Learning Race Theology: Four Recent Encounters

Introduction

There has been a steady stream of thoughtful books published on race and Christian theology over the last few years and, here, the task before us is to reflect on four relatively recent contributions to the conversation which have yet to be reviewed in this journal. These books include Willie Jennings’s After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging, Esau McCaulley's Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope, Miguel De La Torre's Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers, and Can ‘White’ People Be Saved? Triangulating Race, Theology, and Mission edited by Love Sechrest, Johnny Ramírez-Johnson and Amos Yong. While each is clearly speaking to the interplay between society and Christian faith as it relates to race, efforts to gather the texts easily under shared perspectives, themes and problems proves elusive. Each writer (and in the case of Can ‘White’ People Be Saved?, several writers) has different audiences and aims in mind, theological commitments and styles of communication, and so coming to terms with each will require patience.

There is, however, something on which each writer agrees: the particulars of one's social location are essential for assessing the perspective she or he brings to the task of theologising. Indeed, one of the issues that each text in question reckons with in their own way is the prevailing tendency of Euro-centric presentations of Christian faith to assume universality without recognising the cultural conditions which shape their understandings of the gospel of Christ. A central conviction shared among the various authors is the perceived need to expose the totalising effects of that assumed universality and chasten it with accounts of Christianity that come from the overlooked, marginalised and oppressed. As such, a common feature of writing on this subject is the importance of owning up to one's background in order to help identify the sorts of concerns brought to bear on the issues at hand.

With this in mind and as an act of good faith, a word about myself may be in order. I am an American theologian who has studied at or been employed by institutions of higher learning in the United States, Canada, Scotland, Germany and now, England—perhaps unsurprisingly all of them are majority white. Within that educational landscape, my theological sub-discipline, systematic theology, is perhaps the most pigment-challenged with respect to both its practitioners and its content. ¹ As such, for the authors of the books reviewed here, I would undoubtedly be seen as a purveyor of ‘white’ theology. ² And yet, as my name might suggest, ‘whiteness’ is not the only way of making sense of myself. As an American with Japanese and European ancestry, race and racism have been (and continue to be) ever-present realities for me as well. My own experience resonates with other people of East Asian heritage living in America who attest to the phenomenon of liminality or the sense of being a ‘perpetual foreigner’. ³ Without universalising the experience, those with broadly Asian backgrounds frequently testify to never feeling fully at home in any of the socio-cultural spaces in which one finds one's self. This liminality extends to the work of this review as well. As a trained systematician from a somewhat less oppressed racial group living in the United Kingdom, there is a clear sense of approaching these texts as something of an outsider. Nevertheless, the concepts explored and the experiences conveyed are all familiar enough that something sensible might be said from my liminal vantage point. ⁴

Before turning to reviews of each book, it may be helpful to observe shared assumptions among the authors as they reflect on the nature of race and Christianity in America. In general, they all assume the now widely held recognition that the colonial pursuits of the late-fifteenth century onward were in various respects dependent on a form of Christianity that was/is willing to see some humans as something less than human, and that the process of constructing a racialised worldview was undergirded by theological distortion. The authors, broadly speaking, build on the works of J. Kameron Carter and Willie Jennings which argue that a racialised hierarchy developed as a result of a deformed Christology that failed to take Jesus’ Jewishness seriously, a questionable theological anthropology that prioritises European flesh and values as normative humanity, and a missiological outlook that comports with a vision of domination and assimilation. ⁵ Taken together, a racial logic emerged in the Christian West that underwrote the forced displacement of people from those things that had been the basis of identity-making (land, relations, language and customs) with the result that people—all people—‘would henceforth (and forever) carry their identities on their bodies, without remainder’. ⁶ As such, there is widespread recognition that the form of Christianity which washed up on the shores of America over the next few centuries was one that contributed to and was (is) animated by a racialised and racist outlook.

