Using The Conceptual Framework Provided By Jennings And Katongole, Analyze The Form Of Racism

Step 3: Applying a Theological Lens

Racism always takes concrete, embodied forms. Using the conceptual framework provided by Jennings and Katongole, analyze the form of racism you see in our broader society today that you explored in Step 2. Quote and cite each author at least once for this part.

For instance, you might ask the following questions: How does the historical lineage that Jennings describes about racial value correspond with how we treat black men in the prison system today? How does Jennings understanding of race and place influence the way we do church from a racial perspective? How might Katongole’s understanding of the role of greeting transform the way we inhabit our neighborhoods and communities in ways that turn racial dynamics on their head?

Next, offer two concrete things you (personally) can do, drawing on Jennings and Katongole, that show how a rightly formed Christian imagination can help inform Christian practice in the world. Stated differently, use Katongole and Jennings to show how you can work for Shalom in the parts of our society broken by racism. PUT YOUR TWO CONCRETE ACTIONS IN BOLD!!! Also cite Jennings and Katongole here (putting page numbers in parentheses, of course).

Put all sources in in-text citations (MLA) and include a full bibliography.

Write in essay format in 500-600 words.

Christian worship provides one of the best resources and contexts for Christians to
unlearn race and resist racism. For instance, the greeting, which Christians receive and
offer to one another during worship, is a witness to the fact that Christians are drawn
beyond themselves into the story of God’s own life and self-sacrificing action in the
world. It is by standing within this story that Christians learn to see themselves and
others as gifts which, in their bodily differences, are called to be the visible Body of
Christ. In the act of being greeted and of greeting one another in the name of the
Trinity they bear witness to this story. Accordingly, when Christians take worship not
as an occasional act but as a way of life, they acquire resources that enable them to see
and relate to one another in ways far more interesting and truthful than any recommendations for racial reconciliation would ever be.
My appreciation of worship as the best context for a discussion of race has been
shaped by many factors, among which are my own resistance to a newly acquired racial
identity, and a determined effort to recover a vision and way of life beyond such an identity. And so, for the reader fully to appreciate “where I am coming from,” I thought it
would be helpful to begin with this personal story.
On Discovering Race: A Personal Story
I did not know that I was black until the summer of 1991, when I first came to the
United States. That it took me so long to discover my “race” was, however, never due to
any confusion about my parentage or doubts about my skin pigmentation. It is just that
in Uganda “black” is simply an adjective, and a black person is simply one with an
unusually dark complexion. And since, as far as complexion goes, I am “brown” or
“dark brown” I was never black. I was therefore surprised, on coming to the United
States, to discover that these distinctions were not significant in the same sort of way,
and that I was simply “black.” Moreover, what I soon discovered was that, here, “black”
CHAPTER 6
Greeting: Beyond Racial
Reconciliation
Emmanuel Katongole
was not an adjective that operated among other adjectives to describe a person, but an
ethically and ideologically coded designation of what a person is, in this case, my very
identity.
To be sure, I do not remember if there was any particular incident or decisive
moment at which I became “black.” In fact, during this first visit in the summer of
1991, I must have gotten away with a number of things that were outside the usual or
“normal” range of expectations of black and white interactions. This was particularly
the case since I happened to be assigned as summer resident priest at a rural, predominantly white parish in Indiana. And since I was not aware that I was “black,” I just
went about discovering America and American culture in the most innocent manner.
And if people were extra nice to me, this did not strike me as odd. It simply confirmed
my impression of Americans as generally very friendly people. In this way, Americans
reminded me of the people back at home in Uganda.
I do, however, remember being amazed by the fact that, even after a very short
time at the church I served, everybody in the town seemed to know me. Whether
at a supermarket, or at an ice cream parlor, or on an evening walk, I met people
who greeted me with a friendly “Hi Father.” I remember at first thinking to myself:
everybody here must be Catholic, and so they must have seen me at mass. It was only
when I asked one woman whether she came to St Mary’s and she said “no” that I was
curious to know how she knew me. Her swift reply: “This is a small town, and word
goes around very quickly.” It had never struck me that I was the only “black” person
in town.
This fact was, however, brought home to me one afternoon when, as I prepared to
take my driver’s license, I needed some practice in parallel parking. I chose a relatively
quiet street in the neighborhood for this exercise, and when I was satisfied with my
skills, headed back home. Just a couple of blocks away from the church, a police car
pulled me over. The police officer was very polite, and when he had examined my documents and found nothing wrong explained that he had received a call from a concerned
neighbor who had seen a “black” person doing a couple of parking maneuvers in the
neighborhood.
The discovery of myself as “black” continued and even became heightened when I
went to study in Belgium in the Fall of the same year. And though I was never able to
understand Flemish fully, I was aware of how frequently the word zwart came up in reference to or in conversations about me. Not that all these references were “racial” in
the negative sort of way. They just confirmed the extent to which race had become the
dominant grid through which my life was read, and through which I was supposed to
see my life. This discovery made me angry. For, as far as I was concerned, “black” or
“zwart” did not name anything about me – not even my skin color. It was just an identity that I was assumed to have; something I was supposed to be.
What I found particularly difficult to understand is the fact that all my characteristics, roles, and functions did not seem to be as significant as the fact that I was “black”
or “zwart.” I was particularly shocked that my being a Christian among fellow Christians, or my being a priest in a predominantly Catholic country like Belgium, did not
make any difference. I was “black” and that greatly determined my social interactions,
the church I went to, the type of housing that was open to me for rent, and even how
beyond racial reconciliation 69
well I did in some courses. To be sure, most of this was very subtle, though there were
other incidents where racism was just in your face.
I remember, for instance, when Sam, a priest from Ghana who was in the same
program as me, asked me to go with him to check out his new apartment. He had been
shopping around for a while for an apartment, and had called a number of landlords
whose ads he had seen in the paper. At detecting his African voice, the majority of them
had told him that the apartment in question had just been rented out, even though the
ad for the same apartment would appear in the paper the following day or week. Sam
got a brilliant idea. He asked Rob, a Belgian student in our program, who agreed to call
on Sam’s behalf. Sure enough, the apartment was available. So, Sam invited me to go
over with Rob to check out the apartment. On seeing the three of us, the landlord realized the trick. And even though Rob immediately explained that he had called for
the apartment, the landlord apologized for the mistake, but the apartment was not
available.
I am sure there is nothing unique about my story, except perhaps in the sense that
for me this was a novel experience, a recent discovery of what it means to be “black.”
But this is perhaps what made me all the more determined not to accept this new identity of myself as a racialized person. For I soon realized that I was beginning to hate
not only myself, but others as well, for no other reason than their being “black” or
“white.” It was then that I realized that I would either have to accept and learn to live
with my new identity, or find ways to resist it. But, even as I faced the challenge, the
choice seemed to be clear. For how could I allow such a recent discovery to become the
overriding characteristic for my self-understanding?
It is this personal biography that perhaps best explains why I have come to see the
need to move theological discussions beyond the search for guidelines and principles
that foster racial reconciliation. For, helpful as many of these recommendations might
be, they are based on a realism that accepts “race” and racial identity as a fact. Accordingly, their greatest relief seems to be one of providing insights and skills (theological,
ethical, political) to help us “manage” or deal with the reality of race. However, given
my story above, even as I hoped for and expected justice and racial equality, I constantly
found myself longing for spaces and practices in which I could recover a sort of pre-
1991 racial innocence. Accordingly, it became increasingly clear to me that, more than
racial reconciliation, the far more urgent ethical and theological challenge was the
recovery of a vision and way of life “beyond race.”
But, if I understood this to be the challenge, I also soon discovered that the standard
philosophical and theological discussions did not offer much in terms of concrete
resources with which to meet the challenge. For, whereas philosophical and theological discussions could shed light on the issue of race, their recommendations nevertheless still fell short of providing concrete alternatives to, or resources for a way of life
beyond, race. A simple theoretical digression will help to make this clear.
The Consolation of Philosophy
One can learn a great deal from the philosophical discourse on race. In my case, for
instance, it was my philosophy background that helped me to see the connections
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between the notions of “race,” “civilization,” “reason,” “progress” – in a word, the connection between race and the Enlightenment project. It is this connection that led me
to see the extent to which assumptions of “race” still underpin the social, political, and
economic institutions of Western civilization. More specifically, philosophy helped me
to see how the modern problem of race is connected to the modern accounts of the self
and human flourishing. If philosophy helped me to begin to make these connections,
it also helped to expose the arbitrariness of the notion of race. For instance, I found
Hannah Arendt’s attempt to connect race and imperialism highly instructive, especially
her observation that both are grounded in practical economic interests (Arendt, 1951).
