See no Evil, Hear no Evil, Speak no Evil: A Letter to White Americans

I’m relieved that the alleged racial slur from the mouth of George Zimmerman was false. Let me be clear: I’m glad, because if Zimmerman had uttered the slur we could continue to blind ourselves to the pervasive hold, however invisible, race has on our imaginations. We could have chalked Zimmerman up to a racist bigot who was different than the majority of the population and continued to hope in a colorblind system. Like most people, I don’t utter racial slurs, so I’ve spent most of my life blind to racial logics and operations for discerning the identity and character of others. But because Zimmerman never called Trayvon Martin a coon, we thought we could dismiss race as relevant to this tragedy. Indeed, most of us (non-black persons) are quite alike Zimmerman insofar as we justify the man in his suspicions or deceive ourselves by thinking that being suspicious of someone like Trayvon in this case has nothing to do with race. The connection is made, and now we’re all either justified or implicated.

Racial slurs are not the heart of racism, but simply the outworking of a racial logic birthed in the colonial moment. They are one type of expression that flows “out of a person’s mouth, [but] come from the heart” (Matt 15:18). At the heart of the matter is how humans created a new system to articulate the identity of others. These humans were the Europeans during the colonial event. Prior to colonialism, one identified other people and themselves in relation to space, the immediate land and all it contained that served as someone’s home. With the discovery of the new world, however, bodies and lands were severed from one another as Europeans sought to understand themselves and the indigenes inhabiting the new world. They developed a racial hermeneutic in which whiteness (the European self) signified the ideal identity and blackness represented the anti-ideal. The colonizers thereby discerned a person’s/people’s identity by their body. Though these operations entirely fail to reflect true identity, they are nevertheless fully real forces exercising real power over bodies and imaginations.

Of course, the subjection of bodies to this calculus manifested itself in the colonial moment quite visibly and violently, so much so that that abolition of slavery and deconstruction of state sanctioned segregation has led most (at least, white) Americans to believe race is no longer a systemic problem. But the racial logic that began visible, reasonable, and natural has now become invisible, at least to the system and those of us who haven’t been forced to be conscious of our bodies in the ways victims of the operation have. Cloaked thus, the reign of racial logic has become all the more dangerous. It is the demonic force that becomes more powerful when people ignore or don’t believe in its existence. We can no longer detect our racial calculus and operation of discerning the identity of others except through blips of slurs. But when we discern another’s identity by bodily aesthetics on this scale, which includes the ideational perception of attire that transforms garments into prosthetics of the body, we employ the racial logic.

The matter has become more complicated in this age of statistics and data. There are twice as many black people in prison than there are white and Hispanic people. Statistically, black people tend to be criminals far more than other racial categories. Given the data, it seems perfectly reasonable to be suspicious of bodies that do not appear to belong in the space where they travel. But this simply reinscribes the racial logic through a sleight of hand. Any black person that someone else suspects to be dangerous is liable to the “statistically” motivated interrogation. To justify this operation only perpetuates the right and power of one type of body (that embodies the ideal statistically) to judge and identify the body that the statistics condemn. Statistics didn’t replace the racial logic; they simply justified it and masked the operation at once. What enlightened Europeans knew objectively of black bodies is now reasonable enough to be suspicious of black bodies because data supports the racial reality.

But if statistics pragmatically support the reality of criminality around black bodies, then isn’t this simply an unfortunate reality necessary to maintain the safety and order of society? We might say it’s merely coincidence that black bodies commit more crimes than non-black bodies. But we must cease interrogating the other’s body and now reflexively interrogate ourselves. What sort of relationship does the racial calculus and its operation create between the self and the “suspicious” other? What does it mean to identify a particular appearance as suspicious, dangerous, and criminal? To articulate another’s identity according to a racial calculus is to place oneself in the position of judge. The judge determines what is right, normal, and acceptable. The judge also has the right to require another person to give an account of him or herself. Within the racial operation, certain bodies that most closely align with the ideal (prosthetics and all) have the right and exercise their right to demand an account from another body that appears suspect, dangerous, or criminal. This is not a reciprocal relationship. This system of identity allows the judge to never really address the other, but rather assert, “Oh, now I know who you are.” This operation requires the “perpetrator” to give an account of oneself according to the judgment of normalcy. The racial calculus inhibits authentic address between persons. In short, the judge possesses power to which the "suspect" must become subject. Zimmerman articulated Trayvon’s identity as suspicious, dangerous, and criminal and then, through pursuit, required Trayvon to give an account of himself.

