It was just shy of two months after white police officer Darren Wilson shot to death black teenager Michael Brown—whom Wilson would later describe as appearing “like a demon.” Protests continued night after night in Ferguson, Missouri, capturing national attention just as the shooting of Trayvon Martin and subsequent protests had two years earlier. On this night, September 29, 2014, just after 11 pm, a dozen clergy members kneeled to pray in front of the Ferguson Police Department. It was a diverse group, including a Reform rabbi, Susan Talve; an African American United Church of Christ minister, Traci Blackmon; several white Episcopal priests; and Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou, a Pentecostal minister. As Reverend Sekou led a prayer, the police interrupted, demanding that the clergy and other protesters disperse. Reverend Sekou kneeled, continued his prayer—and was arrested by the police. He spent two hours in a blood-stained police van, one of scores of arrests in the Ferguson uprising.1
Reverend Sekou, who was born in St. Louis but was at the time pastoring a Massachusetts congregation, spent three months in Ferguson participating in protests and conducting trainings in nonviolent civil disobedience for fellow protestors. He has a dim view of the potential for churches to take the lead in struggles for racial justice. During the iconic Montgomery and Birmingham protests, he notes, only a tiny fraction of churches participated. “I'm not terribly hopeful for the church. I think queer, black, poor women are the church's salvation. They don't need to get saved. The church needs to get saved.” Reverend Sekou is not contrasting a religiously (or specifically Christian) inspired civil rights movement with a secular, twenty-first-century racial justice movement. Rather, he is pointing to the shared religious spirit that animates both, a spirit found in “the least of these”—a spirit of love. He points to a protest in San Francisco's financial district where black women bared their breasts while stopping traffic to call attention to the police shootings of Yuvette Henderson, Rekia Boyd, and Kayla Moore. Those women were “presenting their bodies as living sacrifices,” according to Rev. Sekou. “This generation has made a commitment to love its way out.”2 Loving black flesh that is deemed by the world un-loveable—doing so publicly, disturbingly, ritually—this dramatizes systemic injustice and forces us to ask difficult questions that are political, personal, and inescapably theological.
It is not only ministers who see love ethics at the core of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. The hashtag originated with a queer black woman, Alicia Garza, a California-based organizer with the National Domestic Workers Alliance. The night neighborhood-watch volunteer George Zimmerman was acquitted of Trayvon Martin's murder, Garza was angry and grieving. The next morning, she composed her thoughts and shared them on Facebook, concluding, “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.” Her friend Patrice Cullors, another queer black activist, shared the Facebook status and added #BlackLivesMatter. With the participation of Opal Tometi of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, the three created a digital platform to facilitate organizing based on the simple principle encapsulated in the hashtag. “The project that we are building is a love note to our folks,” Garza reflects. When a Ferguson grand jury acquitted Officer Wilson, Garza was involved in planning nonviolent civil disobedience in California as a response. She explains that protests and marches did not seem like the appropriate response: “What our spirits need right now is really to stop the wheels”—to block highways, paralyze public transportation systems, and interrupt brunches.3
A swirl of religious ideas, symbols, rituals, and feelings surround today's racial justice movement. While a half century ago the role of religion in struggles for racial justice might be symbolized by the image of a respectable black preacher standing in front of the masses—though certainly the story was much more complicated even then—today, in our spiritual-but-not-religious age, in our age of social-media-savvy millennial activists, in our age that is so new but also, in the pains inflicted by systemic injustice, so old, religion and struggles for justice are closely, complexly entangled.
There is religion on the surface, in the presence of clergy and ideas of love and spirit, but there is also religion below, present but unspoken. There is religion that inheres to the long history of struggles for racial justice, from the memories of African traditional religions and Islam that motivated resistance to enslavement to the ambivalent responses to Christianity that sometimes fueled rebellion to the Black Panthers’ effort to build a secular temple to black humanity in Oakland.4 Today, this religious tradition is often forgotten, or repressed, with freedom struggles described as a part of the (ostensibly secular) black radical tradition. The last half century has seen a rapid transformation of the religious landscape in the United States, together with a dramatic shift in the religious ideas and languages that are legible to a broad public audience. Religion has become more individualized, many staid religious institutions have declined in their membership and moral influence, and intellectual elites have often become invested in a deep secularism. Certainly these shifts play out in black communities differently than in white, but they are essential to understanding how religion relates to struggles for social justice today. They explain, in part, why grander visions of social justice that transcend the religious-secular divide have been neglected. Today, it is necessary to ask: How might we understand the black radical tradition as a black religious radical tradition—or a black Christian radical tradition?
