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The Problem of Whiteness

[President Trump] is kind of the new incarnation of Andrew Jackson. Bad president for Indian people, bad president for everybody. . . . We don’t have a lot of experience with great presidents.

Winona LaDuke, Democracy Now! interview

ON EARTH DAY IN 2018, it rained most of the afternoon. During a lull in the dreary weather, I went outside to check on our garden. I had planted seeds a month earlier, and nothing came up, probably because the soil had hardened during an earlier weeklong storm. In order for my tomatoes, broccoli, and sugar snap peas to grow, I needed to till up the ground again, add some compost, and pull up weeds.

I grabbed my hand tiller, one of those that you stand on, push into the ground, and turn into the dirt so that it pulls up weeds along with it. I stood at the corner of the garden, hitting the same patch of ground over and over again, and eventually mumbled to myself, “There’s something going on down there.” I knew then and there that the dirt represented deeper issues that were preventing growth.

We’ve been spending so much time in the Trump era trying to dig up weeds, to figure out what’s gone wrong with colonial, white Christianity, but it won’t do us any good to pull up only the weeds we can see if we don’t get down to those roots that have dug their spindly, tight fingers into the dirt of our very foundations.

White supremacy is that root. It is the core of all those fingers, way down deep where we can’t see, and its tendrils reach up through our good soil and damage whatever fruit we’ve tried to cultivate all these years, all the work we’ve done. In November 2018, an unprecedented number of women of color were elected to Congress, including the first Indigenous women ever elected, Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) and Sharice Davids (Ho-Chunk). In the midst of pulling up roots, America is stepping into the light of calling out white supremacy for what it is, and many people are seen as beacons of that hope, of a change in the very halls of government. Those who are in power must continue to do the work of decolonizing, but they cannot do it alone, and they must be held accountable. And it cannot stop there. Many of our white American churches have held up white supremacy as a shining model of Christianity, and this egregious evil must be named as well.

In Baptist Sunday school growing up, I took in every Hebrew Bible story and New Testament parable as truth, because they were life to me. I asked no questions, because it was believed that the men and women in my churches knew best. But what was happening under the surface was a slow and steady assimilation into Western American Christianity—what I now see as the mix of empire and God that permeates so many white American churches. The problem with the white evangelical church is that assimilation is subtle; when you walk through that sanctuary door, the assumption is that you participate, you oblige, and you don’t cause a fuss. What I learned in my church growing up was how to be a devout evangelical, but I was also being taught that for my identity to matter, I must assimilate and take on the American dream as best I could. My life became about pleasing an Americanized God who really cannot be pleased.

We remember that stories of Christianity and imperialism, of power and control, have been present all over the world as Christianity became a religion that benefited those at the top more than those at the bottom—rather than a religion that encouraged people to follow the lifestyle and teachings of Jesus. Instead of doing good in the world, many Christians used the name of God to actually create those hierarchies.

We remember that people have been oppressed by the church, oppressed in the name of Jesus, and told that they cannot possibly know God in the way they were born to know God, and that it has resulted in splits and fractures in the world.

We remember, and we begin to ask questions. Many of us ask whether God is really a God who is white, a God who is a patriarchal slave driver. How can this be God? How can the church reconcile this, years later, when it feels like the church itself is imploding?

How can the white American church, with a history of complicity and abuse toward Indigenous peoples, ask any questions about the nature of God if we cannot ask ourselves to take an honest look at our own intentions? As Vine Deloria Jr. says in his book God Is Red, “Instead of working toward the Kingdom of God on Earth, history becomes the story of a particular race fulfilling its manifest destiny.”1 Whiteness is a culture that requires the erasure of all others, considering them less-than. It is believing in that well-known metaphor of a melting pot that we so love to hold on to in America, but erasing the value of the lives of the “other” within the narrative and in the process presenting the idea of assimilation as virtue. But really, assimilation is about power, power that puts shackles on Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color.

Recently I sat at a dinner table with my friend Jacqui and a group of women from mixed backgrounds culturally, racially, and ethnically. In that space, Jacqui reminded us that we must own our identities for the sake of all of us, for the sake of our white kin. Because, at the end of the day, whiteness doesn’t truly give anyone anything. It is a culture of taking and erasing, and we must learn from our mistakes and actively work toward healing.

The church is a searching being, because the people within it are searching. But who are we searching for? How much are we searching? When we search, do we fear who or what we will find?

