Radical Sanctification and Resisting White Supremacy

This article is from a forthcoming series in the Moody Center magazine. To learn more about the magazine and Moody Center, subscribe to their newsletter.

We fight the power of sin by the power of the Holy Spirit. This simple and uncontroversial claim at the heart of the Christian doctrine of sanctification contains radical power, since the Spirit also accomplishes the most radical human transformation—from death to life. Furthermore, scripture’s commands to walk by the Spirit imply that the Christian is to live a life marked by this radical transformation. It is in this demand—of radical transformation—that this simple claim finds its complexity, its challenge, and its resistance even among the most pious.

This article makes another deceptively simple claim—white supremacy is sin. This claim is, like the first, apparently uncontroversial. Most Christians would not hesitate to affirm it. However, many Christians would be hard pressed to accurately define white supremacy, locate its historical or present manifestations, or trace its effects in their own lives. Worse yet, some have so limited the scope of the problem of white supremacy that it is hardly discernible after the U.S. Civil Rights Movement apart from the most explicit instances. Under such conditions, the claim that white supremacy is sin becomes an almost meaningless platitude, a theological answer in search of a question. 

If the above premises are true--that we fight sin by the power of the Holy Spirit and that white supremacy is sin--then white supremacy should be radically resisted in the lives of Christians by the power of the Holy Spirit. But precisely how do we fight sin by the Spirit’s power? What does it mean to call white supremacy sin? And what might it look like to radically resist white supremacy in our lives? Before attempting to address these important questions, however, it is necessary to define what I mean by white supremacy.[1] This article understands white supremacy to be a globally expressed racialized social system, within which those deemed “white” generally enjoy disproportionate material and social privileges in relation to those deemed “non-white.”[2] In what follows, I take this definition for granted and explore some of its features as they support my argument that white supremacy is sin and should be radically resisted by the power of the Holy Spirit.

How the Spirit Reveals Sin

Part of the Spirit’s power for fighting sin is the Spirit’s role in identifying it. The Spirit helps us to identify sin through at least three means: scripture, circumstance, and community. In scripture we find a standard of personal and social goodness in Christ and in the kingdom of God to which we have never lived up. We also find various examples of social and individual evil by which we can evaluate our own shortcomings. For example, when the epistle writer says “you have dishonored the poor man. Is it not the rich who oppress you and personally drag you into court?” (James 2:6, NASB), we should ask ourselves critical questions about how sin has infected our understanding of wealth, poverty, and the ways our decisions serve to dishonor the poor and elevate the rich.

The Spirit also reveals sin through circumstance or, in other words, through history. If, as we saw above, the Spirit reveals the sins of partiality and oppression of the poor through scripture, historical circumstance teaches us that wealth, poverty, and oppression of the poor exist today along explicitly racial lines.[3] Colonialism, slavery, apartheid, and imperialism were and are racial projects as much as they are economic ones. Globally, many of the countries considered “third world” (or worse) are filled with people deemed “non-white” by the Anglo empires who have exploited them and their resources for centuries. Therefore, one of the features of this racialized social system which the Spirit reveals to us as sin is the historical reality that it was accomplished and is maintained through exploitation, through the oppression of the poor.

The Spirit also reveals sin through community. In scripture it was most often the voice of the prophets urging God’s people toward repentance for sin. In our own day, the Black Church has long provided a prophetic voice in opposition to the sins of white supremacist society. Take for example, Frederick Douglass’s recognition of the incompatibility of slaveholding piety with the Christianity of Christ, James Cone’s reflections on the practice of lynching and the lynching of Jesus, or Kelly Brown Douglas’s call to action regarding the racialized implications of “stand your ground” laws.[4] Regrettably, these and many other cries of oppressed humanity have been largely ignored under the spell of white supremacy. Instead of graciously receiving correction and repenting of sin, many Christians have grieved the Spirit by dismissing the cries of the oppressed as exaggerated or untrue. In this way, white supremacy has silently flourished in the hearts, minds, and hands of countless Christians.

The Kinds of Sin the Spirit Reveals

If we have spent any amount of effort resisting sin in our lives we know that there are levels to this. On the surface, there are behaviors which we should discontinue. On another level there are impulses and motivations underlying our behaviors which also need to be interrogated and transformed by the renewing of our minds. Jesus communicated this truth in his sermon on the mount when he raised the standard for holy living from the level of action to the level of the impulses and motivations of the heart (Matt. 5:21—48). We can say, then, that the Spirit reveals both overt and covert sins—the outward expressions of sin as well as the sins working quietly below the surface.

This dynamic is also true of white supremacy. Many today only discern white supremacy in examples like the murder of the Emanuel Nine or the El Paso mass shooting when the assailants explicitly claim white supremacy as their motivating ideology. But these incidents, along with other explicitly racist activity in our society are examples of the white supremacist sin that sits overtly on the surface. In addition to these, the Spirit is revealing the deeper, covert layers of white supremacist sin. As one example, while the apartheid Jim Crow policies of the last century enforced de jure segregation in the U.S., the post-Civil Rights era has seen de facto racial segregation across the country. Some have noted how “current residential segregation has roots going back at least to the Great Depression” through means such as federal redlining practices, restrictive covenants enforced by neighborhood associations and realtors, and even mob violence.[5] When we consider the fact that where one lives in our society determines the quality of education, medical care, and daily nourishment one will receive, the racial configuration of our neighborhoods takes on a more sinister character. Furthermore, where one lives determines the kind of police surveillance one will experience on a daily basis and one’s criminal history (over)determines one’s economic and social prospects.[6] In this way, racial segregation has far-reaching effects which disproportionately harm those deemed “non-white” in our society. The insidious nature of white supremacist sin takes this reality a step further by attempting to justify this situation by ceaselessly blaming “non-white” communities for their own disenfranchisement. In this example (and through many others) we can see how the realities of covert white supremacist sin may lurk just beneath the surface of our actions. However, through the voices of the oppressed and through the work of pastors, theologians, historians, philosophers, and many others, the Spirit is revealing just how prevalent the insidious sins of white supremacy are in our world.

The Spirit and Radical Transformation

So, how does the Spirit call us to address the sins of white supremacy in our lives? The same way we are called to address all sin—through radical transformation, even daily death. The Spirit enables us to plumb the depths of our actions, impulses and motivations, even the ones that are infected with the insidious evil of white supremacy, and to walk in newness of life and liberation. Concretely, this means that we must (1) rely on the Spirit to reveal white supremacy in our lives through scripture, circumstance, and community, we must (2) rely on the Spirit to show us not only our overt sins but to dig deeper to find the covert workings of white supremacy in our own lives and communities, and we must (3) rely on the Spirit’s help to radically root out the sins of white supremacy from our lives by dying to ourselves daily and living into the new life that the Spirit makes possible.

About Michael Yorke

Michael Yorke completed a bachelor's degree in Urban Ministry from Moody Bible Institute and a master's degree in Historical Theology from Wheaton College Graduate School. He is currently enrolled in the Master of Theological Studies program at Emory University's Candler School of Theology. He is interested in race, pneumatology, and theologies of liberation. In his (hypothetical) free time, Michael is either working on a new playlist, watching a movie, or trying to remember how to play basketball. He is married to Chelsea and their first child, Jay, was born in December.

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Further Reading

Lopez, Ian Haney. “The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations on Illusion, Fabrication, and Choice.”

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America.

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

Thurman, Howard. Jesus and the Disinherited.

Raboteau, Albert J. A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History

Comblin, José. The Holy Spirit and Liberation.

Zahl, Simeon. The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience

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Footnotes

[1] It is important to note also that white supremacy does not exist in a historical vacuum; a long history of social, political, and theological factors have resulted in its current configurations. For more on this, see the recommended reading list at the end of this article.

[2] My definition here relies heavily on Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. Bonilla-Silva writes: “When race emerged in human history, it formed a social structure ( a racialized social system) that awarded systemic privileges to Europeans (the peoples who became ‘white’) over non-Europeans (the peoples who became ‘non-white’). Racialized social systems, or white supremacy for short, became global and affected all societies where Europeans extended their reach. I therefore conceive a society’s racial structure as the totality of the social relations and practices that reinforce white privilege.”

[3] This is likely to be the most contested premise of this article; however, this claim cannot be sufficiently defended in the space allotted here. See the following resources for evidence supporting this claim: Mehrsa Baradaran’s The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (2017); Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010); Imani Perry’s More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Race in America (2011); Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (2016); Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (2019)

[4] See Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave; James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree; and Kelly Brown Douglass’s Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God.

[5] See Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism.

[6] See Dominique DuBois Gilliard’s Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice that Restores

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Neighbor Love and Reading CRT

This article is from a forthcoming series in the Moody Center magazine. To learn more about the magazine and Moody Center, subscribe to their newsletter.

When we attend to the cries of suffering people, we reflect God—not Pharaoh.

Buckling under the weight of generational systematic subjugation, Israel cried out to God and God listened. “And the people of Israel groaned under their bondage, and cried out for help, and their cry under bondage came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant…And God saw the people of Israel, and God knew their condition” (Ex. 2:23-25). When God called Moses, God emphasized hearing Israel’s cries: “I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians…And now, behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. Come, I will send you” (Ex. 3:9-10). Exodus contrasts this attentive divine listening to Pharaoh’s callous indifference. When God brings Israel’s cries to Pharaoh through Moses, Pharaoh increases Israel’s labors and suffering. Israel responds by crying out to Pharaoh, not God. But Pharaoh again entrenches in injustice (Ex. 5:15-19).

In the New Testament, Jesus and the Apostles also stress the paramount importance of listening to the cries of suffering, subjugated people. Consider, for example, Jesus’s parables of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10) or the rich man and Lazarus (Lk. 16). Or recall James’s declaration that “religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world” (Jm. 1:27). Godliness requires listening to and caring for suffering people in their affliction. Worldly defilement does not; it fosters entrenchment in unjust sins of commission and omission—like Pharaoh’s worsening Israel’s plight and ignoring their cries.  

Impediments to Godly Hearing when We Read

Godly attentive listening follows from love. In Exodus, God’s love for the people of Israel and their covenant ancestors motivates God to liberate them from physical, political, and spiritual bondage. Jesus’s parables and James’s declaration about pure religion reflect the biblical vision of how neighbor-love motivates godlike attentive listening. Sometimes this love-infused listening is literal; we hear the cries of those suffering around us. Other times this listening is metaphorical; when we read about the suffering of others, we “hear” them through the page. Therefore, when we hear people’s suffering through reading, we imitate God.

But, as with physical hearing, impediments often obscure our ability to hear suffering people’s cries when we read. One impediment is applying the wrong kind of reading practice to a text. C.S. Lewis, for example, distinguishes between reading practices that use a text from those that receive a text. When we use a text, we treat it as a means to information or distraction. This is fine when reading a menu or a joke; it is inappropriate when reading a love letter, petition, or religious text. These works require we read to receive—that we humbly approach the texts with a willingness to let them confront and change us.     

C.S. Lewis notes another obstacle to hearing suffering through a text: We are socially located readers and thinkers socialized to hear and see some things and not others. Lewis writes: “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing [and hearing] certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes.” James Cone makes a similar point. “There is no place we can stand that will remove us from the limitations of history and thus enable us to tell the whole truth without the risk of ideological distortion.” To minimize or avoid these social and ideological limitations, Cone instructs us to “listen to others outside of our own time and situation.” Likewise, Lewis encourages us to read “the old books,” because they help us recognize and adjust for “the characteristic mistakes of our own period.” 

Sadly, Lewis’s and Cone’s proposals cannot guarantee that we hear the suffering voices around us when we read. Sometimes the old books are silent about or obscure our current challenges. The Bible says nothing about the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act or its continued impacts on China and the United States. Moreover, many older histories lie about the United States.