Similarly, by connecting the notion of race to the “invention” of Africa as the dark,
uncivilized other of European Enlightenment, Mudimbe (1988) was able to show how
race classification is just one factor reflecting the anxiety at the heart of Western claims
to “civilization.” Thus, both Arendt’s and Mudimbe’s argument helped me to see the
deep connection between colonialism and race.
But, for all these insights, philosophy was still far from providing skills and resources
for a vision of life “beyond race.” In fact, the best that philosophy seemed to offer in
terms of relief were theoretical skills. No doubt, one could do a lot with these and similar
intellectual insights. I remember, for instance, how, armed with such insights, my
African colleagues and I often found ourselves in a spirited conversation in which we
discussed, debated, and eventually deconstructed “blackness” as simply an invention,
a political and ethical construct, meant to advance particular political and economic
interests. But even with the consolation of such deconstruction we were still without
any concrete skills or practices with which to live out our lives beyond “the political and
ethical construct” that we had discovered race to be. At the end of the day, we were all
still “black” and my friend Sam could still not find an apartment.
Theology and Racial Reconciliation
The challenge of providing concrete alternatives to racism and race categories is also
one that theological discussions have tended to shy away from. For, in turning to theology, one is first confronted with the astonishing realization that the observation that
James Cone noted in 1975 is still largely true today. That is, that in spite of the fact that
race and racism are a major social problem, white theologians have, on the whole, had
very little to say against racism (Cone, 1975: 45–53). The silence may, of course, be an
indication of the realism with which the mainstream of Western theology has come to
accept race and racism as a fact, about which nothing much can be done. It may also
be, as Cone suggests, that the fact that white theologians have remained virtually mute
on issues of race is because they have been unwilling to question their own cultural
history, particularly the political and economic structures of Western societies. What
the silence does however, is to turn the theological discourse on race into just another
area of special interest, one that black theologians are expected to pursue. My being
asked to contribute a chapter on racism to this volume may itself not be unrelated to
this observation.
Secondly, one notes that theological discussions of race have been greatly dominated
by recommendations for “racial reconciliation.” Whereas this might sound like a very
beyond racial reconciliation 71
concrete recommendation, one soon discovers that a great many of these theological
discussions are not only abstract, they leave us at the level of principles and insights.
For, even when the discussions begin by making reference to Scripture or Christian
tradition, the goal is quite often to draw from these traditions ethical implications or
insights which could be applied generally.
This is also perhaps the reason why, within many of these discussions, the problem
of race is easily reduced to a general problem of difference, one that is common to all
societies. Craig Keener’s “The Gospel and Racial Reconciliation”(Keener, 1997) provides a good example. In this essay, Keener first notes that, whereas differences in skin
color and other physical features were noticed but rarely understood in a prejudicial
manner in the New Testament, “racism in the sense of various cultures viewing themselves as superior was widespread” (Keener, 1997: 118). He then examines Paul’s theology of reconciliation in order to show that the gospel provides insights and guidelines
for how Christians can overcome this problem of “prejudice” and transcend “all other
human barriers we have erected among ourselves” (1997: 118). I draw attention to
Keener’s essay because it offers a clear example of how once the problem of racism has
been reduced to a universal human problem, the Christian response cannot but itself
be limited to one of discovering what insights the gospel can shed on this general
problem. To the extent that a great many theological recommendations for racial reconciliation move in this manner, they leave us at the level of insights and principles,
and do not draw attention to specific Christian practices, which might offer concrete
skills of resistance and an alternative to racism.
Even more problematic, however, is the fact that the attempt to reduce racism to a
general problem of difference and prejudice tends to obscure the particular history and
assumptions that sustain racism as a distinctively modern problem. In the absence of
any attention to that narrative, it is simply assumed that race is a natural category, and,
therefore, all that one can hope for is tolerance or some form of racial reconciliation or
harmony.
What my excursus into philosophy had allowed me to appreciate, however, is the fact
that race is not a natural category, but one that is somehow connected to modern
accounts of the self and human flourishing. And so, by not questioning the category
of race, theologies for racial reconciliation may unwittingly reproduce the same
accounts of the self as those responsible for giving rise to the problem of racism in the
first place.
This observation is connected to a wider problem facing theology in modern times;
namely, that in an attempt to remain a respectable discipline, we theologians often
feel that we have to appeal to the modern accounts of culture, race, and history to
provide us with an account of reality. But since it is these accounts that are responsible for giving rise to the problem of race in the first place, appealing to the same
accounts leaves us with little or no resources with which to move beyond the limits that
the vision of these accounts imposes. This is one reason why I personally find the
theologies of racial reconciliation not to be radical enough. For while these discussions
offer insights and ethical guidelines on how to deal with or manage the problems of
racism, they leave us within the same politics and social history where race is still a
dominant story.
72 emmanuel katongole
But if, as I have noted, the challenge is one of recovering a vision and way of life
beyond race, then what is required is a different story and a different set of practices
that would not have to assume “race” or “racial” identity. If this sounds like a utopian
or idealistic expectation, it is because Christian theology and ethics are, by their nature,
idealistic in the sense that they reflect God who constantly calls the Church to new
imaginations of the real, of what is possible. Moreover, my own idealism was also made
possible by my personal biography. For, while I knew race and racism to be a fact in the
West, I also knew as a matter of fact that it is possible not be “black” or “white.” In fact,
what my personal story had led me to see is the fact that being “black” or “white,” or
for that matter any other racial identity, was an acquired identity, which is to say, a
learnt vision of life and set of corresponding habits. This, I think, is what Cornel West
has in mind when he notes that blackness has no meaning outside a system of raceconscious people and practices (West, 1993: 39).
This is what makes a Christian response to race not so much a matter of principles
and insights but one of practices. In other words, if racial identity is a matter of community, an alternative identity is not only possible, it is a matter of an alternative community, embodying different practices and a different vision of the self. If racism is at
home within modern Western societies, then the Christian challenge to racism is really
one of being able to step outside the vision of modern Western society, and find oneself
part of a community and practices in which race and racial identity simply make no
sense. Christian worship provides precisely such an opportunity in the sense that,
within the practice of Christian worship, a new unique community is being constituted
in a manner that both challenges, and offers a concrete alternative to, the story of race
and racism.
Christian Worship as a “Wild Space”
Such a claim needs to be qualified in at least two ways. First, we all are sadly aware that
worship can be, and has so often been, one of the most segregated spaces. And so, far
from offering an alternative to the cultural patterns of racism, Christian worship has
often simply confirmed and even re-enforced the racialized boundaries and interactions
within modern society. That is why an appreciation of worship along the lines we are
calling for involves a re-assessment of the relation of worship to modern culture. While
worship has tended to provide an opportunity for a spiritual confirmation and affirmation of the dominant cultural patterns and values, I suggest that we see worship as
a site for imagining and embodying concrete alternatives to the dominant cultural patterns and values. In this way, Christian worship is able to provide Christians with the
resources and possibilities for living out of, and living out concrete alternatives to, the
vision of modern society.
Secondly, the notion of “stepping outside” might strike many as encouraging a form
of Christian sectarianism. Without getting into the so-often misleading assumptions
connected to this impression (Katongole, 2002: 189–203), there is nothing about
Christian worship that forces Christians to withdraw from engagement in their societies. What is meant instead is that through a practice such as worship, Christians are
beyond racial reconciliation 73
able to develop the skills and practices required to engage critically with their societies,
or, which is the same thing, to live as “Resident Aliens” (Hauerwas and Willimon, 1989)
within the societies they find themselves in.
More recently, I have found McFague’s (2001) notion of “wild spaces” a helpful way
to characterize the practice of Christian worship. In an attempt to recover ethical existence in the face of a consumer-oriented economy and culture, McFague suggests the
cultivation of “wild spaces” as a normative requirement if the individual is to resist,
survive, or creatively reshape the draft of an all too powerful consumerist worldview. A
“wild space,” according to McFague, is whatever does not fit the stereotypical human
being, or the definition of the good life as defined by conventional culture. What is particularly significant, however, is that, for McFague, a wild space is not the province of
a self-sufficient way of life “outside” Western capitalist and consumer society. Rather,
wild spaces are created or discovered in the rifts of that very culture.
