MyQuest | my thoughts on life's journey

The problem of the moderates

Fifty years ago this June The Christian Century published Martin Luther King Jr.'s The Letter from Birmingham Jail.  The April 17 issue focused on this anniversary, reviewing a new book out on the letter and publishing a cover article by Robert Westbrook entitled "MLK's Manifesto."  It is a good article, with much good material in it.  But I was specifically drawn to its discussion of moderates.

In a Century article on the silence of the southern churches, a quotation from one Alabama Baptist minister acutely summed up the moderates' dilemma: "The problem is how to lead without being appropriated by one or the other extremes which immediately destroys the effectiveness of your leadership.  When thus appropriated, you are effective only with the one faction.  Neither the opposite one nor the moderate group will listen to you any longer."  This politics of appropriation was a pivotal feature of the racial politics of the early 1960s. . . .  [King] did set out to convert or, failing that, to pressure or to neutralize white moderates by demolishing their arguments, shaming their consciences, and, not least, threatening their interests.

The letter undertook the task of demolishing the arguments of the moderates. . . .  King strikes a number of poses in it, swinging between "diplomatic" and "prophetic" modes of address.  But his overriding posture might, I think, be termed one of mock moderation, that is, a stance that put pay to the thinking of moderates by arguing against them in the very "patient and reasonable terms" that they fetishized.  Here and there ironic barbs and flashes of overt indignation suggest the difficulties that King had in maintaining his stance.  Yet it was one well chosen for the audience he imagined, hoisting them with their own petard.

Oh how the LGBT community has struggled with moderates.  Finally in the last couple of years, the moderates do seem to have joined our side mostly.  There are now new voices of caution and gradualism -- people who were once opposed to us who now realize they are losing and want to slow things down.  How frustrating this class of citizens can be.  I liked seeing King's strategy discussed.  It was direct and challenging.

The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race

The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race by Willie James Jennings
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the third book in the last year that I have read about the entanglement between Christian theology and racism. Each has provided a slightly different perspective. Each has been well-written, provocative, and original.

Much like Carter in his Race: A Theological Account, Jennings believes that the way toward racism directed against black people was paved by the church's supersessionist anti-semitism. The thesis is convincing in both accounts. For Jennings it is a fundamental flaw dating back to the early days of the Christian church that has stifled the central Christian message throughout our history and has inflicted deep wounds in the modern era.

The central Christian message should be communion -- relationships of belonging built across divides, as Gentiles are brought into relationship with Israel and Israel's God through Jesus Christ. This should have paved the way for the church to become what was enacted at Pentecost, a diverse, multi-lingual body wherein every person was treated with love, respect, and mutuality. Instead, it has become something very different.

Jennings seems to claim that the central theological symbol of Christianity in the modern age is the slave ship. And the slave ship is a terrifying distortion of Pentecost, as a cosmopolitan mix of people are brought together in a community built around violence and death, not communion and belonging.

The universal perspective of the Enlightenment has furthered the problem (Carter makes a similar point) by ignoring the particular, especially the particularity of Jewish flesh in Jesus. For Jennings the major loss of the modern era is identity shaped by relationships with the land and environment. Instead, identity is now shaped by one's racial or ethnic group, as we have become displaced from the land. His vision is that a genuine Christian communion would enact a renewed doctrine of creation, restoring our relationships with the land and environment. I would love to hear a dialogue between him and Wendell Berry.

He argues that the methodology of Christian theology is fundamentally flawed because it has incorporated the hegemony of whiteness. It must expose this history and seek to be renewed. Theology should take as its aim the promotion of genuine communion and a restoration of creation.

Along the way, Jennings' book narrates elements of the history of theology that are often overlooked, focusing on figures like Gomes Zurara, the royal chronicler of Prince Henry the Navigator; Jose de Acosta, an early Jesuit missionary to Peru; John William Colenso, an Anglican bishop in the Natal; and Olaudah Equiano, who published his slave narrative in the 18th century. The first two help to construct a modern theology of race, the third works to move beyond it but reveals how one is trapped within it, and the fourth indicates possibilities for the path forward.

I thought in a handful of places the book resonated with the systematic theology of James McClendon -- the focus on bodies, the role of jazz, the importance of biography as theology, the ecstatic fellowship of all creation.

In its emphasis on how theology has abused Jewish and black bodies, I thought more attention should have been paid to other bodies. Native and aboriginal bodies did appear in the chapter on Acosta and were mentioned elsewhere, but could have had a little more development. Female and queer bodies were non-existent. Carter and Cone, in their books on race and Christian theology, devoted significant sections to women, and Monica Coleman's Making a Way Out of No Way focused almost exclusively on it. Queer bodies were noticeably absent from all except Coleman's book. I know it wasn't a focus of this book, but it could have been mentioned, especially when talking about the role of Jewish and African-American authors and artists in creating much of America's artistic culture and referencing James Baldwin as an example.

Despite these neglects, the book is a fascinating, thought-provoking read.

View all my reviews

Why does the category of race persist?

An interesting article on the topic of race and why the category continues to persist when we know that it does not rest in any metaphysical or biological reality and is a social construct?

