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

by Chanequa Walker-Barnes

Racial reconciliation focuses its efforts 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. White supremacy thus maintains that White people are superior to all other peoples, and it orders creation, identities, relationships, and social structures in ways that support this distortion and denial. I

race, racism, and reconciliation operate. Three such misperceptions seem to dominate the Christian racial reconciliation paradigm: (1) race is a social construct and therefore not real; (2) racism is the sin that results from division based upon the social construction of race; and (3) reconciliation occurs by increasing interpersonal contact between people of different races.

Until recently, much of the thinking about race in the United States has been dominated by classical racialism, the belief that race is an ontological biological reality.

The second frame, naturalization, justifies and dismisses racial disparities by claiming that they occur naturally rather than as the result of intentional practices and policies of exclusion. This frame is often employed by Whites to rationalize school and neighborhood segregation.34 For example, employing the naturalization frame, a White Christian might claim that worshipping in an all-White congregation is acceptable because people “naturally” gravitate toward people who are like them.

Finally, the fourth frame, minimization of racism, simply posits that racial discrimination is a phenomenon of the past that no longer impacts the lives and the opportunities of ethnic minorities. Alternatively, people using this frame may acknowledge that discrimination continues to exist but that it is an aberrant occurrence.36 This frame is often used in response to antiblack police violence. With each new incident that garners national attention, many White Americans resort to “bad apple” logic, refusing to believe that the repeated violence is a symptom of a systemic problem and instead attributing it to the isolated behavior of a few “bad” police officers. This frame is also evoked when people claim that racist attitudes, beliefs, and behavior belong only to “evil” White people.

Collins notes that racism operates through a complex matrix of four types of power: structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal. Structural power involves the way in which societal systems and institutions are structured to create and reproduce patterns of racial injustice over time, including in educational, economic, government, criminal justice, housing, and health care systems. The disciplinary domain includes the regulations and practices that sustain bureaucratic systems, as well as the “gatekeepers” who control who can access and benefit from these systems. The hegemonic domain consists of the ideologies, ideas, images, and symbols that shape how we think about the world, such as our ideals about femininity, masculinity, intelligence, professionalism, and leadership. It includes the stereotypes that form our basest assumptions about what racial identity represents: from the “hot-blooded Latina” to the doting mammy. Finally, the interpersonal domain includes the ways in which individuals and groups interact with one another.

It bears repeating that racism is not about our feelings. The fact that our neighborhood remained White for so long is a result of racism within the structural domain. Most of our elderly neighbors purchased their homes in the sixties, when legalized housing segregation would have barred African Americans from the community. Today, disparities in intergenerational wealth mean that even highly educated, middle-class African Americans cannot afford the high down payments required in the post-mortgage crisis economy.

Bonilla-Silva’s concept of a triracial caste system is crucial to understanding race and racism in the United States for several reasons. First, it highlights the variability in experiences of racial privilege and oppression among nonwhite groups, even among those who might be broadly categorized in the same racial group. In other words, racism is not one-size-fits-all. It does not impact all people of color in the same way. Nor does it necessarily impact all people within one racial-ethnic group in the same way. A light-skinned Mexican American who can “pass” for White will likely have a quite different experience of racialization and racism than a dark-skinned Mexican American. “Racism deniers” will often use the relatively privileged racial perspectives of “honorary Whites” in order to dismiss claims of racism by those within the “collective Black” group.

This reformulation of four pillars of White supremacy encompasses the shifting strategies that racial oppression takes. The pillars represent the various questions that White supremacy poses upon encountering nonwhite peoples of the world: Should we exploit them (i.e., commodification)? Should we eradicate them (i.e., extermination)? Should we villify them (i.e., demonization)? Should we assimilate them (i.e., indoctrination)?

To reiterate, 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.

Recall from the prior chapter that racism is designed to promote and maintain White supremacy, which is the belief that White people are inherently superior to all other races in every respect, including their bodies, intellect, aesthetics, beliefs, values, behaviors, and customs. By design, White supremacy works by convincing all peoples—not just White people—of its truth. Recall again the diversity workshop facilitator’s statement, “Racism robs all of us of the ability to think for ourselves.” When people of color internalize the view that whiteness is superior to all other races (including their own), we call this internalized oppression.

of their fatherless children in a patriarchal and racist society in which Whites

An intersectional understanding of racial reconciliation rejects outright the lie that reconciliation is about relationship. It instead centers upon dismantling White supremacy and White power structures. This understanding requires far more of White people than making a Black friend; indeed, it requires more of White people than it does people of color. But can the people who embody the very construct—whiteness—responsible for racism really be expected to dismantle it? Or does White racial identity pose an insurmountable obstacle to racial justice? I turn my attention to those questions in the next chapter.

Recall that a central claim of this book is that racism is a complex system of power designed to promote and maintain White supremacy, the belief that White cultural values, beliefs, aesthetics, and yes, even people are inherently superior to those of all other people groups.

My objective in this chapter, therefore, is to wrestle with the problem of whiteness from my unique vantage point as a pastoral theologian and a licensed psychologist. I will not attempt to provide a history of the construction of whiteness, nor will I spend time trying to prove the existence and impact of “White privilege.” Instead, as someone trained in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness and dysfunctional family systems, I want to explore the notion of whiteness as a sociocultural system, indeed as a condition of moral injury, into which all White Americans—regardless of their particular ethnic heritage or immigration history—are socialized and in which they participate daily in ways that continuously reinforce White supremacy and undermine racial justice.

