Black History Month invites us to do more than remember; it invites us to reckon. I’ve been sitting with that conviction in a preaching cohort led by Duke’s Dr. Luke Powery, whose work on the Holy Spirit and human dignity has sharpened the way I think about language and race.
In his book Becoming Human, Powery writes that “racialization is real. It is something that is performed on another person or group… Racialization leading to dehumanization has been the historical manifestation of race.” Performed. That is a verb. And I think that single word opens something important for this moment. We have grown accustomed to trading in nouns: racist, bigot, supremacist. Nouns are static. They label and leave. They sort people into fixed categories and, ironically, can shut down the very conversation they’re meant to open. What history reveals is not simply what people were but what people did. Racialization is something that is done. Minoritizing is something that is done. Dehumanizing is something that is done, every single day, by choices that real people make.
This is not a small distinction. When we speak in verbs, we recover both accountability and possibility. A noun tells you what someone is and offers little hope of change. A verb tells you what someone is doing and that means they could choose to do otherwise. The colonial project that gave birth to the racial categories we still live inside was not an accident of nature. It was a construction, built word by word, law by law, exclusion by exclusion.
That same logic did not end with emancipation or the Voting Rights Act. We see it still at work whenever a human being made in the image of God – a mother, a father, a child navigating an impossibly complex immigration system often in search of safety and survival – gets reduced to the noun illegal. That single word performs something. It doesn’t describe what someone did; it declares what they are. It is the same flattening, the same stripping of complexity and dignity that Black liberation efforts have been pushing back against for four hundred years. What has been constructed can, by God’s grace and human will, be deconstructed and something more just built in its place.
So here is an invitation, drawn from one of Scripture’s oldest challenges: Choose this day whom you will serve (Joshua 24:15). Not once, not in some grand gesture, but today, in the words you post, the policies you support, the leaders you hold accountable, the silence you refuse to keep. Will you racialize, or humanize? Minoritize, or amplify? Dehumanize, or love? Will you reach for the noun that cages, or the verb that opens? Every person in every position, in government, in the church, in schools, in corporations, and yes, in our own homes, gets to make that choice. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. And if you bristle at being called a racist, here is the grace of the verb: stop doing racist things. Start doing the opposite. History will not remember what we were called. It will remember what we did.
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