Willie Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging

Given the profound influence that Jennings’s earlier work, The Christian Imagination, has had on theological reflection around race, it makes some sense to begin with his more recent contribution. After Whiteness extends his seminal insights from his earlier work into reflections on the nature of American/Western higher education with special emphasis on theological education. The opening words of the text give a clear sense of what sort of book one is embarking on: ‘I was an academic dean at a divinity school. I learned the secrets. I cannot tell you the secrets, but I can tell you what they mean’. ⁷ From here, Jennings unfolds story after story of people and situations encountered in his ongoing sojourn through academia. Naturally, the identities of people are protected through name-changes and amalgamation of situations. Nevertheless, each story bears witness to the various ways that racial dynamics lie just below the surface (and sometimes above it) in the inner machinations of these institutions and the various kinds of human interactions found there. And yet, to simply recognise that there are racist attitudes found within the halls of the loftiest places of higher learning is an exercise in missing the point. For example, Jennings relates a story about two aspiring academics interviewing for the same job—one is a white male and the other a black female. Both are clearly accomplished and knew their field. However, what stood out for Jennings was the way in which the white candidate was able to present himself as an idealised type of what the institution sees itself as trying to produce—mastery. Mastery of self-presentation. Mastery of disciplinary nuance. Mastery of a venerable European intellectual tradition and its language. Strikingly, it was not necessarily the candidate’s behaviour which signalled to Jennings that the man had the job, but rather it was the fawning responses of his white male colleagues that revealed to him the true nature of the institution's commitments despite their perfunctory commitment to ‘having a diverse faculty’. ⁸ As a product of institutions like the one described, Jennings realises that he too ‘had learned to love an intellectual form that performed white masculinist self-sufficiency, a way of being in the world that aspires to exhibit possession, mastery, and control of knowledge first, and of one's self second, and if possible of one's world’. ⁹

This forms the fundamental insight that Jennings pursues between poems, stories and exposition: the ‘diseased social imagination’ of mastery described with considerable detail in his previous work finds particular expression in the institutions dedicated to the educational formation of its constituents. ¹⁰ Or put differently:

The racial paterfamilias guides institutional unconscious into a bad practice of assimilation. That is its great power: to assimilate, not loudly, not through force of will or threat of life, but through the senses seductively trained until the truth is known like the sight of wind through its effects, and then your voice is gone and you sound like the master even in your resistance to the master. ¹¹

Nevertheless, the subtitle of the book suggests another possible horizon for higher education—theological or otherwise—one in which belonging is cultivated and valued over the current will towards mastery. In the closing pages of the book, Jennings offers a theologically-inclined remedy to this malaise that currently afflicts Western higher education: in the life-giving generosity that is God's nature, the prospect of theological education can ‘start again’ as those who seek to participate in it—presumably teacher and student alike—seek to be part of a community that draws from the one who offers the ‘divine life as our habitation’. ¹³ In particular for places of theological education, this aspirational community is one that might put on display the sort of radical inclusivity that is so markedly absent in most academic settings.

This book is clearly aimed at those who have a vested interest in theological education. The stories Jennings shares are borne out of that context and his diagnoses and prescriptions are especially pertinent for this sort of educational setting. While Jennings’s hoped-for alternative to the reigning educational paradigm may seem naïve, he is not unaware of the very real challenges facing higher education generally and theological schools particularly. With the increasing reduction of theological faculties and campuses, the future of theological education in the English-speaking world can appear increasingly bleak. ¹⁴ However, in as much as the shrinking of faculty and resources is not Jennings’s primary concern, his suggestion that we abandon the misguided colonial project of mastery has potential to chart a new liberating course for the important task of theological formation into the future.