But if we don’t judge all black people to be suspicious, dangerous, or criminal, how could it be that we view blackness itself as suspicious, dangerous, and criminal? Blackness is not simply a skin color any more than white skin strictly biologically manifests the reality of whiteness. The ideas of whiteness and blackness work themselves into bodies, not vice versa. Particular appearances signify the reality of blackness, so that a judge imagines certain appearances, races, as symbolic of criminality, suspiciousness, and danger. In Trayvon’s case, his hoodie and sweatpants served as prosthetics of his black skin. This distinction is important. When we (embodying whiteness) know a black friend personally, there is no need to articulate his or her identity. Also, if a black person dresses and lives a life that appears "normal" and familiar in our estimation (suburb house, wife and kids, steady career, and “proper” attire), those artifacts serve as prosthetics of our whiteness so that we needn’t discern the character and identity of some unknown person. But Zimmerman didn’t know or recognize Trayvon, and Trayvon was wearing prosthetics that confirmed his blackness in Zimmerman’s eyes. So Zimmerman was immediately suspicious of and felt threatened by Trayvon’s body.

Much of what I’ve said thus far has questioned from our position instead of Zimmerman’s. I do this because Zimmerman’s position is our position when we believe his suspicions are reasonable. Zimmerman’s position is that of the judge who identifies the other through the racial operation of discerning identity (he asked, “What are you doing around here,” rather than asking, “Who are you?” The former evaluates with suspicion the answer according to a predetermined calculus, while the latter awaits the answer of the other for discernment), and reserves his/her right to require the other to be accountable to him/herself. Zimmerman saw Trayvon, judged his appearance (hoodie, sweatpants, and seemingly black [confirmed at closer sight], which symbolize “up to no good” and/or “on drugs”) and immediately linked it with those “fucking punk” “asshole” burglars who have been stealing in the neighborhood. Trayvon deviated from the norm that Zimmerman represented and upheld. Zimmerman didn’t need to use a racial slur to betray the prevalence of the racial hermeneutic. He didn’t have to use hateful words to criminalize, demean, and judge another person’s body through racial superiority (normalcy). He demonstrated as much through his paranoia at the sight of Trayvon and interrogating the teenager through pursuit. The court didn’t need to acquit a man (teenage) slaughterer (or even murderer) who used slurs or showed himself to be a racist bigot as we imagine to reveal that the system condones and is complicit in racial logics through its colorblindness. Zimmerman simply had to supply Trayvon’s identity and judge him as he did to confirm to victims of the racial identifying operation that race was at play. The court and jury simply had to say there was insufficient evidence of murder or manslaughter and deem Zimmerman’s actions reasonable to show black persons that the system cannot adequately address racism in its color-impaired state. The system still favors the norm of whiteness, because it’s too busy searching for racial slurs.

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Note: "A Letter To White Americans" is not meant as an attack, but simply a qualification of audience given the language of "we" throughout the post.

For further reading on the nature of race or the role of race in America and the Zimmerman case, see:

Willie Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origin of Race.

J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account.

Anthea Butler, "The Zimmerman Acquittal: America's Racist God," Religion Dispatches.

Willie Jennings, "What Does It Mean To Call "God" A White Racist," Religion Dispatches.

J. Kameron Carter, "Christian Atheism: The Only Response Worth Its Salt To The Zimmerman Verdict," Religion Dispatches.

Sheep Among Wolves: What Does It Mean To Follow A Criminal Today?

