30. Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X; and Marable, Malcolm X.
31. Bantum, Redeeming Mulatto.
32. Piper, Bloodlines.
33. See Bantum, “Bloodlines,” where he states that “Piper’s Christ is a raceless God-man, focused intently on a violent sacrifice that achieves the salvation of our souls with the happy consequence of taking our bodies along for the ride.” Bantum lauds Piper’s desire to foster a diverse Christian community, but laments that in excluding voices from outside of his own trajectory (especially liberation and womanist thought), Piper has pre-determined that his ecclesial community will take the shape of his own theological convictions and tradition without leaving room for “sincere dialogue.” The process envisioned by Piper arguably has very little to do with reconciliation.
34. Jennings, Christian Imagination, 1.
35. Acosta, Natural and Moral History.
36. Jennings, Christian Imagination, 71.
37. Eph 2:11–18.
38. While this could be interpreted as a natural descriptor for the purpose of aiding in apprehension of the person Zimmerman perceived as being dangerous, such a reading may not take into account the full text of the 911 interchange. Zimmerman had already been asked earlier in the conversation to identify the race of the individual whom he decided to pursue and had responded by claiming “he looks black.” It was not until Martin took notice of Zimmerman tailing him and ran away that Zimmerman categorized him as a “black male” and as one of “these assholes.”
39. Dussel, Underside of Modernity. Carter regularly utilizes this phrase in Race.
40. See Robles, FBI Records.
41. Jennings and Carter are not content with either option. Carter, in his criticism of Kantian deontological ethics, tends to work within a modified virtue ethic due to his early affinity with Milbank (although he is not at home in this trajectory). Jennings, in his criticism of Aristotelian virtue ethics (and his recognition of the insufficiency of teleological ethics in general, including the utilitarianism of liberalism), tends to favor a modified Barthian divine command modality, albeit a divinity encountered in a new body politic forged by joining with the unlike other.
42. A militant posture against faith as irrational has been canonized in the works categorized as the New Atheism: See, among others, Hitchens, God is Not Great; Dawkins, The God Delusion; and Sam Harris, The End of Faith.
43. Much research suggests that more liberal communities are often some of the most segregated communities in the United States. Trends seem to suggest that there is a constellation of factors influencing these divisions, including socioeconomic status, educational affinity, occupational similarity, and cultural preference. The net effect, however, is that all the same people tend to cluster together, thereby reinforcing racialized identity. See, for example, Dahmer, “The Harsh Truth about Progressive Cities.”
44. Prather, Christ, Power, and Mammon.
45. Ibid., 228–29.
46. Ibid., 232.
47. My thought in this regard has been influenced by Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
48. Jennings, Christian Imagination, 287.
49. Ibid., 288.
50. Ibid., 79–80.
51. Carter, Race, 156.
52. Jennings, Christian Imagination, 9–10.
53. Ibid., 115.
Chapter 1: Carter and the Religious Academy
An Introduction to Race
I began this text with an autobiographical narrative that demonstrated my difficulty in articulating how race functions within the modern imagination. It was in this difficulty that I encountered the works of Carter and Jennings. I will interact with each in turn, beginning with Carter’s description of Enlightenment as architecture of whiteness. His theory purposes to explain why race is simultaneously a grid for interpersonal interactions in modernity and is invisible to those confined by it. In Carter’s reading, modernity is not so much anti–religious as pseudotheological. The deformity of modernity is not that it is a secular alternative to the religious underpinnings of Western society, but that it is a maturation of the distortions of the theological problem of whiteness that were sown during the colonial period. Jennings delves more deeply into the planting of these seeds, and chapters 3 and 4 will engage his narrative of this earlier period. I will treat each author in the same sequence: First I will delineate the relationship of each theologian to the modern religious academy by way of the disciplines of religious and cultural studies. I will then articulate the radical nature of both theologians’ critiques as I position them against a popular contemporary theological way of imagining identity. This first chapter will explicate Carter’s relationship to the African American religious academy.
In Race: A Theological Account, Carter offers a theological analysis of the modern formation of the human as a racial being. In the contemporary academic landscape, he suggests, there have been a wide range of discourses about race in the social sciences and the humanities, but not in theology.54 The few studies of race which do exist within the discipline of theology tend to reconfirm essentialized views of race by ontologizing it (e.g. “blackness”) or being bound within some other version of identity politics. Such treatments tend to collapse under a hermeneutic of suspicion, and as a result are limited in their ability to offer a way forward out of the maladies and insular identity silos which whiteness has created. Carter maintains that in order to be resurrected into the new life offered to the world by the Incarnate God–man Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the pseudotheology of whiteness must be exposed in order to be resisted. Carter’s work therefore aims to unmask whiteness, to identify what Michel Foucault has called the “order of things,”55 thereby offering a more satisfactory account of the kind of emancipative discourse theology can be.
Given