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Listening While White. The newsletter of Christine Jeske.

Christine Jeske

I'm a professor, author, and listener. Find out more at christinejeske.com. Sign up for my newsletter, Listening While White, to join me in learning how to walk humbly in areas of injustice.

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Featured Post

What causes political polarization, and what can we do about it?

As we head into another (dreaded) year of presidential campaigning, I want to share with you something I read recently that helped me feel just a little less helpless in the face of the widening chasm between political parties. There’s a lot of data showing that Americans are losing the ability to find common ground across political parties. In the 1970s, legislators of the two parties overlapped on a lot of issues. An impressive 37% of legislators in the House of Representatives were...

5 months ago • 2 min read

This week I received the gift of eating dinner with a veritable who’s who of socially conscious evangelical Christians. Jim Wallis, former spiritual advisor to Barack Obama and founder of Sojourners magazine, was in the room. Ruth Lewis Bentley, cofounder of the National Black Evangelical Association. Ruth Padilla DeBorst, reconciliation activist and daughter of liberation theologian René Padilla. Ben Lowe, executive director of A Rocha. Kimberlee Johnson, activist and dean of Palmer...

5 months ago • 3 min read
Note cards on a table

This weekend my long-time friend Chris invited a dozen people into a time of guided story-telling at my house. Chris approaches conversation like an artist to a canvas. He brings out the depths in people, whether he’s teaching poetry to middle schoolers, cooking cafeteria meals, or greeting neighbors in the little French town where he now lives. I knew this was going to be good. As we finished up heaping plates of pork and rice lovingly prepared by our Dominican-American friend, Chris passed...

6 months ago • 2 min read
BLM demonstrators in Kenosha.

In the summer of 2020, David Timmerman, Provost of Carthage College in Kenosha Wisconsin, was scrambling. When the pandemic closed classroom doors across the country, the college was already among the many liberal arts colleges feeling the squeeze of shrinking applicant pools and rising costs. He needed to respond to the politically polarized concerns of parents, students, and staff, all while protecting enrollment numbers and keeping everybody safe. Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty...

6 months ago • 3 min read

“Outliers are the only thing standing between us and madness.” I scribbled this quote in my notebook during a talk I attended last weekend. The event was a conference on “Living as humans in the machine age.” I heard about the conference from my son, a college student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He attended the conference with me, and at lunch time, he swiped me into his cafeteria. As we sat eating our enchilada bake and fruit salad, our conversation meandered back through what...

6 months ago • 3 min read

So I’m sitting in my friend Carla’s kitchen, when in walks a giant pig. Carla with her son. At the time, I’m just a year out of college, and I’ve just moved from the Midwest where I grew up to this beautiful Nicaraguan village. The room has dirt floors, and a wall open on one side to let out smoke from the cooking fire. And in walks this giant pig. Carla reaches over from her bucket seat and slaps that pig on the rump. And she says, “This hog is for Jesus!” So I ask, Carla, “What do you mean,...

7 months ago • 1 min read

Last week the college where I work—Wheaton College—released a 122-page report on “the history and legacy of Wheaton College from 1860-2000 with respect to race relations.” Excerpt from the charter of Wheaton College's predecessor, the Illinois Institute, 1855. Image from the Historical Review. As I reflect on what that document means, I am struck by the contrast between two approaches to history: flight or courage. Which is your approach to history? This report required a massive effort....

7 months ago • 2 min read
meat slices and knife on a cutting board

This week I invite you to think for a minute about... where meat comes from. I know it might not sound like a topic you asked for when you signed up for this newsletter (especially you vegetarians), but hear me out. We’ll get there. I live on a property with a field that is too big to make into a garden and too small to warrant buying a tractor, so a few years ago we decided the best use for it would be to raise a few pigs. Which means we’d have to figure out how to kill pigs. And then eat...

8 months ago • 2 min read
Photoshopped image in a 2000 UW-Madison brochure.

Ok, so imagine you’re part of a predominantly white organization. Imagine you’d like that organization to become more diverse. Cool. Now imagine you’re choosing photos for the organization's website. Whose faces do you include? What percentage of people of color should appear? Including a higher percentage of people of color in communications than in the organization itself has been shown to sometimes be an effective way to push a company in a helpful direction. But there's a risk. That’s...

9 months ago • 3 min read
House on Nicaraguan hillside

You may have noticed I’ve been out of touch for a while this summer. I spent most of July in Nicaragua, visiting a community where my husband and I lived two decades ago. Today I want to share with you something I learned there. View from the Nicaraguan mountaintop. There’s a Spanish word I noticed a lot during the trip: fondo. It can translate to “the depths, the bottom, the source, or the ends.” When we scooped water from a barrel full of rainwater to bathe, our host said it’s pretty clean...

9 months ago • 2 min read
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