Reflecting on the rise of intentionally false narratives about U.S. Reconstruction (1865–1877), W.E.B. Du Bois writes:

I stand at the end of [ writing Black Reconstruction in America], literally aghast at what American historians have done to this field…[these histories are] useless as science and misleading as ethics… [and they show] that with sufficient general agreement and determination among the dominant classes, the truth of history may be utterly distorted and contradicted and changed to any convenient fairy tale that the master of men wish.

What Du Bois chastised in Reconstruction histories, Leon Litwick, president of the Organization of American Historians, applied generally to U.S. historians: “No group of scholars was more deeply implicated in the miseducation of American youth and did more to shape the thinking of Americans about race and blacks than historians.” Most in the U.S. continue to inherit these false histories and their accompanying ideologies. We suffer these injustices. Moreover, receiving these unjust histories obstructs our abilities to hear the stories of how our neighbors and we suffer from white supremacy. This impediment is especially dangerous, for as Cone observed, “When people can no longer listen to other people’s stories, they become enclosed within their own social context, treating their distorted visions of reality as the whole truth.”

Hearing Our CRT Neighbors

Enter critical race theorists. Scholars such as Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, Robert A. Williams, Jr. (Lumbee), Gary Peller, Mari Matsuda, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Imani Perry, and Laura E. Gómez write essays aimed at helping us see how U.S. law and legal institutions have maintained and perpetuated white supremacy and hear the cries of non-white and white communities and individuals suffering from these racist evils. CRT scholars do not claim to stand-in for these communities or individuals. Like Ada María Isasi-Díaz, they would say, “Though I do not speak for them, I speak with them and on behalf of them.”

As they speak, CRT scholars remind us of legal decisions like these:

Power, war, conquest, give rights, which, after possess, are conceded by the world, and which can never be controverted by those on whom they descended. –Chief Justice John Marshall, Worcester v. Georgia (1832) [This is still official U.S. Federal Indian law]

In the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show, that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument. –Chief Justice Roger Taney, Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857)

All people under U.S. jurisdiction have the same right to make contracts and pursue business opportunities “as is enjoyed by white citizens.”—1866 Civil Rights Act [This is still official U.S. law]

There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the US...I allude to the Chinese race.—Justice John Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) referencing the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act

Most of us are unfamiliar with these quotations and the painful, subjugating roles they have played in shaping communities and individuals. We do well, then, to engage CRT texts, working to receive rather than use them, in order to hear these truths and the cries they amplify. These practices will help us imitate God, not Pharaoh. They will help us heal from injustice. And they will help us care for Jesus and our neighbors (Mt. 25).

About Nathan Cartagena

A son of the US South (Mom) and Puerto Rico (Dad), Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL), where he teaches courses on race, justice, and political philosophy, and is a fellow in The Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies. He serves as the faculty advisor for Unidad Cristiana, a student group working to enhance Christian unity and celebrate Latina/o cultures, a scholar-in-residence for World Outspoken, and a co-host for the forthcoming podcast From the Underside.  He’s also writing a book on Critical Race Theory with IVP Academic. For more about hermano Nathan, visit his website.

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A Language for the Pain

To borrow a line from Willie James Jennings, “The things I tell are precise accounts while being exact fabrications…everything I tell you, everything, is the truth. It is the truth in service of moving us to a new place of gathering.”

Mi Amiga

Her lowered head spoke as we sat in silence. So did her hands busily crumpling a napkin from lunch. I listened to mi amiga’s body language while she gathered her thoughts and braced to share her pain.

“This place is wearing on me, Professor Cartagena. I don’t know how much I can take. Some days I feel like I’m gonna loose it…like I’m going to explode.”

Mi amiga was silent for a moment. Her brown hands continued to work on the napkin.

“I can handle the big things—the in-your-face racism or sexism. They’re terrible, but they’re so big that people can’t pretend they didn’t happen, can’t pretend that you’re making something up. Does that make sense, Professor Cartagena?”

“It does, hermana. It does. I hear what you’re saying.”

“When students taped ‘Beaner’ posters on my dorm door, there was no hiding it, no denying it. When they dumped dried beans into my laundry, it was clear that they’d been racist and had violated my privacy and my roommate’s privacy—I mean, they went into our room and put the beans in my clothes hamper! And when white students post racist or sexist things about me on social media, my friends and I can take pictures. We have the evidence!” 

After briefly raising her head to look me in the eyes, mi amiga again gazed at the ground. Her napkin resembled a powder. The evidence of its existence was nearly gone.

“But you can’t screenshot the stares, Dr. Cartagena. You can’t make sure other people see the sideways glances and stink eyes. You can’t pause the question, ‘How did you get into this school?’ to make sure other people hear it. You can’t rewind and play the ‘You know we can date and mess around but can’t marry, right?’ question white males ask you to prove that they’re trying to exploit your ‘exotic’ body and sexuality. You can’t prove that these things happen. You don’t have the evidence, just your memory. And the pain…It’s so isolating, Professor Cartagena. And it adds up. These things add up. They take a toll on you, on your body and your mental health. Sometimes…sometimes the big racism is easier to face.”

A Language for the Pain: Microaggressions

Mi amiga was suffering. She’d experienced neon-light racism, the kind that makes skeptics about racism’s existence confident that, here, at last, is an instance of racism that they may, nay, must denounce. But if we listen to her words and her body, this form of racism wasn’t the greatest source of her pain. Something else had taken a toll, and still was.

What caused my friend to lower her head? What prompted her to dismantle a napkin? What overwhelmed her? What made her feel like she might explode? Stares, sideways glances, stink eyes, racist questions about ability, racist questions about gendered sexual exploitation—these were the culprits.

Race scholars call these culprits microaggressions. Harvard psychiatrist Chester Pierce introduced the term “microaggression” in his essay “Offensive Mechanisms” (1970). Reflecting on abusive behavior, Pierce writes:

Most offensive actions are not gross and crippling. They are subtle and stunning. The enormity of the complications they cause can be appreciated only when one considers that these subtle blows are delivered incessantly. Even though any single negotiation of offense can be considered of itself to be relatively innocuous, the cumulative effect to the victim and to the victimizer is of an unimaginable magnitude. Hence, the therapist is obliged to pose the idea that offensive mechanisms are usually a micro-aggression.

Pierce acknowledges that some abusive actions are glaringly gross and large scale. They include the neon-light racism and sexism mi amiga suffered. But not all abusive actions are this glaring or large. As Pierce notes, most aren’t. Instead, they are smaller slights and put-downs some people receive every day. Moreover, the cumulative effect of these smaller scale injustices takes a toll on victim and victimizer alike, leaving both bowed under these evils’ compounded weight.

In this and later work, Pierce develops the concept of microaggressions to account for subtle, quotidian forms of racism. He argues that antiracists “must not look for the gross and obvious [forms of racism]. The subtle, cumulative mini-assault is the substance of today’s racism.” Thus, Pierce encourages antiracists to look for the stares, sideways glances, stink eyes, and racist questions mi amiga suffered. He contends that “the relentless omnipresence of these noxious stimuli” fill the U.S.’s social fabric. “These cumulative, minor but incessant put-downs often remain psychopollutants in the social environment,” Pierce writes, “[and] their lingering intractability is a major contributor to the continuing traumatic stress” racialized minorities suffer individually and communally.

A Language for the Pain: Racial Battle Fatigue

Building upon Pierce’s work, race scholars such as William Smith study the toll that racial microaggressions enact upon racialized minorities like mi amiga. Within an interdisciplinary framework called “racial battle fatigue,” Smith and fellow investigators examined how the cumulative stress of microaggressions impacts Latin@s and Black Males in historically and predominately white schools. The following chart details the cause and stress responses they uncovered.

Smith, William A., et al. “Racial Battle Fatigue and the MisEducation of Black Men: Racial Microaggressions, Societal Problems, and Environmental Stress.” The Journal of Negro Education, vol. 80, no. 1, 2011, pp. 63–82.

Microaggressions cause physiological, psychological, and behavioral stress responses in racialized minorities. The twenty physiologically responses Smith records include headaches, hives, intestinal problems, and insomnia. Similarly, the sixteen psychological responses range from irritability to hopelessness. And the seventeen behavioral responses vary from overeating to procrastination.

In subsequent conversations, mi amiga mentioned suffering from headaches and insomnia. She told me that she struggled with frustration and feelings of helplessness. And wondered aloud why she’d grown impatient and struggled to do easy class assignments.

“Professor Cartagena, I feel like I’m falling apart. What’s wrong with me?”

“You’ve suffered greatly, hermana. And your body has kept the score.”      

Returning to Mi Amiga

Each time I spoke with mi amiga, a passage from James Baldwin’s “Uses of the Blues” came to mind. Reflecting on Black suffering, Baldwin writes:

You’ve seen these black men and women, these boys and girls; you’ve seen them on the streets. But I know what happened to them at the factory, at work, at home, on the subway, what they go through in a day, and the way they sort of ride with it. And it’s very, very tricky. It’s kind of a fantastic tightrope.…And I know that some improbable Wednesday, for no reason whatever, the elevator man or the doorman, the policeman or the landlord, or some little boy from the Bronx will say something, and it will be the wrong day to say it, the wrong moment to have it said to me; and God knows what will happen. I have seen it all, I have seen that much.

When mi amiga said, “Some days I feel like I’m gonna loose it…like I’m going to explode,” I thought, “I know what happened to you. I know what happened to me. I know what we go through in a day.” But I didn’t share these thoughts with her. I didn’t even recommend that she read Baldwin—at least not yet. Instead, I shared the words “microaggression” and “racial battle fatigue.” I offered her language that illuminated reality and empowered her to name her experience. Naming the causes of our festering wounds is an important step toward our healing.

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About Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena

A son of the US South (Mom) and Puerto Rico (Dad), Dr. Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL), where he teaches courses on race, justice, and political philosophy, and is a fellow in The Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies. He serves as the faculty advisor for Unidad Cristiana, a student group working to enhance Christian unity and celebrate Latina/o cultures, a scholar-in-residence for World Outspoken, and a co-host for the forthcoming podcast From the Underside. He’s also writing a book on Critical Race Theory with IVP Academic.

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Donate today and help us continue to produce resources for the mestizo church.

Is Your Bible Anti-Black

Editors Note: Throughout this essay, “black” refers to the color while “Black” refers to the historic racialized community.

“Our theology never comes from a blank space.””

— Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, Atando Cabos

“The reclamation of racial beauty in the sixties stirred these thoughts, made me think about the necessity for the claim…Why did [Black beauty] need public articulation to exist?””

— Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

Christians are people of the Book, the library of sacred texts that we call the Bible. The Old and New Testaments contain the inspired word of God. They are, as the apostle Paul writes, God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16). And so, they are “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness.”

Yet none of these inspired texts was God-breathed through a modern language. Each was originally etched in Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic—not Mandarin, Arabic, Portuguese, or Spanish. Unless you read the former ancient languages, you encounter the sacred page through the veil of translation.  

But even translators of the original biblical languages encounter scripture through a veil. What New Testament scholar C. René Padilla writes about interpreters applies to translators: “Interpreters do not live in a vacuum. They live in concrete historical situations, in particular cultures. From their cultures they derive not only their language but also patterns of thought and conduct, methods of learning, emotional reactions, values, interests and goals.” Translators are socially situated readers and interpreters. Their contexts and commitments—to say nothing of character—infuse their handling of Scripture. As Padilla argues, “whenever interpreters approach a particular biblical text they can do so only from their own perspective. This gives rise to a complex, dynamic two-way interpretive process depicted as a ‘hermeneutical circle’, in which interpreters and text are mutually engaged.”

Recognizing these dynamics, New Testament scholar Esau McCaulley calls for Bible publishers to hire multi-racialized and multi-ethnic translation teams. McCaulley writes:

I’ve discovered that people of color and women have rarely led or participated in Bible translation. On one hand, this doesn’t trouble me much. It is hard to mess up the story of the Exodus, distort the message of the prophets or dismantle the story of Jesus. It is all there in every English translation.