“See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Beware of them, for they will hand you over to councils and flog you in their synagogues; and you will be dragged before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them and the Gentiles … If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household … Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” – Jesus (Matthew 10:16-18, 25, 34).

“Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Do you wish to have no fear of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval; for it is God’s servant for your good. But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain! It is the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be subject, not only because of wrath but also because of conscience.” – Written by Paul the Apostle (Romans 13:1-5) whom Rome executed a decade later for being a criminal.

Imagine you were following Jesus at the moment he told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” To Jesus’ followers at that moment these words warned anyone who wished to be Jesus’ disciple that they would become criminals, criminals who would meet execution by the state. At this moment Jesus confessed that he would be what his disciples understood as a failed messiah. Is that what the cross means to readers today, many of whom live in America and couldn’t imagine the inside of a cell let alone being the object of state execution?

The troubling reality Christians must confront today is whether we believe the cross Jesus bore and the fate he and his disciples met are still relevant in our society. We’ve transformed that instrument of state power and punishment, inextricably bound to the body of the criminal, into a figurative endeavor expressing the Christian’s need to renounce vice. It’s common to link the cross to the denial of the self as Jesus does, but we’ve interpreted the meaning of the cross for the life of disciples today in light of our understanding of what is the self. The argument typically goes that Christians must be willing to sacrifice their desires—selfishness, greed, envy, passion, etc.—in order to follow after Jesus, specifically in private relations. But when we unfasten the cross from the body of the criminal, discipleship also takes on a new form. In effect, we have severed the spiritual life from the social. Either the cross Jesus spoke of is irrelevant for the life of a disciple today because we assume society no longer embodies the power to which Jesus spoke truth, or we’ve reconstructed the cross so law-abiding citizens can carry it as a badge.

My professor Willie Jennings captured what perhaps lies at the heart of our problem when he wrote, 

The great illusion of followers of Jesus—especially those who imagine themselves leaders—is that they can live a path different from Jesus and his first disciples. They believe somehow that they can be loved, or at least liked, or at least tolerated—or even ignored—by those with real power in this world … Real preaching and authentic teaching is inextricably bound to real criminality. Christians of the modern West have never really grasped our deep connection to the criminal mind, our mind.

Can we truly understand the form and content of discipleship without remembering the true criminal face of the cross?

These issues and questions have recently revealed the site I plan to focus on: criminals and martyrs. Christian martyrs are effectively criminals. And martyrs have often exemplified in the Christian imagination the epitome of the disciple of Jesus, that is the one who obeys Jesus’ command to pick up one’s cross and follow after him. But the martyr has also become a point of contention, something to protect. Following WWII, for example, there was much debate surrounding the martyr status of Dietrich Bonhoeffer due to his participation in the conspiracy against Hitler. As Christians, English-speaking and German, discovered the depth of Bonhoeffer’s complicity they wondered how he could maintain his integrity as a Christian while conspiring against Hitler. Eberhard Bethge, best friend of Bonhoeffer, explains that the very circumstances necessary to Bonhoeffer’s status as a martyr simultaneously constituted for many a menace to Christian identity. Such tension results from the struggle for Christians to reconcile the perceived righteousness of the disciple with the body of the criminal.

This is not simply a concern for Christians living in some nation or time where Christianity is explicitly illegal. We shouldn’t deceive ourselves by thinking that Christianity can maintain its integrity as witness to Jesus—the Word that fundamentally disrupts social powers, categorizations, and orders—if the principalities and powers assimilate or tolerate Christianity. To be clear, I’m not suggesting the Church measure its faithfulness in proportion to social rejection and persecution by social powers. Nor am I baptizing criminality as a new righteousness by which Christians may take the role of judge over and against others. But we must confront the reality that Christians only ceased to be criminals when they wielded the power of the state. 

