This Christian Minister and Activist Warned Us What Would Happened (Rewind)
In September 2020, the Rev. Traci Blackmon warned that the nation was not awakening — it was being exposed. More than five years later, the exposure continues.
In September 2020, as protests swept the United States following the killing of George Floyd, Faithfully Magazine convened a group of Black Christian leaders to reflect on what many were calling a national “racial awakening.” The question then was whether the moment signaled transformation — or merely reaction.
The Rev. Traci Blackmon refused the easy framing. What the country was experiencing, she argued, was not a God-appointed kairos moment, but the cumulative consequence of political, moral, and theological failure. Her assessment was not rooted in cynicism, but clarity. And with the distance of more than five years, her words read less like commentary and more like diagnosis.
At the time of that interview, Blackmon served as the associate general minister of Justice and Local Church Ministries for the United Church of Christ (UCC) and senior pastor of Christ The King United Church of Christ in Florissant, Missouri. She is currently Pastor-in-Residence and Lecturer at Eden Theological Seminary and also founder of HopeBuilds LLC, a consultancy focused on building just and equitable systems.
Blackmon warned that the upheaval of 2020 could not be understood apart from a longer erosion already underway — one that had normalized cruelty, rewarded dehumanization, and sanctioned racialized violence through both policy and rhetoric. She named not only physical harm, but what she described as emotional, verbal, and spiritual violence: a culture shaped by leadership that abandoned restraint and invited others to do the same.
That framework matters now.
The fatigue many White Americans voiced not long after Floyd’s death — the desire to “move on” — and the eventual retreat from racial justice commitments — was already anticipated in Blackmon’s analysis. She understood that solidarity untethered from structural change would evaporate. And that the church, in particular, would be tempted to exchange truth for civility and reconciliation for comfort.
What many experienced in 2020 as revelation, Blackmon insisted, was simply exposure. The violence was not new; only the visibility was.
That exposure did not stop with policing. It has expanded.
In 2026, the same moral logic Blackmon identified is visible in the nation’s immigration crackdown. The language of “law and order,” the expansion of detention and deportation, and the tolerance for tearing families apart reflect the same hierarchy of human worth she warned about more than five years ago.
The church’s response has revealed its own fault lines.
Over the past five years, many congregations that once declared themselves “sanctuary churches” have quietly retreated from the practice, recalibrating commitment when legal risk, donor discomfort, or political backlash emerged. Trump’s chaotic and corrupt immigration crackdown has been reframed as a policy disagreement rather than a theological crisis. The biblical call for empathy has been reframed as “sin,” while appeals to Romans 13 have been deployed as moral cover for silence and inaction.
Blackmon’s critique in 2020 anticipated this narrowing of imagination. Her challenge was never limited to policing. It extended to the deeper stories America tells about itself — through statues, institutional memory, selective repentance, and theological silence. The question, from her perspective, was not if Christians felt compassion, but whether they were willing to relinquish power.
Hope, in Blackmon’s telling, was never sentimental. It was disciplined. Demanding. Rooted not in political turnover or symbolic gestures, but in the stubborn insistence on human dignity — even when public leadership, public theology, and public discourse abandoned it.
Reading her words now, the uncomfortable truth is this: the question was never whether 2020 would change everything. The question was whether we would listen to those who understood what was being revealed — and act accordingly.
What Has Not Changed
In 2026, police still kill Black people at disproportionate rates — a trend that has remained tragically consistent since 2020, with Black Americans still being killed at more than twice the rate of White Americans. Public support for racial justice remains cyclical and conditional. And the immigration system has hardened into a mechanism of fear, marked by violent enforcement and policies that preference whiteness and wealth.
Churches remain fractured along political lines while calling that division “theology.” Many have chosen proximity to power over proximity to the vulnerable, accepting an enforcement regime that racially profiles as regrettable but necessary.
What has not changed is the through-line Blackmon named in 2020: a society increasingly willing to trade human dignity for the illusion of order. What has also not changed is Black clarity.
Blackmon’s insistence that the church must decide whether it will restore dignity or reinforce exclusion remains unanswered. The reckoning she described did not end. It metastasized, finding new targets and familiar justifications.
👉 Read the full, previously unpublished Q&A with the Rev. Traci Blackmon
👉 Read the original feature with other Black Christian leaders: “Redeeming the Time: Black Christian Leaders on the Nation’s Reckoning and Racial ‘Awakening’”
Editor’s note: This article was drafted with the assistance of AI and edited by a human for accuracy, clarity, and context.