To be White in America was—and still is—at the top of the racial hierarchy and thus automatically eligible for the full rights and benefits of American citizenship. As Painter notes, “A notion of freedom lies at the core of the American idea of whiteness. Accordingly, the concept of slavery—at any time in any society—calls up racial difference, carving a permanent chasm of race between the free and the enslaved.”10 In other words, to be White was, and is still, to be free. In contrast, to be any other race is to have one’s rights and freedoms diminished. To be Black, in particular, is to be at the bottom of the racial hierarchy and to have one’s very humanity called into question. This is the essence of White supremacy and White racial ideology.

Thus, as James Cone argued in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, the failure to grapple with White supremacy, including its past and contemporary expressions, is at the heart of the failure of White Christianity. Christian seminaries continue to replicate this failure through their teaching. The idea that “Whites could claim a Christian identity without feeling the need to oppose slavery, segregation, and lynching as a contradiction of the gospel for America” ought to astound modern Christians and send them running back to the drawing board to rethink White theology.20 But White Christians have not, in large measure, grappled with the ways in which slavery has shaped the identity and cultures of White people in ways that continue to present themselves today. They have not wrestled with the moral injuriousness of slavery.

Instead, the prevailing strategies of White Christians have been to diminish the horrors of slavery, to ignore the involvement of the church and its leaders, to demonize and distance themselves from their White slaveholding ancestors, or to resist being labeled “White” altogether.

Indeed, a consequence of color-blind racial ideology is that, because it implies that race is a bad thing, it also implies that those who identify as raced—that is, people of color—are thus morally inferior to those who do not—that is, White people. Thus it reinforces the supremacy of whiteness even as it renders whiteness invisible.

For Irving, those distortions include the ideas that (1) race, culture, and ethnicity are pertinent to only nonwhite people; (2) race is biologically determined; (3) racism consists of making derogatory comments or engaging in intentionally cruel acts against nonwhite people; and (4) “If the cause of racial inequity were understood, it would be solved by now.”

In racial reconciliation, selective sight often means that White people enter antiracist spaces with serious deficiencies in racial knowledge. They often do not understand how the historical construction of whiteness implicates them; they are usually unaware of the material impact that racism has on the lives of people of color in their immediate contexts; and they frequently lack even rudimentary vocabulary to engage in sustained conversation about race. At the same time, however, their sense of superiority often makes them more confident in their own ill-informed opinions than they should be, or it causes them to expect people of color to do the work of teaching them about racism.

The final hallmark of White moral injury is egoethnocentrism, the tendency to view oneself and one’s racial-ethnic group as the moral and cultural center of all things. This is the cornerstone of White supremacy, the notion that White people (and the culture that they produce) are the hegemonic ideal and thus represent the gold standard by which all other peoples and cultures should be adjudicated. White supremacy posits that because White people are the most beautiful and talented, they should be the faces that we see in magazines, on television, and in film; because they are the most intelligent, their books and theories (the “classics”) should be the focal point of our educations; because they are the most authoritative, they should be the people in charge of . . . well, everything. White supremacy tells us that what is White is universally right and that any departure from the norm is a deficiency to be remedied. And because the majority of US Whites live, work, and worship in social isolation from people of color, they rarely have the opportunity for the kind of meaningful cross-cultural exchange that might occasion them to question their internalized sense of superiority. What limited cross-cultural engagement they do have (such as on mission trips) occurs in the context of such an enormous power imbalance that it usually affirms, rather than challenges, their cultural comfort.

There is an adage that states, “The devil’s greatest trick has been to convince the world that he does not exist.” The same could be said of systemic oppression, which maintains its power in part by labeling the oppressed as opportunistic liars who are not to be trusted about the telling of their own stories.

I cannot accept a view of reconciliation based on white values. The Christian view of reconciliation has nothing to do with black people being nice to white people as if the gospel demands that we ignore their insults and their humiliating presence. It does not mean discussing with whites what it means to be black or going to white gatherings and displaying what whites call an understanding attitude—remaining cool and calm amid racists and bigots. . . . We black theologians must refuse to accept a view of reconciliation that pretends that slavery never existed, that we were not lynched and shot, and that we are not presently being cut to the core of our physical and mental endurance.

Reconciliation is an iterative process. The tasks are neither linear nor mutually exclusive, and they are often cyclical in nature as our journey into reconciliation draws us ever deeper into confrontation with the ugliness of racism and the hidden ways in which it has infected our psyches, our relationships, and our world. Genuine efforts toward racial reconciliation are at once spiritual, political, social, and psychological. They are rarely comfortable; more often than not, they are painful. And the seeming intractability of racism within our world makes reconciliation feel more like “mission impossible” than the mission of God.

am writing this chapter in the wake of Donald Trump’s election to the US presidency by a largely White Christian supporter base, after a campaign filled with overtly racist, misogynist, and ableist rhetoric and behavior.2 To say that I feel like abandoning my work for racial reconciliation among Christians in this context would be an understatement. Indeed, many notable leaders have dropped their use of the term “reconciliation,” swapping it out for what they consider to be clearer and more realistically attainable goals: racial conciliation, racial justice, cultural credibility, intercultural integrity, and so on.

With solidarity, however, the privileged make an outward movement. In racial reconciliation, this means that White people must move from the center to the margins because they finally realize that the white supremacy that lies at the center of the human imagination is not actually divine; it is an idol. They recognize that their view of themselves, the world, and the Three-in-One has been so thoroughly shaped by the idolatry of white supremacy that they are unable to imagine what authentic human existence ought to look like. Thus, they move toward the margins because it is the only way to decenter and thus de-idolize themselves. It is only by being on the margins that the oppressor and the oppressed can work together to deconstruct the center.