Summary

R.E.S.P.O.N.S.I.V.E. As the author, still referring to the reader as “beloved,” prepares to bring his sermon to a conclusion, he offers “a few practical suggestions about what you as individuals can do to make things better” (197).

The author’s first suggestion is making “reparation” (“… the notion that the descendants of enslaved Africans should receive from the society that exploited them some form of compensation…”) (197) in a number of forms: donations, paying for schoolbooks or student trips, honoring black veterans. A second is becoming “educated” “about black life and culture” (199) by reading books about slavery and / or the Civil War, the writings of James Baldwin or Toni Morrison, or biographies of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, or other activists. His third, and related, suggestion is to “school” (203) other whites on white privilege and whiteness in...