Hi Black Family:
This is my letter to our white folks to encourage anti-racist behavior. Feel free to share widely and to add your own concerns when you do. Solidarity and love to you.
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Dear Nice Whyte People:
I hope you are as well as you can be, given all the givens.
If you are reading this you know me or know of me. And I hope you’ll hang on in here and read this love note. If you are BIPOC, and it resonates, send this to a white friend or colleague.
First: I am a Black woman and a progressive, womanist, universalist Christian who believes God speaks more than one language. All loving paths lead to God. I’m an author, an activist, a public theologian, and a feminist who believes the personal is political. I’m a wife, auntie, nana, and sister/friend. And with every one of those hats on, and especially when wearing my red fedora, I am sick of “whyteness.” What do I mean by that?
Watch this video for some Black joy.
I am sick of white supremacy. I am sick of white people thinking they are smarter, better, sharper, more gifted, more entitled, more beautiful, more holy, more pure, more saved, and more predestined for goodness, love, fortune, blessedness, and thriving than people who are BIPOC. I am tired of Karen and Biff, who push ahead in lines, who believe they deserve to be first in line, who think lines are not designed for them, who take up more space than they should, who make more demands than they should, who raise little “Karens and Biffs” to believe they can climb up on the backs of the so-called other with impunity, and that all of this is somehow designed by God.
In short, I am outraged at white people “whyting” all the damn time.
What do I mean by “whyting?” It’s the way you treat folks who look like me in meetings; the way you don’t look at me when I’m talking; the way you let my question or comment just hang in the air as though I’m invisible and my words don’t matter; the way you are dismissive and don’t acknowledge what I’ve said and attribute my contribution to another (thanks for that idea, Todd— and I’m thinking, ‘Wait, I said that!’ It’s the way you communicate in emails — terse and rude — like you don’t need to greet my humanity with yours. It’s the way you go around me to call a subordinate because I’m busy (which I am) but it is also how you get to avoid my leadership, and my power. It’s a series of microaggressions and tiny cuts that happen repeatedly and we/I tire of pointing them out to you.
I’m tired of the ways you ignore the accomplishments, beauty, gifts, and talents of people who look like me. I’m over that!! I’m sick of the ways nice white people participate in systems and structures that oppress my people and remain silent in the face of the horrible atrocities occurring right now to people who are not white. I am at a zero-tolerance for whyting. I won’t stand for it. If I see it, smell it, hear it, get near it; if it’s directed toward me or another — I am calling it out. AND I am doing it with people I don’t know, and I am doing it with people I love.
So, to strangers who follow me in these spaces, to digital and in-person friends, to colleagues, and to the people who I respect and love: I need you to be better than this. You KNOW what time it is, and you know your part in it.
Handle. Your. Business.
Don’t make me explain it to you. Read a book. Get Jennifer Harvey on your shelf; read some Robert P. Jones or Tim Wise. Learn from smart, intentional white leaders how to stop whyting all over the place. Then, when you study those, read “Wake Up America, Black Women on the Future of Democracy,” edited by Keisha N. Blain. I’ve got an essay in there. Go back and read Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. Read Cole Arthur Riley, Majora Carter, angel Kyodo Williams, Frederick Joseph, Obery Hendricks, Kelly Brown Douglas, Jemar Tisby, and Natalie Renee Perkins. And yes, get “Fierce Love” and read what I say about ubuntu and what love looks like in the context of a white supremacist culture.
Watch some movies, y’all. Watch “Nickel Boys,” “Mississippi Burning,” and “Mississippi Masala.” Go to Wakanda and Selma in the movies. Subscribe to some Black news like Ebony, Essence and the Amsterdam News.
Shop Black and stimulate Black economies.
You want to learn some more about how to stop whyting? Get involved in a multi-ethnic antiracist community, like Middle Church. And when you join, listen; don’t speak first. Be humble and learn.
You want to participate in the dismantling of what whiteness has done to Christianity? Register for the Freedom Rising Conference: The Fierce Urgency of Now, October 31-November 2, 2025. Come hear a multiethnic cadre of leaders — Indigenous, Hispanic, Asian, white and Black — talk about tools and tactics to build a world in which we all matter and everyone has enough.
And at your dinner table with family, at the gym with friends, at work with colleagues, and in your social media: Speak up! You know what’s right and what’s wrong and yes, you can do something about it. When you see something, say something.
The gift I am giving you, my friends, my love offering to you in this Black History Month? I’m calling you in.
I am not standing by for whyting anymore, not ever again. And I hope you won’t either. I need your help. The only way we dismantle white supremacy is together.
In fierce love,
Jacqui
Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis is senior minister and public theologian at Middle Church in New York. Celebrated internationally for her dynamic preaching and commitment to justice, she champions racial equality, economic justice and LGBTQIA+/gender rights. Featured on MSNBC, PBS, NBC, CBS and NPR, she is the author several books, including “Fierce Love” and the “Just Love Story Bible.” Countless individuals and communities have been inspired by Lewis’ transformative work on her podcast, “Love Period;” in columns and articles; and on stages, in churches, on the street and in digital spaces around the globe.