The Storming of the Teocalli by Cortez and His Troops. Emmanuel Leutze , 1848.
I’ve been reading After Whiteness, by Dr. Willie James Jennings. It’s a stunning work of sharp insight, beautiful writing, scathing critique, and sadness. At least, sadness is the emotion I feel the most as I read the work. I’ll save most of my thoughts about the actual book until later, so I can do a proper book review, but there are some things that need being said. Jennings uses prose, narrative, and poetry to communicate the ideas he wishes to express. This method in the hands of other authors, could easily come off as kitschy and forced. Jennings, on the other hand, weaves these different forms in a powerful way, able to get through the cynical heart to the living person, often wounded, within. And the book is slow. Not in an unengaging or boring way, but in the way a long walk on a summer evening is slow. That is the best way I can think of to describe the pacing of this book. It feels like Willie and I are on a walk together, and he’s telling me about his life, his experiences, and as I listen, he opens up my heart to see the ways “whiteness” has impacted me for as long as I can remember.
Whiteness
Before I go on, I need to define the word “whiteness” so that it’s very clear what we’re talking about and what we’re not talking about. Jennings, and other people writing on racism and white supremacy,1 make it clear that “whiteness” isn’t synonymous with being white. Jennings says his “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.”2 This means that “whiteness” doesn’t refer to individual people or even groups who come from various European backgrounds, no matter what they be, but to a worldview. That worldview, however, did come from Europe, from Europeans, and developed throughout the so-called “Age of Discovery” and continues in various forms today.
This worldview, developed by Europeans, was cast in the terms of skin color, with civilized Europeans being self-described as “white,” people from the African continent described as “black,” and people from the Americas as “red” or sometimes “brown.” The colonists and conquerors, and so very often the missionaries as well, equated whiteness with civilization, intelligence, and Christianity, whereas blackness or redness was equated with being barbaric and uncivilized, unintelligent, wasteful, and heathen. The development of this worldview, takes the form of the “white, self-sufficient man, his self-sufficiency defined by possession, control, and mastery?”3 Because After Whiteness is a book primarily about the institution(s) of higher education, especially theological higher education, he wrestles with how universities and seminaries consistently have tried to (force-)form people of whatever nationality, ethnicity, and gender into this image of whiteness, into this image of the white self-sufficient man. To the degree that a person—white, black, or brown—is unable or unwilling to be shaped into this homogenous, hegemonic image is the degree to which that person cannot be accepted and provided with privilege. It is easier, maybe far easier, for a white man to fulfill this image, but it’s also possible for people of other skin colors and genders to capitulate and conform to this worldview that sees self-sufficiency, as well as master, possession, and control, as the hallmarks of the perfect person. In this way, women of all colors as well as black and brown men can perform and propagate whiteness, both in themselves and in the world around them. This is admittedly a too-brief discussion of whiteness, but I thought it necessary to point towards what Jennings means and say that it’s not necessarily white people, but a worldview we’re calling “whiteness.”
Sadness I Can’t Shake
As I said, the emotion I feel consistently as I read this book is sadness. From the first few pages I began to understand this wasn’t going to be an easy book,4 but I also understood what I was reading was important. “Sad” is the emotion I feel, but what the book makes we want to do is lament. I want to lament for all the things my ancestors have lost, all the things I have lost, all the things I have given up in order to perform the image of the master. I feel like an aluminum can who has crushed himself, who has allowed himself to be crushed in order to be formed into the image of whiteness, and like a can, no matter how gentle the twisting (it’s not gentle), the hard, sharp edges remain. Try as I might, I will never take that image. I lament the things and ways of life I will never know from the ancients, but I also lament because I think my father has fully bought into the lie of whiteness, trying to image it himself, while teaching the child-me to do the same.
Perhaps most of all, what I mourn the most are all the ways I capitulated to whiteness, the way I bought into the lie, and gave myself to that formation. I believed them when they told me, with and without words, that to be desirable and trusted, loved and accepted, I needed to be a self-sufficient white man. And I have myself to it. There’s more to it than this, but from my late teens through my early twenties, I hated being Mexican. This is my internalized racism—to reject and hate what my mother and father passed to me, genetically, to reject and hate who I was because I believe the voice of the white man in the voice of my Mexican aunt and uncle, who whenever I did something they didn’t like, would say, “That’s so Mexican!” I believed them when they said wanting a Coke instead of water at dinner was “so Mexican.” It’s the way I saw my cousins with their light hair and skinny bodies, then, looking at mine, hated what I saw.
I was primed to believe the seduction of whiteness when it came time to be educated by the church, to be formed into a minister at the church where all the Mexicans—family and family friends, mind you—all sat in one section together while the rest of us filled out the church. In the churches of my teenage years, I saw over and over again that the white man was to be honored, obeyed, and “trusted” in all matters of life and doctrine. He was, after all, the man of God. I didn’t have the language then, but what I wanted wasn’t just to be a pastor, though I did and believed it was God’s call, I wanted to be the white man who ruled, who was loved, desired, and accepted.