No society has ever (nor will) embodied, enforced or legislated justice and peace to a degree that no longer warranted speaking holy words of truth to power. As such, we cannot anticipate to be welcomed by power if we faithfully witness to a reality that calls power into question. On the one hand, the Church should be suffering some form of rejection/oppression by those in power regardless of the society, or question whether or not it is truly being the Church. On the other hand, the Church must make certain its suffering comes from politically and socially engaging its place as witness to Jesus, rather than suffering for politicized ideological loyalties or being downright mean or indifferent. Society’s conventions in the penultimate age do not tolerate the Lord whose kingdom is not of this world. If the cross is inextricably bound to the body of the criminal can Christians carry the cross while perceiving themselves—their Christian identity and imagination—to be fundamentally differentiated from criminals? How do Christians presently imagine the criminal theologically and socially in relation to the disciple? How might the body and mind of the criminal inform the content of discipleship?

Disappearing Act:

“And it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!” – Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

Dickens’s story is a Christmas classic. It reminds us to keep Christmas by looking to the needs of others just as the Creator looked to the needs of his creatures. During this past Christmas (Dec. 17), Durham City Council unanimously decided to keep Christmas by passing a prohibition on begging. I reminded of another Christmas story with a similar situation, but this town didn’t need legislation to accomplish its goal. It was sometime around 4 A.D., when a pregnant mother with her husband needed a place to stay the night. Her husband, Joseph, begged the townsfolk of Bethlehem for somewhere to stay. An innkeeper offered one place that was out-of-sight, a stable for animals. Since Bethlehem was Joseph’s hometown, his neighbors probably heard that Mary got pregnant before she lived with Joseph. Many people call that a whore, and most people prefer to ignore or avoid undesirables like that. The same desire seems to be at work 2000 years later in Durham. Scrooge felt the same way when he told Tiny Tim not to beg near his office. Perhaps we need the same change of heart Scrooge had.

Friends at the Divinity school have brought some of us other students together to protest this ordinance, namely through letters to the city during the Lenten season. We invited other students to participate, too, should they desire. There have been some questions as to the point of this protest. The goal of this protest is not to allow for the continuance of begging so that the Church will not take care of people in need. Nor do protesters believe that it is the state’s or civil community’s duty to take on this “burden” to the exclusion of the Church. We take issue with the city’s solution to the begging problem and the motivation behind this prohibition. Prohibiting begging is not a solution to poverty, nor does it seek to “protect” someone who is begging in high traffic areas. Wanting to keep undesirables out of sight by making begging illegal motivates this prohibition.

As Christians, we cannot support this “solution.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it well in Discipleship: 

"God’s own Son was dishonored and humiliated in order to honor the Father. But the Father, refusing to be separated from his Son, will likewise not be separated from those whose humanity the Son assumed as an equal and for whose sake the Son bore his humiliation" (124). 

We cannot accept any “solution” that requires separating certain undesired bodies from desirable bodies in public. The prohibition amounts to indirect segregation by prohibiting undesirables among us to not perform actions that will remind us of their existence. The protest laments a failure to regard the existence of others as grace rather than burden.

God Died So Humans Could Live: How Nietzsche Killed A God Who Needed To Die:

If God is at the root of slavery, then slave-owners traffic in an economy of lies. But as with any effective lie, serpents masterfully mask their idolatrous words as convincing icons of truth. In his essay on freedom, belief and language in Nietzsche’s philosophy, Michael Lackey argues that Nietzsche liberates the “subject” not simply by killing God. True liberation requires renouncing faith in grammar. As such, God is not the slave-master; rather, the real masters disguise themselves as his priests by inserting their will in divine discourses articulated to rule the imaginations of the faithful. Such is the case with words like “consciousness” and the “subject,” which reflect someone’s will framed in language more than stable anthropologies. This means that authentic freedom and identity are not possessions to be known, but unstable performances conducted through a lifelong cycle of deconstructing counterfeit “subjects” constructed by priests’ wills to power articulated in divine discourses about God and metaphysics.

