle freedom? And of course we can. She goes down to help with Port Royal. She trains people, she heals people, all that stuff.
And then she leads this incredible battle on the Combahee river and frees more enslaved people in a single night than she did on all of her underground railroad trips. That's a perfect microcosm of the communal understanding of liberation, healing, salvation, and how many black people undertook it for themselves to help uplift all.
Alison Cook: Yeah. It is a whole different mindset that is so convicting and so compelling, about how we can all take on more of that experience, that communal understanding of healing. Frankly, this is a little bit of a leap, but I think about it in our current model of therapy where I need to go see a therapist by myself and heal my individual self, and I'm always thinking about as a therapist, then this person is going to go back into a toxic family structure, a toxic church structure, a toxic community, a toxic culture.
There is no such thing as individual healing without it being connected to the rest of the community. And we see that portrayed through the history of how these individuals that you're highlighting in the book, every single one of them had that understanding of, it's not about my freedom. That made my brain think about how much individualism is embedded in white culture.
Jemar: That's critical. I've tweeted this a few times, but I said if I could get all the white people in the room and tell them one thing about racism, it would be that racism is not a matter of individual interpersonal attitudes. It's also a matter of systems and structures. So that's slightly different from the individual versus communal.
I'm emphasizing the individual feelings and attitudes versus structural solutions, but I think they're related. So it is great that you don't have a racist bone in your body or some of your best friends are black, like whatever the trope is. But fundamentally, even if you are as good and gracious and kind of a person as you can be, that's only going to affect your individual relationships and your network.
What can we do structurally to affect the community? On the policy level, on the practice level. That's what many black Christians, I think, bring to the table when we're talking about fighting racism, that many white Christians struggle to understand at least initially when they get into this work.
Alison Cook: What is your hope for who will read this book and how it will land on them? You've talked a little bit about wanting to inspire some hope and some encouragement, but what is your hope for some of the different types of folks who will read this book? Who did you write it for and what is your dream for how it will affect change?
Jemar: I always write books for myself. That is to say, I always write the book that I think I need. They always say, have your reader in mind, your audience in mind. Other people, of course, but also partially what I need to hear. So when I wrote The Color of Compromise, I needed to come to grips and contend with how Christianity has been used as a force of racial oppression and where that came from.
To name it and to put it down in words actually helped me to struggle against it better, but also be more at peace, not with evil but the tension and that dissonance that you named earlier.
And then How to Fight Racism was also my need to express myself and think out for myself, what do I think needs to be done about this? I emphasize both the individual and relational mindset shifts that need to take place as well as the structural and policy shifts that need to happen.
The Spirit of Justice fits into both of those books because once you understand the problem, The Color of Compromise, once you get a sense of what we can do about it, How to Fight Racism, then it really sets in that we got to be in this for the long haul. Often, it's going to be two steps forward, one step back, and it's going to be a lot of obstacles, a lot of setbacks.
So how do you keep going? And that's one of the fundamental questions that The Spirit of Justice answers. How do you keep going? You tap into the spirit of justice, and you learn from those who did in times before us and against odds and obstacles that were even more daunting than we face today.
Alison Cook: Yeah, that's powerful. Briefly, before we end our time, you're a pretty outspoken advocate for mental health and in particular for the need for more black mental health resources and therapists. Can you talk a little bit about where that comes from? What are some of the resources and what is some of the work you're involved in?
Jemar: Yeah, I'm so glad. I always get excited talking about mental health. It came to me in a typical God fashion, which is “totally unexpectedly”. I was at seminary, and there was literally a street dividing the campus. We had two sides of the campus: one side is where all of the MDiv classes took place, all the hardcore Bible and Biblical languages and theology classes.
On the other side of the street was the marriage and family therapy program. There was a literal divide between the intellectual and the emotional that was really unhealthy, but they did offer free services for students. You went in and your therapist was someone in training. So they weren't very experienced…
Alison Cook: I remember being one of those.
Jemar: …but what it did for me was say, A, this is okay, B, I don't need to be in a crisis to see a therapist, and C, it starts to break down the walls even internally between your thoughts and your feelings and helps you really begin to process all of that holistically.