It is our contention that those struggling for racial justice would do well to reflect on religion, and specifically on Christianity. There are obvious, practical reasons for racial justice organizers to deepen their understanding of Christianity: there are lessons to be learned from history; there are institutional resources to be tapped; there is rhetoric that moves the masses to action; and there are spiritual disciplines that enable the emotional balance necessary to persist in struggle. There are also less obvious reasons. Some scholars have contended that the very idea of race may have a provenance that is not only economic and political, but also religious—so grappling with religious ideas can offer critical leverage for challenging racist practices and for dismantling white supremacy. Further, religion offers more than a set of resources to be mobilized: at their best, religious traditions offer a way of seeing the world at odds with the status quo—that is, at odds with the way the wealthy and the powerful would like us to see the world. Because of the importance of Christianity in shaping American culture and in shaping Americans (whether they admit it or not), retrieving that world-defying potential of Christianity holds the possibility of critical leverage for seeing the world otherwise—and seeing another world absent injustice.
We further contend that Christians discerning how to live ethically (lay and clerical and academic) would do well to reflect on the insights found in struggles for racial justice. Again, there are obvious, practical reasons: race is one among the list of ethical issues that every congregation's social justice committee contemplates along with the other usual suspects: environment, women's rights, workers’ rights, immigration, poverty, and so on. The race-specific injustices of the prison system, drug laws, the education system, and everyday interactions (microaggresions) have captured media attention and demand a response from religious communities. But there are subtler reasons, too. Something like race has long played a central, if ambiguous, role in Christian self-understanding—neither Jew nor Greek. Racial injustice is not only a problem out there, in the secular world; it also infects religious congregations that remain deeply segregated and at times incubate rather than combat prejudice. But most importantly, God is black. This was the provocation of Albert Cleage and James Cone, the first formalizers of black theology, in the 1960s, and, for Christians, it should be straightforwardly true. God identifies with the most marginalized, those who suffer from systemic injustice. In twenty-first-century America, those are blacks, so that is where God is to be found, with all this claim implies. To understand Christian ethics, studying the practices of black communities, particularly black communities struggling against injustice, is more likely to yield insights than studying the works of European theologians alone. An even higher yield will come when that study of black struggle is accompanied by participation in struggle. In the formulation of black theologians, this is the imperative to become black.5
At the heart of racial justice organizing today, expressed in the unifying principle Black Lives Matter, is a commitment irreducible to secular terms. This commitment is misunderstood if it is taken quantitatively: that white lives count as, say, 10, perhaps Latino lives as 6, Native American lives as 4, Muslim lives as 2, and black lives as 0, with the goal being to raise all lives to a 10. The absurdity of such a formulation points to the inadequacy of scalar frameworks. Indeed, what is at stake is the belief that no lives are disposable, that there is something about human life that deserves reverence, not calculation. Human life has inherent worth and dignity, or, in a more theological idiom, sacredness—it images and shelters the divine. In a sense, the claim of racial justice organizers today is that white lives are treated with reverence, accorded dignity; black lives are treated as disposable, subject to crude calculation that could result in their end. The police officer is charged with protecting sacred (white) life by means of calculating and neutralizing threats from disposable (black) life. As disposable, as object of calculation, black life is stripped of spirit. At the extreme, what remains is only the black body, object of repulsion and attraction, of fantasy, transformed into a demon in the mind of Officer Wilson, warehoused in prisons, executed by lethal injection or by environmental racism or by inadequate health care. What remains is flesh without feeling, incapable of being loved by others, let alone loving itself, let alone loving the world that so humiliates it.
