Christology and Whiteness

What Would Jesus Do?

George Yancy, George Yancy

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136256707
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Teología y religión
• Categoría: Religión

This book explores Christology through the lens of whiteness, addressing whiteness as a site of privilege and power within the specific context of Christology. It asks whether or not Jesus' life and work offers theological, religious and ethical resources that can address the question of contemporary forms of white privilege. The text seeks to encourage ways of thinking about whiteness theologically through the mission of Jesus. In this sense, white Christians are encouraged to reflect on how their whiteness is a site of tension in relation to their theological and religious framework. A distinguished team of contributors explore key topics including the Christology of domination, different images of Jesus and the question of identification with Jesus, and the Black Jesus in the inner city.

1
WHAT JESUS WOULDN’T DO

A white theologian engages whiteness

Karen Teel

Over one hundred years ago, W. E. B. Du Bois (1996) declared that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line” (pp.1, 13, 35). He summed up the attempts of many white people to make conversation with him, an African American, by pointing out that what most of them really wanted to know was this: “How does it feel to be a problem?” (Du Bois, 1996, pp.3–4). He reports that he never responded to this question beneath the questions, and one suspects that most white people he describes never admitted, even to themselves, that this was in fact the question they were really asking.

In the U.S. today, “the problem of the color-line” remains. To be perfectly precise, the “problem” has never been people of color, but rather white notions of white superiority. In this chapter, I contend that it is past time for contemporary white people to turn our question “How does it feel to be a problem?” back on ourselves.¹ Nearly one hundred fifty years after the demise of legalized slavery, over forty years after the Civil Rights Movement officially ended segregation, and having elected a biracial man as our nation’s president in what some please to call a “colorblind” or “post-racial” era, white people still maintain a death grip on a disproportionate share of resources, opportunity, and power in the U.S.² What is wrong with us?

By way of answering this question, this chapter renames “the problem of the color-line” for the twenty-first century as “whiteness”: a system of structural injustice and inequality with roots at least as far back as the beginning of race-based slavery in the “New World” colonies. As a white Roman Catholic theologian, I am particularly concerned with white U.S. Christians, whose predecessors created this system and who today should be actively engaged in dismantling it, but by and large are not. I consider this problem in four parts. First, I describe whiteness and suggest that white Christians might be compelled, by way of our belief in Jesus, to address it. Second, I ask whether striving to imitate Jesus can generate an adequate response. Briefly exploring the book that gave rise to the “what would Jesus do?” movement, I caution that this approach tends to emphasize individual moral or spiritual improvement at the expense of systemic critique and change. Third, following the theology of James H. Cone and others, I interrogate the assumption implicit in a white person’s asking “What would Jesus do?”: that if Jesus were here today, he might be (like) a white Christian. Fourth, having considered what Jesus would do in our situation—or to be more precise, what Jesus would not do—I argue that in order to fight effectively against whiteness, white Christians must cultivate a particular existential and Christological discomfort in our own skins. Unless we feel viscerally that we are part of the problem, we may not be compelled to address it. I conclude with the hope that we will begin alerting our white Christian brothers and sisters to the need to resist and subvert our whiteness.

Whiteness: a white Christian problem

Whiteness, which Du Bois was the first to theorize,³ can today be defined as a system of hegemonic power that operates to benefit people perceived to be white and to disadvantage people perceived to be of color.⁴ Whiteness has developed through a long and tortuous history (see, for example, Roediger, 2005, 2007), a history that some scholars contend has its root in an ancient and fundamental perversion of Christianity’s Jewish origins.⁵ There can be no doubt that it began at least as long ago as the European Christians who, even before thinking of themselves as “white,” created the U.S. system of race-based slavery. “Whiteness” is a properly and peculiarly white Christian theological problem that demands a white theological response.⁶

In the decades since legal slavery met its demise, whiteness has metamorphosed through Reconstruction and the tragedies of segregation and lynching into the varied forms of white supremacy and racism that persist today. Whiteness can be manifested in attitudes and acts of personal racism, but it is primarily a system of social or structural injustice: the inequalities that persist even though the laws have changed, even when no one consciously intends a racist outcome. Social scientists document this phenomenon.⁷ When a white person gets a job interview before an equally well-qualified black person (Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2004), whiteness may be working. When a white felon finds employment before a person of color without a criminal record (Pager, 2003), whiteness may be working. When people in communities of color are more likely than people in white communities to fall victim to high-cost mortgage lending practices (Been et al., 2009; Boehm et al., 2006), whiteness may be working. When a non-African American child finds an adoptive home before an African American child (Maldonado, 2005–6), whiteness may be working. Whiteness operates to benefit white people, regardless of our individual wishes. This makes us a problem. So, guided by Du Bois, let us ask ourselves: how does it feel?

