I Bring the Voices of My People: A Womanist Vision for Racial Reconciliation (Prophetic Christianity)

by Chanequa Walker-Barnes

We know firsthand that such proximity does not protect us from the abuses of racism; it often renders us more susceptible. Womanists demand reconciliation that confronts inequalities in power, privilege, and access. Its telos is not simply the cessation of racial hostility; it is the establishment of justice and liberation for all women and men . . . regardless.

And while millions of lives have been claimed by wars between countries whose very identities are based upon boundaries imagined by humans, there is no push to abolish nationality as a category of identity. The discomfort with the idea of race, then, is not really about ontology or constructionism. It is about the discomfort with acknowledging the real problem: racism, or more specifically, White supremacy.

But racism is not about our feelings. Nor is it about the attitudes, intentions, or behavior of individuals. Racism is an interlocking system of oppression that is designed to promote and maintain White supremacy, the notion that White people—including their bodies, aesthetics, beliefs, values, customs, and culture—are inherently superior to all other races and therefore should wield dominion over the rest of creation, including other people groups, the animal kingdom, and the earth itself.

“The structural domain organizes oppression, whereas the disciplinary domain manages it. The hegemonic domain justifies oppression, and the interpersonal domain influences everyday lived experience and the individual consciousness that ensues.”

White supremacy is that it rank-orders the value of humanity based on proximity to whiteness. The closer one is to whiteness, the more value she is believed to have. This rank ordering has taken various forms and rationales over time, evolving to incorporate newly immigrating ethnic groups. One thing that has remained constant in the racial hierarchy has been that Black identity is always on the bottom. This is why the Black-White binary is important in racial reconciliation.

Bonilla-Silva proposes that the US racial caste system is evolving from the simple biracial continuum (i.e., white and black) to a triracial stratification similar to that of many Latin American and Caribbean countries.

In other words, no one is untouched by White supremacy.

“Racism robs all of us of the ability to think for ourselves.”

Racism is not “one-size-fits-all” but is meted out in distinct ways to nonwhite groups based on their position in the racial hierarchy and the degree to which they are viewed as threats or resources to the interests of White supremacy. This understanding of racism directly challenges the prevailing Christian paradigm for racial reconciliation, which assumes that increasing interpersonal contact between people of different races will reduce feelings of racial hostility. But racism is ultimately not about our relationships or our feelings.

however, racism is not about race or racial difference. Racism is a complex matrix of power that is designed to protect and promulgate White supremacy. It is not meted out symmetrically to all racial-ethnic groups. Rather, it operates according to differing logics—commodification, extermination, demonization, and indoctrination—based on the particular challenge that each racial-ethnic group poses to the interests of White supremacy.

Consequently, the same bill that made discrimination illegal has also made it nearly impossible to rectify the damage of centuries of systemic racial discrimination. It overemphasizes intent rather than impact and individual behavior rather than systemic patterns.

By design, White supremacy works by convincing all peoples—not just White people—of its truth.

“Racism robs all of us of the ability to think for ourselves.”

This Bridge Called My Back. Quintanales, for example, states: “Yes, lighter-than-black skin color may confer on some ethnic minority women the option of becoming ‘assimilated,’ ‘integrated,’ in mainstream American society. But is this really a privilege when it always means having to become invisible, those-like, identity-less, community-less, totally alienated? The perils of ‘passing’ as white Americans are perils indeed.”79

It is ironic, then, that given the centuries of policies designed to protect whiteness, there is so much resistance to naming it.

The pre–Civil War American economy was dependent upon slavery, and the maintenance of slavery depended upon White acquiescence.

Wendell Berry, for example, states: If white people have suffered less obviously from racism than black people, they have nevertheless suffered greatly; the cost has been greater perhaps than we can yet know. If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself. As the master, or as a member of the dominant race, he has felt little compulsion to acknowledge it or speak of it; the more painful it has grown the more deeply he has hidden it within himself. But the wound is there, and it is a profound disorder, as great a damage in his mind as it is in his society.25

“a particular type of psychological trauma characterized by intense guilt, shame, and spiritual crisis, which can develop when one violates his or her moral beliefs, is betrayed, or witnesses trusted individuals committing atrocities.”

Poor Whites are labeled “White trash” for having failed to conform to middle-class standards of achievement, success, and productivity; and they are frequently made scapegoats for the racial failings of White Americans broadly.46 And Whites who are perceived to be too similar or sympathetic to Blacks or other people of color are labeled as traitors to their own kind. In both cases, the message is clear: “real” White people behave as other White people do. They conform.