Imagine conventional Western culture as a circle with your world overimposed over it. If
you are [a] poor Hispanic lesbian, your world will not fit into the conventional Western
one. It will overlap somewhat (you may be educated and able-bodied), but there will be a
large crescent that will be outside. That is your wild space; it is the space that will allow –
and encourage – you to think differently, to imagine alternative ways of living. It will not
only give you problems, but possibilities. (McFague, 2001: 48)
Christian worship is precisely such a wild space, which allows – and encourages –
Christians to think differently, to imagine and embody alternative ways of living.
Worship enables Christians to break out of the status quo of conventional culture, but
also offers resistance to it in ways that a new change in rules does not. For, it is by standing within the wild space that is worship that Christians can now see themselves in a
different perspective. Such seeing, of course, is not theoretical, but is, in fact, made possible to the extent that the Christian is located within concrete practices, which reflect
a different story of the self than that named by race.
And so, in the remaining part of this chapter, I would like to draw attention to just
one such practice of Christian worship, namely the act of greeting, in order to highlight the conclusion that the greeting which Christians receive and offer to one another
during worship provides resources for Christians to unlearn race, and come to embody
a new pattern of life.
On Being Greeted in the Name of the Trinity
When Christians gather for worship, they are greeted and in turn take time to greet one
another. The Catholic liturgy of the mass, for instance, begins with the priest greeting
the congregation in these or similar words: “May the Grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ,
the Love of God the Father, and the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you . . .”
Although I have been quite familiar with this formula, I first began to appreciate its
full theological significance on a visit to Malaysia in 1997, when, on one afternoon, I
was invited to participate in the celebration of mass at a Kampung (village) community outside Kuching. Mass began outside the church, with the priest greeting the con-
74 emmanuel katongole
gregation, and everyone in the congregation greeting everyone else. What I found particularly striking was not just the orderliness of the whole exercise, but the fact that we
had to extend greeting not only to those next to us but to each person in the congregation. For what happened was that the greeting was part of the procession into the
church whereby the congregation formed two lines, with the person at the end of each
line passing through the formed lines and greeting everybody in the line. Although it
was quite a while before the last person got into the church, by that time we had all
had a chance to touch, kiss, shake the hands, and look into the eyes of everyone else
in the congregation.
I draw attention to this example not only because I do not know any other congregation that takes the practice of liturgical greeting as seriously, but also because this
Kampung community is one of the most racially and ethnically diverse communities I
have experienced. A simple survey confirmed that the congregation comprised Christians of Chinese, Malay, Indian as well as a host of Orang Asli (indigenous or tribal)
backgrounds. Thus, the more I have had a chance to reflect on this experience, the more
I have realized its profound theological relevance, and the rich resource that greeting
provides for Christian ethics in the context of race.
Beyond Modern Anthropology
Ordinarily, greeting can be a good way to help people drop their guard and feel at home.
Within the context of Christian worship, greeting accomplishes a similar goal. This was
certainly the case at the mass at the Kampung. On a deeper level, however, what greeting does is to help Christians drop the guard of their modern self. This is so important
if we are to begin to imagine ourselves and others beyond racial categories. For I suspect
that one of the reasons why racism is such an intractable problem for us is that it reflects
the story of the modern self, particularly the constant anxiety at the heart of the
modern project. The anxiety has somehow to do with our desire to become both
autonomous and our own self-makers. For, having repudiated any story beyond its own
choosing, the modern self must now seek to justify not only its own existence, but
also the certainty of its knowledge, as well as the worthiness of its undertakings and
values. However, with self-interest as the one and perhaps only story to live for, selfjustification becomes both tenacious and ever suspect.
This anxiety cannot but give rise to a distinctive politics of power as control, and an
economics of exploitation of those different from us in the name of “self-interest” and
“self-preservation.” In fact, as McGrane (1989) puts it, it is this constant anxiety that
gives rise to practices in which the meeting with the other is policed by theories of race,
history, or culture – all of which are meant to assure the modern self ’s place at the
center of history, as the climax of civilization, or as the “most advanced.” It is perhaps
not surprising that the result of this self-arming has been a history of colonialism,
imperialism, and slavery. What this history reflects, however, is nothing but the endless
thrust of the desire for control and conquest of the modern self, a self haunted by the
need to justify its own existence and place in history. Racism is just one aspect of this
story.
beyond racial reconciliation 75
That is also why, unless this story of the modern self is questioned, ethical recommendations for racial reconciliation may unwittingly reproduce the same politics of
anxiety. That is what makes an ethics of “tolerance” problematic. For it reproduces a
problematic form of inclusion by which power and privilege are extended but not questioned. In this way, white privilege may be extended to black folks without, however,
questioning the underlying politics and accounts of the self and of human flourishing
that are responsible for giving rise to the problem of racism in the first place. What is
required if such a politics is to be resisted is an altogether different story of the self, a
different politics in which the self is “relieved,” so to speak, of the need to provide the
grounds for its own existence or to prove its importance. The relief can only come to
the extent that the self is not at the center of life. Christian worship is precisely the
performance of this different story, which draws the self into the wider story of God’s
creation and redemption.
In other words, if modern anthropology, in which the theories and practices of
racism are at home, is an “arming” strategy, Christian worship is a “disarming” practice. That is what being greeted “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the
Holy Spirit . . .” does. For the greeting is an invitation to the Christian to “relax,” as it
were, in the knowledge that his or her life needs no other grounds for its justification
since it has already been justified and the Christian is already part of that new creation
that is made possible by “the love of God, the grace of the Son and the fellowship of the
Holy Spirit.” Becoming thus aware of, and learning to relax in, this good news, Christians can now be aware of other Christians – not as strangers competing for limited
resources, but as fellow pilgrims, fellow citizens of this new creation.
The Performance of a Christian Anthropology
The greeting at the start of worship places the Christian at the very heart of a Christian anthropology, or, which is the same thing, the very heart of ecclesiology. For what
the greeting announces is the fact that the Christian is part of a peculiar gathering, one
that is based not in the self-interested accumulation of economic or political gains,
but a gathering or assembly (ecclesia) of reconciled sinners, performed by the selfsacrificing love and forgiveness of God.
To put it differently, the story is not one of Christians gathering, but of being gathered, being assembled, of being greeted. The greeting at the start of worship announces
the wonderful news that the Christian is the recipient and not the provider of this new
dispensation. That Christians are greeted just goes to confirm that they are not the ones
who initiate this story of grace, love, and forgiveness. In fact, the story is not about
them. Rather, it is the story of what God has done and continues to do on their behalf.
Not just them, but God’s whole creation. In other words, this is a story whose existence
and truth precedes us. That is why the greeting is at the same time a reminder of the
story of “in the beginning” – a beginning that reflects God’s superabundance and goodness. For this is what the very name of Trinity names – the superabundance of love,
fellowship, and communication as it exists within the three persons of the Trinity. It is
76 emmanuel katongole
into this superabundance of creation and fellowship that the Christian is invited and
drawn by the act of being greeted “in the name of the Father . . .”
Thus the greeting pronounces us as the gifts that we are. And, having received the
good news of our being gifts, we can learn to see others similarly as gifts. Thus, having
been greeted in the name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, Christians can now greet one another in the same name. In this way, the greeting becomes
a benediction, which is offered to the congregation, and which they, in turn, offer to
one another. But it also becomes an invitation to mimic or model the same story of differences as embodied by God the Trinity. This does not mean that we can now dismiss
as irrelevant all differences, but rather it is an invitation to learn to name our differences and particularities in the name of the Trinity. The act of greeting, whether it is
by kissing or shaking the hands of the one next to us, is the way in which Christians
make this conviction concrete.
Once the issue has been put in this way, then one realizes that, within the act of
greeting, the range of Christian theology from creation to eschatology is being played
out. In other words, being greeted and taking the time to greet one another in the name
of God, the Christian is standing in between creation and eschatology; witnessing to
the peaceful abundance and differences within God’s creation, while at the same time
anticipating the final display of the fullness of God’s love, fellowship, and grace in the
whole of creation at the end of time, when Christ will be all in all. In the meantime,
Christians become part of this new creation, this new gathering or assembly; a new
community of worship, not just one that performs this act of worship, but one for whom
worship has become a way, the way of life.
A Christian Ethics
Greeting thus becomes a mode of being in the world in between times; it does not have
ethical “implications,” it is Christian ethics. And as ethics it announces and opens up
a revolutionary future in which, as McCabe says (1969: 75), “we do not merely see
something new, but we have a new way of seeing” God, the world, ourselves in it, and
others. Similarly, as Christian ethics, worship does not simply encourage or facilitate
racial reconciliation. Rather, it institutes a whole new social reality in which being
“black” or “white” just makes no sense. That is why worship itself is the revolutionary
future, a “wild space” in which a different story, a different performance is being played
out and rendered visible in the world.