On the other, I believe it matters who translates the Bible, and that more diverse translation committees could inspire fresh confidence among Christians of color….

The insight, experience and skills of female scholars might open our eyes to nuances that a committee of all men might miss. Christians for whom English is a second language might highlight ways in which our word choice is unclear. Similarly, [B]lack Christians may call to mind neglected aspects of the text. 

McCaulley supports his call for diverse translation teams by considering English translations of Exodus 12:38, beginning with the King James Version. When Israel leaves Egypt, “a mixed multitude went up also with them” (KJV). McCaulley notes that “Nearly all scholars agree that the original Hebrew meant to highlight that an ethnically diverse group of people left Egypt with the Jewish people. This group could have included Egyptians and other ethnic groups, such as the Cushites.” So, whereas “The translation ‘mixed multitude’ isn’t necessarily wrong,” McCaulley argues, “It simply does not communicate the power of this simple verse in a way that would be understood by those reading today. If I were translating the passage, I would say that ‘an ethnically diverse crowd’ went up out of Egypt.”

McCaulley’s alternative translation is a mild corrective of the KJV. He does not deem it wrong nor unfit for its time. Instead, McCaulley argues that it and modern English translations that speak of a “mixed multitude” leaving Egypt (e.g., ESV) neglect linguistic frequencies that carry important conceptual and contextual insights for today’s English readers.

I affirm McCaulley’s call for racial, ethnic, and gender diversity in translation teams and his proposed alternative translation of Exodus 12. I’d like to extend both by arguing that anti-Black racist ideas have crept into English Bible translations. To see what I mean, let’s turn our attention to the King James’s translation of a verse in Song of Solomon.

Is Blackness Beautiful?

Song of Solomon begins on an exuberant note. After noting that it is the song of songs and belongs to Solomon, the song’s primary female figure professes her enthusiasm to be with her beloved.

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.

Because of the savour of thy good ointments thy name is as ointment poured forth, therefore do the virgins love thee.

Draw me, we will run after thee: the king hath brought me into his chambers…(vv. 2-4)

A supportive, enthusiastic chorus enters the text to celebrate this highly anticipated joining. “We will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will remember thy love more than wine: the upright love thee” (v. 4). All is right. All rejoice.

The text turns to the female’s first self-description. Here’s the original Hebrew, reading right to left:

שְׁחוֹרָ֤ה אֲנִי֙ וְֽנָאוָ֔ה בְּנ֖וֹת יְרוּשָׁלִָ֑ם כְּאָהֳלֵ֣י קֵדָ֔רכִּירִיע֖וֹת

Here’s how KJV reads: “I am black, but comely [beautiful], O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon” (v. 5) Those who read Hebrew will recognize that the KJV has failed its readers.

The failure comes in verse five’s opening. The KJV’s translation team renders “שְׁחוֹרָ֤ה אֲנִי֙ וְֽנָאוָ֔ה” as “I am black, but comely [beautiful].” But as Old Testament scholar Wilda Gafney observes, this translation choice is grammatically impossible. The conjunction וְֽ at the start of וְֽנָאוָ֔ה means “and”—not “but.” Moreover, as Gafney argues, because there isn’t a “but” in Hebrew, authors writing in Hebrew must compile “a bunch of stuff to make a disjunction”; they can’t simply use a conjunction that means “and.”

Gafney realized these linguistic truths as a child. From a young age, she loved learning languages and desired a more direct relationship with the biblical text. As she compared the Hebrew and KJV, she saw “it was wrong in the King James Bible that I grew up with, where it said, ‘I am black but beautiful.’” This sparked a second realization:

The people translating [that passage] could not see blackness as beautiful, and so their whole identity [as self-identified white men] went into that one conjunction saying, ‘in spite of being Black, she’s all right.’ But that is not what the text said. And so that was the first place where I understood that people make choices when they translate [the Bible], and those choices affect what we hear [from the text].     

McCaulley’s alternative translation of Exodus 12:38 mildly corrects the KJV’s. Gafney’s alternative translation of Song of Solomon 1:5 is a damning corrective of the KJV. It highlights that the KJV’s rendering is wrong—and layers anti-Black racist ideas onto the biblical page.

The KJV’s Racial Context

Gafney claims that the KJV’s translation team injected their anti-Black sentiments into the KJV. For many, this claim is jarring. Congregations that use the KJV rarely discuss the translation’s racial context (or content). The same holds for academic treatments of the text. David Lyle Jeffery’s, Alister McGrath’s, and David Norton’s books on the KJV say nothing about the text’s racialized context (or content). None have an index entry on “race,” “whiteness,” or “white supremacy”—let alone a sustained discussion about the anti-Black translation of Song of Solomon 1:5. Though from different parts of the globe—Canada, Ireland, and England, respectively—none of these racialized white authors ensured their books addressed the KJV’s racial dimensions. What Gafney noticed as a youth, they overlook in their mature academic writing.

Given these ecclesiastical and scholarly omissions, a word about the KJV’s racial context is in order. Let us consider two aspects of this context: international anti-Blackness and anti-Blackness in contemporary English literature and theatre.

Starting in the fifteenth century, a racial scale that prioritized “whiteness” informed European imperialism. The first recorded slave auction makes this clear. Reflecting on the year 1444, Portugal’s royal chronicler Gomes Eanes de Azurara writes:

[On] the next day, which was the 8th of the month of August, very early in the morning, by reason of the heat, the seamen began to make ready their boats, and to take out those captives, and carry them on shore, as they were commanded. And these, placed all together in that field, were a marvelous sight; for amongst them were some white enough, fair to look upon, and well proportioned; others were less white like mulattoes; others again were as black as Ethiops [Ethiopians], and so ugly, both in features and in body, as almost to appear (to those who saw them) the images of a lower hemisphere.

All depicted are slaves; not all are equal. Some are “white,” and therefore “fair to look upon, and well proportioned.” Others are “less white like mulattoes,” and, apparently, deserve little discussion. Others still are “black,” and hence “ugly”—as if they had come from Hell itself. Here is a scale that advances white supremacy and anti-Blackness.

European colonizers repackaged and disseminated Azurara’s scale as they constructed pigmentocracies—governments for and by those deemed “white.” Historian C.R. Boxer notes that, although Portugal and Spain respectively granted mesticos and mestizos a positive colonial status, “both Iberian empires remained essentially a ‘pigmentocracy’ . . . based on the conviction of white racial, moral, and intellectual superiority—just as did their Dutch, English, and French successors.” Race scholar and sociologist Howard Winant similarly observes that these European colonial powers believed they were “the whites, the masters, the true Christians.” And historian Winthrop Jordan succinctly captures this trend among the British, highlighting that, during the seventeenth century, English colonists treated “Christian, free, English, and white” as metonyms. For them, each word was equivalent.

The racialized language Jordan details has antecedents in English literature that’s contemporary with the KJV, which was published in 1611. In 1578, the widely read English travel writer George Best offered a damning account of “the Ethiopians blacknesse.” While discussing his Artic voyage, Best argued that, because Ham had sex on the Ark, God cursed Ham and his descendants to be “so blacke and loathsome that it might remain a spectacle of disobedience to all the worlde.” Thus, Best championed a racialized curse theory which linked Blackness to ugliness and hypersexuality. Similar anti-Black ideas populate William Shakespeare’s plays.

The first Black character in Shakespeare’s plays is Aaron, the evil, deceptive, hypersexual, murderous Moor in Titus Andronicus (1594). The most famous Black character in Shakespeare’s plays is also a Moor: Othello (1604). Iago, Othello’s ensign, despises the Black Othello for marrying the White Desdemona. “For that I do suspect the lusty Moor/Hath leaped into my seat,” Iago claims. And while talking to Desdemona’s father, Iago says Othello is “an old black ram/…tupping your white ewe.” Iago later tricks Othello into believing that Desdemona has betrayed him. Before Othello kills Desdemona, he cries, “Her name that was fresh/as Dian’s visage, is now begrim’d and black/As mine own face.” After Othello learns that he unjustly killed his wife, Emilia, Desdemona’s maidservant, declares: “O! the more angel she. And you the blacker devil.” The Tempest’s (1611) Caliban also recapitulates the conceptual linking of Blackness and Satan that filled European theatre. Caliban is the bastard child of an African witch from a “vile race” and a demon. Caliban is also hypersexual.

Other English playwriters also employed anti-Black ideas and images. Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness (1605) is especially important for our discussion. Commissioned by King James I, Jonson’s play was the most expensive production made in London. Premiering in the luxurious Whitehall Palace, the play is the story of twelve ugly African princesses of the river god Niger. The princesses learn that they can be “made beautiful” if they go to “Britannia,” for there the sun “beams shine day and night, and are of force/ To blanch [make white] an Æthiop, and revive a corpse.” White women, including Queen Anne, played the Black princesses. How? They used blackface.

White supremacy and anti-Blackness occupied a privileged place in European imperialism and English literature and theatre. Shakespeare and Jonson composed and presented plays that drew upon, shaped, and perpetuated anti-Black and pro-White English sentiments. These international and cultural realities were pillars of the KJV’s racial context. 

Returning to the Song of Solomon

The KJV’s anti-Black translation of Song of Solomon 1:5 reflected its cultural context. It also shaped other cultures around the globe and across the centuries. The U.S. is a case in point. As historian Mark Noll argues, the KJV was the U.S.’s national book in the nineteenth century. Biblical language and allusions filled U.S. public discourse, and “the vast majority of public Bible references came from a single translation”—the KJV. It was this translation that filled debates about the U.S.’s slavocracy and global racialized chattel slavery. Moreover, it was this translation that became a staple in African American congregations and homes. Recall that Wilda Gafney grew up on the KJV. So did Esau McCaulley.

I grew up in a [B]lack Baptist church that revered the King James Version (KJV). Whenever it was read aloud, the congregation rose to its feet. But the KJV was more than a book read on Sunday. It shaped the culture of Southern black Christianity. Its thees and thous permeated our parents’ extemporaneous prayers. It marked the rhetoric of our most powerful preachers.

McCaulley argues that his experiences are common for Black Christians in the North or South. “If Flannery O’Connor can say that the South is Christ-haunted, then we can say that [B]lack Christianity is haunted by King James.” We hear this haunting hum in James Baldwin’s and Toni Morrison’s books and essays.

The KJV may also haunt modern English Bible translations of Song of Solomon 1:5. Consider these twenty-six translations (emphasis added):

Like the KJV, fourteen of the twenty-six versions offer a grammatically impossible translation with “but.” Four others offer a similarly impossible translation of “yet.” Only eight versions correctly translate the text’s “and.” Consequently, eighteen of these modern English translations—an arresting sixty-nine percent—give readers a wrong translation that perpetuates an anti-Black idea about beauty that the original Hebrew rejects. Thus sayeth the Lord, indeed.

Black is Beautiful

Biblical translations matter. They help or hinder our ability to encounter God and creation. They rebuff or retrench idolatry. They foster or fizzle love of self and neighbor. Song of Solomon teaches that black is beautiful. The Song’s primary female figure is beautiful and black. There is no contrasting conjunction here. Rightly encountering God and creation require seeing and feeling this truth. So does rebuffing the historic idolatry of whiteness. So does Black self-love and love of our Black neighbors. A diverse translation team populated by members with the lived experiences, communal ties, and interpretive skill of a Wilda Gafney would empower English Bible readers to experience and celebrate these God-breathed truths.

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About Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena

A son of the US South (Mom) and Puerto Rico (Dad), Dr. Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL), where he teaches courses on race, justice, and political philosophy, and is a fellow in The Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies. He serves as the faculty advisor for Unidad Cristiana, a student group working to enhance Christian unity and celebrate Latina/o cultures, a scholar-in-residence for World Outspoken, and a co-host for the forthcoming podcast From the Underside. He’s also writing a book on Critical Race Theory with IVP Academic.

