Race: What has Been Constructed can be Deconstructed

It has been a season of revealing: the murderous knee on George Floyd’s neck, the disproportionate number of people of color dying from COVID-19, and the flagrant racism depicted in Bryan Stevenson’s movie, Just Mercy. All three reveal that systemic racism did not die in the United States with the removal of Jim Crow laws in the 1950’s and 60’s. This revealing calls for response. Even so, I did not anticipate my next blog would address racism and whiteness—not because I did not think it is vitally important, but because I did not think I am the one to speak. It is a moment for this writer to take his hands off the keyboard and read others, a moment for this teacher to step away from the lectern and learn from my former students, including Marcel Woodruff (and here), Ivan Paz (and here), Noemi Vega (and here), Nathan Hunt (and here), and Dallas Nord. I have listened and read. And what has happened for decades now when I read something that grabs me? I want to share it with others. So, although in regards to racism I still think my posture should remain, predominantly, that of learner and listener, I am going to follow the internal voice that today said, “Mark, you are a teacher. Be who you are.” I read an article and am listening to a podcast series that propel the teacher in me to want to share a few insights and say “read this” and “listen to this!”

In a previous blog about whiteness I quoted Ben Franklin writing glowingly about white people and making disparaging comments about non-whites. The shocking thing was that I was in the latter category! Franklin wanted to stop the swarthy Germans from flowing into Pennsylvania and contaminating the purity of the English-Saxon culture of white people. My father’s ancestors came from Germany and settled in Franklin’s beloved Pennsylvania. Franklin’s comment made very concrete something I was learning from Willie Jennings (book, article, lecture) and some of my students mentioned above. Race is not a biological given, it is a construction. And, as Franklin’s comments display, it was as much about perspectives on superiority and inferiority as actual skin color. Of course, there have been people with different shades of skin for millennia, that is biological, but there were no racial categories of white people and black people until after Europeans started taking Africans as slaves. 

What has been constructed can be deconstructed. Understanding more of how racism was constructed will aid us in deconstructing it and constructing alternatives.

Season two of the Podcast Scene on Radio is titled “Seeing White.” The second episode “How Race was Made,” repeated and reinforced things I had already learned, yet the conciseness of some statements grabbed my attention. I share two with you.

- Exploitation came first. People were not seen as inferior and therefore enslaved. The concept of blackness as an inferior race to whiteness was developed to provide a rationale for enslaving Africans. The “enlightened” Christian Europeans needed, and came up with, a justification for the oppressive practices of their day.

- Race is constructed, but real. To say it is not a given of nature but a human invention does not mean the construction does not exist today. It does, however, mean there is opportunity for deconstruction.

One thesis of the podcast series is that working at “race relations” is not enough. Changing attitudes is not enough. Those relations and those attitudes are lived out in a system that is fundamentally racist. This coheres with what I learned from Willie Jennings: whiteness is not just certain privileges and biases, but a way of understanding land/place, property, rights, relationships, and the economy. The series seeks to display systemic aspects by exposing how exploitative racialization was intentionally woven into the fabric of this nation.

One way the podcast does this, in the third and fourth episodes, is by peeling back layers and exploring early colonial rulings and legislation about race. The chattel system of enslavement of blacks was not a given in the early days of the colonies. It developed as something distinct from indentured servitude through rulings and legislation. The definition of whiteness and the rights of whites were constructed over time. The podcast argues that power and economics were at the root of all these decisions. For instance, the first legislative body in the colonies, the Virginia House of Burgesses, crafted legislation to define who was white—and therefore those with rights. They were going to use a purity definition of whites being those without one drop of African or Native American blood. But some of the most powerful and richest men in the colony were descendants of the mixed marriage of John Rolfe and Pocahontas. So the legislation allowed that one could still be considered white with a degree of Native American blood, but no black blood. White was not a definition of biological realities; it was a category of those who had power.

There is so much more. I encourage you, listen to this podcast series!

