Someone you grew up with in church now says the faith was handed to Black people to make them easier to rule. He has left it for the Hebrew Israelites or the Nation of Islam. Part of what he says is true, and you know it. But you cannot tell how much to grant him before you have granted everything. That uncertainty is the real problem, and it can be worked through.
Grant the history, fully and out loud. People who called themselves Christians used the Bible to defend slavery, and much of the church let the faith look like white property. But the conclusion he draws from that history does not follow. Christianity was not invented to control anyone. It was African long before it was European, and the people who wanted Black people docile had to cut the Bible apart to make it serve them. Once that is said, the real conversation can begin. It is about identity, and about who Jesus is.
The people who have thought hardest about this for the Jude 3 Project agree on most of that. They split on one point that matters a great deal across a kitchen table: whether your friend’s new ethnic identity is itself the problem, or whether the problem is only what that identity gets attached to. Reaching that point means taking his reasoning one assumption at a time, in the order he holds them.