You may have read one of our earlier posts about Professor Anthea Butler who called God a white racist in the wake of the Zimmerman trial verdict.

She wants you to know that she’s very upset that people heard what she said and dared to take issue with it.

Conservatives bashed me for speaking out about the Zimmerman verdict

Hours after the George Zimmerman verdict, I found myself at my computer, calling to mind a text I had first read in seminary. The text, Is God a White Racist, By Rev. Dr. William Jones, is still studied by theologians and academics and taught in institutes of higher learning. The book called into question the chief construction of black liberation theology: that God is on the side of the oppressed.

Jones’ thesis was simple: God wasn’t on the side of the oppressed, and that the tortured history of African Americans’ experience in America with slavery, violence and the civil rights proved it. The theme resonated with me as I sat down to write a piece reacting to the Zimmerman verdict for the online magazine Religion Dispatches. Little did I know that the book’s title alone would cause an avalanche of vitriol against me, my race, my institution – even my hair.

The screeds came via Twitter, email to myself and my university, conservative blogs, and – the coup de grace – Rush Limbaugh’s airways. The piece was hijacked and “repurposed” from its original meaning to show that I was a racist because I had dared to talk about race. I had dared to talk about an “American god”, which was clearly not GOD.