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Imagining Una Iglesia Mestiza: Vision Amid Crisis

This article is from the forthcoming Moody Center magazine, set to publish spring 2022. To learn more about the magazine and Moody Center, subscribe to their newsletter.

Middle-America is currently facing a years-long identity crisis.

The March 2018 issue of National Geographic includes an article by Michele Norris titled, As America Changes, Some Anxious Whites Feel Left Behind. Its subtitle reads: “Demographic shifts rippling across the nation are fueling fears that [white] culture and standing are under threat.” The story centers on Hazleton, Pennsylvania, an old coal mining town transformed by an influx of Latin Americans, particularly Afro-Latinos from the Caribbean. White residents – themselves children of European immigrants to Hazelton – repeatedly told Norris during interviews they now felt “outnumbered.”  She writes about white residents no longer participating in the town’s fall parade because it “became too scary. Too uncomfortable … too brown.” White Hazletonians were feeling, perhaps for the first time ever, the cultural collision, el choque, that has shaped the borderlands of the US for over a century. Their reaction to this encounter is unsurprisingly defensive:  

“With Hazleton’s changing demographics and persistent economic decline, the community began to see itself as white. The city reasserted its identity as white.”[1]

The realities of the US borderlands are no longer bound to the outer edges of the country, and Hazelton’s identity crisis exemplifies a common response. This crisis, and the fear stemming from it, marks wide-reaching debates about racial justice and the role of the evangelical church; it raises questions about who US Americans are and what must be conserved as things change. Few evangelical leaders are addressing the identity question inherent to the growing tensions in towns like Hazelton. Fewer still are asking if a non-white community identity can help congregations bring peace between neighbors. Ironically, the very people whose presence is cause for Hazeltonian suspicion produced a theological category and identity from which to imagine this peace. US-Latin American theologians reimagined the meaning of a racist identifying name and in doing so created a good tool to use according to the guidance of the Spirit. This article explores the US-Latin American use of the “mestiza y mestizo” identity as a tool to resolve the crisis and move toward peace.[2]

A Brief History of “Mestizaje”

During their colonization of the Caribbean and Latin America, the Spanish developed a system of racial classifications to assert their superiority. Sanctioned and perpetuated by the church, these racial categories became the hierarchical and ordering arrangement of Spanish colonies. Those designated “blanco” (white) were given the full rights and privileges of a colonial citizen. The Spanish system included 14-20 official classifications of racial mixture to distinguish between greater and lesser “whiteness” and provided measured rights and privileges accordingly. These racial categories were fluid but rooted in phenotype (e.g. skin color, hair type, etc.). Some people managed to move up via the accrual of wealth, becoming a priest, or being appointed to serve in government, and they received certificates of racial purity as they arrived at “white” status.

Mestiza/o was one of the official classifications of the Spanish colonies. It was given to those mixed children of Indigenous and Spanish blood. This designation would later become the leading self-identity for several Latin American countries attempting to establish their own peoplehood. Mexico, for instance, under the guidance of philosophers and politicians like Jose Vasconcelos, attempted to encourage (often by force) the mixing of remaining African and Indigenous people in the land, so they could become one “mestizo” people. Cuba, Colombia, Brazil, and other nations had similar blanqueamiento (whitening) programs that were justified according to racial improvement logics.[3] The goal of these programs was to move the people further up the scale toward becoming “white.”

In the 1960s, along the borders of the US, Latin-American pastors, poets, activists, and theologians reappropriated the word mestiza/o to describe the experience of Latina/o diaspora. That is, the term now described the bi-cultural tension of Latina/os born along the border who felt neither fully of the US or the country of their parentage. These Latina/os felt they belonged to both and neither at once; They were, as one writer would say, living “on the hyphen.” These borderland mestiza/os made mistakes in adopting such a term for their purposes, yet their use of mestiza/o reveals a way of imagining belonging that can be useful to the church. Here are three ways the mestiza/o identity can serve the church’s witness to a US in crisis.

1) Rejecting the Purity Myth

By definition, mestiza/os are impure. They are the byproduct of colonization by Spain and US-empire expansion. The former produced people of literal mixed heritage. The latter created the circumstances in which the already mixed person experienced a second-level mixing of culture, theology, and race. Gloria Anzaldúa would call this second mix a product of a “choque” (collision) that created dissonance for the Mestiza/o. This dissonance, what Anzaldúa calls “mestiza consciousness,” stands in stark contrast to “the theory of the pure Aryan, and to the policy of racial purity that white America practices.”[4] Because the mestiza must operate between worlds that neither accept nor include her fully, she can better handle ambiguity and develops a tolerance for contradictions. She learns to participate as a partial exile in worlds borne of conflict. To say it plainly, mestizas are disinterested in the claims of objectivity and purity used by whites to protect and insulate themselves from others.

Consider the way the Hazeltonian reaffirmation of whiteness animates retreat by its residents; they flee from that which they cannot understand. They wish to retain the “purity” of their vision for Hazelton. They accuse their Afro-Latina/o neighbor of distorting, deforming, and breaking the town fabric. Anzaldúa demonstrates the irrationality of this purity myth. Her ideas press the Hazeltonians to see themselves as equally impure byproducts of their collision with new lands and exile from former European roots. Their practices are not more true, good, or beautiful. Both “white” and non-white exist as impure products of a violent history, mixtures born from empires.

2) Accepting a Non-Innocent History

The complexity revealed in the mestiza/o identity echoes a truth long affirmed by the Church: no human is pure and innocent (Rom. 3:23). Whiteness, understood as a purity claim, records a history of innocence that reifies that purity. The default for whites is innocence, not guilt; racial purity is equated with moral purity. This began with the endorsement of the church on the racial arrangement of colonies, and it persists in many respects today. This self-defense is only possible through organized forgetting – “the intentional, repetitious omitting of certain facts, narratives, and artifacts, and the repetitious presenting of other facts, narratives, and artifacts, [by which] communities form themselves to know some things and to overlook or disremember other things.” Any attempt to disassociate from historical (and present) racism is conditioned by this form of forgetting. The normalcy of the forgetting is what makes it possible for “whites” to feel innocent regarding racial systems. They simply do not know what they do not know. Once more, whiteness moves away from sound doctrine, and the mestiza/o identity offers a corrective.

Theologian and church historian Justo Gonzalez, referring to Hispanics and their inherited history, writes:

Our Spanish ancestors took the lands of our [Native] ancestors. Some of our [Native] ancestors practiced human sacrifice and cannibalism. Some of our Spanish forefathers raped our [Native] foremothers. Some of our [Native] foremothers betrayed their people in favor of the invaders. It is not a pretty story. But it is more real than the story that white settlers came to this land with pure motivations, and that any abuse of inhabitants was the exception rather than the rule. It is also a story resulting in a painful identity.[5]

Anzaldúa expands Dr. Gonzalez’s line of reasoning. In a world deeply marked by conflict, Anzaldúa believed mestiza/os could serve as mediators because the mestiza consciousness “serves as a mode of self-critique.”[6] Anzaldúa resisted the idea of simple two-sided conflicts where one group is oppressor and the other is oppressed. She believed “no one is exempt from contributing to oppression in limited contexts.”[7] These scholars echo truths of Scripture. The historical church acknowledges it is not beyond the guilt and crookedness of this violent world. The identity of God’s people is always simul justus et peccator (simultaneously righteous and sinner). As those who confess their non-innocence, Christians engage ministry differently.

3) Inverting the Scale (Life in the Middle)

Mestiza/os must make a choice: (a) attempt to move up the scale toward whiteness or (b) as mediators and ambassadors, pursue justice for all those negatively affected by the scale. If Dr. González is right that the mestiza/o identity is a “painful identity” marked by inherited guilt, this must include the ways mestiza/os have made attempts to move up the scale to white. Surely mestiza/o history does not stop with the earliest ancestors. Those blanqueamiento (whitening) programs meant to produce mestiza/os demonstrate the ways Latina/os perpetuate racism. On the other hand, shaped and informed by theology, mestizaje offers a vision for ministry rich with gospel implications. This vision begins with the subversion of the scale all-together. In other words, it begins by resisting whiteness’ invitation toward preferential treatment of the powerful (James 2:1-13). Instead, mestiza/os are invited to take up God’s missional focus on the poor.

The mestiza/o who prioritizes those affected by racial injustice also approaches their ministry methods with deep humility. In their work, they acknowledge their impurity and non-innocence; they are aware of the real risk for self-contradiction. These three lessons inform the church’s approach to the identity crisis poisoning towns like Hazelton. Rejecting whiteness is about remembering collective guilt, acknowledging shared impurity, and prioritizing the inverted scale.

“It is in the very way of Jesus that mestizos find their mission: to create. In this is both the excitement and challenge. God might have created the world in seven days, but it takes us many generations to create a new humanity, a new culture. It cannot be merely legislated. It has to develop gradually through the efforts of the poets, the artists, the thinkers…” the culture-makers.[8]

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About Emanuel Padilla

Emanuel Padilla is president of World Outspoken and cohost of the Mestizo Podcast. He is committed to serving bi-cultural Christians facing questions of identity, culture, and theology. He also serves at The Brook, a church on the northwest side of Chicago, along with his wife Kelly.

Follow him on Twitter to learn more.

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Footnotes

[1] Jamie Longazel, professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, as quoted by Norris.

[2] The words “mestiza, mestizo, mestizaje” and related variants have unique meanings in various Latin American countries. The focus in this article is the specific use of the word(s) by Latin Americans in the US.

[3] See PBS documentary Black in Latin America (2011) for more information on forced miscegenation political programs.

[4] Gloria Anzaldúa, Norma Cantú, and Aída Hurtado, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4th ed. Edition (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012), p. 99.

[5] Justo L. González, Manana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective (Abingdon Press, 2010), p. 40. As a point of observation regarding non-innocence, it is worth noting the exclusions in Gonzalez’s comments about Hispanic heritage. It could be said that Gonzalez is guilty of exclusion of the African in his historical account, and in so doing, is non-innocent regarding their erasure.

[6] Nestor Medina and Nstor Medina, Mestizaje: Remapping Race, Culture, and Faith in Latina/O Catholicism (Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books, 2009), p. 25.

[7] Anzaldúa, Cantú, and Hurtado, Borderlands / La Frontera, p. 8.

[8] Virgilio Elizondo, Davíd Carrasco, and Sandra Cisneros, The Future Is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet, Revised Edition, Revised, Subsequent Edition (Boulder, Colo: University Press of Colorado, 2000).

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Tempted to Silence

Stage Setting

To borrow a line from Willie James Jennings, “The things I tell are precise accounts while being exact fabrications…everything I tell you, everything, is the truth. It is the truth in service of moving us to a new place of gathering.”

Here is a temptation story. Does it sound familiar?

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En El Parque

We sipped our coffees between sympathetic sighs and pain-laced chuckles. We had suffered greatly and we knew it. That’s why we agreed to grab café and walk to a park where we could talk freely. We knew our colleagues wouldn’t be there. We knew the police rarely patrolled it; no need to worry about “inquiries.” Sometimes you must escape modes of surveillance so you can be—so you can listen and cry en conjunto.

Our visit did not start with sipping and sighs. Because our coffees were too hot to drink and our stories too agonizing to share without the security of a secluded space, we carried our coffees and swapped fun family updates while we walked to the park. We had much to celebrate. We had jokes to tell. Smiles adorned our faces and joyous laughter filled the space between us as we spoke. These laughs were divine gifts. We needed them and we knew it.

We reached the park and scanned the grounds. No one was there. Relieved, we selected a place to sit. Some burdens demand stillness. Sometimes movement fosters avoidance.

Our moods changed as we began discussing our personal pains. So did our cadence. Nervous, trauma-infused laughter filled the space between us. We had suffered greatly and we knew it. The brown bench bowed under our weight.

“Remember the racist meme?” I ask.

