BLACK AND BROWN folks have discussed at great length white supremacy and empire, but unless white folks have the conversation, those demons will never be fully cast out of our lives. White folks have become content with a lifestyle that hovers above black and brown folks and doesn’t dive into the white supremacy and empire that threatens them.
But Greg Jarrell, author of A Riff of Love: Notes on Community and Belonging and a self-described “white, middle-class, highly educated, straight man,” departs from this pattern. Jarrell plunges into the issues, examining the story of his family’s more-than-a-decade-long journey of building QC Family Tree, an antiracist spiritual community of people in solidarity with black folks experiencing gentrification and displacement in the Enderly Park neighborhood of Charlotte, N.C.
Jarrell, who plays saxophone, frames the book around the concept of riffs, which he describes as “a few notes ... the essence of the full melody, the foundation from which a whole work is constructed.” Some of the greatest jazz arrangements begin with a riff, born of careful attention to a melody and improvisation on a theme.
One of Jarrell’s reasons for writing A Riff of Love is to make his audience better excavators of their places and souls so they too can discover riffs that may appear to be deficits but are actually pregnant with possibility and abundance. This type of prophetic imagination can bring liberation from white supremacy and empire and deliver us into the way of Christ.
Jarrell’s writing style is smooth, poetic, jazz-like: His words roll off the page. This is not easy reading topically, though. There is nothing easy about grappling with white supremacy and empire inside of a search for community and belonging. I certainly found myself needing to step away at times from Jarrell’s book to lament, cry, rejoice, and meditate.
Because A Riff of Love is poetry and not treatise, its readers will likely find themselves able to cope with the difficult truths it presents, as the rhythm and rhyme of Jarrell’s tales draw them in. You’ll find in the pages of Jarrell’s authentic narrative humor, great quotes, and no shortage of critical race theory.
But Jarrell’s storytelling is the real draw. Pulling together scripture, theology, history, music and literary theory, and the lives of his relatives and neighbors—young and old, black and white—Jarrell tells a story of radical discipleship, a story of following Jesus. He writes to an ethnically diverse audience of people seeking the good of their neighborhoods.
But, ultimately, the intended focus of Jarrell’s book is white folks like him, and rightfully so. A Riff of Love is nothing less than a spiritual autobiography of whiteness, a memoir about healing from white supremacy and empire and exchanging it for abundant community. Such a work of art is rare. I strongly recommend A Riff of Love to all who seek a better world and want to start building it in their neighborhoods—especially folks of European descent who must find liberation from whiteness to fully immerse themselves in the movement for social justice.
Brandon Wrencher is a provisional elder in the Western North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church. He has written for The Other Journal, Missio Alliance, and other publications.
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