A Theology of Race and Place. Andrew Thomas Draper
place several days before the verdict, had been on social media and immediately received a flood of comments from many loved ones and acquaintances who claimed to not understanding how the killing of Martin or the reaction of the public could have had anything to do with race. I was told that the facts of the case did not make it clear that Martin was not killed in self-defense, that race was not involved because Zimmerman was in fact not white but of mixed white and Hispanic racial ancestry, and that it is our constitutional right to carry arms and our legal right to “stand our ground.” I was forwarded a news story about black youth shooting a white woman and her baby, with the added comment that there were no “White Panthers” protesting that occurrence. The ironic fact that said youth were not acquitted seemed to escape the recognition of that view’s proponents. As “evidence” that race was not a factor in this case, I was sent one of the few speeches the press could find given by a black man in defense of Zimmerman. An historically controversial African American pastor told his New York congregation that if they would only look at this situation “through the blood of Jesus” instead of through their “black eyes” they would see that Zimmerman was justified in killing Martin, whom he named a “pot-smoking munchies, paranoid 17-year-old boy.”5 I was accused of being “taken in” by the “racist left” and was demanded to explain how I, as a Christian, could speak out for justice for Trayvon. What was most saddening about these interchanges was that most of my interlocutors were self-avowed defenders of “Christian morals.”
After several days, I noticed that, of the hundreds of people who had responded, every person who had challenged me was white. People of various ethnicities had shared a sense of concern or outrage at the manner in which the trial was progressing. When I publicly noted this observation, I was chastised with the “post-racial” assumption that we now live in a “colorblind” society in which the ethnicity of a view’s proponents means nothing. What matters is whether or not a person’s observations are “right.” Invoked to bolster this view was Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that his children would be judged not by “the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”6 It seemed to me that this utilization of King appropriated his words out of context and insinuated that while ethnicity meant nothing, the innate character of the nonwhite other was readily discernible.
I was told that to talk about race as playing a substantial role in ethical discourse serves to stoke the flames of racial division and strife, turning back all the “progress” we have made as a society. How was I to interpret these critiques from “good” people about a society that has presumably “gotten over” ethnic division? Were it not for my experience of the racial calculus that operates reflexively within contemporary theological and ecclesial formation, I might have more seriously questioned my assumptions about the death of a black youth and the acquittal of his killer.
While I had long recognized problematic aspects of my own formation in regard to the assumed universality of what were highly culturally-constructed theological, aesthetic, and ethical frameworks, it is through the works of Willie James Jennings and J. Kameron Carter that I began to link things I had observed, but not been able to connect or explain in a coherent fashion. What had been troublesome in the way “reconciliation” was imagined within the ecclesiological frameworks I had received was explicated in their texts in a cogent manner that purposed to expose the inception of the racial vision and its subsequent masquerade as universality. Jennings’ and Carter’s related genealogical accounts present whiteness as a sociopolitical order that must be maintained and invested in so as to be given life.7 As such, whiteness as a comprehensive way of life can function as a challenge to the Way of Life embodied in the One who is the Way. It will become clear throughout this study that what I am referencing as problematic is not the particularity of European experience, but the particularity-as-universality that is whiteness and which competes with the reign of Christ as it invites all flesh into its sociopolitical order.
The major portion of this book pursues an in-depth analysis of the theological race theory of Jennings and Carter. Taken together, their works form an emerging school of thought that finds the genesis of the modern racial imagination to be the racialized scale inaugurated by colonization and coming to maturation in the structure of Enlightenment. Jennings, in The Christian Imagination, explores the colonial underpinnings of whiteness while Carter, in Race: A Theological Account, reads modernity as the evolution of this way of being in the world.8 Jennings and Carter contend that the trajectory of “whiteness” as sociopolitical order is enabled by a supersessionist tendency that undervalues the particularity of the work of YHWH through the chosen people Israel in favor of a universalizing framework characteristic of European hegemony. In other words, Occidental dominance functions within a problematic theological legacy in which the particularity of the Jewish body of Jesus Christ is of little importance. This minimizing of the particular locus of salvation can be seen as underemphasizing the particularity of all people groups. This loss of particularity is experienced as a loss of the importance of place—tangible, local space—in the constitution of a people. Without a spatial constitution, bodies are called upon to stand in for place and are accordingly racialized along a hierarchical continuum. Racialized bodies are then understood to be drawn into the telos of whiteness as the salvific hope for those trapped within the taint of dark flesh, which stands as signifier of a more primitive nature. This configuration of thought and practice bars genuine joining of peoples except through assimilationist motifs in which European aesthetic, ontological, and ethical constructs are held to be the norm toward which all of creation is maturing. This book will explicate in much more detail how Carter and Jennings build this sequence of arguments.
Returning now to my experiences following Zimmerman’s acquittal will allow me to illustrate my claim that whiteness is a sociopolitical order that demands continual maintenance. On the second day of the jury’s deliberations, the jury found Zimmerman “not guilty” on all counts. Having lived and ministered for a decade in my inner city neighborhood located on the “color line,” I had seen countless African American male youth faced with a sense of nihilism at the hopelessness of resisting the forces of categorization, exclusion from empowering education, police profiling, and a criminal “justice” system which has functioned to effectively eliminate the threat of the nonwhite body through mass incarceration. I had watched as tender young boys were streamlined down the pipeline from ghetto school to state-of-the-art prison. I had seen sensitive young men waived as adults and hardened by several years of warehousing in the prison industrial complex. I had witnessed adult men with fates largely predetermined as they faced a daunting job market with little formal education, branded with the scarlet letter of “felon” for crimes that would have been ignored or received a slap on the wrist in suburban or rural contexts. I had witnessed on my street several of the young men who spent time in our home or Bible studies as children now finding the easiest option to be one of violence in the face of seemingly pointless resistance. Defying this predetermined fate was the experience of only a few young men who had the good fortune to experience a convergence of: being afforded the possibility of non-traditional educational opportunities, connecting to a strong local faith community, receiving the approbation of multiple caring adults who intentionally and sacrificially invested in them, and possessing an uncommon mix of self-esteem, tenacity, and an extroverted personality that won favor in the eyes of those with whom they came in contact. This seemingly serendipitous confluence was the exception and not the norm and took massive amounts of effort on the part of all involved to maintain, largely because it brought one into direct conflict with the principalities and powers.9 When Zimmerman was declared “not guilty,” I realized that I was at a loss regarding what I could now tell these young men. Could I tell them that if only they made sure to do the “right” thing society would protect them? How could they have any confidence that if they, like Trayvon, were walking home with a bag of Skittles and a soda, their lives would be viewed as being worthy of protection? Could I assure them that if they attempted to avoid conflict and yet were attacked, the trial of their murderer would not turn into