That is why it is significant that the greeting comes at the start of worship. In fact,
one reason why I found the practice at the Malaysian Kampung so remarkable was that
the greeting was the way, the only way, that anyone could get into the church, and thus
to listen to the word of God and share the Eucharist. This in itself is highly significant
since it confirms that greeting is the concrete embodiment of a key Christian claim;
namely, that we cannot know God, we cannot even hear his word rightly let alone share
his table, unless we have learnt to greet each other, including the stranger, with the
sign of peace. In fact, within the context of greeting each other “in the name of the
beyond racial reconciliation 77
Father . . . ,” the very concept of “stranger” is being challenged and redefined from a
radically Christian perspective.
Significant as it is, the rite of Christian greeting cannot be isolated from the full
context of Christian worship and presented as an “ethic” for racial reconciliation. The
fact that greeting is located at the beginning of worship simply goes to show how it is
this concrete practice that initiates us, draws us into the full politics and economics of
what it means to be a worshiping community. Anyone able to stand the greeting should
be willing and ready to go all the way. In the particular case of the Malaysian Kampung,
this was perhaps the reason why the worship did not end with the usual “dismissal,”
but with an invitation to “fellowship.” What I found particularly remarkable about the
fellowship, apart from the fact that everybody stayed, was the fact that all the cans of
Coca-Cola that different people had brought with them were broken open and poured
into one jug. It was from this one jug that the Coca-Cola was served using only one cup,
which was passed on from one person to the next. As I thought about this practice, I
found myself thinking that it would have been much easier, more time-efficient, and
even more “hygienic” to hand each person a can of Coke (or invite people to take one)
since there were more than enough to go around. Only gradually was I able to see in
this “awkward” practice, a form of resistance to the individualism inherent in a market
economy that, for instance, neatly packages Coca-Cola in cans and bottles that are so
convenient for “individual” consumption.
This is what is meant by the claim that greeting is both an invitation and a concrete
embodiment of what it means to go all the way. For through the act of greeting, the
otherwise racially and ethnically diverse Kampung community found ways of moving
beyond the dominant cultural identifications of being Malay, Indian, Chinese, Dayan,
or Kadazan. At the same time, worship constituted a visible wild space, which allowed
and encouraged resistance to other dominant stories, including resistance to the individualism of capitalistic consumption, even as they were already standing within the
story of modern economics – thus drinking Coca-Cola.
But that the entire gamut of Christian theology and ethics should be embodied
within such a gesture as greeting just confirms how God is not abstract, but as concrete
as the handshakes, voices, hugs, and kisses of a people who greet each other “in the
name of the Father . . .” And so, abstracted from such concrete practices, “God”
remains just an idea, a hypothesis, to be believed or contested.
Beyond Docetism: On “Touching Color”
We can highlight the point above by noting how Christian worship, the act of greeting
in particular, provides Christians with an opportunity to be present to one another in
ways that challenge the docetism that may very easily be masked by theologies of
“racial reconciliation.” Early Christian docetism was an attempt to downplay the significance of Jesus’s bodily incarnation. Because the docetists felt that attributing full
bodily incarnation to Christ would limit the claims to Jesus’s divinity and attributes,
they taught that Jesus’s bodily incarnation was just an appearance, which Christ had
to assume in order to effect for us his saving operations.
78 emmanuel katongole
Jennings (1997) is right to note that there is an unrelenting docetism that haunts
the way in which Christians in the West deal with race, culture, and the problem of
racism. For though racism is, in great part, an imagination involving bodies, the danger
now is to claim an easy and quick “racial harmony” – one, however, that avoids the
need to confront, touch, feel, and relate to bodies that are different from us. Thus, the
temptation, as Jennings reminds us, is to claim: “I do not see anyone as black or white,
just my sister or brother in Christ. There is no such thing as race. We are all one in
Christ.” Or we say, “we just need to learn how to forgive, respect and live together and
go on to the future.” Or we say, “where I was raised there were no black people. Therefore, race was and is not an issue for me” (Jennings, 1997: 47)
Such claims, however, are so often a reflection of our desire to see racial harmony
without facing the need for the transformation of our usual forms of social existence
and community. Moreover, the claim to color blindness may be, as Mary McClintock
Fulkerson (2001: 140) suggests, just another strategy of condescension associated
with liberal claims to tolerance whereby the one who is “tolerant” can still position the
other in his or her sphere of influence. In this way, claims to color blindness are just a
way of avoiding face-to-face bodied relation in situations of reciprocity. Without such
bodied interaction, however, Christians cannot fully appreciate what it means to be the
Body of Christ. That is why the practice of greeting within Christian worship is a good
place to begin if we are to recover the significance of the body for Christian salvation.
This is another reason why I found the practice at the Kampung very significant, in
that the greeting was so much about the body. It involved movement, touch, hugs,
kisses, and handshakes. There was therefore just no way one could avoid touching and
relating to other bodies. In so doing, however, a key conviction of Christian life was
being played out – namely that the body matters for Christian salvation since as Christians we believe that we are saved in and through the body, our own bodies, but ultimately the Body of Christ. Such concrete bodily interaction is therefore a good way to
learn what it means to be that very Body of Christ – the one Body of Christ which is
made up of different members (bodies). And so, in the very act of Christian greeting,
in kissing or touching other bodies, including those that look very different from one’s
own, one is being introduced to the very mystery of the Body of Christ.
Which means that, in our modern time-conscious world, in which greeting is often
nothing more than a disinterested “hi,” the challenge is, at the same time, one of recovering an embodied account and practice of greeting like the one at the Malaysian
Kampung. What is, however, even more important is the need to recover Christian discipleship as a practical way of life at the margins of the dominant cultures of our day.
For I suspect that the fact that the Christian community in Malaysia had learnt to take
worship so seriously has to do with the unique situation of their being a minority in a
predominantly Muslim country. Finding themselves in a marginal (8 percent of the
population) and often marginalized position, Christians in Malaysia may have no choice
but to turn to their tradition and practices for resources with which to lead meaningful lives at the margins of the dominant culture.
That is why the specific challenge facing Christians in the West, as well as in other
cultures where Christianity is the dominant religion, has to do with the recovery of
worship as a “wild space” that can foster an alternative imagination to the one of the
beyond racial reconciliation 79
dominant culture. This challenge is particularly urgent in the West given the fact that,
as already noted, worship here tends to reflect and reinforce the same neat, racialized
interaction as the dominant culture. In this respect, Martin Luther King Jr’s comment
that 11 o’clock is the most segregated hour in America is not only a true sociological
observation, but it is also a deeply disturbing theological assessment of a Church that
has long given up on the challenge to embody an alternative imagination. What makes
King Jr’s observation more disturbing is the realization that it is true not just of the
Church in the West. For, whereas the case of racism that we have been examining
makes this obvious in relation to America, Martin Luther King Jr’s observation reflects
a more global phenomenon of a Christianity that has become comfortable – too much
at home – within the dominant cultures of our time.
In Africa, for instance, similar versions of a cultural Christianity are so easily reproduced through an uncritical quest for inculturation. The effect is that here, too, instead
of providing an opportunity for re-imagining African identities and societies from a
Christian perspective, Christian worship tends to reflect and reproduce the same ethnic
or tribal divisions within African society. This is also what leads us to suspect any
attempts to encourage racially or ethnically homogeneous congregations even when
their existence is justified in terms of a need or appreciation of cultural diversity or
authenticity. For if what we have said about worship and greeting is true, there seems
to be no greater challenge relating to our invitation to be the Body of Christ than to
resist these new forms of segregation, which might easily ride on a postmodern
celebration of culture. Such fascination with “difference” and “culture” might just be
another way to assume a kind of superficial “racial diversity,” one, however, that avoids
the need to resist the dominant forms of our social and cultural existence.
Conclusion
Here, by way of conclusion, I can only recount my own experience of the transformation that worship makes possible, which brings me to where I began my story. For,
during the years I lived in Europe, I was lucky to belong to the St Mary and St Martha
English-speaking parish of the university. It was through worship with and in this multicultural, multiracial congregation that I not only got a chance to meet people from all
parts of the world, but also to recover somewhat the sort of pre-1991 racial innocence
which I had longed for so much. Through our weekly worship and the concrete greeting and interaction this provided, I was able to become part of a community for whom
being black or white had ceased to be an interesting identity. Not only did this allow a
certain relaxation and lack of pretentiousness in our worship, it opened up possibilities
for friendship based on what we discovered to be more interesting stories of our lives.