But Black Lives Matter. This is not only shorthand for a political program, it is also an affirmation of a truth that the world denies. Black women and men, girls and boys, young and old, straight and queer, northern and southern, and immigrant and biracial—black humanity in all its variety—is beautiful. Is dignified. Is sacred. Loves. Is loved. Doing all this, being human, when the world treats black life as disposable—that takes something special, something powerful, something supernatural. In black life, denied but irrepressible, we see the divine imaged in the human clearly. For those who do not face racial oppression, the dignity or sacredness of life may become but an abstract principle to be affirmed, and one that is sometimes affirmed at the same time black humanity is denied. This is the tragic gift that black folks bring to the world, a reminder that to be human is to struggle against the powers that be, against the wisdom of the world, at once personally and collectively. This is what we see in black communities: in the songs, the art, the wit, the ingenuity, and most especially the collective action, all of which evidences both grave oppression and an ability to transcend the limits on personality and community prescribed by the world.
This story seems too stark, too black and white. Why not speak more generally about racial justice? Why slip into a seemingly old-fashioned, simplistic opposition? There is something very specific to anti-black racism—and very enduring. Anti-blackness is a key term animating both theoretical discussions of race today and grassroots organizing for racial justice. In both, this term indicates that the racial oppression faced by blacks in America (and, on some accounts, globally) is more than can be expressed by a collection of empirical evidence. Housing and employment discrimination, enormous wealth inequities, police harassment, disproportionate incarceration—these are all realities of black American life, but they are symptoms of a chronic ailment. The same ailment expressed itself in de jure segregation until a half century ago, and the same ailment expressed itself in slavery before that. Unless this disease is named and addressed, whatever remedies are offered for the specific forms of oppression faced by black Americans today will prove to be no more than short-term solutions. If mass incarceration is ended, some other, equally if not more grotesque social institution will take its place.
Anti-blackness is the key term employed in struggles for racial justice today. The key term for an earlier generation was racism. As a category of critical analysis, racism has two major limitations. First, it is very general. It can refer to any set of beliefs or practices that disadvantages one race more than another. Conversations about racism can tend, therefore, to remain at an unhelpful level of abstraction. They can also be easily sidetracked by appeals to so-called reverse racism. Second, despite many efforts to define racism as a structural evil, many people still associate it with prejudice on the part of individuals, of racists.6 In contrast, the term anti-blackness draws particular attention to harms done to black people, and it points to both the interpersonal and structural dimensions of these harms.
What is this disease of anti-blackness, where does it reside, and how did it come about? Accounts vary. Some locate it in the institution of slavery: it is so unnatural to treat another human being as nonhuman that a mythology, diffused through not only stories and images but also habits and feelings, had to develop for slavery to seem plausible and remain sustainable. On such accounts, black Americans today are still, effectively, enslaved, because the racial ontology developed during slavery persists.7 Others—of particular interest in the present context—tell an even longer history of anti-blackness, one in which anti-blackness is a transformation of the anti-Indian cultural metaphysics developed during colonialism, itself a transformation of the anti-Jewish logics developed in the early days of Christianity.8 In other words, the structure of anti-blackness is really a new form of the theological problem of anti-Judaism, or supersessionism.9
Regardless of which theoretical picture of anti-blackness seems most persuasive, it is clear that anti-blackness is deeply entrenched. So combatting racism requires more than policy fixes, and more than changing individuals’ hearts and minds. Transforming something so broadly and firmly held is daunting, and secular theorists often appear stumped (hence the label for such theoretical frameworks: Afro-pessimism). The critical leverage offered by religious traditions promises a response. If the problem is fundamentally about theology infected by supersessionist heresy, then fixing theology should fix anti-blackness, but of course that is too simple. Theorists probing the depths of theology or cultural metaphysics for the hidden roots of our current racial dilemmas can be compelling storytellers, but their stories are not particularly useful as specific guides for ethical and political action. The essays in this volume are mindful and appreciative of the insights of such theorists, but they equally attend to the practical challenges of living together today, in a nation debilitated by anti-blackness.
Why focus on anti-blackness instead of white privilege or white supremacy? The category of white privilege names the unearned, disproportionate benefits that white people regularly receive just because of their whiteness. Scholars who want to stress the oppressive power dynamics involved in this arrangement tend to prefer the category of white supremacy.10 Both of these are valuable analytical tools, and valuable tools for self-reflection. However, they also place whites at the center of struggles for racial justice. Although conversations surrounding these terms have helped some whites take responsibility for the functioning of whiteness in contemporary societies, these conversations also risk taking attention away from the harms that are being done to black bodies, selves, and communities. The term anti-blackness concentrates precisely on these harms and primes black communities to fight back. (Katie Walker Grimes's chapter in this volume makes the intriguing argument that we ought to shift the discussion further toward the category of “anti-blackness supremacy.”)
