CS 3 - What is a Culture of Whiteness?
“What the $%#@ are you doing here?”
It was not the expression we were looking for. A fellow pastor friend who is also white and myself wanted to go and support our community. It was a Tuesday night and the Rayshard Brooks murder that had occurred the previous Friday night in our community. On Saturday a group of pastors and leaders from our neighborhood were in the streets feeling the weight and the pain of people tired of racialized police brutality.
That following Tuesday I suggested to my friend that we go and be present at the burned down Wendy’s simply to offer our support and say that we’re sorry. We parked the car across the street and walked across University Ave that had been blocked off and that’s where we heard the words from a young black man, “What the $%#@ are you doing here?”
After stating who we were and our intentions as pastors in the community, we were welcomed in. It was a few tense moments. But why would this young black man say these words? He was reacting to everything my friend and I represent as two white men in that space. I can understand what he’s reacting towards with me as a 6ft 2 in white man with a bald head that looks like a police officer. In that moment I represent the oppressor of whiteness.
What exactly is whiteness? Where do we find its origins? The concept of race was specifically created by the United States and was connected to the definitions, “white” and “slave” in the 1500s by the Europeans settling in the new world. In between the 1500-1700s the misconception that white people were superior, more intelligent, and more able began to take root all over the world. This false and sinful ideology was the origin for European colonization and the oppression of people from Africa for the purpose of slavery. Whiteness is a made up definition that has been used by Europeans as a tool to oppress others.
Whiteness is also not exclusive to America. The brilliant, Dr Willie Jennings defines it in After Whiteness as; “my use of the term "whiteness" does not refer to people of European descent but to a way of being in the world and seeing the world that forms cognitive and affective structures able to seduce people into its habitation and its meaning making”.
One of the first glimpses of how all of this works is with Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 in Northern Virginia. Nathaniel Bacon was a wealthy white land owner and was related to William Berkely, the governor of Virginia. Bacon and Berkely argued over what to do with Native lands. Bacon wanted to wipe out the Native people and Berkely knew that in doing so would band the Native people together and they would be wiped out.
Bacon rebelled and united poor white and black people and attacked nearby tribes and ultimately captured Jamestown and had it burned. Bacon would die a few months after this, but the damage had been done. The wealthy white planters saw what could happen if the poor white and black people could band together and so they gave the white people more power and wrote laws that would enslave anyone with black skin.
Michelle Alexander writes: “The events in Jamestown were alarming to the planter elite, who were deeply fearful of the multiracial alliance of [indentured servants] and slaves. Word of Bacon’s Rebellion spread far and wide, and several more uprisings of a similar type followed. In an effort to protect their superior status and economic position, the planters shifted their strategy for maintaining dominance. They abandoned their heavy reliance on indentured servants in favor of the importation of more black slaves.”
After this incident whiteness began to be normalized in laws like the Virginia Slave Codes written in 1705. Whiteness was specifically created for power. This power has manifested itself since them in slavery, lynchings, housing segregation, school segregation, etc. Megan Tinsley writes; “Whiteness is an invented concept that has been used as a tool of oppression.” It was created to give white people power and was designed for hierarchy and exclusion. And, unfortunately the white church has been complicit in all of it.
So, I show up at the Wendy’s in June a few days after Rayshard Brooks was shot and a young black man who didn’t know anything about me was reacting to my skin, to history, and to everything I represent as a white man coming from the same system. My white skin means I represent power that was created hundreds of years ago by my ancestors.
Dr. Willie Jennings writes in, After Whiteness about the power and standard that it creates; “That is, whiteness is the imagined right that those designated as racially white are the norm, the standard by which all others are measured and evaluated. It is the imagined right to be superior in most every way—theologically, morally, legally, economically, and culturally. It is that power, now centuries upon centuries old, that is worshiped, felt, protected, and defended. As the legendary scholar W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1920: “ ‘But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?’ Then, always, somehow, someway, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is ownership of the earth forever and ever. Amen!”
The reality is this, I am a part of this system of power created by whiteness! Lastasha Morrison, Director of Be the Bridge has become a friend and mentor in this space and has left a huge impact upon my life. When she wrote her book, Be the Bridge, she asked me if I would write a prayer of lament for the end of one of her chapters and I was honored to do so. This is what I felt led to write; “Christ, you alone are the reconciler of all things. I confess that I have been part of a system of whiteness that has oppressed, stolen, and killed those who are different from me. May I follow your spirit deep into my divided self that still does the same. Christ, may you heal me as you build the new humanity.”
We have to be honest with ourselves as those that come from the majority culture that we are a part of a system of power that is still at work to this very day. But there is good news! Christ births us out of this culture. Latasha Morrison writes in Be the Bridge; “The truth is that race is a social construct, one that has divided and set one group over the other from the earliest days of humanity. The Christian construct, though, dismantles this way of thinking and seeks to reunite us under a common banner of love and fellowship.”
For there to be good news, there also has to be bad news. To be sanctified out of a culture that gives white people power, we have to see it and name it and take on the humility of Christ. The good news is that the gospel interrupts any systems of sin, both personally and systemically. This is why we need the gospel and why Paul says in Galatians 2 that the way Peter was behaving was “not in line with the gospel.” But, we need to have a proper understanding of what the gospel is.