Margery Freeman, Dr. David Billings, Mary Pender Greene, and Sandra Bernabei/credit Billings Archives
DAVID BILLINGS
Rev. David Billings, a white anti-racist, Organizer, Educator, Minister, and a long-distance runner for social justice, pulls the covers off the intricacies of white supremacy in this nation. As a historian and author of Deep Denial: The Persistence of White Supremacy In United States History and Life, David has worked for half a century in the struggle for racial justice with the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond. Billings focuses his research and teaching primarily on the deeply embedded notion of white supremacy and tells us why, despite the Civil Rights Movement and an African-American president, we remain, in the words of the author, a nation hard-wired by race.
David Billings was born in McComb, Mississippi, and grew up in Helena, Arkansas. He has a BA from the University of Mississippi, a Masters of Divinity degree from New York Theological Seminary, and a Doctor of Ministry (ABD) from the University of Creation Spirituality (now Wisdom University). He has been a core trainer and organizer with the Peoples Institute for Survival and Beyond, AntiRacist Alliance, and other educational and faith-based organizing groups across the country since 1983.
He and his wife Margery Freeman live in the Bronx, New York. They have three children, Nathan and Noah Shroyer, and Stella Billings, and seven grandchildren, Johnathan, Abigail, Isaiah, Sofia, Twain, Whipple Ann and Hazel Kate.
DEEP DENIAL:THE PERSISTENCE OF WHITE SUPREMACY
IN UNITED STATES HISTORY AND LIFE
Deep Denial (purchase here CDDBooks), 2016, is part popular history and part personal memoir, documents the 400-year racialization of the United States. With a particular focus on post-WWII history to the present, Deep Denial explores the normalizing of racial superiority in contemporary society. Each chapter begins with an intimate and unsparingly personal account from the author's own life. He then lays out the historical facts, while preserving the master storyteller's connection with the reader.
Well-researched and substantive, Deep Denial untangles the cobwebs of ignorance and misunderstanding about white supremacy and critiques the popular evasion, willful or unconscious, of society’s racialized power realities. Importantly, the book also presents a direction for deconstructing white supremacy.
Deep Denial won the 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Award in the Current Events/Social Change category; it was a Finalist in both the Historical Non-Fiction and Multicultural Non-Fiction categories. The study guide, for your convenience, is here.
