What is Whiteness?

[ The "National Memorial for Peace and Justice" located in Montgomery, AL ] 

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Note: In January, I posted what amounted to a public confrontation with my with experience growing up as a White American Evangelical, and more specifically, the anti-Christian, violent impulses which I believe animate much of that community's public and political behavior. It was an attempt to kick-off a series of self-examinations on how my upbringing has shaped my development, tainted my values, and affected even my most basic understandings of the Christian faith. This post is a continuation of that "confrontation" and examination--it was also my answer when I was asked recently what it means to be "white". I welcome your perspectives and insight.
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To talk about whiteness, I feel as though I have to begin with what Chanequa Walker-Barnes describes as the "great moral injury" at the heart of whiteness (see her book I Bring the Voices of My People). I recognize that doing this may look like centering myself in a discussion about racism, but I don't think that is Walker-Barnes' aim when she uses this device. She is not dismissing the obvious social advantages and privileges that I, as a white man, am gifted by a white supremacist society. It is instead her attempt to go beyond a discussion of privilege and drill deeper into the ways whiteness corrupts.

Walker-Barnes explains how the justification and maintenance of a slave economy required the construction and defense of an elaborate white supremacist system, one in which truly everything—laws, religious beliefs and practices, educational systems—had to be carefully organized to maintain a brutal and utterly unnatural society. This heinous reality required the meticulous cultivation of the white psyche: white people needed to find a way to accept the brutality they had fomented, facilitated, participated in, and were surrounded by.

This wasn't limited to America's slavery-era, of course. During the civil rights movement, many whites distanced themselves from the image of the “mean racist” they saw on television by abandoning the mention of race altogether. This was especially true with respect to the category of whiteness. Having thoroughly identified whiteness with white supremacy for generations, many whites simply stopped thinking of themselves as white. We crafted an absurd "color-blind" racial ideology which reinforced the notion that noticing, acknowledging, or even talking about race or racism was undesirable.

In other words, to accept what was going on around them, White people have--for generations--had to be formed and enculturated into whiteness.

This "great moral injury" reveals itself in so many troubling ways. For me, the most obvious revelations are in my community--white American evangelical Christians. White evangelicals have learned, for some time now, how to separate their personal beliefs from their social and political ethics. Even as white evangelicals repressed their public participation in acts of racial oppression, we never came remotely close to meaningfully confronting our silent complicity. White evangelicals instead buried the cruel history behind our creation of theological and ecclesiastical structures that exacerbated racism throughout this country. White evangelicals eventually came to define our faith in an almost entirely intellectual way: the pursuit of the purest of orthodoxies (correct belief) with little attention to robust orthopraxy (correct conduct). Today, being a white evangelical can be boiled down to "believing in God" and achieving satisfaction with one's "personal relationship" with him. There is little space for and few habits dedicated to continuously confronting and conforming to the demanding nature of Jesus' social ethics.

For me, that is devastating. Taking responsibility for the way in which white culture and white racial identity have been formed and distorted should to be the primary work of white evangelicals like myself, especially those who claim to desire "racial reconciliation" and racial justice. Instead, white evangelicals have responded to the horrors of slavery, racism, and white supremacy by ignoring the involvement of our church and its leaders, demonizing and distancing ourselves from our "mean racists" ancestors, and resisting the label of "white" altogether.

This reflection may or may not "define" whiteness, but it is the foundation for it in my life.