So I've been in therapy on and off since 2013. I have a wonderful therapist now and we talk every week or every other week, and I'm a huge advocate for it because it's helped me so much. Obviously there's a testimony there as well. But also, as I do this work of justice for longer and longer, I realize so much of it is not what's happening externally, the changes that we affect in the world, but what's happening internally and the people we're becoming in the process, which is by the way, why I say pursuing justice is a goal worthy in and of itself.
Because whether you change the law, whether the person you want gets elected or not, who you become in terms of character and virtue, as you do the right thing for the right reasons, that counts too. And we fill the world with the kind of people that we hope to see: people who are gracious, people who are patient, people who are resilient, people who are courageous.
From a Christian perspective, I think God is at least as interested in those sort of qualities of your heart as, did you make the world a better place?
Alison Cook: That is a whole word. I love that. It changes us as well. It aligns us. It aligns us with God's spirit, with the person we're supposed to become. That's so interesting, to bring this full circle, because the deep satisfaction, the deep integration internally, is what empowers you and buoys you to keep doing the work, even though often the external work is difficult.
Jemar: I think it's a Holy Spirit moment because it came to my mind as you're speaking. We talked about Myrlie and there was this press conference after, maybe 25ish people in the room. She's in a wheelchair. She said at this point in her eighties, I think she's in her nineties at this point, and she's still alive as we speak. Thank God.
But people like her who lived through so much, there is a presence about them. Literally, she was regal when she spoke. The whole room hushed. We leaned in to hang on her every word. I think that is related to what we're talking about–who she has become over half a century of working and sacrificing and praying and struggling for justice is now a presence and an aura that fills and inspires an entire room, wherever she goes.
Alison Cook: That’s the Holy Spirit right there. Yeah. It changes us for the better. This is also for us. I think that's important. I think it's important for all of us to hear, but I think as White people with a fair amount of privilege. What you're saying is, man, this is also for me. This is for me. This is how I become a better person. It gets us out of that, “I'm trying to rescue other people”.
I'm more into the, “”I need this. I want to be this person. I want to be filled with the spirit that brings justice and mercy and goodness and healing for all”. There's a cost to that, but man, the other side is beautiful. And I thank you for that. That's really beautiful.
Jemar: You, like I said, have summarized and encapsulated and articulated so much of my heart behind this book and really my whole sort of ministry and work. I'm really grateful and appreciative. I do want to highlight and underscore what you said. This is for white people too. You asked about the audience.
I really am eager for black people to read this book because, for once, it's not a book primarily about our suffering, but about our resistance. We can get really weary focusing on blacks suffering quite understandably, even though it's true and we need to know about it.
We also need to see our own agency, and that's what this book does. In terms of the internal transformation, I reserve the entire last chapter to talk about the virtues that I think are in common. I talk about courage, faith, imagination, and resilience as the tie that binds all these folks together. And that's for everyone.
Alison Cook: That's right.
Jemar: It is in the process of pursuing justice and righteousness and following Jesus and being the kind of people that we're supposed to be, that I think humanizes us, builds empathy among each of us, and makes us into the kind of people that we can look back at in history and admire. And we become those folks ourselves. That's for everyone.
Alison Cook: I love that. That's beautiful. I love it. It's such a powerful book. It's called The Spirit of Justice by Jemar Tisby. Where can people find you and find your work and get the book and all the things?
Jemar: Easiest thing to do is go wherever you get your books. Please support local bookstores, but you can find all the relevant links @JemarTisby on social media, or I would love for folks to subscribe to jemartisby.substack.com where I write frequently and I am going to be posting about it all the time.
Alison Cook: I can't recommend it more. You learn so much historically. It's such a powerful, really well researched book, and these stories are about some people in all different spaces in all different ways throughout history, doing courageous things in the spirit of justice against all odds.
Thank you for writing it. Thank you for the work that you're doing. Thank you for continuing to be a voice of such wisdom. Bless you this week as the book comes out and all the people who will read it. I hope that the spirit of justice lives in this book and will infiltrate each person who reads it.
Jemar: Thank you for being an early reader and introducing me to your listeners. The spirit of justice is available to us all.