Miguel De La Torre, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers

Like Jennings, De La Torre makes efforts to diagnose the ways in which ‘whiteness’ has defined the contemporary American experience. While Jennings’s interests in After Whiteness are especially concerned with the ethos cultivated in institutions of higher learning, De La Torre's reflections range widely across American society more generally. Written towards the end of the Trump presidency, De La Torre exhibits a marked concern with the way a ‘satanic’ form of white Christianity turned out to support Trump's election and thus demonstrated that ‘the one whom they worship is demonic’. ¹⁵ One of the more striking features of Decolonizing Christianity is how prominently Trump is featured throughout. Every chapter includes some account of his many misdeeds, and while De La Torre indicates in the introduction that his book is not intended for white Christians, ¹⁶ it often reads as an effort to help white Christians in particular recognise the incongruency of their so-called faith with the values of the person they supported in the poll booth. De La Torre explains his decision to focus on Trump by suggesting that Christianity in America today simply cannot be understood apart from the way Trump's unusual religiosity appeals to white Christians and the way in which the Trump phenomenon has decisively reshaped the American religious landscape. ¹⁷ Even though much of the book is preoccupied with Trump and the religious right, De La Torre's criticisms are occasionally non-partisan. When detailing the historic development of the current racist immigration policy, he recognises that both Clinton and Obama were instrumental in putting it into place and its implementation. ¹⁸ Similarly, he is very willing to affirm that no political party or agenda—‘either from the right or left—is God-led’ on account of being subject to self-interested leaders. ¹⁹

De La Torre's account of a racist ideology in American Christianity is not restricted to a discussion of racism alone. He suggests that the desire to control and demean non-white bodies is just that—a desire—and one that is erotic in nature. Thus, on De La Torre's telling, racism and classism are more fundamentally rooted in sexism, because all forms of oppression are ‘modeled after sexism’. ²⁰ As such, one discovers that the problem with white Christianity in America is not simply that it is white, but that it is white and male. This perhaps explains why white male theologians of the twentieth century who are not aligned with the political right are also subjects of criticism. Reinhold Niebuhr's theology is understood as justification for continued imperialist projects and Hauerwas’s ethics are understood to be an obstacle to meaningful social justice efforts. ²¹ If the problem is white masculinity, it is less clear why De La Torre takes issue with current Latino evangelical leaders. To be sure, the problem continues to be ‘white Christianity’, but in this instance these Latino Christians are supposedly displaying their susceptibility to having their minds colonised. ²² While the power dynamics operative in a racialised world certainly allow for this, there is a curious sort of paternalism implicit in the notion that these non-white men are incapable of coming to meaningful conclusions of their own.

The critical edge of De La Torre's work is plain enough. His liberationist tendencies are expressed in a sustained and unflinching chronicle of white American Christianity's continued support of racist and xenophobic behaviour. The concluding chapter, however, offers an outline of a more constructive account of what it means to become ‘badass believers’ that goes beyond recognition of the ways a segment of American Christianity has capitulated to Trumpism. Central to this ‘feet-on-the-ground praxis’ are ‘acts of jodiendo—acts that f*ck with the social structures responsible for oppression’. ²³ These acts include standing in solidarity with the oppressed, refusal to acquiesce to laws made by men, celebration of all cultural forms of belief, and most importantly, ‘the total rejection of Eurocentric religious thought’. ²⁴ It matters little whether its expression is more conservative or liberal in its orientation; they all have been formed into an ideology of white supremacy and the only hope is for an unequivocal rejection of it in all its forms.

It was somewhat difficult to come to terms with Decolonizing Christianity, no doubt because it was not written with me in mind. I do not think De La Torre would take it as a mischaracterisation to suggest that the book reads like a manifesto for rallying all non-whites to be ‘born-again’ into a new form of Christianity—one free from the oppressive authoritarian structures of Euro-centric patriarchy and so-called European religious orthodoxy. In dispensing with a supposedly unhelpful preoccupation with confessions and professions of right belief, this reformed Christianity would instead commit itself to right action. In the end, De La Torre is advocating for an expression of Christianity which recognises that rather than a dead (and death-dealing) orthodoxy, the ‘purpose of the church’ is found in the living out of one's ethical commitments. ²⁵ While one can certainly sympathise and support this call to action, there may be a small measure of irony that his vision for true Christianity bears a striking resemblance to the ideas of a certain European white male from the eighteenth century. ²⁶

Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

McCaulley's book is of a different sort than the previous two on at least two counts. First, McCaulley is a New Testament scholar and much of the book is an attentive and fresh reading of the biblical text. He expresses concern over what he takes to be an unfortunate tendency within more progressive forms of American Christianity which recognises that the Bible has been used as a means of oppression and so it is probably best to be avoided as the book of the white man's religion. Naturally, McCaulley realises that there are instances of this being true historically, but to reject the scriptures on account of its being co-opted as a tool of oppression fails to recognise that it was also the ‘rock upon which [black Christians] stood’. ²⁷ To understand Black Christians’ attitudes towards the Bible, McCaulley suggests that academic theologians—both white and black—do not represent the ways ministers and congregants in the Black church have and continue to look to the scriptures as a source of encouragement, hope and resistance. Reflecting on his experiences both within the Black church and the New Testament guild, McCaulley observes that it may well be the preaching in the Black church which more represents the apostle Paul's use of the biblical text as ‘a fire that leaped the gap (of time) and spoke’ to congregations about their shared experience. ²⁸

Second, and related to the first, McCaulley is less enthusiastic about what he takes to be progressive efforts to revise traditional doctrine and belief. Having a breadth of experience with various American perspectives—evangelical and mainline, ecclesial and academic, white and black—McCaulley is seemingly well-positioned to notice problematic uses of the text in all quarters. In a discussion of the liberative hermeneutic principle which animates the growing number of liberation theologies, he worries that approaching the text with a ‘predetermined definition of liberation’ assumes the ‘inspiration and in effect infallibility of our current sociopolitical consensus and the inability of the biblical text to correct us’. ²⁹ This is not to suggest that he rejects liberationist insights when reading the biblical text. As the discussion that follows will show, much of his own scriptural interpretation is amenable (if not identical) to the concerns of liberation theologians. Rather, he is concerned that presupposing what the text must mean in advance is to repeat the same errors that liberation theologians seek to correct. Some might patronisingly suggest that McCaulley has fallen victim to the sort of intellectual colonisation De La Torre and others discuss, but he is keenly aware of the ways in which minority voices have been weaponised by white religious conservatives and progressives for ideological point-scoring and he is not interested in being ‘a casualty of someone else's war’. ³⁰

There is not space to discuss all of McCaulley's scriptural interpretation, so perhaps two examples will adequately give a sense of the kind of thought he is advancing here. First, in a discussion of Paul's supposed underwriting of the establishment and status quo, McCaulley notes Paul's reference in Galatians and elsewhere to the language of ‘this present evil age’ (Gal. 1:4; cf. Col. 1:13). Recognising that some have inappropriately spiritualised Paul's ‘rescue’ from this age to mean something like ‘going to heaven’ when one dies, McCaulley reasons that Paul likely has in mind specific evils of his own time and place. Among these demonic forces at work, McCaulley suggests that Rome's economic exploitation of the populace—which would include the practice of slavery—‘existed because of the policies of Roman leadership as dictated by spiritual forces’. ³¹ McCaulley argues that separating the ‘spiritual’ from ‘political’ would be foreign to Paul's theology, and yet there is a perennial temptation to misinterpret his meaning here. On the one hand, an under-interpretation of Paul's meaning here reduces the salvation to a highly individualised and privatised experience. On the other hand, to read from this a call for the church ‘to establish God's kingdom in all its fullness now’ does not fully take into account the eschatological dimension of Paul's thought. Nevertheless, to call this age ‘evil’ is to make ‘a political assessment as well as a theological one’ and Paul's encouragement is that his hearers are not enslaved to the economic and sociopolitical logic which seeks to oppress all through the power of empire. ³²

