Burying White Privilege: Resurrecting a Badass Christianity

by Miguel A. de la Torre

I (and all people of color) am forced to be fluent in Eurocentric philosophy and theology. To reject the worldview of those who excluded the colonized, attempting to construct my theological view on my own cultural context, is to risk being dismissed as unscholarly or exotic. No institution of higher education within the United States would have granted me a PhD if I were not fluent in Hegel, Heidegger, or Habermas. And yet my white colleagues are deemed rigorous scholars without ever having to read Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, José Martí, or Miguel de Unamuno. I must be fluent in Eurocentric thought and knowledgeable about the contributions made by scholars relegated to the underside of the academy. While this double-consciousness gives me a broader and more rigorous grasp of reality than my white colleagues have, still a large number of those colleagues insist that affirmative action was responsible for my professorship.