Individuals can only kill God with words, according to Lackey, because of the nature of belief. Whereas the pious believe they exercise freedom by willing to believe or not in different concepts, Nietzsche positions freedom in opposition to belief (in grammar) altogether. For Nietzsche, using language itself is a performance of faith, because when one speaks words or articulates concepts, she must believe 1) that there is an existing reality signified by language and 2) that such language adequately captures these realities. To the extent that a person believes in language, she limits her imagination and experience (freedom) by vocabulary. But how adequately can language frame reality? What is the nature of mediation?

Middle Nietzsche rejected the existence of a one-to-one correspondence between language and reality, and late Nietzsche rejected any correspondence entirely. Against correspondence, he argued that language users implant their will into things by naming them. As an act of faith, therefore, language is either the innocent ad hoc invention birthed by ignorance for the sake of communicating or a willfully devised duplicity parading around as sacred truth. The former evolves into the latter when a “subject” buries her will in a newly articulated vocabulary and claims that her vocabulary faithfully mediates reality. Therefore, when an individual believes that signs faithfully signify referents, faith subjects the believer to the will of the one who names. Lackey explains,

This [subjection] is so because the directionality of linguistic dependence has been effectively reversed—it is not the pre-encoded referent which limits the linguistic sign but rather the originary language uses who, in fixing the semantic coordinates of language, coerce language users to see and experience the world as they deem fit (750).

Whether or not a pre-encoded, pre-discursive reality exists, limits come from the language of liars claiming to be priests. Language is the performance of faith that binds a person to the will of the speaker. Freedom “as such” precedes discourse; it resides with the one who slays the serpent before it speaks a word with its silver tongue.

But what is so attractive about language? At the heart of this faith is anxiety of instability. Emotion exercises tremendous power/authority over those who wish to seize security as a subject buttressed by God and metaphysics—by analogia entis. In overblown rhetoric, Nietzsche prescribes suicide for pessimists and the execution of God for “subjects,” because both acts constitute an affirmation of life—a life freed from subjection to the wills of others. Like, Luke Skywalker, the prototypical orphan searching for his identity and place in the universe, we must search our feelings in order to recognize and break our bondage to those conceptual masters from which we stabilize our identity/”subject.”

But if language limits freedom, how can individuals overcome the subject without replacing one master tongue for another creedal language? What does Nietzsche’s goal—liberation of the individual—entail? Lackey writes, “Nietzsche wants to deconstruct the sovereignty of all words, including his own, so that individuals will become creators themselves—they will put their will into things, rather than seeing in things a will” (752). So long as individuals perceive correspondence between words and an established ontological reality, they continue to be either the herd animals subject to the wills of ranchers or the decadent serpents using their linguistic guile to seduce others into “slavery.”

The idea of the “subject” is particularly misleading: “If consciousness is nothing more than a lordly ruler’s will to power, then in coming to know our ‘selves’ as beings with consciousness, we know, not our own ‘natures’, but someone else’s will to power, a will which has gained ascendancy in us through language” (752). In short, identity is unwieldy and elusive. Nietzsche writes, “We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge—and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves … So we are necessarily strangers to ourselves” (752-753). Freedom, then, is outside belief in stability (God and metaphysics) framed in language. Rather, individuals exercise freedom instead by “discover[ing] how one has been constructed by other people’s wills to power, because it is in understanding how one has been constructed that a person can begin the process of overcoming one’s currently constructed self” (753).

As perhaps the first deconstructionist (after Jesus), Nietzsche believes this performance must be a lifelong cycle of deconstructing each new construction of the “self.” Freedom is not a static possession but a performance, because “wills to power, effectively concealed in the guise of language and values, insidiously work their way into our bodies, encoding us, whether we know it or not, so that we become the involuntary carriers of other people’s verbal projections” (753). Masters use these communicative tactics like naming slaves and marking their bodies in order to stabilize social relations (identities) and rule social imaginaries. The goal, then, is not to seize a (impossible) final construction that simply re-inscribes these relationships, but to recognize greater freedom with each deconstructive performance.