A second example comes in chapter 5, where McCaulley seeks to push back on the commonplace assumption that Christianity is a ‘white’ religion. He does so by paying particular attention to the way in which people of African descent appear in the biblical narrative. While many are aware that people from the continent of Africa sporadically appear in the scriptures (e.g., the Ethiopian eunuch of Acts 8, Moses’ wife Zipporah, the several mentions of Cushites), at least three people of African background play prominent roles among the people of God and are routinely overlooked. Simon the Cyrene (in present-day Libya) was compelled to carry the cross for Jesus on the way to Golgotha. ³³ While the post-crucifixion details are not entirely clear, it would seem that along the way Simon's sons Rufus and Alexander became part of the earliest expression of the church (cf. Mark 15:21 and Rom. 16:13), and there is some speculation that Simon the Cyrene's service to Christ extended beyond his literal cross-bearing (cf. Acts 13:1-2). Two other overlooked figures with African ancestry are Ephraim and Manasseh. Born in Egypt to Joseph and his Egyptian wife, Asenath, they are eventually welcomed and blessed by Jacob as being included as heads of the tribe of Israel in the same way that Jacob's own sons are (cf. Gen. 48:5). The point in highlighting the presence of these (and other) Africans in the scriptures is not an attempt at biblical tokenism, but rather to highlight that people from the continent of Africa were consistently included among God's people and were integral to the unfolding drama of redemption. ³⁴ Even as others are ready to dismiss it as an irredeemable tool of oppression, it is often over-looked details like these which encourage McCaulley to exhibit a ‘patience with the biblical text’ knowing that ‘God has willed our good and not our harm’. ³⁵

Love L. Sechrest, Johnny Ramírez-Johnson and Amos Yong (eds.), Can ‘White’ People Be Saved? Triangulating Race, Theology, and Mission

Whereas the previous three books are all single-authored texts, the final work under consideration emerges from the 2017 ‘Race, Theology, and Mission’ conference at Fuller's School of Intercultural Studies and has contributions from no less than thirteen theologians. As a multi-author work, it will be difficult to do justice to each of the fine essays found within, but an overview of the five major divisions offers a foretaste of the ways readers might benefit from the collection.

After the editors’ introductory essay which situates the volume, Part I has Willie Jennings and Andrea Smith separately giving an account of the problematic relationship between Christianity and ‘whiteness’. Since Jennings’s work has been enormously influential in shaping the conversation around the emergence of race within the so-called Christian colonisation projects of the last several centuries, it comes as little surprise that he reprises his seminal insights here. To the degree that Western civilisation sees itself as bringing a vision for a ‘mature’ society, those who take part in it are being formed—either knowingly or not—into a culture of whiteness in which all people are subject to a racialised identity. ³⁶ The undoing of this dehumanising racialised formation into whiteness begins, on Jennings’s account, by offering and living into a different vision—a counter-cultural Christian vision—of a shared life intentionally overcoming boundaries erected to segregate bodies into separate geographic spaces. Andrea Smith's essay lends welcome specificity to Jennings’s thesis by offering an unsettling account of the way colonial Christianity has sought to strip indigenous peoples in America of their cultural identity. Additionally, she explores a variety of ways that indigenous groups have negotiated their relationship to Christianity. ³⁷

Part II continues the discussion of ‘Race and the Colonial Enterprise’, but here non-North American settings are brought into view. Daniel Jeyaraj's essay is a careful analysis of the complexity of race language and the arrival of an array of Christian missionaries among the Tamil people in India. His essay demonstrates the difficulty with importing American-styled race discourse into a society that is more structured by caste. To be sure, what many refer to as racial or ethnic distinctions play a part in Indian caste structures and the arrival of European missionaries complicates what is already an intricate and established social hierarchy. Akintunde Akinade explores missionary efforts in Africa and the varied responses of African peoples to the introduction of Christianity. He suggests that perhaps contrary to conventional belief, Africans have ‘managed to maintain a firm grip on the shape of African Christianity’. ³⁸ In particular, he suggests that the pan-African understanding of ubuntu, as a highly communal understanding of human identity and existence, holds promise for a distinctly African contribution to global Christianity.