This book does not consider anti-blackness in isolation from other social problems. On the contrary, it examines concrete connections between anti-blackness and colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and homophobia, to mention but a few, and it relates anti-blackness to similar harms done to other nonwhite groups, such as immigrant communities from Latin America and Asia and indigenous peoples of the Americas. Clarity about the role of anti-blackness in this interconnected web of social crises and oppressions is possible only if we can appreciate anti-blackness as a distinct category of critical analysis that is not reducible to the others. All of the contributions to this volume exhibit the intersectionality of the term in one way or another. To mention just two examples: Santiago Slabodsky draws connections between anti-blackness and other forms of colonial oppression, and Eboni Marshall Turman analyzes the gendering of anti-blackness as a particular assault against black girls and women.
The focus on anti-blackness does not require any allegiance to a racial essentialism that would reduce the meaning of black existence to some fixed essence or set of narrow stereotypes. Nevertheless, resistance to anti-blackness has the potential to mobilize people for social action in much the same way that appeals to black identity have done in the past. The double negative—resisting anti-blackness—allows the meaning of black life to remain open-ended. Yet the political stakes of resisting anti-blackness are clear and urgent, in contrast to the risks of political inactivity and discursive confusion that come with some postmodern performances of indeterminacy. Without telling black people what they must do or be to achieve black authenticity, it is clear that we are engaged in a determinate struggle for black lives and black futures. (On the question of black authenticity, see Andrew Prevot's chapter.)
The movement-mobilizing power of anti-blackness is arguably much stronger than that of diversity, inclusion, or multiculturalism. Although these terms represent positive social values that we do not want to dismiss, they lack the precision and critical edge that come with an explicit struggle against anti-blackness. There can be no justice in the celebration of multiple ways of being human unless and until there is also firm commitment to overcome the negations of black life that are rampant today. Nonetheless, the struggle against anti-blackness is, and must be, inclusive. Diverse persons, groups, and institutions must come together to build up a more black-loving and black-friendly world that can be genuinely hospitable to all.
Without providing a comprehensive list of types of anti-blackness, we can point to a few examples that reveal some of the harmful realities that this category is meant to name and address: colonial domination of African nations by European imperial powers, which expropriated their resources, destabilized their politics and economies, and fueled apartheids and genocides; the trans-Atlantic slave trade, with its uniquely devastating forms of dehumanization, violence, and rape (see the chapters by Walker Grimes, M. Shawn Copeland, and Kelly Brown Douglas); Jim Crow era discrimination and lynching, continued in new forms today; unjust policing practices, including killings of unarmed black adults and children and “stop-and-frisk” policing strategies targeting black communities; the mass incarceration of black persons, including many persons convicted of only nonviolent crimes; sexualized violence against black bodies in policing and in the pornography industry (see especially Bryan Massingale's chapter); structural inequalities that disadvantage black persons in areas of housing, education, health care, and employment; negative cultural tropes about the meaning of blackness, perpetuated through popular culture and the viral distribution of lynching videos (see especially Elias Ortega-Aponte's chapter); physiological, psychological, sociological, and spiritual effects of being perpetually excluded, marginalized, and feared; and microaggressions permeating the quotidian experiences of black life.
The category of anti-blackness enables us to reflect critically on the concrete ways that Christian persons and institutions, including the very discipline of Christian ethics, have failed to resist the multifaceted harm that is being heaped upon black people. Ashon Crawley's chapter makes the thought-provoking suggestion that resistance against anti-blackness must begin from an “anethical” attention to performance, beyond the bounds of what we normally understand by “Christian ethics.” Slabodsky argues that “religion,” particularly the Christianity that allied itself with colonial powers, functioned as a tool to dehumanize black peoples. Copeland shows that the Catholic Church has been an active participant in the forging of anti-blackness. Brown Douglas makes a similar point about Anglo-Saxon civil religion of the United States, which has been historically blended with and misconstrued as Christianity. Marshall Turman argues that even the Black Church, in its various denominational forms, remains complicit in certain anti-black and other oppressive dynamics.