Despair

And I want to say, “read this!” In a New Yorker book review Atul Gawande engages the question why the death rates of working-age white men and women without college degrees have increased dramatically in recent years. We have heard the immediate causes of the increase: suicide, drug overdoses, alcohol related liver diseases, but what is behind them? Despair. So argue the authors of Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. They found that locales with higher rates of people without jobs also had higher death rates. And those who are working have seen their wages stagnate or go down while they see the college educated growing wealthier. The article states, “Religious institutions previously played a vital role in connecting people to a community. But the number of Americans who attend religious services has declined markedly over the past half-century. . . (The rate is lower among non-college graduates.)” No job, less meaning and purpose, less connection—despair.

There is much more in the article that calls for reflection. I read it and wondered, “how is the church responding?” Perhaps I will return to this article in a future blog. I am wary, however, of giving it more attention in this blog because I do not want to pull the focus away from where we started—the knee on George Floyd’s neck. I do not bring this article in as an attempt to counter “Black Lives Matter” by saying “some white people have it pretty bad too.” Rather, I include it to say, “those dying of despair are hurt by whiteness as well.” And, especially, to reinforce the point that whiteness was constructed by the powerful and is used by the powerful. I will do that by pointing to similarities between what the article describe and something the podcast described.

Many whites in the south, in colonial days and after, were poor. They were not enslaved but in other ways they too were exploited by the powerful elite. This wealthy minority, that controlled the economic structures, hindered the flourishing of the poor whites. But the elite used racial categories to create a white-black division rather than an oppressor-oppressed division. Even though in reality poor whites had more in common with slaves than the slaveowners, the powerful turned them against blacks and created unity through having a common other. The racial prejudices that poor whites developed against blacks did nothing to help the concrete situation of the poor whites. How about today? What have some of the rich and powerful said to the working-class whites dying of despair today? Have those with power worked to address the root causes of despair? No, they have shifted the poor white’s angry gaze from the white elite who continue to prosper, in part by moving industries and jobs to other countries, and have told those in despair that the cause of their problems is brown-skinned people from south of the border. 

In each case racial difference was used to scapegoat one group of people and create a superficial unity, a racial unity, that ignored deep differences and injustices. Every layer of these actions is opposite to the way of Jesus seen in the gospels and counter to the movement of the Spirit observed Acts. Let us be aware of how race may be used today as a tool to enable some to continue to oppress others and to create false divisions between people.

Final Thoughts

I want to underline, I write this blog mostly to say, listen to this podcast, read this article, and join me in learning from Willie Jennings and my former students listed above. With a spirit of humility of one still learning and one enmeshed in systems of whiteness, I end with a few implications of the above observations for us as followers of Jesus.

- The God revealed by Jesus Christ stands against categorizing groups of people as inferior or superior to others, and through the liberating power of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection we have the possibility of living in ways of unity and respect radically different than our racially sick society.

- Systemic problems are revealed through George Floyd’s death, through COVID-19, and descriptions of the criminal justice system like Just Mercy. Part of the problem is individuals who are profoundly racist, but it is much more than that. (And even those individuals are products of systems.) Deep repairs are needed.

- At the core of racial categorization are some things that I address directly through the Discipleship and Ethics course and website—Mammon, Greed, Consumerism. But there are other things at the core that are so much part of the air I breathe that it is hard for me to imagine alternatives. I want to. As followers of Jesus we are called to and enabled to. Join me.

Whiteness

I recently read derogatory comments a prominent political leader made about non-white immigrants swarming into our towns and cities and ruining our way of life. It was not Donald Trump, but Benjamin Franklin. And the threatening masses were not Latinos from south of the border, but immigrants from Germany—my ancestors.

“Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.” – what follows is an excerpt from the 1751 original by Benjamin Franklin

[W]hy should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.

I have always been labeled as white—by myself and others. Yet not according to Ben Franklin. My ancestors are the exact people he sees as a threat to whites. They came from Germany and swarmed into Franklin’s beloved Pennsylvania. My father is a 6th generation German-American. And even after five generations in Pennsylvania they still spoke German. My grandfather did not learn English until he went to school. According to Franklin I am not white, but a swarthy German—a threat to the ways of whiteness.

It is common place to observe that most of those who complain about immigrants today are part of ethnic groups that once were slandered and scorned in similar ways. Franklin’s comments reinforce that important observation. Important, but not new for me. What was new for me was the realization that there was a time when some people would not have seen me as white.

