Centering Black Voices
This month and every month, who are the Black voices you can center in your life to learn from, to grow in healing, understanding, wholeness, love?
I know there are myriad sources pointing us to Black writers, artists, etc., this month—rightly so. But I don’t want that to inoculate me from the loving work of amplifying Black voices this month—and every month. If I were silent on my Substack during Black History Month, it would be a blind spot on my part to say the least.
Focusing on writers, here are some writers whose literary streams have nourished, challenged, expanded, deepened, provoked, and awakened me. In the comments, please make your contribution, too!
Langston Hughes, poetry
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
bell hooks, The Will to Change
Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy
Dr. Chenequa Walker-Barnes, I Bring the Voices of My People
Danté Stewart, Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle
Drew Jackson, Touch the Earth: Poems on the Way
Robert the contemplative, Substack
Percival Everett, James
Trevor Noah, Born a Crime
Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dr. John M. Perkins, Let Justice Roll Down
Dr. James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree; Black Theology and Black Power
Dr. Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race; After Whiteness; Acts commentary
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love
Dr. Reggie Williams, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance
Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
Rev. Dr. Allan Boesak, Radical Reconciliation: Beyond Political Pietism and Christian Quietism
Rev. Dr. Manas Buthelezi, father of Black theology in South Africa
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness
This is not just some voyeuristic endeavor into Black culture. This is an exercise in taking an honest assessment of the soil within which we’ve grown, been formed; how we see, what we don’t see. Discovering treasures we’ve neglected. Growing in empathy, wonder, richness. Learning, expanding, growing, weaeping, laughing, healing. If we are only listening to voices who look and think like us, that’s ought to alarm us—especially for those reading who have a horse in the race in the Christian tradition, claiming to follow a Messiah who came as a liberator of all and elevates no race or nation above another (in fact, in Jesus’ transvaluation of values, the last shall be first, the lowly are raised up, the oppressed are seated at the table.)
Zooming out from the Christian faith, for all of us in “Western” society (as much as that may have died, faded, or become amorphous in our digital-economic-entertainment-tethered media planet), even if the jury is out for anyone on God and we’ve tried to escape by jumping ship to side with ‘the good guys,’ the racially-charged history of forced displacement, enslavement, exploitation, dehumanization is woven throughout our individual and collective conscience in ways we need to reckon with internally, communally, politically, structurally. The racial (and class, gender) wounds and divisions in our society are centuries-long struggles, are not irrelevant, and are not hidden from us as they are presently unmasked within the tragic theater playing upon the national stage in 2025.
At communal, ecclesial, institutional, and societal scale, we are living through the long and quaking years of an apocalyptic upheaval. The American experiment is in a relatively young laboratory, and the lab is feeling another earthquake. Through it all, Black men, women, and children, Black churches, Black communities have been strong, resilient, creative, brilliant and resilient in ways worthy of our attention. As Jemar Tisby has written on his Substack, speaking to his Black brothers and sisters, instead of “we’ve been here before,” a more appropriate reframing might be “we’re built for this.” Maybe we might benefit from paying attention to those who are indeed built for the struggle.
So in this Black History Month, in this present moment where white Christian nationalism and white strong men oligarchy conspire together in disorienting and discouraging ways, I conclude with this consideration from James H. Cone:
“What is at stake is the credibility and promise of the Christian gospel and the hope that we may heal the wounds of racial violence that continue to divide our churches and our society.”
Shalom to you,
Jonathan