A Theology of Race and Place. Andrew Thomas Draper

A Theology of Race and Place - Andrew Thomas Draper


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lay in bed that evening, I choked back tears and prayed that the grace of God would keep our local community and our country from taking ten steps backward in our ability to know and trust each other. While it was a foregone conclusion for my brothers and sisters in the black community that in some way every aspect of this tragedy had been about race, and while I took comfort in the strength I borrowed from them, I was not sure how I would be received the next morning. Zimmerman was acquitted on a Saturday night and Sunday morning I would be standing to preach before the joined black and white community that makes up the congregation which I pastor. I needed to put into words the sadness and outrage which we felt, while clinging to the hope that mutuality is possible within the body of Jesus of Nazareth. What happened was not what I expected. The building in which we worshiped was full and our members, black and white, were there and ready to worship. The African American members of the body experientially led our congregation, including those of a lighter hue, into an affirmation of God’s goodness in the face of injustice. Even after having lived and ministered in my community for years and after having availed myself of many autobiographical, theological, and sociological resources related to the struggle for black liberation upon the soil of the New World, I was existentially unprepared for the familiarity of the black worshipper with exalting the name of the Lord while walking through the valley of despair. While I was able to speak to the deep sense of betrayal we as a community were experiencing, the maintenance of an affirmation of God’s goodness did not rely primarily upon me. We had together formed a bond strong enough that we were able to be vulnerable with each other in the midst of our pain instead of alienating each other because of the perpetration of evil. I will never forget the heroic posture of my black brothers and sisters that morning as those of us who had not been on the receiving end of racial profiling were invited into the shared experience of lament and celebration.

      There can be no “proof” that George Zimmerman targeted Trayvon Martin because he was black. To frame the issue in this manner radically misunderstands the nature of the racial imagination as inaugurated by whiteness. The point is that both Zimmerman and the contemporary church and academy often operate within similar evaluative frameworks: the former judging the intentions of a black youth and the latter posing ethical and aesthetic theories and submitting non-Western cultural forms to those judgments. While I identify Zimmerman as “racist” in ways that many Christian theologians are not, it will be my task in this book to demonstrate the ways in which a similar racial imagination enlivens both overt racism and the dominance of many “white” forms of Christian community and theological inquiry.

      Those who looked primarily for a clear sign of “racial animus” in this case were not looking deep enough. While it is certainly not the case that racism (as a matter of the will) has been eradicated, what I am describing here is the gaze that animates the ability to make racialized judgments. It is this gaze that is not primarily dependent on the conscious choice of an individual in a moment of hatred or discrimination, although it does serve to produce such animosity. It is this gaze that Jennings and Carter contend must be named, recognized, and resisted. Our contemporary public rhetoric, with its laudable emphasis on rooting out racism, is able to address only clearly defined acts of discrimination in an attempt to discern the prejudicial intentions of the perpetrator behind said bias. Paradoxically, the almost exclusive focus on racism as a matter of the will can distract from the underlying problem. This could be one reason why the racial judgment was purportedly so difficult for white persons to discern in the Martin/Zimmerman case. Yet for those who have experienced both sides of the objectifying gaze of judgment that assumes the transparency of the nonwhite body, the racial imaginary can be seen in the assumptions made about Trayvon’s intentions. Although the only language available to observers of these legal proceedings was the language of racism, many black and white Americans intuitively understood that there was more at stake in this case. I am making a hermeneutical judgment here. Yet I must stress that it is not a hermeneutical judgment that proceeds primarily from my “will”; it is a judgment that is inescapable because of the reality of being joined with those whose daily experience and historical reality directs and instructs me. Fundamentally,


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