In many white circles, this question would be a non-starter. White people have a notoriously difficult time seeing whiteness, for we are barely aware of ourselves as “raced.”⁸ While biologists agree that race is not a biological reality, it remains a very real social phenomenon (see, for example, Townes, 2006, pp.63–65; Bonilla-Silva, 2006). In terms of the self-understanding of many whites, to be white in the United States is not to be “colored”: black, brown, yellow, red, mixed. To be white, we think, is to have no race. To be white, we think, is to be a unique, individual expression of universal humanity, while to be raced is to be conditioned, contingent, a less-than-adequate representation of universal humanity. By and large, white people believe that to be white is to be “normal” and therefore requires no reflection; when we do notice whiteness, we may insist that we are really observing something else. As noted, social science research indicates that to be white in U.S. society is to receive all sorts of advantages that accrue from the social valuation of white skin over non-white skin, not from personal merit.⁹ Yet we often take these advantages for granted. We may notice them only if they are eliminated, and then we may complain bitterly about injustice; witness the ongoing debates over affirmative action. To be white is to have unbelievable power, power that is unearned and undeserved and unjust, and, typically, to be virtually unaware of it.

Since whiteness is systemic, and operates regardless of individual intention, a white person who happens to notice that all is not well might logically conclude that if she does not approve of whiteness and does not intentionally collude with it—that is, if she is not part of the problem—then she is not responsible for its effects. She could even argue that if she were a racist, she would not through that personal failing become responsible for systemic whiteness; to renounce her own racism and try to do better would be enough. In Christian terms, she might believe that such an effort could absolve her of the sin of racism.¹⁰ It is certainly true that being (relatively) pale does not necessarily mean actively or willfully promoting injustice. Indeed, to name the unjust structures in society as stemming from whiteness is not to claim that we whites who are alive today created them. It is rather to recognize that this system confers benefits upon us, regardless of whether we want them. Whiteness has taken on a life of its own, and no one person or group can hope to solve it.¹¹ Thus, if asked, “What is the responsibility of individual white people to the problem of whiteness?” or, “What should white people feel about whiteness as a problem?” some would say, “Nothing at all.”

I contend, however, that even though we contemporary whites did not create the system, and may in principle oppose it, our responsibility to it is very great. One cannot be white in the U.S. without receiving the privileges of being white in the U.S.—that is, without being part of the problem. Can any white person honestly say that he has never thought, in relation to a person of color, something along the lines of “Oh, you poor nonwhite thing!” (Du Bois, 2003, p.56)? Activist Tim Wise (2008) testifies to the fact that even a white person who has built a career fighting racism can still experience the rising in his mind, unbidden, of a purely racist thought (pp.165–67). To be white in the U.S. is to be shaped by whiteness.

Moreover, regardless of what goes on inside our heads, whiteness is something that white bodies perform. Because of my skin color, my default position is on the side of whiteness. As I go about my everyday activities, I am logically associated with the hegemony of whiteness and receive its benefits, unasked for, unearned, and largely unnoticed. Whenever my actions fail to visibly contradict whiteness, I melt into the masses of white people who have not done enough, are not sufficiently aware of the problem, and even deny that it exists. Colluding with whiteness can be something my body does freely, because I choose it; there have been times when I have “leaned on my whiteness” to get something done the easy way.¹² But more often this is not the case. It is precisely in the context of the larger society in which whiteness is over-privileged that my body takes on this meaning. My consistent complicity in whiteness, intentional or unintentional, reliably distorts my own and others’ freedom into unfreedom. How does this feel? Horrible!