I thought of whiteness as a biological trait—a given, about DNA, not based on subjective perceptions. But Franklin labels as non-white a whole host of people that I would have thought of as clearly, biologically, white. We could get into shades of paleness, and say Franklin is talking about people whose skin is REALLY pale. I do happen to be a bit darker skinned than my two brothers, perhaps I got more of the swarthy German blood and they got a bit more of my mother’s Irish, English and Dutch blood. But if it had been Irish, instead of Germans, swarming into Pennsylvania would Franklin have said anything different? If he can label the Swedes swarthy, he would have found a way to call the Irish non-white as well.

What is whiteness for Franklin? Although he links it to a physical trait, skin color, it clearly is first and foremost about culture, language--a way of life that is deemed superior to others. Franklin’s whiteness is not a biological given, it is subjective and constructed. Realizing something is constructed, not a given, creates space for evaluation. (I remember distinctly the new space I felt to evaluate the dispensationalism I had grown up with when I found it had been developed in the 19th century. I had assumed it was the way people had always read the Bible.) Franklin’s comments point to whiteness not being what I thought it was and invite taking a step back and asking: what is whiteness?

Prejudice, discrimination, one people group feeling superior and oppressing another has gone on for millennia. But categorizing people by race—skin color and physical features--is relatively new. Willie Jennings, in his book The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, locates the origins of racial categorization in the African slave trade. There were no black people in Africa until they were ripped away from their land and tribe, which had given them identity, and were mixed together with people of other tribes on a boat. Before, Akan or Yoruba, now black. Using primary sources from the colonial period Jennings chronicles in great depth how whiteness developed as Europeans sought ways to legitimize enslavement, subjugation, or destruction of native peoples in Africa and the Americas. As Franklin displays, whites were considered superior. Others’ racial categorizations of whiteness, however, were much broader than Franklin’s. For instance the Spanish and Portuguese, very “swarthy” and definitely not white according to Franklin, led the way in developing whiteness, and very much put themselves in that category.

In some ways the category “white” was fuzzy and clearly not first and foremost about skin color. For instance on slave ships all slaves were black and all crew members, of whatever shade, were considered white.[1] In other ways the categorization sought precision and exactness. Different people group’s status, intellect, and ability were linked to where they landed on the light-dark spectrum. The Spanish had intricate charts categorizing people depending on how much Spanish, African or indigenous blood they had—16 different categories![2]

We see in these examples the same thing observed in Franklin. In one sense it is all about skin color, but in another sense skin color is a convenient vehicle that is flexed and stretched. Jennings displays that whiteness was developed as a way to interpret, organize and narrate the world, and, crucially, to legitimize certain peoples’ perspectives as the central facilitating reality in the world.[3] It was about so much more than skin color. In her recent thesis Noemi Vega captures, concisely, some of the breadth and depth that Jennings’s words point to.

Racial formation began with a forceful social imagination that saw the world through a white human ideal. This ideal would be used to re-create and reinterpret human bodies and their worth along a racial scale for economic profit, becoming a hegemonic orientation of reality. Whiteness is the power to sustain the social imagination that promotes white bodies. It is hegemonic in usurping identity rooted in connectedness to land and one another and promoting an individualized identity formed apart from geography, history, or common memory. Whiteness didn’t just privilege white bodies, it also shaped societal and economic structures such as the racist immigration laws in the early twentieth century . . . Whiteness further institutionalized racism through Jim Crow laws and continued to flourish even after emancipation. Whiteness impacted the way people lived, by replacing the communal lifestyle of indigenous peoples with an entrepreneurial, capitalistic one focused on material profit.[4]

The above paragraphs begins to answer the question: what is whiteness? The question, however, calls for much more exploration, and reflection on how to respond, than I can do in one blog. I will offer an invitation and a few short observations.

Invitation

In the last three years I worked with three students who used Willie Jennings’s book in their thesis. I read Jennings's book myself, and used it as a text in my Contemporary Theology course. I have learned from and been challenged by Jennings and each of the three theses. Although having use of Jennings in common, each thesis asks different questions and uses his work in distinct ways. I recommend them highly and invite you to read them.

