April 2025 | What We're Reading

The Day God Saw Me as Black by D. Danyelle Thomas

In full transparency, selecting a book this month was challenging and also easy. Challenging because, as we’re living throuhg Trump 2.0's strategy of shock and awe, there are many worthy topics we need to explore to understand how best to RESIST as they come for our necks in all corners.

But here's where it's easy. The question we should all be asking (as we organize, strategize, gather allies, and lean deeply into the community) is how we are going to get free. D. Danyelle Thomas, MPP, a Black faith and spirituality speaker, author, public theologian, spiritualist, and activist, has been asking and answering this question for over a decade.

Our selection for April, Thomas's The Day God Saw Me as Black, is a genre-defying, cultural critique of white supremacy in the Black Pentecostal religious experience through the lenses of race, gender, sexual expression, and class analyses. A narrative that weaves between critique and meditation, decolonization and reconciliation, the theoretical and the deeply personal, The Day God Saw Me as Black is an imagining of what could be if we stopped denying ourselves — and each other — full liberation.

I want to pause here and say that this book is for you no matter where you land on the religious/spiritual spectrum (Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, agnostic, atheist). Why? Because, at its core, this book is about liberation. AND a deconstruction of the systems that impede it.

“I do believe that the body is the first site of liberation. If you’re not free within yourself to be your whole self, there is nothing you can do to contribute to the work of liberation…You begin to understand that is where we are all attacked,” Thomas explains. “All laws are governing the body. So when you become free in that space, you understand that you belong to you. In order to maintain your own belonging, you have to protect that for everybody else.”

– D. Danyelle Thomas in Essence Magazine

As they come for our necks, heads, and bodies through assaults on trans bodies, Black bodies, Brown bodies, immigrant bodies, women's bodies, all non-White cis hetero male bodies, we must get to the root of it all.

I also want to note how important it is not just to uplift but also to CENTER the voices of groups this administration, its lackeys, and fawning acolytes are actively trying to erase in real time. Even as they attempt to scrub our presence from websites and restore monuments to Confederates, those who literally fought to maintain the institution of slavery, so we must resist in word, deed, and action.

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.

–Arundhati Roy, War Talk

We are looking forward to diving into the brilliance and joy of The Day God Saw Me as Black. (There's the traditional book AND an audiobook read by the author.) We hope you join us as we read this month and for our discussion at the end of April. The date will be announced soon. Stay tuned!

In solidarity and love,

connease

ps. A note on where to purchase books. We are, of course, still avoiding Amazon. Here are some alternatives we love.

The Massive Bookshop: An anti-profit, abolitionist, online bookstore that bails people out of jail.

Bookshop.org: Support independent bookstores.

Simon & Schuster: Buy directly from the publisher's website.