“Of course. How could any Latino or Latina forget it?”

“During a conversation, an institutional leader asked me if I had to use the word ‘victim’ when I talked about being pictured in that anti-Latin@ meme. ‘Perhaps another word is more appropriate?’ If I’m not a victim for being pictured in a racist meme that hundreds of people viewed on the internet, when would I be a ‘victim’?”

“Right? Sometimes these attempts to ‘reframe’ things to appease the constituents of historically white Christian spaces like ours leave you wondering: ‘Did I just hear that, or am I going crazy? You can’t be serious. Is it still the 1950s or something?’”  

“Exactamente. The subtle efforts to nudge Latinx folks into more ‘respectable’ speech—the kind that won’t rock the Anglo boat—infuriate and terrify me. They require so much vigilance! I’m telling you: It’s easy to become a cooked frog, assimilating to every minor temperature adjustment designed to keep ‘certain’ Anglo constituents appeased.”

“And when you resist, when you ask, ‘Why are you adjusting the water temperature?” they look you in the eyes and say, ‘What are you talking about?’”

“Preach.”  

“You see their hand on the nob. You watch them turn up the heat. But when you ask them why they’re doing that, they say they aren’t doing anything. The blatant gas-lighting is gross.”  

“Sure is.”

“Ever notice how often these leaders gas-light you right before charging you with being a troublemaker?”

“Ah—the dreaded T-word. Not sure any racialized minority can recover from being labeled a ‘troublemaker’ in a historically or predominately white institution.”

I sip my coffee; my friend is silent. No one sighs. Our muscles tense. Apprehension fills the space between us.

“Nathan, you know people are calling you a troublemaker, right?”

“I know some people are calling me much worse than that!”

“I’m serious.”

“I am too…”

“Okay, but hear me. I’m worried about you. People are labeling you a troublemaker, hermano—and some are trying to keep you from getting a seat at important institutional tables.”

“I know…and I’m grateful for your loving concern. You unfortunately have good reasons to worry.”

“Yes I do. We both do.”

“This reminds me of a line from Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction. Du Bois says that the U.S. will never have a truthful history ‘until we have in our colleges men [and women] who regard the truth as more important than the defense of the white race.’ What Du Bois says about U.S. higher education generally holds for U.S. Christian higher education in particular—especially in historically white institutions. My speaking out against the histories of racism, white supremacy, and U.S. Anglo-Saxon imperialism has upset some folks.”

“Sí; it has.”

“Fans of white Christian Nationalism are outraged. Some have called for my job. ‘He’s racist and a liar!’ they say. ‘Fire him, or I’ll stop financially supporting your institution!’”

 “Got to love the financial power plays coming from the very people who decry ‘cancel culture.’ I wish you never faced those threats. It must be anxiety inducing.”

“You know they are, because you get them too. Nothing like having to trust God for your daily bread when people are calling for your job or labeling you a troublemaker.”

We both look down. The bench remains bowed. My hands start to sweat as I raise my coffee to drink with my friend. We sip. We shake our heads and sigh. Then we look at each other. My friend continues.

“If you dialed it back—and I’m not saying you should—I suspect you could shake the label ‘troublemaker.’”

“I can’t dial it back. We both know that. If anything, I have been too quiet. Mi gente in Puerto Rico are the world’s oldest colony. They continue to suffer from U.S. white supremacy and economic exploitation. God has called me to bear witness to their miseries and amplify their voices in places where they have gone unheard.”

“You and your people have suffered greatly. And I agree about your calling. But I worry that your pace and the labels you carry may keep you from amplifying these voices in the halls of power. I mean, just look at how I’ve been ostracized and disrespected—and I’ve said far less ‘incendiary’ things than you have.”

Pain radiates from my friend’s eyes. Psalm 35 comes to mind as I consider my next words.

“I hear you,” I begin. “And I’m sorry you’ve suffered so much for confronting institutional racism. I hate it. I wish yours wasn’t a vocation of agony.”

“Thanks, Nathan. Me too.”

“The ‘reprimands’ and gas-lighting you’ve faced have been egregious. Simply egregious.”

“Seeing the institutional underside has been rough. I’ve shed many tears while crying out to Jesus. You’re right: It’s been a vocation of agony.”  

“I got that phrase from MLK. He says promoting justice is a vocation of agony in ‘Beyond Vietnam.’”

“I haven’t read that.”

“It’s so good. That’s where King says there comes a time when silence is betrayal.”

“Some Latinx folks justify their institutional silence by saying that we need to go poco a poco.”

 “Yeah. I’ve received this counsel several times. It flies in the face of history. And it’s eerily similar to the gradualism King denounces in ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail.’”

“Ever the race scholar…But you’re right: Those are good connections.”

“Thanks...I wish they weren’t. I wish those pieces weren’t relevant to our lives.”

“If only…”

“Silence and gradualism remain enticing temptations. But often silence is betrayal and gradualism is an ideology that sooths flawed consciences while it perpetuates exploitation and oppression. ‘Don’t worry: We’re moving prudently—with ‘all deliberate speed.’”

“But Nathan, don’t you see, ‘We’re making big strides: We’ve written statements. You should be impressed—and grateful.’”

“You and I have heard those lines time and time again, haven’t we?”

“Yep.”

“So many evangelical institutions and institutional leaders repeat this mantra. It’s painfully predictable.”

“And it often accompanies gas-lighting.”

“You’re right.”   

We pause to sip our coffees. They’re nearly empty.

“Even when we do the work God’s given us,” my friend says, “promoting justice for and amplifying the voices of Latinx folks, we still end up in a position where we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“If we promote justice and amplify our people’s pains, people ostracize us, removing us from institutional or societal places of power. But if we’re silent or play the institution’s desired gradual game, we’ll get accolades and mammon—but we and our people suffer, though in different ways.”

“I hear you. That’s it, isn’t it? Nothing like being stuck between a rock and a hard place while you’re trying to stand firm upon the Rock.”

“It’s exhausting.”

“It sure is. Racial battle fatigue is no joke. We must recognize it. We need to take time to recover from it. I say this knowing that, for some reason, the LORD keeps preparing a table for us in the presence of our enemies, keeps calling us to a Eucharistic feast in which we participate in Christ’s sufferings.”

“In these circumstances, it is easy to succumb to the temptation to remain silent or ‘work’ for ‘gradual change.’” Those paths are less painful and the fast tracks to fame, money, and power. ‘Forget all this misery. Isn’t Christ’s yoke supposed to be light? This isn’t light—it’s heavy!”

“You got me thinking about Jesus’s temptation. We face something similar. ‘If you just bow an assimilated knee,’ figures in historically or predominately white institutions tell us, ‘all these kingdoms can be yours. No need to suffer.

And why not better position yourself to empower your people?’ As if we could have those kingdoms and advance the Kingdom. As if we could support our people by selling them out.”

“Can’t serve God and mammon. No wonder some of the nudges and calls to assimilate feel satanic.”

“Now that’s a word.”

We wrap up our conversation expressing our gratitude for friendship. We stand and the brown bench creaks in relief. It is no longer holding our burdens. Our burdens aren’t gone; our coffee cups are empty. Still our cups runneth over.  

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About Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena

A son of the US South (Mom) and Puerto Rico (Dad), Dr. Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL), where he teaches courses on race, justice, and political philosophy, and is a fellow in The Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies. He serves as the faculty advisor for Unidad Cristiana, a student group working to enhance Christian unity and celebrate Latina/o cultures, a scholar-in-residence for World Outspoken, and a co-host for the forthcoming podcast From the Underside. He’s also writing a book on Critical Race Theory with IVP Academic.

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Living in my Memory: Pastor Rich Perez on “In the Heights”

This article was first published by Rich Perez on his personal blog and can be read at here.

In the Heights, Warner Brothers 2021

Like everyone else, we were excited. Beaming with pride that any semblance of our story — our neighborhood story was being told on the silver screen. We were especially proud because our son, who has been acting for 6 years now, was able to land an on-screen background role in the movie. So, no matter what suspicions or reluctance some of us had about which story would be told, “In The Heights” had us all waiting with eager expectation.

And it delivered…kind of. Well, it’s complicated. Within a few days of its long anticipated premier, social media and news outlets like The Root exploded with criticism mainly about the movie’s misrepresentation of Washington Heights, a neighborhood that recently was canonized as “Little Dominican Republic” to pay homage to the many Dominican residents that call it home.

And that may be the source of the rub.

There are much smarter people than me talking about the nuances of Latinx identity. I won’t attempt to be scholarly about that. These are my reflections, most of which are birthed out of my experiences as someone deeply shaped by Uptown culture. The only other motivator here are my kids, who I feel the exciting responsibility to pass on the legacy of my identity so that they could discover who they are.

Art will always be complex

No matter how deeply a piece of art is connected to a real moment in history, place or person, its expression will always be at the mercy of the artist. As enjoyers of art, there will always be room to insert your observations or interpretations of the piece, but ultimately the artist decides — even if subconsciously — what the pen writes, what the brush strokes, what the camera captures. Lin-Manuel is the architect; he’s the artist. In The Heights was shaped by his experiences of Uptown (mainly Inwood, or Dyckman for us natives, which is the northern most part of the neighborhood. how that difference shapes his storytelling is also important, but for another time). For those of us that took to the theaters in celebration of what could be, we watched a movie about a neighborhood that existed in his imagination. and we didn’t leave with the level of satisfaction we had hoped for. Why? Because we don’t live in his imagination. Not as main characters, at least.

Art will always be complex, because art is birthed out of us. And we are complex beings who are shaped by nuanced experiences, privileges or lack thereof. We’re shaped by our desires and preferences — spoken or unspoken. As the architect Lin created what he imagined, a “mosaic.” But therein lies a fundamental obstacle. Washington Heights is not a mosaic. While it may be home to a variety of Latinx identities, Washington Heights is demonstrably Dominican; Afro-Dominican.

There have been so many Mexicans, Cubans, even Brazilians declaring their praise for In The Heights because they felt seen. And rightfully so, their flags and accents were in the movie. They felt seen because they were on screen. The movie’s effort to celebrate Latinidad (I don’t want any of the smoke that comes with this word) was beautiful but it minimized the Dominican story that lives in the very air of this community. Now, this is dicey, because I’d hate for this to be interpreted as a campaign to not celebrate those cultures. This is not that. We should celebrate them.

This is, however, an effort to show that Latinx expression varies across the different Latinx ethnicities, and this movie was an opportunity to put that on display.

Beyond the tasks of filmmaking

Casting, as much as the wardrobe, the script, the director, or any other department on the set of a movie, is not so much a task, but an opportunity. Better yet, it’s a responsibility to build the world of the film. And in the case of a movie about a neighborhood with such a unique expression, it is difficult to see the right cast in the backdrop of the wrong setting. It’s also devastating to see (on the big screen no less) our streets, our bodegas, our corners, our stoops with strangers occupying them. Even more — what the cast wears, how they sound, their accent, their syntax, their references, their isms, their music, their skin color, the smells of the movie, el sabor of the movie. All of those are special and important to the telling of our story. All of those serve as bricks in the construction of the world that the movie promised simply by virtue of its name. Oh, how i wished there was a perico ripia’o or a number with una bachatica ensendi’a!

But this is not In The Heights through my eyes, nor your eyes. It’s through the eyes of two Puertoriqueños, one of whose relationship to the Heights could perhaps be understood as periphery having grown up in West Philly. This may be the reason for a heavy presence of salsa music and a dominant Puerto Rican cast. Even if they played the role of Dominicans. This may explain why the beloved piraguero cooled los vecinos from the sweltering heat with piraguas and not frio frios. ¡Dame uno de chinola!… not parcha. When you know the artists, you better understand the art.

