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“First I have to tell you about the best gift I ever received,” my friend and colleague Tiffany Eberle Kriner said as she handed out seed packets for my students during a field trip to her family farm. She told how just after they moved to this property, her husband spent months incapacitated from an injury. She had carried the physical and emotional burden of raising their first sheep, pigs, and cows while turning an utterly run-down farmhouse into a home, all as a full-time professor. She was moving fences and pulling trash from her forest every moment of daylight and coming home to wash dishes in a bathtub. The despair of it all loomed larger than any way out she could imagine.
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During that time, a friend of a friend offered to help remodel their non-functional kitchen. He came and went, and she was grateful but thought little of it in the swirl of exhaustion. Then months later he showed up unannounced at their farmers market stall and handed them this box—handcrafted from wood from their farm, etched with images of their farm transformed into something beautiful.
If you read my previous newsletter, you know that there are many ways to give and receive gifts, and those ways matter because they establish and confirm our relationships in social structures. As I explained, if we carry forward unbalanced mutual accounts of gift exchanges (“I’ll buy your coffee today and you get me next time”), we strengthen non-hierarchical friendships. In contrast, if we give without mutual receiving, we can communicate that the giver is higher status than the receiver (“Let me cover that meal since I earn more”). Or if we bring an account to a balanced closure (“Here’s $12.49 for the meal you gave me”), we communicate that the relationship is closed to further obligations. Recognizing gift-giving patterns can help us establish communities that dismantle hierarchies of race, class, gender, ability, citizenship and the like.
But there’s one more kind of gift-giving pattern that deserved its own newsletter: gifts of grace. A grace gift is an undeserved gift of incalculable value that anticipates future relational responsibility. To attempt to repay a grace gift in precise value would be an insult to the giver. Likewise to demand or expect such a gift would be impudent. And while the recipient can not and should not try to repay precisely, if the value of the gift is truly recognized, it becomes a catalyst to future gift-giving, often by paying forward more grace gifts to others. Tiffany’s seed box was a grace gift. It didn’t just add to her collection of things, it transformed her toward a person who extends grace to others, like the students in my class.
As I’ve researched what causes white people to develop long-term commitments to racial justice, I’ve found that gifts of grace play a surprisingly pivotal role. Here’s how.
White people, and maybe especially white Christians (the subject of my research), are socially conditioned to think of themselves as the benefactors of grace. They believe themselves to be helpers, givers, and philanthropists. Core to their identify is being “good people.” But in stories told by white people who’d been pursuing racial justice for decades, I heard them describe reorientations around grace: they’d come to see themselves not as net benefactors, but net beneficiaries of grace. In learning about the history of racism and colonialism, they began to recognize all they’d received that they could never repay. They were beneficiaries through a twisted mess of force and forgiveness.
Like Tiffany’s seed box, whites receive things too immense to repay—land stolen from indigenous people, privilege and promotion, acceptance into neighborhoods and churches where people of color have every reason to hate or retaliate. Much of this was stolen, but what really knocks white people off their feet is when they see how much could be demanded back but hasn’t been. Among the gifts of incalculable value they receive again and again is forgiveness—for structural domination, micro-aggressions, ignorance, complicity, and outright violence.
The more whites know of their history, the more they feel how grace irrupts as a crazy juxtaposition amidst despair. Receiving these gifts is not new or unique—both people of color and whites I interviewed were clear that this sort of gift is being given all the time. What sets apart white people on the road to transformation is not receiving grace, but recognizing it. They realize that people of color are free gift-givers who have every freedom not to give, and yet still sometimes do. And that blows their minds. Sometimes something as small as a hug when a white person walks into a Black church starts a rattling that can’t be settled.
I know I tread cautiously here. White people have been controversially forcing and taking advantage of Black grace from Uncle Tom to Brandt Jean. But the existence of false grace doesn’t mean real grace can’t exist. And only free people can give truly free grace. If you want evidence of how Black people have resisted confinement and assimilation and destruction for centuries, look to how they have determined for themselves whether and when and how to give grace.
What’s essential about grace is that when people sincerely interpret a gift as grace, they have to respond through relationships. A gift of grace changes who a person is—the person becomes beholden. Grace recipients reinterpret themselves as bonded to individuals, communities, or all of humanity, not out of guilt or obligation or to be a better person, but because that’s what receiving grace makes them.
The theologian John Barclay says that this concept of grace formed the church. Early followers of Christ interpreted the resurrection as a grace event that forever transformed their relationship to God and humanity. Whites who recognize the combination of their own undeserving plus their receipt of incongruous and even love-based gifts from people of color are similarly transformed.
I’ll be honest—I didn’t expect to find this in my research. I’ve been mulling it around for the past six months, trying to figure out how to describe it in a way that won’t be weaponized against people of color (“they just need to be more forgiving for white people’s sake”) and in a way that makes sense to people who weren’t raised in the grace language of Christianity. I’m grateful to have such amazing colleagues and research participants as conversation partners to help me learn. I have much more to say than fits in a newsletter, and that’s why I’m chugging ahead with a book.
When I look back at my own life, I see moments of receiving and recognizing grace from people of color dotted all across my life. Doing research showed me that I’m not alone in experiencing grace events as transformative epiphanies. I could write a new story every day of how someone has extended grace to me. The story of how anything good came to be in me is that chain of stories. If this sparks new thinking for you, too, I’d love to talk.
As we say each week at my church, grace and peace to you.
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