This was the very same “relief ” that had helped me to survive the summer of 1991,
when I first discovered that I was black. For, even as I discovered my race, I was lucky
to be part of the community of St Mary’s parish. The opportunity to worship in and
together with the “white” congregation of St Mary’s again proved to be one of the transforming spaces for both me and my “white” congregation. I remember, for instance, an
elderly man who tearfully later confessed to me that I was the first black person whose
80 emmanuel katongole
hand he had shaken. Another man whispered to me at the end of mass how he had at
first been reluctant to receive communion from the hands of a black person. The most
telling case, however, was that of Dorothy, a woman in her late eighties whom I had
seen regularly and greeted at Saturday five o’clock mass. When I learnt that she had
been taken to a nursing home, I went to visit her. She was very happy to see me, and
excitedly called on her roommate: “Come and say hello to Fr Emmanuel,” she said. “Fr
Emmanuel is not a Negro. He is a priest!”
If, through the greeting we receive and offer within Christian worship, we can, like
Dorothy, begin to see each other not as strangers in competition for limited resources,
but as gifts of a gracious God, then we will already have discovered ourselves within a
new imagination, on the road to a new and revolutionary future, which worship both
signals and embodies. Part of this new future consists in discovering that there are more
determinative, and far more interesting, stories that we can tell about ourselves and
about others than just being “white” or “black.”
References
Arendt, Hannah (1951) The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace).
Cone, James H. (1975) The God of the Oppressed (New York: Seabury).
Fulkerson, Mary McClintock (2001) “ ‘We Do Not See Color Here’: A Case Study in Ecclesial Cultural Invention,” in Converging on Culture: Theologians in Dialogue with Cultural Analysis and
Criticism, ed. Delwin Brown, Sheila Greeve Daveney, and Kathryn Tanner, pp. 140–58 (Oxford:
University Press).
Hauerwas, Stanley and Willimon, Will (1989) Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony
(Nashville, TN: Abingdon).
Jennings, Willie (1997) “Wandering in the Wilderness: Christian Identity and Theology,” in The
Gospel in Black and White, ed. Dennis L. Okholm, pp. 37–48 (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity).
Katongole, Emmanuel (2002) Beyond Universal Reason: The Relation between Religion and Ethics in
the Work of Stanley Hauerwas (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press).
Keener, S. Craig (1997) “The Gospel and Racial Reconciliation,” in The Gospel in Black and White,
ed. Dennis L. Okholm, pp. 117–30 (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity).
McCabe, Herbert (1969) What is Ethics All About? (Washington: Corpus).
McFague, Sallie (2001) Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress).
McGrane, Bernard (1989) Beyond Anthropology (New York: Columbia University Press).
Mudimbe, Valery (1988) The Invention of Africa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press).
West, Cornel (1993) Race Matters (New York: Vintage).
beyond racial reconciliation 81

CHAPTER 21
Being Baptized: Race
Willie Jennings
Christians have a sordidly complicated history with race. Race remains one of the most difficult areas to confront, discuss, and think through for Christians and especially for theologians. The central reason for our difficulty is that the Western Church
has yet to grasp fully its deep involvement in the formation of the modern racial condition. Race as it now floats along the social imaginations of peoples would not have been
possible without Christianity. Racial identities and Christian identities draw from the
same theological matrix and carry mutually reinforcing characteristics. Race, of course,
is an elusive concept. What is most striking about its elusiveness is that so many people
believe they know what race is, even without an agreed definition: it is self – evident.
Our commonsense knowledge of race, however, is less about knowledge and more
about a way of seeing the world. Yet, it would be a mistake to narrate race as part of a
long natural history of the ways peoples make distinctions amongst each other. There
are elements of more general distinction – making processes involved in the formation
of racial identity, but describing race through a historical catalog of the ways humans
register differences misses the point. Such ways of thinking race conceal what was an
unprecedented change in the way people viewed human existence. Race is best seen
through the story of its emergence.
Race as it is known and experienced in the modern world has its genesis in the time
of New World conquest. Beginning with the Portuguese and the Spanish, peoples of
what we would now call Europe entered into worlds, little known or unknown, and
among peoples in areas we now call Asia, Africa, and the Americas, setting the stage
for the confluence of technologies, ideas, practices, traditions, and institutions that
would profoundly change the world. Christianity was at the center of this confluence,
not as the engine driving it, but as the conceptual glue holding it all in the same arena
The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, Second Edition. Edited by Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells.
© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
278 WILLIE JENNINGS
of European imagination. The engine that drove this interaction was the desire for new
wealth in resources, land, money, and labor. The specific trigger for these new possibilities was travel.
The Emergence of the Racial Condition
The history of European New World conquest could be told like a science fiction story.
Technological advances in the building of ships facilitated the unprecedented expansion of the geographic reach of peoples in Europe. Along with geographic expansion,
the vision and imagination of Old World peoples expanded as they were brought into
contact in a very short period of time with a wide variety of human beings and ways
of life. Such expansion easily fit inside the missional sensibilities of church – drenched
Old World societies. The Church presided over the unexpected – a new world that God
had created that it had neither known nor could easily understand. Yet the Church had
in its hands servants (explorers, soldiers, merchants, and priest – missionaries) that
would bring this unknown world inside the known and bring its peoples into the arch
of salvation. The Church willed that the New World be baptized into the faith.
Several things were behind this ecclesial will – to – power that would also guide the way
the Church envisioned and related to the New World. The struggle against Islam
and the perceived Muslim threat, the feverish desire to eradicate Jewish identity as a
competitor to theological truth, and the fears of fragmentation born of the Protestant
Reformation pressed the need to seize the world for the sake of the gospel. Seizing the
world emerged as a twofold desire of both Church and market. Ecclesial interests and
the interests of merchants and kings powerfully merged together at the beginning
of the age of conquest. This merger would mean a fluid interaction between technological advances in travel and weaponry, chivalric military cultures, systems of exchange
of goods and services, and mission activity.
Together these elements fostered a new imaginative way to grasp the Church ’ s
mission in the world. Conquest opened up for the Church a view of the world in boundless desire. All peoples of the New World could now be seen as simply sheep bound
formally under – and materially toward – paternal – ecclesial care. The driving concern
for the salvation of the world that lay at the heart of the gospel became, when viewing
the New World, a breathtaking radicalism which blew through the tribal, linguistic,
and geographic specifics of every people. These aspects of their identities were rendered
irrelevant through a perspective on the gospel that announced them as God ’ s property
and bound them to an identification matrix that flowed from sinner to saint, reprobate
to elect, and irredeemable to redeemed. Here was a cultural – linguistic baptism before
water baptism, a death and rebirth enabled simply by conquest.
The descriptive regime displayed through this conquest – baptism was neither naive
anthropology nor harmless generalizations, but rather signs of two powerful hermeneutic principles that built from the doctrinal insight of creation out of nothing, creatio
ex nihilo. The first principle was the fundamental instability of all things. Nothing is
sure in itself. All things are contingent and held together by God. When viewed through
this hermeneutical horizon, people exist without a necessary permanence of either
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place or identity. This kind of hermeneutic principle facilitates a different way of viewing
human communities. The essential characteristic of people is not their habitation, nor
the deep ecologies of their lives bound by place, animal, and daily practices, but their
need – for pardon and life, that is, for salvation from God. The second principle is the
identity of the creator. Jesus Christ is the beginning of all things. All things belong
to him. The doctrine of incarnation yields in this regard the idea of embodiment in
service to the idea of ownership. It is precisely this sense of embodiment pressed toward
ownership that gave the Church its sense of geographic authority over all peoples and
all lands.
If ecclesial ownership of the world was formal, its material reality was being brutally
enacted by the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the other kingdoms that would follow
them. Ground zero for that enactment was the emergence of New World (modern)
slavery. Slavery was not new, but what was new was slavery bound up inside this confluence of expansive ecclesial and market desire. What was also new was slavery flowing
in and out of a set of descriptive gestures recalibrated to do new conceptual work.
As explorers, merchants, soldiers, and missionaries entered new worlds and had
New World peoples brought to the Old World, they described who they were seeing in
terms of being white, black, or being in – between white and black. This was not the first
time white and black marked identity in the Old World, nor was this the only designation for New World peoples, but these racial designations took on new conceptual labor
as they traveled with and inside the imaginative powers of Europeans in the New World.
White, black, and everything in between emerged as a way of looking at all flesh. It was
first a comparative intellectual gesture as Old World peoples compared their bodies to
the new bodies of new places; compared native bodies to their vision of ancient bodies,
angelic or demonic; compared native bodies of one place to equally foreign bodies
of another place; and compared native bodies to the bodies of alien bodies in their
midst – Jews and Muslims.