And as for the visual direction, well, that was in the hands of an Asian man and a white woman. Jon Chu and Alice Brooks are responsible for what, and more importantly, who, is captured by the camera. And listen, this is no indictment on them for those things. I could never. And I wouldn’t want to. But it is a call to awareness that they are the source of this art. And the truth is that perhaps for some of them, this wasn’t their story to tell.

Casting directors and other executive roles in the film-making journey are like the visual managers at retail stores. It’s their vision that decides which mannequins and outfits are considered most attractive for the windows that face the street. Yes, we got to see Latinos on the screen in ways that we never have, yet there still remains glass ceilings to be shattered for the Afro-Latinx community. Perhaps much of the frustration is coming from the expectations we had on this movie to deliver some of that shattering.

Nonetheless, as a Dominicano from Uptown, Lin-Manuel has given me sufficient reasons to be proud of my Latinx identity — no matter how nuanced it may be. But we shouldn’t make the conclusion that critique means that we hate the project and can’t appreciate it generally. I think Lin knows that. He’s also just an artist navigating all the heat his work is receiving. That’s no easy place to be in. I get that, too.

I won’t beat a dead horse. Afro-Latinos were desperately absent in the foreground of this story, and thus, in the present imagination of its creators. But it’s important to share that I won’t condemn anyone for not highlighting me in their imagination. None of us can, I suppose. We can only hope to inspire imagination, stretch it with truthful criticism — whether it spills out of us harshly or not. Though we hope it wouldn’t.

It’s a big deal to have this movie in Hollywood. And I’m thankful for that. There is nothing like In The Heights that has been memorialized into cinema history. That should be celebrated. As big, however, is the missed opportunity to tell the story more truthfully. Again, I think Lin gets that. His humility and active listening is a hopeful sign for great future projects and advocacy of the stories some of us felt fell short here.

If anything I’ve gotten from the loving relationship in my life is that mature love leads with celebration while holding space for growth, transformation, correction.

In the Heights, Warner Brothers 2021

The Gift of Becoming Yourself

Yes, Hollywood is watching us have our disagreements, but I want to strongly encourage us to reframe the way we have these discussions. It’s important that we don’t frame those bringing critique as “hating” on the movie and damaging our perception to Hollywood. And on that note — big production companies, like Warner Bros., with their white dollars, are not the only way to have our stories told. The film-making industry is like any other industry, I imagine. There are enough creators, writers, producers, actors, directors, DP’s of color telling our stories without the help of big wig executives. I’m hopeful for the stories In The Heights will give birth to, but I’m wary of adjusting ourselves to mass appeal. I know it produces dollars, but it dwarfs our stories into something foreign. The road to getting Hollywood to see the value in our stories is long and arduous. Surely, there are other ways.

Perhaps the next best thing that we can do is more simple than we imagine: create. Tell your story. Tell your ancestor’s story. Tell your block’s story as you know it; as you experienced it. Tell it truthfully. Don’t be held hostage by mass appeal. It’s one of the pitfalls we’ve inherited from the social media age. If you drink from the cup of mass appeal you risk the integrity of your story because you decide that what others think is more valuable than the deepest truth of your experience.

There’s no question that this movie has poured gas onto the on-going conversation about Latinx identity. And for that I’m thankful. Our Latinx identity is nuanced and complex, with Afro-desendencia and Indigeno-descendencia. Learn your story. Climb your family tree. Saca tu abuela del closet. With all its twists, painful turns and pleasant surprises, there is no journey more important than the one where you become yourself, as you’ve been made. To share both that journey and what you discover is a gift to the world. To experience that in your art, your stories, your movies is to construct a bridge that allows me; that allows us, the opportunity to enter your story. The only catch is that it must be done truthfully. No hiding the mess. Not forgetting a chapter. And not making anyone invisible.

Living in my memories

My teen years were all about basketball at Dyckman park, bread runs to Kenny’s bakery, and parties at Incarnation Catholic School’s gym on 175th and St. Nicholas. For over a decade I lived in Dyckman with my wife and two kids as a faith and community leader. In 2017 I debuted my memoir about what it meant for me to love this place that had changed so much over the years. I’ve had a number of non-native New York friends message me after watching the film: “Wow, I feel like I understand your story more” or some version of that sentiment. If I’m honest, these reflections are in large part to ensure that those unfamiliar with the place that shaped so much of me wouldn’t conclude that this film captured all what that place is.

If your conscience makes room for it, go buy a ticket. Watch this movie. Take with you what you can from this story. And trust me, you can. There’s plenty there for you. There’s plenty there for us. Beauty does not evade this movie. El fuego Caribeño wasn’t a stranger. To see the hydrants open, the streets flooded with kids, and the struggle to find our place in society — that was still especially beautiful and compelling.

About Rich Perez

Rich is the author of Mi Casa Uptown: Learning to Love Again, a memoir of his experiences growing up in the inner city of Nueva York and the intersection of faith, family, identity and the significance of place. Founder and pastor of 10 years at Christ Crucified Fellowship in NYC before transitioning to Atlanta, GA with his wife, Anna, and their kids, Josiah and Hayden.

Cuida tu testimonio: A public theology of repentance

When I was a child, my mother would always say to me, cuida tu testimonio (watch, or take care of, your testimony). Whether she was dropping me off at school or going to a friend’s house, this dicho served as a reminder to always be on my best behavior. As the years have passed, this saying has become a guiding principle in my life, and my understanding of it has grown more profound. While as a child it only meant to not do anything that would embarrass myself or my parents, today it represents living in a manner that is worthy of my God. Mi testimonio is my Christian witness. It is the evidence of the supernatural work of Jesus in my life and my most powerful evangelistic tool for a suffering world in need of a Savior.  Mi testimonio is an expression of the image of God in me. It is my attempt to live as God’s royal representative on this side of eternity. 

I have also come to believe that while this principle applies to individuals, it also applies to collectives such as businesses, organizations, and even religious institutions. When an individual or institution fails to abide by the principle cuida tu testimonio, the integrity of their testimony is compromised, and often discredited. I believe this is the crisis of the evangelical church that has resulted in the loss of the credibility of the Church’s prophetic witness in the public square today. Ed Stetzer observes that, “tempted by power and trapped within a culture war theology, too many evangelicals tied their fate to a man who embodied neither their faith nor their vision of political character. As a result, we are finally witnessing an evangelical reckoning.”[1]

My mother also used to say, dime con quién andas y te dire quién eres (tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are). The apostle Paul similarly warned the Church at Corinth, “Do not be misled: ‘Bad company corrupts good character.’”[2] In the evangelical church’s desperate attempt to gain power, influence, and control through the veins of American democracy, it has lost the hearts of its people and in turn, compromised its public witness. And while not all evangelicals have engaged in these practices, we collectively bear the name and consequences of those who have. How then can the evangelical church regain its credibility so that it can once again be a transformative agent for the American conscience and the public square? I believe the answer lies in a public theology of repentance. 

The reality of the saying, cuida tu testimonio, is that while we seek to live in a manner worthy of God, there are times that we fall short of Gods calling on our life. In the same way, just as individuals sin from time to time, so also do religious institutions, as they are comprised of individuals. To this, mi iglesia pentecostal (my Pentecostal church) taught me that the Church’s altars are always open for anyone and everyone who is willing to repent for their sins, and that Jesus is ready to meet them in that sacred place to renew and restore them once again. It is in our brokenness and not our perfection that the confidence of nuestro testimonio lies. 

For the individual, the decision to repent from one’s sin is a central element of the gospel message; it is necessary to transform the human heart. For the collective, it serves to jumpstart the process of systemic and institutional change, which can be theologically understood as a form of “social sanctification.” The evangelical church’s adoption of a public theology of repentance has the potential to result in the restoration of the integrity of its public witness by living consistently with the very message it proclaims: “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”[3]  

I imagine some Christians might have reservations about the evangelical church taking a position of humility by acknowledging its sins as counterproductive to the Church’s witness to the world. After all, the Church is meant to reflect the Kingdom of God as holy and set apart from the world. Therefore, to admit any type of fault would tarnish its character. However, I believe there is no act more Christian then that of repentance, whether individual or communal. In fact, the majority of the Bible is about a loving God who restlessly calls a rebellious people to repent from their sinful ways. Furthermore, if the Church does not model the central message of the Kingdom of God to this world, how then will the world ever learn what it means to repent from one’s sins and believe in Jesus Christ? 

Therefore, the most Christian response the evangelical church can practice to cuidar su testimonio and the credibility of the gospel message it proclaims is to repent. It must repent for placing its hope in false messiahs and partisan politics, for neglecting and suppressing the cries of black, brown, and minoritized communities, and for its companionship with white supremacy and its supporting leader(s) as exemplified at the Capitol insurrection. In embracing a public theology of repentance, the evangelical church has the opportunity to demonstrate to the world what it means to turn from sin, and even teach the world how to acknowledge and address its own historical evils through Christ’s message: “repent and believe.” In doing so, the evangelical church creates room for the Spirit to renew the credibility of the Christian message, restore the testimonio of the evangelical church, and enable the gospel message to produce spiritual transformation and social change. 

The people of Israel demonstrated this firsthand, as they knew that their public repentance would lead to the spiritual and social transformation of their community. It was only the righteous kings of Israel who were brave enough to acknowledge and properly respond to Israel’s sinful condition by removing the high places, tearing down the idols, cleansing the temple, and reestablishing their covenant relationship with God. This in turn led to the restoration of their community and the blessing of their nation. Repentance attained through the purging of evil, and belief proclaimed through the renewal of covenant relationship, the message of Christ to “repent and believe” is a timeless characteristic of what it means to be a Christian community. Should the evangelical church receive the call to “humble themselves, pray and seek God’s face, and turn from their wicked ways,”[4] perhaps then, the world will believe the gospel message they proclaim as good news indeed.

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About Daniel Montañez

Daniel Montañez was born in Visalia, CA to a Mexican mother and a Puerto Rican father. He is a Ph.D. student at Boston University in the area of Theology, Ethics, and Philosophy, and an adjunct instructor for the Latino and Global Ministries Program at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He is the founder and director of Mygration Christian Conference, a non-profit organization that seeks to explore God’s heart through the stories of migration in the Bible. He is also the national director for the Church of God Migration Crisis Initiative, a ministry that seeks to provide church leaders with the biblical, pastoral, and ministerial preparation to positively and proactively respond to the crisis facing our immigrant communities in the United States. Daniel is dedicated to serving his Latino/a community at the intersection of the Church, the academy, and the public square.

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Footnotes

[1] Stetzer, Ed. “Evangelicals Face a Reckoning: Donald Trump and the Future of Our Faith.” USA Today. Gannett Satellite Information Network, January 11, 2021. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/01/10/after-donald-trump-evangelical-christians-face-reckoning-column/6601393002/?fbclid=IwAR2rJ3hrI0ld4HHRUCok788ZvoPD6B7k3lkbU3UylAVed17ZAT9NUYNchJ8. 

[2] 1 Cor 15:33 (NIV)

[3] Mark 1:15 (NIV)

[4] 2 Chr 7:14 (NIV; paraphrased)

What We Forget

Advent is the season encompassing the four Sundays which precede Christmas. Traditionally for Christians these weeks mark the beginning of our year and are defined by themes of remembering and waiting. While these weeks are latent with meaning for all Christians, I want to suggest that, for white Christians who are growing to care deeply about racial justice and reconciliation, Advent can provide an especially helpful starting point for our discipleship.

Remembering and waiting. We remember the lineage of faith to which we belong, including the generations of God’s people who anticipated the coming of the Messiah. We hear the longing in Isaiah 40:10-11, “See, the Lord GOD comes with might, and his arm rules for him; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him. He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.” And we wait as a people who expect our Savior’s return. We understand that life as we know it in a world groaning under sin will not last forever. A day will come when the will of God will be done on earth as in heaven.