In Part III, Elizabeth Conde-Frazier and Angel D. Santiago-Vendrell add Latin American perspectives to this triangulation of race, theology and mission. Conde-Frazier's essay offers a compelling account of racism as sin, and therefore something requiring confession and repentance. To aid Americans in that confession, she recounts the country's legacy of repeated efforts to ‘legally’ exclude people living in the land from the category of ‘people’ or ‘persons’. ³⁹ Santiago-Vendrell's essay more narrowly focuses on Puerto Rico as a site of colonial construction of racialisation. In accord with Jennings and Carter, the genesis of racialisation on the Iberian peninsula was the introduction of blood purity laws directed towards the Jewish people generally, and more specifically, Jewish converts to Christianity. ⁴⁰ This helps to provide a backdrop for the racial milieu in Puerto Rico, which he suggests was mistakenly seen by white American missionaries as a model of what a non-racist Mestizaje community could look like. He concludes that invoking utopian visions of Mesitzaje society obscures the sexist, racist and classist dynamics at play in Puerto Rican and Latin American contexts.

Andrew Draper's essay, ‘The End of “Mission”’, begins Part IV and calls into question the racist presuppositions of various forms of mission borne out of the modern Euro-American context. Like previous essays, he suggests that the only response to this can be one of confession and repentance. This repentance will, however, take particular expression in ‘decentering’ whiteness by a greater willingness to inhabit non-white spaces, listen to non-white voices, and adopt the posture of guest as opposed to the paternalistic role of host inherent in many forms of ‘Christian hospitality’. ⁴¹ Hak Joon Lee's essay follows with an examination of and proposal for Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘Beloved Community’ as a model for Christian engagement with matters of racial justice. Lee raises a concern about the sort of liberationist discourse committed to the binary logic of oppressor and oppressed in which he queries whether or not it is ‘completely free from the hegemonic framework that created racial oppression’—an important observation that we will return to in the conclusion. ⁴² This section closes with a contribution from Jonathan Tran, who takes the Asian American affirmative-action controversy at Harvard University as an opportunity to reflect on what sort of post-racialism might be best pursed in the American context. Given the tendency for white Americans to use Asians as a ‘wedge’ against other non-whites, Tran makes the bold proposal that Asian American Christians might, in the spirit of Philippians 2, not consider their privileged spots at Harvard as something to hold onto. ⁴³

Part V is comprised of concluding essays from the editors/organisers. Drawing from Walter Brueggemann's understanding of biblical anthropology and from the book of Acts, Johnny Ramírez-Johnson explores how persons participating in a renewed human community might learn to communicate with one another in a way that demonstrates their appreciation of each other's diversity. Love Sechrest offers a fascinating and counter-intuitive account of the notorious Matthew 15 passage in which Jesus supposedly displays something approximating racist behaviour. Rather than focus on Jesus’ assumed racism, Sechrest reads the biblical text through a liberation hermeneutic that recognises the biblical texts as documents of resistance written by oppressed communities. As such, Matthew's portrayal of Jesus is less about his xenophobia and more a word to the Matthean community about working through their internalised racism and not capitulating to Gentile oppressors. Amos Yong's final essay draws together the various insights gained from the collection of contributions, and he proposes the Asian American experience as ‘perpetual foreigner’ is a useful hermeneutic for theological reflection around scripture in as much as the biblical narrative is written by and depicts those who consistently lived under the conditions of exile, diaspora and marginalisation. Importantly, Yong recognises that overcoming the legacy of racialisation and white supremacy exceeds what is possible by human effort, and so he joins with others to affirm that the ‘coming reign of God in Jesus can only be the work of the Spirit of Christ’. ⁴⁴

Conclusion

This review has attempted to show that each of these books can be read profitably, even if they are pursuing varying aims with different audiences in mind. Each of these writers skilfully guides the reader into understanding the history of racially motivated oppression and the ways it expresses itself in contemporary (mostly) American religion and society. For those who are relatively new to this conversation, one might be well-served to first read Jennings’s Christian Imagination and Carter's Race: A Theological Account to provide the necessary scaffolding for a richer engagement with this collection of books; they are all in various ways indebted to their insights about the construction of ‘race’ as a necessary implicate in European colonisation. Nevertheless, each of these books offers the reader much to consider about the shape of (mostly) American Christianity as its theologians attempt to reckon with the abiding effects of racism and imperialism on the church and broader society.