Racial designation grew in strength on the currents of this new geographic reality
of comparison. Its strongest nutrient was its synergy with theological designation. This
synergy in some measure drew from the theological history of white and black being
sometimes equated with good and evil, (morally) dirty or clean. Yet the far more decisive
element of synergy was their collaborative elasticity. Racial designation (white/black/
between white/black), like theological designation (sinner/saint, reprobate/elect,
demon – possessed/exorcised) jumped geographic, linguistic, tribal, or clan boundaries.
But while it transcended boundaries it powerfully joined people together, so that peoples
in the Americas, Asia, or Africa could be seen as and designated black or white. Peoples
of vastly different ways of life, different languages, different geographic locations, and
different patterns of interaction with animals and other peoples would be racially designated along a scale from black at one end to white at the other end of existence.
Racial designation as it emerged in the context of New World conquest revealed
an aesthetic sensibility that was ancient, one shared by some Mediterranean and
North African peoples, by some Christians, Jews, and Muslims, that lighter skin was
more attractive than darker skin, that certain facial features sometimes associated
with darker skinned peoples were less attractive than other features. This aesthetic
sensibility, unleashed inside a new comparative analysis, opened up a powerful new
280 WILLIE JENNINGS
way of calculating human difference. Travelers to the New World surmised that
darker skinned peoples displayed environmentally damaged bodies and deficient minds.
Damage and deficiency were not always tightly coordinated racially, but the point is
that aesthetics yielded anthropological truth. This aesthetic sensibility merged with
various native aesthetic judgments and grounded a trajectory of visual experience that
would have deep and tragic effects on the social imaginations of peoples around the
world.
Racial designation also drew life from an already existing theological problem:
supersessionism. We could define supersessionism in many ways historically and theologically, but as Church life emerged in the New World, so too merged two crucial ideas
of supersessionist logic – replacement and visibility. The Church in this logic constituted
the visible people of God. Human visibility and divine election migrated deeply inside
racial vision. If Israel had been the visibly elect of God, then that visibility in the
European imagination migrated without return to a new home shaped now by new
visual markers. If Israel ’ s election had been the compass around which Christian identity gained its bearing and found its trajectory, now with this reconfiguration, the body
of the European would be the compass marking divine election. More importantly, that
new elected body, the white body, would be a discerning body able to detect holy effects
and saving grace.
European Christians claimed this gift of discernment in the New World based on
their constant exercise of it in the Old World. They had learned how to discern saved
bodies by working with the instability of Christian commitment in two groups of the
medieval Iberian world: converted Muslims (or Christian Moors), called moriscos; and
converted Jews (or New Christians), called conversos, or sometimes referred to with the
derogatory term marranos. These converts to the faith carried unsure and therefore
dangerous Christian identity. Their bodies presented a serious question. Was Christianity
a firm reality of their lives, or were they inherently bound to an apostate return to Islam
or Judaism? As the Church sought to discern the surety of these converts ’ faith, they
were also wary of covert anti – Christian activity inside the Christian body. These converts might be secretly practicing Muslims or Jews. This fear and suspicion carried
an Augustinian – like multigenerational effect so that anyone within the Church with
Jewish or Moorish “ blood ” must be siphoned out and kept from significant Church
leadership.
This operation of discernment grew in power and scope as it flowed through a racial
optic, allowing the Church on colonial sites to gauge which peoples might be suitable
for salvation, which peoples reflected salvific instability similar to Islamic and Jewish
converts, which peoples exhibited fundamental reprobation by their barbarism, and
which peoples may be capable of assuming leadership in the Church. The clarity,
success, or failure of such discernment is not the crucial point. The real innovation was
how such discernment wove itself inside racial vision and how racial vision informed
its operation. The new comparative possibilities of anthropology born of conquest
enabled a secularization of that discernment. This was witnessed in the New World in
the Iberian racial caste system with its virulent and infectious obsession with limpiezas
de sangre, purity of blood. Was a person born of Spanish, Black, or Amerindian blood?
Was the person in question part – Indian, part – African, part – Spanish? Which part – from
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the mother, or the father, grandmother or grandfather? What kind of mixture was at
play in this person?
At one level, purity of blood concerns focused on the problems and dilemmas of
racial mixture, racial identification, and how to properly place people in the social order.
But at another level, purity concerns encoded investigative gestures for tracing the
racial make – up of anti – social and immoral behavior or projecting intellectual, moral,
and spiritual capacities or incapacities to their racial foundations. Racial purity concerns also witnessed the often unspoken reality of rape, bondage, and subjugation of
African and indigenous women. Racial designation in the New World gained its own
gravitas. It acquired the elasticity, flexibility, reach, scope, and character of theological
designation. In fact, it breathed in and with theological designation. The discursive acts
of theology now had its symbiont – the language of race. Furthermore, the aesthetic
regime of race overwhelmed theological aesthetics. The good, the bad, the beautiful,
the ugly, the sublime, the grotesque, the demonic, and the angelic were baptized in
racial vision and rose to new coordination with bodies deemed black, white, and in –
between black and white.
The new aesthetic regime riding inside racial designation brought to the New World
by the conquerors, although terribly important, is one innovation in a constellation of
innovations. The most decisive one had to do with the land. Europeans encountered
peoples whose sense of identity was inextricably bound to the land. This land – based
identity witnessed an ecology of connection that envisioned the ground, the earth alive,
and animals, an integral part of one ’ s family, clan, and/or body. The specific places that
played out these interactions of landscape, animals, and people were crucial, irreplaceable signifiers of identity. Such a vision refused any sharp split between bodies and
specific environs. Europeans might have understood or in some sense shared aspects of
this sense of connection, yet when they encountered these peoples the merger of ecclesial and market desire enacted a devastating vertigo.
They imagined these New World peoples as separable and movable from the land,
and they imagined the land and the people as marketable – that is, as transformable
into private property. Additionally, they introduced into the New World a variety of
plants and animals, including horses, attack dogs, rats, and sheep as well as pathogens,
which reformatted the landscape. There is a density of action that must be held together
to understand this vertigo. People are being captured and stolen. People are dying from
recently introduced diseases. Land is being taken and imagined as private property.
People are being stripped from their particular places and (very often) separated from
their animals. New things are being introduced that will have great ecological impact.
Europeans are describing themselves and the indigenes, enacting judgments regarding
their nature and the nature of their world. They are also imposing new linguistic
systems on native speakers and seeking to control or destroy existing language systems.
The Spanish and the Portuguese and all those who followed them discovered an
unprecedented reality of power, the power to recreate worlds. This power was much too
great a temptation for the Church, which saw in colonial strength the possibilities of
fulfilling its mission. Although the Church and Christian theology moved toward tremendous expansion of its influence in the world, it in fact entered into a reality
of insularity. We must understand the insularity it inhabited and the insularity it
282 WILLIE JENNINGS
performed in order to grasp the modern racial condition. The insularity it inhabited
came out of the new pastoralist vision born of the colonial moment.
The Immersion of Christianity into Racial Existence
The history of Christianity in the modern Western world pivots on the connection
between landownership and the performance of Christian life. Christians entering the
New World, whether in Africa, Asia, or the Americas, entered an unimagined reality,
the possibility of owning vast stretches of land. People who in the Old World would
have been merchants (of modest or significant means), soldiers, or even paupers became
in conquered places the owners of land and all that comes with land – plants, animals,
bodies of water, precious minerals, and people. Whether the space was designated an
encomienda, a hacienda, a plantation, or a farm, the resulting transformation was the
same. The land would now be bound to the body of the owner as an extension of his
will. The owner ’ s love of the land, appreciation for it, or care of it, was secondary to
the fact that he owned it. Men were the landowners in the majority of the cases, setting
the stage for a pastoralist vision that would join the performance of masculinity to the
organizing of household ecologies, and both to the formation of nationalism – and all
inside an overarching vision of possession.
This pastoralist vision sought to regulate a world that bound the bodies of women,
slaves, animals, and their labor to the desires of men. Its power grew in large measure
from its abiding relation to global and local economies. It hung life – goods, services,
people, animals, and relationships – between processes of production and consumption. Displacement was the order of the day, as peoples were moved off lands, or pressed
into fundamentally new arrangements with the land as workers or slaves. Imported
slaves worked the land as those chained to an economic circuit that flowed from the
Old World to the New World. The Church comfortably inhabited this pastoralist vision
because it allowed coordination of its own vision of incarnational – ownership of global
spaces. This situation engendered a hegemonic hospitality in which native inhabitants
became the guests in a Christian world formed on their places. The gestures of welcoming, receiving, and honoring guests translated through a colonialist matrix became
the subjugating gestures of oppressors and marked a deep failure of the Christian
imagination to discern its real status as guests and the need to translate its own life
inside existing ways of living.
