I appreciated Vincent Bacote’s article and the conversation that it has started. Although it may be de rigueur to begin such a response with a demonstration of my anti-racist bona fides, I am concerned that conversations on these matters have often been too dominated by a concern to justify or absolve ourselves to allow for the sort of searching discourse that issues of this importance require. I will rather submit the following thoughts to the charitable consideration and criticism of fellow Christians, hoping that by bringing my un-airbrushed thoughts into the light they may be properly tested, any errors or sins revealed, and our understanding of the truth advanced. My thoughts are primarily concerned with some features of the rhetorical form of the current discourse surrounding race.

As a pale Englishman, I come to this conversation as an outsider in more than one respect. While the globalization of our political, social, and ideological discourse has led some to attempt to import America’s racial discourse to our UK shores, its categories are often quite ill-fitting, arising from and speaking into a rather different situation. While we undeniably have racial and ethnic tensions here in the UK, they have a different history, shape, component factors, and relevant parties and can only adequately be addressed on their own terms.

Yet, witnessing such attempts, along with the developing American conversation from a distance, I have felt a growing concern that the direction of the discourse is destined to produce a great deal more heat than light. It has seemed to me that recent years have witnessed a growing essentializing and ideologizing of racial discourse, as a specific set of discourses of American provenance have been conflated and projected into the world more generally in ways that cannot but prove unhelpful. The gains in rhetorical force have frequently come at the expense of clarity and understanding.

It seems to me that this is in no small measure a result of the abstraction of discourse encouraged by the Internet, on which vague ideological concepts can subsume and efface the particularity and variegation of concrete issues and events (which get rendered as de-particularized symbols of the concepts). Master concepts such as ‘white supremacy’, ‘white privilege’, or ‘whiteness’—concepts in which countless disparate tensions, inequities, and frustrations of myriads of individuals’ and communities’ lives can be agglomerated—may be incredibly low resolution for the purposes of analysis, yet are effective rhetorical tools for mass mobilization and offer catharsis in their naming of pervasive yet rather amorphous realities people feel.

When such vague abstract concepts dominate, particular persons, realities, and events can be stripped of their particularizing features and employed as symbols of the abstraction. The perception of the confrontation at the Lincoln Memorial in January last year is a good example of how just one 16-year-old boy’s face could come to bear the symbolic weight of ‘white supremacy’ and ‘toxic masculinity’, provoking the fiercest denunciations and attacks. His face served as a lightning rod for people’s anger about all that the vague master concepts symbolically concentrated in him represented in their lives.

An overdependence upon abstractions and their attendant symbols, by focusing upon a malign unified and coordinating agency behind all racial problems, can threaten the process of analysis. Analysis, by its characteristic breaking down of the vague master concept into distinct, disaggregated, and sometimes detached component elements, is feared to have a deflationary effect upon the denunciatory rhetoric, unsettling the image of a single malign power at work. We may need fewer prophets condemning evil and many more prudent local and national persons and leaders, who are able to go beyond mere good intentions to craft more effective means of addressing inequities and divisions on the ground. By framing issues of race overwhelmingly as matters of good versus evil, we struggle to reckon with how much our current struggles are more a result of folly or simplicity versus wisdom. We all want to be assured and to assure others of our good intentions, but good intentions won’t get us very far without wisdom.

Various discourses concerning race as they currently operate are often far more optimized for the moral positioning of various parties than for actual understanding and effective responses. Some parties want absolution, others want victimhood, still others want saviour status. Christians can be in particular danger of this. We may want to be assured that the church is the solution to our vexing issues of race, when it has more commonly found itself contributing to the problems. The church herself stands in need of salvation; she is not the Saviour.

We want our theologies, our heroes, or our movements to be vindicated or absolved. In societies where guilt is employed as a means of control, we fear to confess our faults. We do not want to place ourselves in the hands of others. Quests for ‘racial reconciliation’ can all too easily weaponize a distorted Christian doctrine of forgiveness to pressure others to relieve us of the guilt of sins with which we have not truly come to terms. They can be attempts to cover rather than truly to tend to the wound.

On the other hand, where racial discourse is approached principally as a means by which guilt, debts, and claims are variously assigned to different demographics and as a means of atoning for or absolving ourselves of our sins, it will be difficult to move beyond relitigations of or recriminations for past wrongs to forging a better future.

A narrative of guilt and victimhood, which the racial narrative has often been, can also have the unpleasant effect of leaving the guilty abject and the victims dependent and stripped of agency. And this has rendered the racial discourse and various other discourses of victimhood that followed in its wake a powerful means of consolidating control and power in the hands of governments, corporations, and various other larger institutions in society. The fact that Civil Rights discourse is so celebrated and co-opted by America’s oligarchic class should be a source of caution. It always risked positioning African-Americans as a class of persons dependent upon the State and other institutional powers, rather than as a group with rightful self-determination, civic tenure, and their own agency.