In addition to learning about the historical and theological particularities of racist colonial religion, there is as much to be discerned from these books about the nature of racially-minded theological discourse itself. As I mentioned from the outset, the sort of theological reflection that supposedly concerns itself with abstract ideas is seen as obscuring issues that people are actually facing in real-time and, as such, serves the status quo by diverting attention away from the problems and struggles of the marginalised and oppressed. From these books, De La Torre says it most explicitly, ⁴⁵ but it is implied in the nearly universal narratival mode of theological writing which seeks to ground reflection in the lived experience of real people and communities. Whether it comes in the form of thick historical analysis, biographical sketch or autobiographic anecdote, the assumption is that human experience has important things to disclose about the world and the lived Christian faith. The guiding presupposition seems to be that there is not a universal ‘thing’ called Christianity that one can point to, but only its varied cultural expressions. The result is that there is little perceived need to speak about faithful articulations of the gospel, but rather to generate depictions of the gospel which are faithful to the communities served by it.

However, if one listens carefully enough to the conversation around race in the West, one can discern a nervousness about the possibility of a racial fixation that legitimates its hegemonic hold on our collective social imaginations. Intriguingly, if not tellingly, this nervousness is artfully expressed most often by non-white thinkers. Kwame Anthony Appiah suggests that even though nearly everyone recognises that race is a social construct, contemporary modes of race discourse serve to reify racial categories as the appropriate way of accounting for human existence. ⁴⁶ This is related to a concern that Hak Joon Lee registers when he suggests that overly subscribing to a poststructuralist framework can essentialise difference in ways that result in greater alienation and inadvertently fund the white nationalist claims of marginalisation. ⁴⁷ Jennings laments that we ‘live in a defeated conceptual moment’ in which our imaginations have surrendered ‘to working inside the ideas of race, religion, and nation as the most rational way to think collective existence’ and yet he queries whether we should ‘continue to surrender our imaginations to them’. ⁴⁸ Brian Bantum expresses a similar concern when he observes that the racial logic that operates in Western society ‘reduces me and my body to a narrow and shallow story of what my body means’. ⁴⁹

To be sure, no one thinks that we are capable of ushering in a non-racial utopia. Race as a way of accounting for human bodies may be a social construct, but its effects cannot be diminished by simply affirming it as an elaborate fiction. Yet there is a clear sense that overcoming the insidiousness of white supremacist racialisation will involve resistance, and one such mode of resistance might express itself by refusing to allow race to be the only story told about and by communities. If one attends to the scriptures and communities borne out of its witness, then we may well discover that there are indeed better ways to tell the story.

I began this review by suggesting that inhabiting a cultural liminal space holds potential for generating new perspectives on theological accounts of race. One way this might be done is recognising Jesus’ own liminality. If we follow Cone's instincts that one needs to attend to the particularities of Jesus’ ethnic and social existence, one discovers that Jesus was not merely Jewish but that he was a Galilean. ⁵⁰ As a Galilean, Jesus would have been doubly discriminated against: the Roman imperium would have oppressed him for being an Israelite, and the Jewish leaders would have found him questionable for, among other things, being Galilean and not Judean. ⁵¹ As such, Jesus’ life was not simply a confrontation of Roman imperial power but, as the gospels clearly indicate, Jesus’ harshest rebukes were directed towards those who were among his own people. This recognition that Jesus does not fit neatly into the oppressor-oppressed binary is not a suggestion that Jesus is affirming liminality as the preferred mode of existence for all. ⁵² This would simply repeat the problem of attempting to portray Jesus as having a unilateral preference for one group of people over another—sometimes white, sometimes Black, sometimes someone else. Instead, highlighting Jesus’ liminality potentially has theological significance for it suggests that Jesus himself resists being drawn into various socio-political agendas of any kind. His followers did not simply esteem Jesus as a Jewish rabbi or a Galilean prophet, but as the ‘Lord’. ⁵³ Jesus may have been a human with a particular skin tone, language, ethnicity, and cultural location, but it is precisely in his less-than-perfect fit within any of these categories which gestures towards that which is most fundamental about his identity—and so also ours.