Moreover, the insularity of the pastoralist vision allowed the Church to improvise its
own insularity within its pastoral vision. The New World was alien and frightening to
the newcomers not only in terms of the landscape, but also in terms of the language
systems. Landscape and language bound inextricably together through the indigenes
had to be addressed together in order to transform space. The imposition of new linguistic systems coupled with the reordering of landscape turned a world alien and
frightening into one familiar and docile. The Church spread Christian language
throughout the given and built environments. The conquerors and their theologians
renamed people, places, and things, reframing the New World. Natives were pushed to
imagine the world as a Christian world, filled with angels and demons and controlled
RACE 283
by the providential hand of the Christian God. They also pressed native speakers to
announce their humanity in new enunciative regimes, both orally and through writing.
Indigenes were constrained to think themselves in new languages, thereby helping to
solidify a new vision of themselves.
Language indeed created a world. Yet more importantly, Christian language performed in the New World established a new reality of evaluation, a pedagogical
imperialism energized by the pastoralist vision that inscribed all natives and slaves
as eternal students. If peoples were squeezed inside a new utility by colonialism, then
through the Church ’ s vision they were pushed inside a new reality of monitoring. This
was best exemplified by the African slave. The African slave stood at the bottom of a
Christianized process of valuing and evaluating bodies in terms of their docility, diligent
labor, obedience, intellectual abilities, spiritual capacity, and moral character. This
treatment of the African slave gave witness to a character of relations within which
Christian theologians would learn their most definitive intellectual gestures. Inside this
pedagogical imperialism, Christian theology would form a vision of orthodoxy that
emphasized linguistic conformity and mastery over thought patterns. However, the
formation of the theological imagination in the New World cannot be fully grasped
without recognizing the generative power of the racial imagination. At the nexus of
pastoralist and pastoral vision, whiteness emerged not only as an anchoring reality
of racial vision but also a facilitating reality of racial existence.
Whiteness and blackness were bound together, but whiteness functioned at two
levels. At the first level it flowed inside processes of identification and comparison of
bodies. Europeans marked bodies, theirs and others, as white or almost white. They
announced characteristics of racial being bound to whiteness. Yet at another level
whiteness conditioned the possibilities of becoming. Native peoples ’ life – strategies and
life – courses moved inside a racial trajectory toward an endless becoming enfolded by
white bodies. This endless becoming was like a death and rebirth. Indigenous peoples
found that their journeys of life – toward adulthood, leadership, and participation in
their communities – were severely disrupted, attenuated, irrevocably altered, or even
destroyed. If, for example, your vision of growth, maturity, leadership, and community
all depended on the hunting of buffalo in a particular land shaped by life coordinated
around specific mountains, plains, valleys, plants, and bodies of water, what would
happen to you and your people when the buffalo were taken and you were removed
from that land, then who would you be, who would you become?
With unprecedented speed this kind of dilemma confronted countless peoples in the
New World. They were left with only a few options, one of the most obvious being to
turn life toward new trajectories made possible by the new arrangement of relations:
economic, social, cultural, military, and, most important, spatial. It was precisely this
new arrangement of relations that gave whiteness its supra – human characteristics.
Whiteness emerged as a reality of agency and a structure within which agency could
be articulated and acknowledged. Whiteness in this regard is more comprehensive
a reality than could be captured with the ideas of European hegemony, or white
supremacy. Whiteness became a way to perform normalcy – a way to see, imagine, and
articulate the common, the human in all its complexity – while also creating the abnormal, and the different. Thus it carried from its New World beginnings a visibility and
284 WILLIE JENNINGS
an invisibility, a presence and an absence, an aesthetic permeability, and a dependence
on and yet an independence from any Old World people or any particular indigenous
people, whether in Africa, the Americas, Asia, or other parts of the colonialist theater.
In effect, it took over many aspects of the identifying work that once belonged to the
land. Whiteness became the signified that also signifies because the land no longer did
so. The land became inert, dead ground existing only in potential, in need of creative
working and constantly reworking, in need of ownership, in need of its rebirth as
private property.
Race and racial identity exists in proxy for the earth, for land. It is the absolute beginnings of modernity – the movement away from trans – individual forms of authority,
away from deep commitments to irreplaceable connections to specific ecologies, and
toward hyper – individuation and fixation on the human body and its agency as the locus
of identity. The Church and Christian theology in its colonialist frame accommodated
this modernity and thereby wed racial existence and especially whiteness to its social
imagination, making way for a refined process of racial assimilation bound to Christian
formation. The emergence of racial identity as something people see as natural could
only have come about with the powerful conceptual support of Christianity. In effect,
the racial condition shows us a deformed doctrine of creation, what Dietrich Bonhoeffer
would call an example of sicut deus, a false image of God at war with the imago Dei, the
authentic image of God ( 1997 : 113).
The central tragedy of the racial condition is how it has stolen from the Church its
revolutionary power of belonging in Christ. People from vastly different regions, histories, and ways of life through the optic of race imagine themselves or imagine others
as part of a white race, or a black race, or something in – between. The point here is not
how they designate themselves. The point is the power to imagine connection, belonging. In almost all cases such racial imagining is always stronger, more enduring, and
more decisive than ecclesial belonging. Moreover, even in places where other forms of
belonging are strong – of clan, tribe, or people – the Church, crippled by its colonialist –
born disease, is utterly impotent in the face of ethnic strife, becoming in many cases
simply the church of a particular people and not a place for the radical belonging of
all people. Thus the Church itself has been baptized into racial existence and is in need
of a way forward.
The Church and Baroque Baptism
Racial existence, ironically, emerged as unstable existence. Indigenous peoples and
immigrants in the New World experienced this instability as they sought to become
white or be identified as close to white as possible. No one was born white. You had to
achieve your whiteness by placing your body at the social, economic, and spatial intersection of where, on the one hand, you could approximate white bodies in manner,
mood, and/or make – up, and, on the other, you could perform evaluative gestures that
distanced your body from nonwhite bodies. Most importantly, you had to make it impossible that you would be identified with black people, as somehow appropriately cast with
them. This was the overarching reality of immigrant transformation in the West, espe
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cially in North America, where hopeful immigrants pressed their identities inside the
strictures of race. Sometimes their transformation required becoming Christian or
entering new forms of Christian life. Sometimes the Christianity that they knew in the
old country now placed in the new land of America became the tool that helped them
transform. And sometimes their ethnic churches became the islands of safety in the
face of the failures of transformation, or the sites of resistance as they realized that they
did not wish to be white.
Colonizers, however, never achieved complete assimilation of natives because indigenous life and African slave life merged in powerful ways with colonial life forms to yield
unforeseen mixed cultural and social realities that changed the Africans, indigenes, and
Europeans. This was a point of hope. These groups created, by choice, necessity, or
circumstance, baroque new worlds. By baroque, I am referring to forms of mixture –
cultural, social, physical, spatial, architectural, and artistic – that lumped, layered, or
wove together different, distinct, sometimes oppositional, even inappropriate materials,
thought forms, rituals, physical gestures, languages, and life patterns to create unanticipated forms of expression and existence (Zamora and Kaup, 2010 : 4, 212 – 40). This
miscegenational, mestizo, or mulatto way of existence grew outside and inside the
Church, often nurtured by Christian faith ’ s deep theological structures, and represented a new possibility at work inside the death – dealing operations of conquest,
slavery, and colonialism (Gruzinski, 2002 : 45 – 51). Sometimes this way of existence
was overlooked, hidden from eyes insensitive to newness, unaware of the movement of
the Spirit of God to reconcile all flesh through the life of Jesus Christ. More often this
way of existence was ignored, despised, or suppressed by ecclesial authorities captured
by visions of cultural or racial purity that were coordinated with images of moral purity
and social acceptability.
This baroque way of life echoed our beginning as Gentiles joined to a Jewish hope,
as outsiders brought near by the blood of Christ. We are those who have been joined
to worlds not our own, words and stories not our own, hopes and dreams not our own,
but made ours with Israel through the Son of God. It is precisely the mixed way of our
salvation that generates a Christian baroque possibility. However the historical shame
of the church has been our unwillingness to remember that we were Gentiles joined to
Jesus (Eph. 2:11 – 22). We have always resisted the mulatto character of our faith, the
beautiful weakness of our claims to truth, the lovely brokenness of our voices as we
utter (translated) words born of another people, of Israel. The colonial moment saw
our resistance to Gentile weakness joined to grotesque hubris that yielded our current
racial condition. We are Christians with a weak sense of belonging to one another and
a lukewarm desire for joining.