What is it about these Advent themes that can help white Christians grow in our commitment to racial justice and reconciliation? Before exploring this question, we ought to acknowledge why so many of us need to mature in these areas. For as long as there have been white churches and Christians in this country, there has been a deficit in our discipleship. Time and again, we chose racial exclusion over embodied solidarity with the rest of Christ’s body. The segregation in our churches today is not the benign result of personal or cultural preference; its roots run deep through the soil of racism and racial supremacy.

Of course, this isn’t how most of us think about ourselves or our churches. But over the years, many Christians of color have warned us about our captivity to segregation and complicity with racial injustice. For example, in 1898 Rev. Francis Grimke, the African American pastor of Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., pointed to the silence of most white Christians in response to the lynchings that ran rampant throughout the country. In his sermon he asserted, “Another discouraging circumstance is to be found in the fact that the pulpits of the land are silent on these great wrongs. The ministers fear to offend those to whom they minister… This is the charge which I make against the Anglo American pulpit today; its silence has been interpreted as an approval of these horrible outrages.”

Why has it been so hard for white Christians to confess our conformity to this wicked status quo? In large part, it has to do with what it meant to become racially white. When my ancestors arrived in this country, they did not think of themselves in racial categories. They were immigrants from Sweden and Germany and they brought with them the particularities of their histories, culture, language, etc. But upon landing on these shores, they faced a new racialized reality in which those who were white had the greatest access to the American Dream. On the other end of that hierarchy were African American and indigenous people, those most likely to experience racial oppression.

In order to assimilate, my ancestors had to discard their cultural characteristics and pick up the more recent social construct of race. They had to become white. This exchange away from cultural particularity to racial homogeneity carried innumerable consequences. As Isabel Wilkerson writes in Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, “Each new immigrant had to figure out how and where to position themselves in the hierarchy of their adopted new land. Oppressed people from around the world, particularly from Europe, passed through Ellis Island, shed their old selves, and often their old names to gain admittance to the powerful dominant majority.” Because the country’s racial hierarchy was built on the plunder and exploitation of Black and Native people, newly arrived immigrants internalized these forms of racism as a necessary feature of the path toward the country’s promises. But there were other implications as well which bring us back to Advent.

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

When my ancestors became white, they were engaging in an act of forgetfulness. They set aside some of the important attributes which had defined previous generations in order to access power and privilege. This was the price of admision required by the racial hierarchy and it continues to exact its toll today.

We see this legacy of forgetfulness in how many white people struggle to talk about race and racism. When I facilitate racial reconciliation workshops, it is always the white participants who stumble when asked to describe their racial identity. The difficulties only increase when we begin considering the impact of the racial hierarchy. Rather than coming to these conversations with curiosity and humility, white Christians have often reverted to defensiveness, deflection, and denial: I never owned slaves! I have Black friends! I don’t have a racist bone in my body! We’re all Christians so we shouldn’t focus on our differences!

The forgetfulness of our race engenders a false sense of innocence. Because we have not remembered the cost - to ourselves and to our neighbors of color – of becoming white, we interpret our society with the kind of boot-strapping possibility only available to the privileged. If we think about racial segregation and oppression at all, it’s with a vague evaluation of someone else’s choice. We certainly don’t assume responsibility in this story; we are but innocent bystanders.

Only we’re not. And as Christians we ought to be quick to confess not our innocence but our susceptibility to sins of all kinds, including pernicious racial ones. As Isaiah admits in another common Advent passage, “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.” (Isa. 64:6) Why, for a people whose hope is so rooted in the grace of God which meets us as we confess our sins, is it so painful to acknowledge that we have, in the Apostle Paul’s language, conformed to the pattern of the world? We have forgotten.

Advent, with its invitation to remember, is the antidote that many of us need. As we approach our Savior’s birth, we are reminded of the danger posed to our faith by forgetfulness. We hear the stories of those like Simeon and Anna who recognized God’s Messiah precisely because they remembered. We hear the prophets pleading with God’s people to remember who they were - a sinful people in need of God’s comprehensive salvation.

If we listen closely enough, we’ll also hear the summons to remember our own troubled stories and histories. Advent beckons us to cast off our innocence and self-righteousness, to be done with the defensiveness, deflection, and denial which keep us from unity and solidarity with our sisters and brothers of color.

Remembering is not easy; there are reasons we’d rather forget. But as with every generation who has preceded us, when we choose to remember our histories – the losses, the complicities, the sins – we will also encounter the God has not never forgotten his people, who remembers his covenant with us. And with this memory newly refreshed, we can resolutely turn to the work of justice and reconciliation, freed of the forgetfulness and false innocence which has long kept us from our family in Christ.

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About David W. Swanson

David is the founding pastor of New Community Covenant Church, a multiracial congregation on the South Side of Chicago. He also serves as the CEO of New Community Outreach, a non-profit organization working to reduce causes of trauma and raise opportunities for equity.

David’s book, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Discipleship, is available now. Read more from David at his website, dwswanson.com.

Do We Have To? Engaging Pro-Trump Family

Many black and brown people faced a familiar dilemma in 2020: To engage or not to engage; that was the question. Since so many of our friends, family, and co-workers have been “doing the work,” reading (or at least buying) the bestselling books and watching carefully curated “Representation Matters” collections, we feel we have a responsibility to engage conversations about race, politics, and justice. These conversations are always exhausting, often infuriating, and sometimes they make matters worse. 

But is it ok not to engage? Especially for Christians, isn’t the burden of hard conversations the necessary price for “gospel unity?” Sometimes, maybe. In the wake of 2020’s presidential election, a previous World Outspoken article gave an example from the gospels of why Latin@s, for example,  should engage Trump-supporting family members. But every conversation with a Trump-supporter and/or racist is not a conversation with a Zaccheus. In this article we present three gospel principles for not engaging conversations about race with those who are committed to ignorance, misunderstanding, and white supremacy.

1) Scope Out the Situation: “Who All Over There?”

As any black potential party-goer will tell you, the wrong answer to the question “who all over there?” may result in the unfortunate response: “I’ll let you know” (i.e. definitely not going). The thought of interacting with a certain person or people is enough to detract from any potential good the party might have to offer. The situation must be scoped out. The words of Jesus in Matthew 7:6 express a similar sentiment. Jesus says, “Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, or they will trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.” 

While we might hesitate at the thought of naming friends and family members dogs or pigs, the idea is this: discernment must be exercised before deciding who to give the gift of conversation, relationship, and some of the most personal aspects of our existence. Not just anyone can presume to have access to our time and energy. And we need not feel guilty about saving these precious pearls for those who know how to value them. We gotta scope out the situation before deciding whether to go.

2) Shake It Off: “Aight Imma Head Out”

Many of us—whether subconsciously or not—still feel like we’re inconveniencing people when we talk about the problems of white supremacy. In reality, we’re offering a gift, a miracle really—freedom from the burden of whiteness and an invitation to a better form of life together. When this gift is treated as a burden by those who can most benefit from it, we sometimes find ourselves begging for their attention. But Jesus has a word of advice for those with a miraculous gift to give when they are not received: shake it off and head out like the Spongebob meme.

In Luke 9:5 Jesus says, “And as for all who do not receive you, when you leave that city, shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.” Those with stiff necks without ears to hear from their fellow humans about the realities of injustice and oppression do not deserve more attention; they deserve less. And those of us with a gift to give can exercise the confidence and resolve of Spongebob. There’s no reason to stay in that conversation. Shake it off and head out, fam.

3) Don’t Even Try: “Woooooooow…. ok.”

Sometimes the ignorance is appalling. It’s not even funny. You hear something like, “Hasn’t every culture had slavery? What was so different about America?” and you start looking around for hidden cameras and Ashton Kutcher. The levels of empathy, education, and attention that would be needed to have anything like a fruitful conversation are so absent that the invitation to engage almost seems patronizing. In such a circumstance, sometimes all you can say is “woooooooow…….ok.”

Jesus faced a similar situation in Mark 6:6. Faced with crowds who couldn’t believe that he was who he said he was and came to do what he said he came to do, Jesus refused to give in to their patronizing. When the passage says that Jesus “could not do any miracle,” it was not a reflection on his ability. The clue is in the next verse, “he was amazed at their unbelief.” Jesus effectively said “woooooow…….ok” and worked his miracles only among a select few. With the rest of them, he didn’t even try. It wasn’t worth his attention. And it’s not worth ours, either.

Obviously, this is not an exhaustive list of potential responses to interactions about race, politics, and justice. The earlier article gives a good example of when and how we might choose to engage. But we should know that engaging is not the only gospel response possible. Many who pretend to want to learn and grow don’t deserve our precious time and attention. And we do not always endanger gospel unity when we choose to withhold our engagement. Like Jesus taught, we might need to scope out the situation, shake it off, and sometimes, not even try.

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About Michael Yorke

Michael Yorke holds a degree in Historical Theology from Wheaton College Graduate School in Illinois. He thinks and writes at the intersection of race, history, and Christian theology with a view toward a liberative and antiracist future. He is married to Chelsea and their first child will be born in December.

A Word on Trump-Supporting Latinos

It should already be common knowledge. It should not need repeating. Still, the obvious truth of the “Latino community” was, for lack of a better word, discovered by many on election night. With surprise and disbelief, political analysts spent the days after the election discussing a simple truth: Latin@s are not a monolith. We already know this. It was not news to us, but what the election did reveal was the deep divisions disintegrating the Latin@ community. Some news outlets were quick to simplify this division, pointing to generational distinctions to explain who voted for Trump or Biden. Others proposed it was a difference of regionality. A few thought it could be reduced to nation-of-origin. In all cases, these simplifications are reductions of reality that prove more about the analyzing world than they do about nuestra gente.

I am not going to explain why an increased number of Latin@s voted for Trump. Political scientists and sociologists will do enough of that in their writing. My concern is for those Latin@s who are feeling betrayed by these voters. Among our supporters and friends, fellow activists, and nonprofit workers, many are angry. In the moment, many of my colleagues were tempted to fury, and some took to social media to lacerate their familia with “prophetic speech.” I understand this frustration well. For a decade now, my work in Christian Higher Ed has been in entrenched, white, evangelical spaces. Many of the Latin@s I meet along the way are actively working against the pursuit of justice, and at times, I retaliate too. There is, however, a person the Spirit keeps bringing to my attention since the election. His story is worthy of reflection because it is a story of empire, betrayal, and Christ’s response to both.

Passing through Jericho

Of the four gospel writers, Luke stressed the upside-down Kingdom of God and revealed Jesus as the liberator. Jesus came to “proclaim the Good news to the poor… to proclaim liberty to the captives… to set at liberty those who are oppressed” (Lk. 4:17). Jesus subverts the religious and political establishments of Israel and Rome. Like Moses, He is a deliverer. On His way to Jerusalem to make His ultimate sacrifice, Jesus passes through a borderland city named Jericho. At the time, this border city served as a customs station, an outpost of the Roman empire. The shock of Jesus’ passage through Jericho was who Jesus visited while there.

Luke tells us that Jesus stopped for one person in Jericho, Zacchaeus. He was a rich man, the chief tax collector, a publican. Zacchaeus was responsible for the extortion of his own people. Therefore, he was hated and despised by most Israelites and barred from religious practice because of his betrayal. In fact, Jesus’ words at the end of the story suggest that the Jews considered Zacchaeus’ sin so severe, he was no longer one of them (19:9); They disowned him. Yet despite his service to Rome and his role in oppressing the Jews, Jesus called Zacchaeus down from the tree to dine with him in his home. The scandal of Jesus’ choice caused the crowds to grumble. How could Jesus welcome this man? Worst, why would Jesus choose to dine in his home?

¿Y que con el Publicano?

