“A seminary professor wrote a prayer in which she asks God to help her ‘hate White people'”, reported Campus Reform.
The professor was Chanequa Walker-Barnes at Mercer University, which has Baptist traditions and is located in Macon, Georgia.
Her prayer is found in A Rhythm of Prayer: A Collection of Meditations for Renewal.
“Dear God, Please help me to hate White people,” the prayer begins. “Or at least to want to hate them. At least, I want to stop caring about them, individually and collectively. I want to stop caring about their misguided, racist souls, to stop believing that they can be better, that they can stop being racist.
“I am not talking about the White antiracist allies who have taken up this struggle against racism with their whole lives,” Walker-Barnes says. “No, those aren’t the people I want to hate.”
Walker-Barnes says she has no yearning to hate “strident segregationists who mow down nonviolent antiracist protesters, who open fire on Black churchgoers, or who plot acts of racism terrorism hoping to start a race war,” because such people are “already in hell” and thus don’t need to be hated. Instead, she asks for strength from God to hate “the nice ones” — specifically, the “Fox News-loving, Trump-supporting voters who ‘don’t see color’ but who make thinly veiled racist comments about ‘those people.’”
She says such Caucasians “welcome Black people in their churches and small groups but brand us as heretics if we suggest that Christianity is concerned with the poor and the oppressed” and “politely tell us that we can leave when we call out the racial microaggressions we experience in their ministries.”
She confesses that “I don’t have many relationships with people like that,” so “they are not a good use of hatred either.” So, she asks the Lord for the “permission and desire to hate” the Caucasians who claim “the progressive label but who are really wolves in sheep’s clothing.”
“Lord, if you can’t make me hate them, at least spare me from their perennial gaslighting, whitemansplaining, and White woman tears,” prays Walker-Barnes. “Lord, if it be your will, harden my heart. Stop me from striving to see the best in people. Stop me from being hopeful that White people can do and be better. Let me imagine them instead as white-hooded robes standing in front of burning crosses.”
“Let me be like Jonah, unwilling for my enemies to change, or like Lot, able to walk away from them and their sinfulness without trying to call them to repentance,” says Walker-Barnes, completely inverting the point of those Bible stories. “Free me from this burden of calling them to confession and repentance.”