The modern Church carries in its common life a profound struggle over how
Christians should imagine their life together. We struggle with two ways of life together,
one bound up in the racial condition and the other found in the baroque way of our
baptism. Indeed, we are caught between two competing baptisms, with two mirror
baptismal rites, and two forms of baptismal consciousness. The way forward for the
Church cannot be simply to invoke baptismal confession, commitment, and identity
without realizing its demonic deployment in the formation of the New World. That
demonic deployment created not only a false vision of humanity but a process of
286 WILLIE JENNINGS
creation that must be challenged and turned toward the body of our savior, the Jewish
Jesus. What might that challenge and the turning look like?
The baptism of homogeneity must be turned to a baptism of the multitude
The racial condition has been about creation through destruction and the rise of unrelenting homogeneities. Churches in the West are yet to understand their own love of
homogeneity. We have naturalized a formation process that is nothing less than the
emergence of totalitarian subjectivities that grew out of a mass upheaval of peoples,
places, and ways of life. In so doing, we have robbed the baptisms we perform of their
message of death and rebirth into Jesus Christ. A family gathered around a baptismal
font or a congregation staring at a baptismal pool often see themselves reflected in those
waters, either remembering their own baptism, or contemplating the joy of their community gathered for that event. Neither thought is wrong, but neither yet sees what the
waters hold. This child or adult enters through the waters of baptism the body of Jesus
filled with different bodies, spanning space and time. The newly baptized are set on a
journey that will bind them to peoples they have not seen, to ways of life they have not
known, and endow them with a holy desire to love other people different from the
people who brought them to those waters. This is the fire born of baptism that they will
carry. Only a counter – desire, a counter – commitment could quiet this flame.
It is, however, precisely this counter – commitment that they meet immediately after
their baptism. Churches in so many ways tell the newly baptized that they belong only
to Jesus and to their people. They tell them that no journey toward others is required,
only recommended, and that their baptism was not an event of disruption, but one
smoothly seamless with their life in that community, with their race, and their people.
But a baptism that does not frighten us is a baptism invisible to us. Baptism means that
our baptized loved one may, by the desire of the Spirit of God working in them, decide
to love others we don ’ t want them to love, others we don ’ t like, others that we believe
are troublesome and that we do not want among us. Separate – but – equal thinking has
always been with us and the Church has always been poised to reveal itself the stumbling block of offense to such thinking. Unfortunately, we have closeted our identity as
stumbling blocks. Yet we will not enter into the power of our baptism through theological assertion alone. Other crucial steps are required.
The waters of baptism must be released from their containment
The racial condition is also a spatial reality. Until we reckon with its spatiality, we cannot
grasp the malignancy at work in our ecclesial life. The earth, the ground has been separated from people and transformed into pure utility, pure tool. The power of racial
identification flows within the turnings of spatial fragmentation and land distribution.
Yet Christians have been shamefully ignorant of the spaces we inhabit or the spatial
dimensions of identity reformation and deployment. We are constantly being pressed
to follow place creation and land distribution determined by the market. With little
RACE 287
fanfare or resistance, Christians around the world often accept such determinations. In
addition, we are continuously being mapped geographically, plotted on scales and
charts of consumptive desire, financial viability, social and political allegiances, and
cultural longings. Others know where we live, but churches often don ’ t know where
they live.
Racial existence depends on ongoing spatial fragmentation. Spatial fragmentation is
a crucial operation of capitalism which needs to create ever smaller and more tightly
controlled commodity chains (Dunn, 2008 : 50 – 75). Even ethnic identities exist (or are
created) within such chains and present possibilities of micro – fragmentation that
harden racial identities and routinize their life performance (Comaroff and Comaroff,
2009 : 68 – 85). Markets, especially real estate markets, count on our acquiescence to
spatial fragmentation that nurtures racial existence. Baptism, however, is about placement, revolutionary placement. Our baptism points to the body of God placed in water
for our sake. Water, that substance that the entire world needs, that substance that
carries the power to overcome every kind of containment, has been seized by the body
of God for holy use, life – giving use. Through baptism we entered those mighty waters
and we emerged from the water filled with its power, power to nurture life and to overcome boundaries. This is not a power of our own, but the power of the One who fulfilled
all righteousness in being baptized (Matt. 3:13 – 15).
Churches must be about the business of engaging place and space. Our way back to
a healthy doctrine of creation demands that we engage the powers of spatial fragmentation and commodification and challenge a demonic process of desacralization of the
earth that began when the Church and the kingdoms of this world joined forces to claim
the world as private property. What specific strategy Churches employ will depend on
listening carefully to the Spirit of God as our God guides us in where, how, and with
whom we should live for the sake of our witness to the coming reign of God. Yet
we must not be self – deceived by our love of homogeneity inside of which flow market
operations. A church comfortable inside its boundaries – socioeconomic, educational,
racial, spatial – is a church formed to protect those boundaries at any cost. Such a
church has forgotten its real baptism. There is yet another crucial step that must be
taken: renunciation.
Renunciation bound to baptism is a way of life
I have heard people suggest that racial identity should be renounced or rendered inconsequential by denying its descriptive power, or even that time itself will soon bring us
to its obsolescence. These are noble sentiments, and, taken at their best, they suggest a
hope for social relations that might yield constantly humanizing results. The racial
condition, however, exists at a depth that is not beyond the hope of these sentiments
but certainly beyond their analysis. Racial existence is in part substitutionary existence
that points to the remaining fragments of identities torn from connection to specific
places, landscapes, and animals, and then reduced to the body, and finally placed
on an endless process of becoming geared to excellences configured around white
bodies. Race is a like a large cloth that covers several complex interlocking machines
288 WILLIE JENNINGS
with thousands of circuits that run through every aspect of our lives. We must understand the creative processes covered over by racial identity and then engage in the
subtle and finely tuned operation of renunciation. We must move quietly beneath this
cloth and confront the machines. Some of these machines must have their circuits
rerouted, while others must be destroyed. Others may never be destroyed by the Church,
but we must rage against them.
The work of renunciation within confronting the racial condition returns us to
renunciation as part of the rite of baptism. Although renunciation surely points to a
central work of confession and the gesture of turning away, it builds directly from the
decision to follow Jesus and live inside his repentance, his own turning away. We are
turned in and toward his body, that multitudinous body which collapses the visions of
the true, the good, and the beautiful formed by various peoples, clans, and nations. This
operation of renunciation first disrupts the processes of racial becoming which have
placed all peoples on trajectories toward the original colonialist dream of having global
significance, endless resources, and eternality. This dream bequeathed to the Western
world the facilitating image of a powerful white man as the central figure of a symbolic
universe of progress and achievement. This dream continues to work itself out in the
educational, social, cultural, and economic endeavors of peoples and individuals who
hope to secure a future for themselves and their progeny.
Baptism is also about becoming. This becoming wars against racial becoming not by
destroying images, or resisting one people and embracing another, but by joining many
different peoples through the expressed image of God (Heb. 1:3). The body of Jesus collapses every dream of global significance, endless resources, and eternality onto himself,
and turns us toward an aesthetics of the multitude where we are drawn to many visions
of the true, the good, and the beautiful, and where together we take on the ways of
many people. Renunciation in this regard breaks open and reroutes every determination of life that chains together what neighborhoods we live in to where we send our
kids to school to where we go to church to where we shop to who we will love and to
how we see ourselves, because it is precisely in such determinations that the racial
condition continues to be born anew with each generation. What we renounce is not
a single path of life, but every path of life that does not wait on the Spirit of God to
speak guiding words to us surrounded by sisters and brothers different from us who
together with us call on the name of the Lord in many tongues.
The way forward has never been hidden from us. It has always been there at the
margins where people who should not love one another do love one another. It has been
there where men and women risk all in order to be with those who are not their people,
who they make their people. There is the witness of servants of God who chose to live
their entire lives not simply with people different from them, but who chose to become
different, never leaving who they are behind but joining who they are to who they are
becoming. There is the witness of a Jew who went among Gentiles and announced the
formation of a new people, of both Jew and Gentile, and then that same Jewish man
spread his life out inside that announcement. Most importantly, there is the witness of
a God who entered the human condition, never despising its utter difference, but
making it his own and in turn making his life available to us. Perhaps, this witness that
has been at the margins of our lives may one day move to the center.
RACE 289
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