Brown Bodies Are Not White Bodies
It’s not just the view of the world out there, though, where whiteness grows like a weed. It’s right here in the space I can never leave or run from. It’s my body.
Jennings describes an interview he sat in for the hiring of a new teacher at his university. There were two interviewees, a Black woman and a white man. He talks about how, in his estimation, the Black woman had more to offer and was a better candidate for the position, but he knew long before the interview was over who would be selected. The way he described the event digs into my own colonial wound.
They looked at him longingly and lovingly, admiring his poise, confidence, seeing in him what they longed to be…
The committee [saw] the body of candidate A [the self-sufficient white man] as exactly the body it wanted to be and wanted every student in school to resemble, intellectually speaking. How else are we speaking?5
This isn’t the abstract, “That’s so Mexican!” of my aunt and uncle, who so desperately want to be white. This is the concreteness of lived life, of staring at another body who has been successfully formed into the image of the plantation owner who exudes strength and intelligence and who is ready to play the game. I didn’t just learn to hate the stuff I did or didn’t do that made me “so Mexican,” I learned to hate the very thing that was concretely Mexican, this body.
I am pale, as far as things go, but I’m still darker than my white friends. I used to try, though, to be pale. I hated, and still do, my bodies propensity to roundness and soft lines. I could change these, more or less. I can stay out of the sun (I tan easily) and I could work out and eat less, but I can never change that I’m short, a characteristic I inherited from my ancestors. I can’t change this face. I can’t be rid of this body, not without destroying it. Then again, I believe in the resurrection of the dead, so…
It’s a powerful combination when the right body is coupled with the right worldview. No matter how hard I tried, I could only do one, Providence and Nature have determined the other for me. I still wrestle because I’m not the tall, thin, sharply intelligent, stoic white man I wanted to be in Jr. High and High School. I can love Chicano culture, or learn to love it. I can love my Mexican ancestry, and am learning to love it more and more, especially as I learn to cook our food. But, can I learn to love this body?
Lament
I’m in the middle of this book. I am in the middle of my decolonization, or maybe at the beginning, I don’t know. I do know there is a lot to be sad about. I also know that I do not know how to lament all this, but I need to. I need to cry, to rage, and to sit still in the aftermath. To learn to build again what I can. It’s difficult, at 38, to believe a rebuilding is possible, but I can’t go back now. I’ve taken too much apart. I’ve seen to far into the deception of whiteness and the harm and wreckage its caused all over the world, let alone to my people.
What I do know, is that Jesus is not a self-sufficient white man, that if he has mastery, possession, or control of anything, he has it by giving those things up for the sake of those he loves. I believe it is Jesus who is calling me to follow him through this dismantling, and it is Jesus to whom I cling. I haven’t said much about him in this post, but I believe he is with me in this walk, and I’ve written about it before.
I suppose it is to Scripture that I should look in learning to lament. The books were, after all, written mostly by people who had been exiled from their homelands, who lived in lands that had been taken over by outsiders who forced their worldview and ways of life onto the indigenous peoples they found there.
For now, my lament sounds like the stillness I find myself in, sitting at my couch or on my porch, pondering what was and what was lost. Perhaps my lack of words is appropriate. I offer my silence to my ancestors, whose bodies feed the ground from which I grow. I offer it to my family spread throughout Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, understanding that conforming to whiteness is what made me believe living in Kansas City without mi familia was a viable option in the first place. Finally, I offer it to the Lord Jesus, the brown Man calling me to follow him, to the Holy Spirit who inspires the dancing body, and the Father who formed me in my mother’s womb, who formed me from my Mother, the earth, with a Mexican body.
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As in the book with the provocative title, Can ‘White’ People be Saved? published by InterVarsity Press.
Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020), 9.
ibid, 6.
I have read the Prologue before as well as the third chapter for a group I’m apart of, but that was a rushed reading while I was in the last quarter of my Master’s program. Things weren’t sinking in then like they are now.
Jennings, 24 & 28.
Thank you for sharing. I can relate to a lot of what you've shared about the struggle to accept looking and being the way you are in the face of whiteness. I hated being black for years because of the labels of "dangerous" or "unprofessional" others assign to blackness. It wasn't until my late teens and early twenties that I began to like and love the way that God created me and felt a deeper sense of pride in my black cultural heritage as I took a DNA test and started to learn more about my ethnic makeup. I'm in an ongoing journey of learning more about my cultural history, and it's brought up lots of negative and positive emotions. It's quite a whirlwind of a journey!
What a topic. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experience. I am definitely going to read this book as I too, am hispanic and seek to know a bit more about a culture I have always felt detached from and never quite a part of. I feel this in general though. Not really identifying with any culture.