Many of my ministry friends think of Trump-supporting Latin@s as modern-day tax collectors. Their view is that Latin@s in power have reached their position by following the path of Zacchaeus. By aligning themselves with the empire, they are elevated from among their own, only to support a structure that oppresses their people. And indeed, some have done that. But the story of Zacchaeus is instructive for our moment. Jesus’ words to the Jewish crowd bear repeating to the angry Latin@: “the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (19:10). What transformed Zacchaeus was not judgment – of which he got plenty from fellow Jews – but kindness. Jesus did not resist Zacchaeus, He welcomed him. His welcome changed this man. The minute Zacchaeus’ feet hit the ground, he reversed his injustices, paying back what he stole beyond what the Law required.

This Thanksgiving we have an opportunity to bear witness to the gospel as we (virtually) dine with Trump-supporting family. Our welcome and embrace, despite their betrayal, is an echo of Jesus’ love for Zacchaeus and His love for us. As we pray prayers of thanksgiving, pray as non-innocent tax collectors, not self-righteous Pharisees (Lk. 18:9-14). Remember what Paul asked self-righteous Jews later in Rome: “do you presume on the riches of [God’s] kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?” (Rom. 2:4). It’s kindness, not judgment, that transforms the tax collector.

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ABOUT EMANUEL PADILLA

Emanuel Padilla is President of World Outspoken, a ministry dedicated to preparing the mestizo church for cultural change through training, content, and partnership development. He is also an instructor of Bible and Theology at Moody Bible Institute. Emanuel is committed to drawing the insights of the Latina/o church for the blessing of the wider church body. He consults with churches on issues of diversity, organizational culture, and community engagement.

Are Black Bodies Cursed? Dominican Racial Identity and the Life of Oscar Wao

“The family claims the first sign was that Abelard’s third and final daughter… was born black. And not just any kind of black. But black black – kongoblack, shangoblack, kaliblack, zapoteblack, rekhablack – and no amount of fancy Dominican racial legerdemain was going to obscure the fact. That’s the kind of culture I belong to: people took their child’s black complexion as an ill omen.””

— Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 248

During the early stages of this project on Afro-Latin@s, I had a conversation with my cousin about Dominican racial identity. My cousin worked at a bank and often perplexed Dominican clients when she asked them to mark their race. “Dominican,” they’d respond. “No, your race.” The confused client would look at the list in front of them for a moment, read past the more common designations: White… Black, and self-identify as “Indio.” Not Black. Not White. Indio.

I recently had a similar conflict filling out the U.S. Census for me and my son. After looking over the list for far too long, I circled “other” and wrote “Hispanic/Dominican.” Dominican, and especially Dominican-American racialization is a complex subject mixed with a variety of understandings and histories.[i] Ginetta E.B. Candelario notes that “for much of Dominican history, the national body has been defined as not-black, even as black ancestry has been grudgingly acknowledged. In the place of blackness, officially identity discourses and displays have held that Dominicans are racially Indian and culturally Hispanic.”[ii]

To many observers, this racial identification is a denial of what is visually undeniable (“Dominicans are Black”) and proves that Dominican histories, social hierarchies, and political policies have and continue to contribute to Dominican anti-Black sentiment - see Haitian immigration and citizenship in the Dominican Republic. Historians, sociologists and ethnographers have substantiated this claim to one degree or another. Literature also provides a unique lens to examine Dominican racial identity and its role in establishing anti-negritud (anti-Blackness) in our people. This article will consider the topic in conversation with the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscao Wao by Dominican-American author, Junot Díaz.[1]

The novel tells the story of Oscar de León, an overweight Dominican nerd living in Patterson, New Jersey. The novel goes to great lengths to explain that Oscar was not a “normal Dominican.” And yet his story unfolds within the landscape of the Dominican experience. Though he is the protagonist of the story, his story is told alongside the stories of his sister Lola, his mother Beli, and his abuelo Abelard Luis Cabral. Our characters are set in New Jersey, then in Dominican Republic and back again. And because this is a Dominican story, Rafael Trujillo and el Trujillato (The Era of Trujillo) shape the lives of our primary characters. But this isn’t typical historical fiction. This story is a Fukú story.

The Fukú: A Curse on Black Bodies

The narrator of the story is Yunior, a “proto-typical” Dominican who ends up dating Lola and rooming with Oscar in college. Yunior provides commentary throughout the story. In the first chapter he explains the prevailing belief in Fukú in Dominican culture. “Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú – generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World.”[iii] The Curse came from Africa, but to Dominicans, Rafael Trujillo is its high priest. Yunior helpfully notes, “It was believed, even in educated circles, that anyone who plotted against Trujillo would incur a fukú most powerful, down to the seventh generation and beyond.”[iv] So this is a story about a family that crossed Trujillo so badly, they had incurred a Fukú for at least three generations. Given our limited space, our focus will be on the curse itself rather than Abelard’s offense against Trujillo.

Throughout the novel, two realities are linked together. Our primary characters have black skin, and the unfolding of their lives suggests that a generational curse has in fact been placed over their lives. With the exception of Abelard and La Inca, attention is given to each of our primary characters’ black complexion. In school, Beli’s black complexion is noted by a classmate. “You black, [a classmate said], fingering Beli’s thin forearm. Black-black.”[v] Lola observes that she has her mother’s complexion which means “[she] is dark.” In D.R., a boyfriend calls her “his morena.” Oscar too is notably of dark complexion. His afro, along with his other “non-Dominican traits” confuse those around him and they question whether he actually is Dominican or not. Alone, these descriptions might seem insignificant: evidence of family resemblance. But they serve a more significant role in the novel and its examination of Dominican racial identity.

To family members, Beli’s dark complexion was evidence that the family had been cursed. Shortly after her birth, her mother stepped in front of a moving truck and her two sisters each died under unusual circumstances. Beli was left an orphan. “She was so dark [that] no one on Abelard’s side of the family would take her… and no one outside the family wanted the darkchild to live.”[vi] Beli was eventually sold to strangers to work as a servant girl. She’s eventually rescued by La Inca, a cousin of her father who discovers that the girl is alive and being kept in a chicken coop after she is burned by hot oil for “skipping out on work to attend classes.”[vii]

A few years later, Beli falls for Dionisio who is married to none other than Trujillo’s sister. When la hermana Trujillo discovers the affair, she has Beli taken out to a sugar cane field where she is nearly beaten to death. Yunior reports that “they beat her like she was a slave. Like she was a dog.”[viii] While laying there she slides into a deep lonliness “[where] she would dwell forever, alone, black, fea.”

These descriptions are not accidental. The author intends for us to recall the slaves who worked the sugar cane fields during early Spanish Colonialism. During the Spanish conflicts with France and England, the economy of the Island of Hispanola collapsed. Eventually many Spanish Whites left the island. In their place descendants of White men and Indigenous and African women “ascended the social ladder.” Together with freed Blacks they became the “blancos de la tierra.” The term black “came to be used in Santo Domingo only in reference to those who were still enslaved.” Beli and later Oscar, in his final moments, become stand-ins for the the histories of Blacks who received violence in Sugar Cane fields on this island.[ix]  

The lives of these primary characters seem to confirm a sinister truth: our Black protagonists were under the fukú; they were cursed. It isn’t always clear whether their Blackness was the Curse itself or the evidence of their being cursed, but the problem remained. They were Black, and black bodies in the Dominican Republic have often been subjected to marginalization, violence, and trauma.

The novel also demonstrates another side of the Dominican racial imaginary: the identification as non-Black and more importantly non-Haitian. Throughout the novel, to be Haitian is viewed as an insult. When Oscar returns from his first trip to Santo Domingo, his uncle greets him, “Great… now you look Haitian.” Later, on his return trip to the Island, Oscar notices a group of peddlers on the street. “So dark,” he noticed, and his mother said, dismissively, “Maldito haitianos.”[x] On that same trip, Lola and Beli have an interesting exchange at a restaurant. The waiters look at their group strangely, Lola teases her mother and says “Watch out Mom… they probably think you’re Haitian.” In response her mother retorts, “La única haitiana aquí eres tú, mi amor.”[xi] Anti-Haitian rhetoric was a strategy implemented throughout Dominican Republic’s history, especially during Trujillo’s reign. Haitians were Black, not so Dominicans.

Fukú vs Zafa

Yunior began the story by framing it as a fukú story. But at the end of the first chapter he introduces a second folk word: the zafa, or the counter spell. The novel, as a whole, is tragic. Upon first reading, one is left with the impression that the fukú will remain over this family for generations to come. But when Lola’s daughter is introduced in the final pages of the novel, Yunior hints at the possibility of a more powerful magic: a zafa of sorts. Lola’s daughter is dark like her mother, uncle and grandmother before her. But on her neck she wears three pendants: “the one that Oscar wore as a baby, the one that Lola wore as a baby, and the one that Beli was given by La Inca… powerful elder magic.” Yunior is not completely convinced it will work. He imagines eventually she will hear the word fukú. Maybe then, he imagines, she will come to see him and he will bring out old photographs and papers. Yunior doesn’t name it, but I suspect behind this little dream of his, is the counter spell itself. In those photographs and the pendants is connection and memory.

Together the opening and close of the novel suggests a way out from under the Curse of the New World. The Curse isn’t Blackness. It is the racialization that we’ve experienced and participated in throughout our histories. The Curse is the trauma and the silence of a people who experienced violence and marginalization under Trujillo and then again in the Diaspora. The Curse finds expression in our loss of memory and our erasure of all of our history, especially our African history.

Junot Díaz has often noted that his life and writings have been shaped in large part by silence caused by trauma.[xii] Throughout the novel, his characters are also made silent. Beli never says a word about her childhood trauma. She never tells her children about Dionisio, nor about the night she was almost beaten to death. Oscar doesn’t get the chance to finish his own story. His last correspondence to Yunior and Lola are lost. So what is the counter spell? The counter spell is connection and memory. Yunior is right when he suspects that the book is his own sort of counterspell. The act of storytelling, when it is honest and embracing of the good and the bad parts, can become our counterspell.

Our racial histories are complex. How can they not be when we are the fruit of the “new world?” How can they not be when we are the heirs of Trujillos’s Santo Domingo? How can they not be when we are the Diaspora, seeds planted in United States and all over the rest of the world? We cannot deny our afrodescendencia. Nor can we deny our own complicity in anti-negritud. So we must speak the counter curse. We must break the silence of our past traumas and our own acts of violence and tell our full history.

About Kerwin A. Rodriguez

Kerwin A. Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor of Pastoral Studies at Moody Bible Institute. He teaches in the areas of preaching, cultural dynamics, spiritual formation, and Bible interpretation. He is currently a PhD in Preaching student at Baylor University’s Truett Seminary. His doctoral research will be on Caribbean Latin@ preaching with a particular focus on the Dominican Republic. Kerwin and his wife, Meredith live in the Humboldt Park neighborhood in Chicago with their son Ezra Joél, where they serve in their local church, Good News Bible Church.

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Footnotes

[1] Note: It should be acknowledge that in May 2018 Junot Díaz was accused of sexual misconduct and verbal abuse by multiple women. In a statement made to the New York Times, Díaz stated, “I take responsibility for my past.” He later amended his statement and told the Boston Globe, “There is a line between being a bad boyfriend and having a lot of regret, and predatory behavior.” This article is not the place to give extensive commentary on the serious allegations made about Junot Díaz’s conduct. It should be noted that shortly before the allegations were made public he wrote about his own experience as a victim of sexual abuse, and a prominent theme throughout his writings is the relationship between sexuality and trauma.

[i] Milagros Ricourt, The Dominican Racial Imaginary: Surveying the Landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016).

[ii] Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Black behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 18.

[iii] Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 1.

[iv] Díaz, 3.

[v] Díaz, 84.

[vi] Díaz, 252.

[vii] Díaz, 255.

[viii] Díaz, 147.

[ix] Ashley Kunsa, “History, Hair, and Reimagining Racial Categories in Junot Diáz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 54, no. 2 (2013): 211–24.

[x] Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 273.

[xi] Díaz, 276.

[xii] Junot Díaz, “Junot Díaz: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma,” The New Yorker, accessed October 12, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/the-silence-the-legacy-of-childhood-trauma.