A large-scale struggle against anti-blackness is already underway. This book seeks to affirm, participate in, and contribute to this struggle. It does not put forward a completely new agenda but instead builds on the already-existing momentum and emerging consensus within critical race theories and activist communities. Working in solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives and other similar initiatives, the contributors to this volume not only reflect on various aspects of the social evil of anti-blackness (including aspects linked to religion and Christianity) but also seek positive ways forward, drawing on religious and specifically Christian ideas and practices. This volume presupposes no single definition of “Christian ethics” but instead engages it as a category that can be questioned, concretized, and developed in different ways.
The range of interpretations of Christian ethics that follows reveals a variety of ways that Christian ideas and practices can contribute positively to the struggle against anti-blackness. First, as Copeland, Massingale, Brown Douglas, and others show, Christian ethics can give voice to God's righteous anger against societies that abuse the poor and oppress the stranger. Christian ethics can condemn as idolatrous any cultural tropes or religious institutions that explicitly or implicitly identify divinity, purity, and holiness with whiteness and associate evil with blackness. Christian ethics can urge individuals and communities to cry out in lamentation at the horrors of anti-blackness, mourning those who have been wounded and destroyed by it. In these ways, Christian ethics can function as a powerful, prophetic critique. Precisely as a theological discourse, Christian ethics has the ability and the obligation to invoke God's name against this blasphemous violence.
Christian ethics can engage particular Christian doctrines in areas such as theological anthropology, Christology, pneumatology, trinitarian theology, ecclesiology, soteriology, and eschatology in its fight against anti-blackness. For instance, Copeland argues that anti-blackness contradicts the basic tenet of theological anthropology that all persons are created in the image of God and have rights and dignity on that basis, regardless of their race. She also raises ecclesiological issues when she discusses Catholic bishops who were supporting anti-black policies, not only in defiance of Rome, but also in direct opposition to the efforts of certain local pastors and the resilience of black Catholic laypersons. Marshall Turman offers a christological and soteriological reading of black girl suffering and resistance. Massingale turns to social forms of trinitarian theology for a model of just, loving relationships that can assist us in the struggle against sexualized anti-black violence. Vincent Lloyd discovers a quasi-theological eschatology in the writings of the imprisoned Black Power leaders George Jackson and Eldridge Cleaver, which helps them order their loves and locates them in an Augustinian ethical tradition.
Within Christian ethics, and within other ethical and anethical traditions, resistance against anti-blackness may involve reconnecting with oneself, with one's communities, with the land, with aesthetic experiences of body and soul, and with a spiritual life of prayer and contemplation. Crawley finds hope in the sounds, vibrations, and affects that the character Helga Crane experiences in Nella Larson's Quicksand. For Crane, these experiences were a “path toward some other sociality.” Prevot seeks to recover Sojourner Truth's life of mystical prayer, which begins on “a small island in a small stream, covered with large willow shrubbery,” as the hidden source of her prophetic witness.
Confronted by the complexity, malleability, and persistence of anti-blackness in modern societies, it can be difficult to know how to proceed ethically. Even when the problems are clear, the solutions are often less so. Ortega-Aponte wrestles with perplexing questions about the shape of a liberationist ethics in a digital culture, where anti-blackness happens at the intersections of virtuality and reality. Lloyd retrieves powerful insights from Jackson and Cleaver, while recognizing that there is significant moral ambiguity, and even moral failure, in their treatment of women. Slabodsky shows that the entanglement between anti-blackness and Western religious culture has deep roots that cannot be easily undone. Walker Grimes considers challenging questions about how anti-blackness and other social problems, such as economic inequality and mistreatment of immigrants, can be combated at the same time and with equal vigor. Many such questions remain open. This book does not purport to offer the final word about how Christian ethics can best respond to the social evil of anti-blackness. Our hope is only that it may be a spur for further reflection and action.