Willie Jennings

A great place to start is his short article in the Spring 2015 Divinity, the Duke Divinity School magazine—pages 5-9, “Overcoming Racial Faith.”

Explore in his book, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race in great depth what is summarized in the above article

A short article that focuses on land and place in relation to this theme, including comments by Jennings on ways for churches to respond: “Possessed by the Land: An Interview with Deanna Zantingh and Willie James Jennings.” 

Videos of presentations by Willie Jennings:  “Race, Faith, and Community”  and “Disrupting Image: Overcoming the White Aesthetic Regime”

Jennings has written a theological commentary on Acts, just released. I have not read it, but look forward to doing so.

Students who used Jennings’s book in their theses – they are available electronically from the Fresno Pacific University library via these links.

• Nathan Hunt, “On Earth as it is in Heaven: Place, Shalom, and the Creation of the World,” 2016

• Ivan Paz, “The Myth of Ontological Human Sinfulness: How the Notion that Humans are Inherently Sinful Contributes to the Institutional Scapegoating of the Urban Poor,” 2015.

• Noemi Vega, “Entre Nos: Covenant Epistemology and a Theology of Immanuel for Racial Healing Among Us,” 2017.

Observations

I long ago recognized the reality of white privilege—that many doors open easier for me than for people of color. Through reading Nathan’s thesis I recognized that whiteness is much more than just perks and privileges that I have as an individual. Reading Noemi and Willie built on and expanded that awareness. Important as it is to work at that micro level of individual opportunity and privilege we must go further than that. Let these authors point the way.

It is hard for me as a white person to see whiteness. It is the way things are, normal—a given. If you are white, I invite you to let these authors help you see the water you swim in. They provide a helpful mix of perspectives: an African-American, Euro-American, Mexican/Salvadoran-American, and Mexican-American.

As the subtitle to Jennings’s book implies, theology is not a separate entity that we bring into this conversation. Theology has been woven into whiteness and racial thinking since the first days of slavery and the first days of the conquest of the Americas. One response to that is to observe that if theology contributed to the weaving of that tapestry it can also contribute to weaving a new tapestry. But, we cannot use the same threads. Before we start weaving anew we must recognize how theology was distorted through its use in the tapestry of whiteness and race. In different ways each of the authors help us see distortions and point to alternatives.

Place – so much more I could say here, but I just will call attention to the fact that all four authors give attention to place. Something that whiteness has downplayed in theology and life.

Much of Jennings work is history, yet it is a book rooted in and centered on Jesus. That sings forth on the first page and the last section. Jennings is not pitting black theology against other theology, nor just calling for equality. He dares to believe and hope that through Jesus we can experience intimacy--something beyond racial equality. Let us not, however, simply celebrate that Willie Jennings, like us, sees Jesus as the answer and move on. We must take very seriously the hundreds of pages of work he did digging deep into the history of whiteness and the theology woven into that history. If we simply state Jesus is the answer and ignore the way whiteness has influenced us and our view of Jesus, we will not experience the intimacy that Jennings points to. That is because, as Nathan Hunt has observed, whiteness as principality and power, including the supremacy and hierarchy it establishes, forms character that is diametrically opposed to the identity and character provided by Jesus through the Spirit. (Compare, for instance the words of Benjamin Franklin with the actions of Jesus or words of Paul.) The intimacy Jennings points to requires transformation of character. As explored in a part of this website, character change is not quick or easy.

Let us dare to look honestly at how whiteness and race have shaped us (whether white or people of color); let us dare to look honestly at ways that common conceptions of Jesus have been clothed in garments of whiteness, and let us risk, at the micro and macro level, allowing the Spirit of Jesus to guide us in imagining and living in new paradigms. Let these authors guide you in first steps. May the result be greater intimacy in Jesus.

[1] Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven, CN: Yale, 2010), 180.

[2] Jennings, 80.

[3] Willie James Jennings, “Overcoming Racial Faith,” Divinity: Duke University, 14, no. 2 (April 2015): 9

[4] Noemi Vega Quiñones, “Entre Nos: Covenant Epistemology and a Theology of Immanuel for Racial Healing Among Us” (MA thesis, Fresno Pacific Biblical Seminary, 2017), 15-16.