White Christians such as myself, then, must engage whiteness as a systemic injustice that we both encounter and enact. Christianity—a religion of radical justice and love, yet also inescapably bound up with the origins of whiteness—ought to have a lot to say about how to do this. A few white thinkers, including theologians, are beginning to address whiteness, including practical suggestions for how white people should proceed once we have decided to resist its insidious power (see, for example, Harvey et al., 2004; Cassidy and Mikulich, 2007; Nilson, 2007; Wise, 2008).¹³ While indispensable for those who have ears to hear, I want to draw attention to the fact that such suggestions do not grab the attention of the majority of white Christians, who in all likelihood consciously intend to do no racist or white supremacist harm, and who have no inkling that we should or could be doing anything to prevent or to remedy such harm. Unfortunately, as Robin Hawley Gorsline has observed, “No one—no white person—has to do anything for white supremacy to continue” (2004, 53, italics in the original). White supremacy, or whiteness, flourishes in an environment of white disengagement. As I see it, then, before we ask what white people collectively ought to do about the problem of whiteness, the logically prior question is how to get white Christians to notice that there is such a problem, and that we must decide whether to undertake the struggle against it.

In my limited experience of trying to draw white people’s attention to what I am here calling whiteness, I find that neither rational argument nor moral suasion (not that these are opposed!) reliably obtain. Many whites are aware of the wealth, income, and opportunity gaps in this country but think that these gaps generally result from some people’s having worked harder than others.¹⁴ If one disagrees, even bringing relevant social-scientific evidence to bear, one must be prepared to face charges of insanity. Pointing out that whiteness costs white people something, as some thinkers do quite persuasively (see, e.g., Wise, 2008, pp.147–71), is also insufficient; again, one may simply be called crazy, or worse, boring and irrelevant. When compared to the apparently painless present that we white people enjoy and the discomfort that inevitably accompanies an awakening to reality, we do not perceive the potential benefits as valuable enough to pull us out of apathy and into action. We need to be shocked into it.

While I hope there will be many ways to accomplish this, here I am writing as a white theologian concerned with white U.S. Christians’ responses to whiteness. As such, one possible method that occurs to me is to try to confront ourselves and one another with images of Jesus that challenge our assumptions about him, and about ourselves in relation to him. In order for ordinary white Christians to start taking whiteness seriously, we need to meet a discomfiting Jesus who accosts us where we are, reaches into our ignorant complacency, seizes hold of us, and thrusts us into the maelstrom of whiteness. In the remainder of this chapter, I experimentally propose one way that we might begin to discover and deploy such a Christology.

What would Jesus do?

The heart of Christian faith is the hope of a personal, life-giving relationship with God through Jesus of Nazareth, who was executed as a criminal by the Roman Empire and proclaimed by his followers to be the risen Christ. At our best, Christians are followers or disciples of this Jesus. We strive to listen to him, do what he wants us to do, even emulate him. Finding that racism has a hold on our minds, even our souls, and that the benefits of whiteness accrue even against our will, white Christians might think it sensible to ask: What would Jesus do in my situation, as a white person who wants to shoulder her responsibility vis-à-vis the problem of whiteness?

Since Charles M. Sheldon’s 1896 book In His Steps, efforts to follow Jesus have been popularized through this question, which formed the book’s subtitle: “What would Jesus do?” In His Steps enjoyed wide circulation and has been retold twice (Clark, 1950; Sheldon and Morris, 1993); the most recent version generated the familiar WWJD bracelets and bumper stickers and, in 2010, WWJD: The Movie. Surely a Christian could never go wrong in striving to imitate Christ, especially in racially charged situations where it seems obvious that kindness and compassion should replace hatred and misunderstanding. Yet an analysis of In His Steps reveals that, for white people mired in whiteness, asking “What would Jesus do?” can be dangerously misleading.¹⁵

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Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction: framing the problem
• 1 What Jesus wouldn’t do: a white theologian engages whiteness
• 2 Grotesque un/knowing of suffering: a white Christian response
• 3 Jesus must needs go through Samaria: disestablishing the mountains of race and the hegemony of whiteness
• 4 The Black Church and whiteness: looking for Jesus in strange places
• 5 What would Zacchaeus do? The case for disidentifying with Jesus
• 6 Is Christ white? Racism and Christology
• 7 When a white man–god is the truth and the way for black Christians
• 8 Who belongs to Christ?
• 9 Upstart Messiahs, renegade Samaritans, and temple exorcisms: What can Jesus’ peasant resistance movement in first–century Palestine teach us about confronting “color–blind” whiteness today?
• 10 Jesus, whiteness, and the disinherited
• 11 Looking like me?: Jesus images, Christology, and the limitations of theological blackness
• 12 The (black) Jesus of Detroit: reflections on black power and the (white) American Christ
• 13 The mimesis of salvation and dissimilitude in the scandalous gospel of Jesus
• Index