A recent collection of essays about racism today by leading American writers took as its patron saint James Baldwin, and borrowed its title from him, The Fire This Time.11 Baldwin used similar words to conclude his classic jeremiad against American racism, published in 1963 as The Fire Next Time to wide acclaim, and the poets, journalists, and novelists of The Fire This Time riff off Baldwin's meditations on the depths of American anti-black racism in elegant, varied ways. Totally absent from this, the state of the art in the literary world's engagement with race, is religion—despite the ubiquity of religion in Baldwin's own thought, and the religious source of Baldwin's title. Indeed, the alteration to the title in the twenty-first-century volume marks its secularization. The climax of Baldwin's book is a citation of a slave spiritual: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time”—itself a paraphrase of 2 Peter 3:6-7. Following the classic form of the American jeremiad, refined over the centuries from John Winthrop on the Arbella to Abraham Lincoln's summoning of a New Israel to Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision from the mountaintop, Baldwin warns of potential doom if the ways of the world are not radically altered.12 Implicit in Baldwin's words is a vision of world-transcending justice, a vision that would guide the dramatic transformation of our nation that Baldwin believed is so urgent. Baldwin forced his readers to choose: accept the ways of the world or have faith that another world is possible.
In contrast, The Fire This Time offers no time or space to turn away from the world. Anti-black racism is permanent and suffocating. The fire is upon us now: We can't breath. What Baldwin does so magnificently, and what the essays in our volume attempt, is at once to recognize the horror and intransigence of anti-black racism and, at the same time, to recognize that we have the opportunity to imagine otherwise—and we have the ability to build another world. The Christian tradition offers resources to vision and build. Crucially, the Christian tradition offers a peculiar hope—not that our struggles will inevitably result in victories, not that white supremacy will soon be relegated to the history books, but that the world does not have the final word on what is possible. The world is not in flames, but it could soon be. Whether it burns will not be determined by the decisions of the wealthy and powerful and white. It will be determined by God. Our task is to respond—not with melancholy to the possibility of destruction, but with faith in a world-transcending, world-transforming God, a God who is to be found among the weakest as they organize and struggle, a God who calls for our participation in the divine, through struggle.
1. Kenya Vaughn, “Praying While Black: Rev. Osagyefo Sekou Detained by Police,” St. Louis American (October 2, 2014), http://www.stlamerican.com. On February 9, 2016, a jury took just twenty minutes to acquit Rev. Sekou. See Steve Giegerich, “Cleric Acquitted in Ferguson Protest Case,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (February 9, 2016), http://www.stltoday.com.
2. Sarah van Gelder, “Rev. Sekou on Today's Civil Rights Leaders,” Yes! Magazine (July 22, 2015), http://www.yesmagazine.org; Tanvi Misra, “San Francisco's Topless Protest Against Police Brutality,” Citylab (May 22, 2015), http://www.citylab.com.
3. Alicia Garza, “A Love Note to Our Folks,” n + 1 (January 20, 2015), https://nplusonemag.com.
4. See Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Gary Dorrien, The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015); Barbara Savage, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008); “Son of Man Temple,” in The Black Panther Party: Service to the People Programs, ed. David Hilliard (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008).
5. See Albert Cleage, The Black Messiah (Kansas City: Sheed & Ward, 1969); James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1970); and Kelly Brown Douglas, The Black Christ (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994).
6. See Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); and Bryan Massingale, Racial Justice and the Catholic Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010).
7. The most prominent account along these lines is Frank B. Wilderson, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). See also Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Linda Martín Alcoff, “Afterword: The Black/White Binary and Antiblack Racism,” Critical Philosophy of Race 1, no. 1 (2013): 121–24; Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); João H. Costa Vargas, Never Meant to Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008); Lewis Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1995); Hortense Spillers, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81.
8. Sylvia Wynter “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–333; J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
9. Jared Hickman offers an alternative theological account where the figure of Prometheus, a human stealing power from the gods, is central. Whites aspire to be Prometheus, themselves stealing fire, while blacks attempt to dethrone the gods without occupying the newly emptied throne. “That empty throne…grounds an alternative tradition of radicalism, a political theology arrayed against Euro-Christian apotheosis via non-Euro-Christian debasement, perhaps captured in W. E. B. Du Bois's resonant phrase, ‘Divine Anarchy.’” Jared Hickman, Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 147.
10. See Paula S. Rothenberg, ed., White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism, 3rd ed. (New York: Worth, 2008); Laurie M. Cassidy and Alex Mikulich, eds., Interrupting White Privilege: Catholic Theologians Break the Silence (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2007); Moon-Kie Jung, João H. Costa Vargas, and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, eds., State of White Supremacy: Racism, Government, and the United States (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011); and George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009).
11. Jesmyn Ward, ed., The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race (New York: Scribner, 2016).
12. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).