Excerpt from "White Ain't God"

“As a powerful but vain imagination, white supremacy attempts to imprison God to whiteness. In a white supremacist framework – God has a white sentence without parole. While confined, God must look white, talk white, think white, affirm white, bless white, and value, above all things, “his” own image made in whiteness. White supremacy attempts to hold the very God of the universe in chains – theological, liturgical, spiritual, creedal, geographical, social, emotional, and political…

…The normalcy of white supremacy makes acceptable and praiseworthy the sociopathic systems, institutions, and governments that name white supremacy as privilege, merited, and or the favor of God. Failure to undermine, expose, and disrupt the patterns of white supremacy that are part and parcel of our shared life ensures the persistent undue suffering of ALL creation.

For people of faith, what does it say that in 2016 we still [perpetuate] the illusion of a white Jesus in our christian imaginations? What does it say that our churches would have a fit if we pulled down our white Jesuses and white saints and white cherubims and angels as an act of repentance? That doing this would shake the very foundations of our churches is proof that we have a problem. This is not about nostalgia and honoring the [heritage], this is about understanding the ways that white supremacy has decimated the human family. This about acknowledging our need of repentance, reformation, and salvation. We all need to be saved from the evil of white supremacy and the ways it has [hijacked] our conception of God and one another.”

Source: “White Ain’t God” by Nick Peterson from RadicalDiscipleship.net

Excerpt from Mujerista Theology

“Our participation in the act of salvation is what we refer to as liberation. It consists of our work to transform the world. Liberation is both cause and effect of the struggle to have a love relationship with others, including God. Now, there can be no salvation without liberation, though no single act of liberation can be totally identified with salvation in its fullness. As Gustavo Gutierrez has said, ‘Without liberating historical events, there would be no growth of the Kingdom…we can say that the historical, political, liberating event is the growth of the Kingdom and is a salvific event; but it is not the coming of the Kingdom, not all of salvation.’ …

To struggle against oppression, against alienation, is a matter of an ongoing personal conversion that involves effective attempts to change alienating societal structures. This personal conversion cannot happen apart from solidarity with the oppressed. But why are the poor and the oppressed those with whom we must be in solidarity? Why does overcoming alienation demand a preferential option for the oppressed? The reason is not that the poor and the oppressed are morally superior. Those who are oppressed are not personally better or more innocent or purer in their motivations than the rest of us. The preferential option at the heart of solidarity is based on the fact that the point of view of the oppressed, ‘pierced by suffering and attracted by hope, allows them, in their struggles, to conceive another reality. Because the poor suffer the weight of alienation, they can conceive a different project of hope and provide dynamism to a new way of organizing human life for all.’ This contribution, which they alone can give, makes it possible for everyone to overcome alienation. The preferential option for the poor and the oppressed makes it possible for the oppressors to overcome alienation, because to be oppressive limits love, and love cannot exist in the midst of alienation.”

Source: Mujerista Theology by Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz (Orbis Books, 1996), pages 90-91.