Atlanta megachurch pastor Louie Giglio sat down with rapper Lecrae and Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy on Sunday (Jun. 14) and had an “open and honest conversation around how racism has plagued our city for generations, and the steps we can all take to confront it head-on in our church, our neighborhoods, and our hearts.”

During that “open and honest conversation,” Pastor Giglio—who heads ATL’s Passion City Church—said that instead of using the term “white privilege,” he would rather say “white blessing” since slavery was a “blessing” to white people.

He started out by saying: “I feel like on the inside of the church we’re fighting this historical context you [Lecrae] talk about. In other words, we love the blessing of the cross but we don’t love to sit in it and realize this is what God’s asking me to do, to die to myself, and live for him, whatever context that’s going to look like for me.

“But I want to flip that upside down because I think the other side of it is true with our nation’s history. We understand the curse that was slavery, white people do, and we say ‘that was bad,’ but we miss the blessing of slavery that it actually built up the framework for the world that white people live in and lived in.”

Giglio went on to explain that he feels as though the term “white privelege” makes some white people uncomfortable as hell (Ed. Note: AS IT SHOULD!), so he proposed that they change the phrase.

Speaking to Lecrae, the pastor said: “I know that you and I both have struggled in these days with ‘hey if the phrase is the trip up, let’s get over the phrase and let’s get down to the heart, let’s get down to what then do you want to call it,’ and I think maybe a great thing for me is to call it ‘white blessing’. That I’m living in the blessing of the curse that happened generationally that allowed me to grow up in Atlanta.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=838dbo4TgcA

Following Pastor Giglio’s comments, the phrase “White Blessing” quickly became a trending topic on Twitter, along with Lecrae’s name, as folks pointed out how ridiculous and offensive that statement is and how Lecrae just sat there and nodded his head as if he were in agreement.

After getting dragged all over Twitter, Pastor Giglio clarified his comment, writing that he was “not seeking to refer to slavery as [a] blessing—but that we are privileged because of the curse of slavery. In calling it a privilege/benefit/blessing—word choice wasn’t great. Trying to help us see society is built on the dehumanization of others. My apology, I failed.”

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