In the midst of the article, the philosopher makes a fine point about how America ignores elements of its history by blaming racial categories:

It is American culture that is principally responsible for the perpetuation of the concept of race well after its loss of scientific respectability by the mid-20th century. Even the most well-meaning attempts to grapple with the persistence of inequality between “blacks” and “whites” in American society take it for granted at the outset that racial categories adequately capture the relevant differences under investigation (see, for example: Thomas B. Edsall’s recent column, “The Persistence of Racial Resentment“) . This may have something to do with the fact that the two broad cultural-historical groupings of people in this country, which we call “white” and “black” and which have been constituted through the complicated histories of slavery, immigration, assimilation, and exclusion, tend at their extremes to correlate with noticeably different phenotypic traits.

An African-American is likely to look more different from an American of exclusively European descent than, say, an Orthodox Serb is likely to look from a Bosnian Muslim. This creates the illusion that it is the phenotypic difference that is causing the perception of cultural-historical distinctness, along with the injustice and inequality that has gone along with this distinctness. This also creates the illusion of American uniqueness: that our history of ethnic conflict cannot be understood comparatively or in a global context, because it, unlike conflict between Serbs and Bosnian Muslims or between Tutsi and Hutu, is supposedly based on “race” rather than history, politics, and culture. But where people are living with a different historical legacy, as in much of European history prior to the high modern period hailed in by Hume and Kant, the supposedly manifest phenotypic differences between “blacks” and “whites” can easily recede into the background as irrelevant.

Displacement, identity, and theology

I'm also reading The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race by Willie James Jennings.  I finished the first chapter yesterday.

That chapter begins with a narrative of the first African slaves returned to Portugal and sold, all this as part of the beginning of the colonial age with the adventures of Prince Henry the Navigator.  Jennings engages in interesting theological analyses of the writings at the time which gave Christian justifications for these new actions.  After that the chapter became very dense.

The thesis of the chapter is that prior to the modern age identified with the start of colonialism, human identity was largely shaped by the landscape in which one existed.  He cites numerous examples from a wide range of cultures.  What happened in colonialism was a displacement that changed how identity was structured.  Land became something you conquered and possesed rather than being shaped by and in.  He argues that the Christian doctrines of creation ex nihilo, incarnation, and of supersessionism paved the way for this new age.  The prince or pope who embodied Christ could replace pre-existing cultures and peoples and create a new Christian environment.

It was after this change in how identity was structured occured, that race as an identity category was created.  He does not complete this next step of the analysis in the first chapter.

"The white South's last defeat"

A fascinating article on Salon.com about the changing demographics of the South and how that is impacting culture and politics.

The article also links to this fascinating map: 

So, I guess the GOP isn't going to change its approach to immigrants

Gov. Heineman of Nebraska carries through on threats to deny driver's licenses to young adult immigrants authorized for work under the new presidential program.  

Now, haven't there been all these articles and columns by conservatives saying that the first thing the GOP needs to do is change its approach to immigrants?  

Anti-black attitudes affecting the presidential race

An academic paper reveals the prevalence (I was surprised that the levels were so high) and their impact upon the presidential race (this did not surprise me).

The	proportion	of	Americans	expressing	explicit	anti‐Black	attitudes	held	
steady	between	47.6%	in	2008	and	47.3%	in	2010,	and	increased	slightly	and	
significantly	to	50.9%	in	2012.		The	proportion	of	Americans	explicitly	expressing	
pro‐Black	attitudes	declined	slightly	from	46.7%	in	2008	to	45.6%	in	2010	and	
41.9%	in	2012

Consistent	with	past	research	(Sniderman	&	Carmines,	1997;	Tesler	&	Sears,	

2010b),	explicit	racism	was	more	common	among	Republicans	than	among	
Democrats	in	all	years.		In	2008,	the	proportion	of	people	expressing	anti‐Black	
attitudes	was	31%	among	Democrats,	49%	among	independents,	and	71%	among	
Republicans,	highly	significant	differences	(p<.001).		In	2012,	the	proportion	of	
people	expressing	anti‐Black	attitudes	was	32%	among	Democrats,	48%	among	
independents,	and	79%	among	Republicans,	again	highly	significant	differences

 

"The Contested Color of Christ"

A good essay on the history of race and the representation of Jesus in America.

As is often true, both the rhetoric and the silence speak volumes. Time and again throughout American history, what has been said about the color of Christ (and what has been left unsaid and displayed through art) highlights some of the most profound struggles within the nation.

How is it that a Jewish prophet from the Roman era could become so entangled with the American obsession with race? How could the color of Christ be invoked throughout American history to justify some of the worst atrocities of white supremacy as well as to inspire some of the most heroic civil-rights crusades?

 

WWII Allies engaged in ethnic cleansing

I knew nothing of this and am alarmed by the article in HuffPost that talks about the forced removal of native German populations from other Central European countries.  Especially alarming are the details -- packed trains, forced marches, concentration camps, and death tolls.  This is something our nation engaged in.

Ray Charles' America the Beautiful

An interesting blog post on Ray Charles' version of "America the Beautiful," which differed dramatically from Katherine Lee Bates' original.  Be sure to watch the video before reading the article.