“Hiding behind color blindness makes it difficult, if not impossible, to see how white privileged beliefs and habits continue to function in one’s life. The result is a strange kind of pride in one’s interpersonal cluelessness. . . . White people’s epistemic failure is simultaneously spiritual because of the hubristic pride taken in white ignorance, camouflaged as moral innocence and goodness.”

Because the US is a White supremacist society in which whiteness is considered both normative and superior, White people can—and most often do—live free from daily awareness of race and racism. Consequently, they lack (1) an awareness of how their own personalities, identities, and cultural preferences have been shaped by whiteness; (2) the vocabulary and rudimentary knowledge base needed to discuss structural racism competently; and (3) the biopsychosocial stamina to withstand racial stress. Their solutions to racism, then, tend to emphasize efforts that remain within their comfort zone: establishing cross-racial friendships and multicultural congregations. This, however, is not reconciliation. It does nothing to repair the harm of systemic racism or to dismantle the system of White supremacy. It is a therapeutic approach designed to make White people feel better about the unjust system in which they live and with which they are complicit.

In a womanist ethic of reconciliation, the primary focus of healing is not the relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor; it is the restoration to wholeness of the victim herself.

Racial reconciliation, then, must be invested in healing the bodily, mental, socioemotional, spiritual, and financial wounds inflicted by White supremacy.

“So often white people, when a deep pain with regard to racism is uncovered, want it to be immediately addressed, healed, released. Black people have had to live with the wounds of racism for generations. Even goodwill and hard work won’t make the person’s hurts cease.”

But Jesus’s acts of healing for the marginalized are distinct from his calls for their repentance.

Moreover, it points to the potentially transformative power of breaking relationship, which may not only facilitate the liberation and healing of the oppressed but also the repentance and repair of the oppressor.

The telos, or divine “endgame,” for racial reconciliation is not restored relationship between Whites and people of color. It is not, as one ministry colleague, activist Onleilove Alston, once sarcastically described it, the image of “a big Black dude and a White dude on a stage, hugging it out with a single tear rolling down their cheeks.”73 It is the establishment of a just world, one in which racial inequities have been abolished. This means that the current practices, policies, and societal norms that disadvantage people of color or advantage White people must be abolished and corrected.

The prevailing models of racial reconciliation within largely White evangelical and mainline Christian communities fall far short of what is needed to adequately address racism and repair its legacy. Having been disproportionately articulated and advocated by White Christians, racial reconciliation has heavily emphasized the importance of proximity, dialogue, bridge building, forgiveness, and friendship, while largely excluding issues of liberation, justice, and transformation. Much of what passes for racial reconciliation feels like an interracial playdate. Whites leave the playground feeling good about their new friend of color, but the material realities of people of color are unchanged.

Racial reconciliation is a social justice movement that focuses upon dismantling White supremacy, the systemic evil that denies and distorts the image of God inherent in all humans based upon the heretical belief that White aesthetics, values, and cultural norms bear the fullest representation of the imago Dei.

To be a Christian, then, is to be committed to God’s mission of reconciliation. This means that racial reconciliation is neither a solely interpersonal nor a solely economic interaction. It is our responsiveness to God’s offer of new life in Christ. We cannot opt out of it. We are either working toward justice and reconciliation, or we are not Christian—period.

In merely human terms, racial reconciliation is most certainly impossible. But as followers of Christ, possibility is not a criterion for our faithful obedience.

Racism, at both the individual and systemic levels, is predicated upon unequal power distribution that always favors whiteness. Racism is not an interpersonal situation in which both partners are equally culpable. There is a victim and there is an oppressor.

South African pastor Trevor Hudson says that each of us stands beside a pool of tears, the summation of our historical and current experiences of pain, hardship, and oppression.

Grace enables us to see beyond the superficialities of a person’s being and to imagine that there is always more beneath the surface of any person (or group of people) than can easily be seen.

We come to realize that racial reconciliation in the United States is impossible precisely because it demands that we attempt to transcend white supremacy while still ensconced in the bodies that have been racialized by white supremacy. It demands that we find ways to redeem the constructs of race while eradicating racism. It demands that we learn how to become a new people even as White racism continues its assault on people of color.

It demands that our struggle against racism also engage sexism, heterosexism, classism, ableism, xenophobia, and all forms of oppression. And it demands that we do this from the margins, being led by those who bear the brunt of oppression, those who live at the intersections. It is impossible. Fortunately, nothing is impossible for God (Matt. 19:26). And as followers of the risen Christ, we are called to believe in the impossible every day.