It seems to me that the category of ‘whiteness’ is quite inadequate for interrogating the actual dynamics operative here and, indeed, frequently serves to mystify them in unhelpful ways. It conflates many different demographics and dynamics by focusing on skin colour and through such conflations can reinforce some of the problems that it purportedly sets out to address.

On one level, ‘whiteness’ could refer to the predominance of the various loosely connected cultures and societies of Americans of European origins in American life and wider society and the difficulty that people from different societies and cultures have in entering into and belonging to institutions and communities dominated by such persons. In some contexts, an aspect of such ‘whiteness’ can be things as simple as a love for craft beers, fusion food, swimming, winter sports, hiking, greater openness to polyamory, and adopting Eastern spiritualities. Yet, on a deeper level, it can be a culture that socializes its members into certain norms of emotional expression, relationship forms, ways of pursuing marriage and family, career tracks, political, religious, and scientific beliefs and practices.

While many people of non-European racial backgrounds—African immigrants included—have readily assimilated to these ‘white’ cultures in various ways (not least through marriage), the expectation of assimilation has always presented serious obstacles to African-Americans’ full participation and success in society, which, like virtually every human society, has been optimized for the participation and success of those within the majority culture. The natural human desire for commonality coupled with racial distrust and animus are the primary obstacles here. A mixture of partial assimilation on the part of minority cultures and determined hospitality on the part of majority cultures seems to be the only realistic solution to such problems in most societies.

Yet such tensions will always be difficult to navigate: most of the obstacles to belonging and participation established by ‘white’ cultures are quite unwitting and relatively minor, even though their cumulative effect upon others can be quite considerable. While notions such as ‘microaggressions’ may unhelpfully imply intent, they are highlighting something real. The discomfort that white Christians experience discussing questions of race should be a concerted attempt to share something of the unchosen discomfort of other members of the body. Addressing the forgetfulness of a past that feels distant to members of the majority culture, whose recency is nonetheless keenly felt by African-Americans, is an important part of this. It seems to me that the tragic asymmetry of such situations is often inadequately understood on either side. African-Americans may struggle to appreciate that the intensity of the obstacles that they experience and the darkness of the shadows the past continues to hang over them simply do not correspond with a matching level of inhospitable intent or guilty memory on the part of the ‘white’ culture; ‘white’ persons may struggle to appreciate that their good intentions and their condemnation of the past can still leave African-Americans feeling deeply marginalized.

Unfortunately, the equation of ‘whiteness’ with racism has encouraged radical cultural self-abnegation or wilful destruction in many quarters. As a pejorative term, ‘whiteness’ taints anything associated with historically dominant culture of European origin, encouraging an iconoclastic fervour that purges figures such as Shakespeare from the curriculum, to be replaced by suitably ‘diverse’ alternatives. But having a dominant culture isn’t a sin, provided that it extends hospitality to others.

‘Whiteness’ has been much less effective at highlighting the operations of the power of an oligarchic class that rules society. This class accords privilege to certain institutions, agencies, and persons who depend upon them, but don’t have true power of their own. While racial animus has always been and continues to be a deep problem in American life (albeit mild compared to that which one encounters in many other countries), by focusing too much upon it, the agency of the oligarchy, which has little to no actual solidarity with lower class Americans of European origin, is conveniently hidden. Indeed, rather too much contemporary racial discourse is a petitioning for privilege from the oligarchic class and its orbiting institutions, while the lower classes of European-Americans serve as the ‘white’ whipping boy for the actual ruling forces in society.

Both Bacote and Ince mention the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan. While we should condemn the idea that Christianity is ‘the white man’s religion’, Bacote is right to recognize that this charge has often been uncomfortably close to the truth. One of the strengths of the Nation of Islam has been its self-conscious focus on securing black agency, self-determination, ownership, and power, against what was often an alternative of victimhood, dependency, forgetfulness, false reconciliation, or mere assimilation into dominant white culture.

From where I am standing, it seems to me that a great many African-Americans have found being minorities in majority white churches to be an alienating experience, in which belonging involved assimilating into a lesser whiteness, and in which it was challenging truly to perceive themselves in the peoplehood of the community. I have wondered in the past whether denominations are necessary for the realization of a truer unity, where, rather than a premature assimilation into one dominant culture or theology, we must reckon and tarry with differences as distinct voices in ongoing discourse and relationship.

While I think a discomforting dialogue about race and towards genuine fellowship is something to which we are called, I wonder whether such a conversation can generally effectively take place on the territory of the majority culture, even in their churches. Rather, for the present, for many—though by no means all—it may require black churches that take self-conscious ownership of the Christian faith and act and think from such a position, persistently encountering white Christians from a position in which they are taking care not to lose themselves. It seems to me that a truer unity could emerge from this. Wounds this deep cannot be lightly healed.

Alastair Roberts (PhD, Durham) is adjunct Senior Fellow at Theopolis and is one of the participants in the Mere Fidelity podcast.  He is also the contributing editor of the Politics of Scripture series on the Political Theology Today blog. He blogs at Alastair’s Adversaria and tweets using @zugzwanged.