The more we define God as an old, white man with a gavel, the more we create a society based around that idea, around the hate in that metaphor, and eventually, it bleeds into everything we do and believe. As Richard Twiss, member of the Sicangu Lakota Oyate tribe, once said, “When the heart is flooded with racial, cultural, ideological or denominational strife, there is little room in the heart to hold love, honor, respect and admiration for those who are different from us.”2 Over time, it leaves us with a church culture and identity so blended in with whiteness that we have learned to no longer value those who wish to decolonize, to separate themselves from the work of assimilation. In other words, the church has a lot of work to do.

The problem of a white God stretches into so many parts of our culture, even into the race politics of DNA tests, which have been used by people to “prove” their Native American identity when they have no real ties to an Indigenous community. In 2018 Elizabeth Warren came out with her DNA test results as a way to fight back against Trump’s claims that she’s not really Native, and as a result there was an uproar within some Indigenous communities, especially from people within the Cherokee tribe Warren claimed to be connected to. Because tribes have fought so hard to have sovereign rights, this battle, simplistic at best, between Trump and Warren over whether she should be called Pocahontas or not, came down to a test that says nothing of kinship within tribes. Elizabeth Warren is not claimed by the Cherokee people, and yet she made a public effort to stake a claim on their identity for herself. Test results do not equate kinship with an Indigenous community, yet Americans flock to DNA tests to give them answers to this question: Am I Native?

Daniel Heath Justice, an academic writer and member of the Cherokee nation living in Canada, explains it like this: “The simple fact of DNA relation isn’t actually kinship, or at least not entirely; to be a good relative, to be fully kin, we must put that relatedness into thoughtful and respectful practice, individually and collectively, and take up our responsibilities to one another and to the world of which we’re a part.”3

Despite all the ways she’s working to be an ally and spokesperson for Indigenous peoples, Warren nonetheless is breaking the very laws of kinship and belonging. By taking a DNA test to say that she’s part Native American, she is essentially telling all tribes, especially the Cherokee people, that stories told within non-Native families about that “one Native relative” aren’t problematic and that Native identity can be determined by a simple test. Kim Tallbear, associate professor of Native studies at the University of Alberta, has an incredible book on this topic. In Native American DNA, Tallbear critiques DNA test companies and the implications of these tests for Native communities. She writes, “Race politics over the centuries in both Europe and the US have conditioned our experiences and opportunities, including the federal-tribal relationship. They have impinged upon our ability as indigenous peoples to exercise self-governance.”4 This is exactly what Warren’s experiment in DNA testing has done: solidify the idea that anyone can take a test and claim to be racially “Native,” while erasing the actual cultural identity of Indigenous peoples. In the fight between Christian conservatives who side with Trump and Christian liberals who side with Warren, Native peoples who oppose them are left in the middle, traumatized over and over again, mocked for the very identities that we hold to be sacred in our own cultures.

In early 2019, right after Warren held a rally to announce her run for the presidency, Trump tweeted at her, saying, “Today Elizabeth Warren, sometimes referred to by me as Pocahontas, joined the race for President. Will she run as our first Native American presidential candidate, or has she decided that after 32 years, this is not playing so well anymore? See you on the campaign TRAIL, Liz!”5 This tweet, mocking the Trail of Tears—the forced removal of Cherokee people (and other Southeastern tribes) from their homelands—left Cherokee people the target for racist hate speech and toxic stereotypes that have been around for centuries, now exacerbated by this battle between a woman who claimed Native identity and a racist president who doesn’t care who he harms. It is important to remember that Indigenous voices are not homogenous, and Indigenous voices should be listened to on all sides of issues like these. If we want to talk about these issues and center Indigenous experiences, both sides of the political spectrum are guilty of using and abusing Indigenous identity for their own gain. We must address this reality in our political and religious spaces, because if we don’t, white supremacy will continue to hold power. My hope is that Warren will apologize in the right way by speaking about the settler narratives that often erase Indigenous identity and that she will then build long-lasting relationships with Indigenous peoples, because we need to see more stories of solidarity in our midst, of power to overcome systems of oppression and erasure.

White supremacy within our politics and within our churches should be addressed on a number of levels, but if we cannot admit that we have a problem in the first place, nothing will ever change. DNA tests will come out, people will lay claim over a culture that they have no part in, and our ideas of true kinship and belonging will be made into a mockery—and I believe all of this greatly grieves the heart of God and destroys the sacred love with which we should respond to each other.

Our political arenas and our churches are spaces in which we largely ignore the oppression of Indigenous peoples, people of color, women, LGBTQ+ folks, and disabled people, because we see only that individualist God who looks at our sins and yet ignores the bigger picture of what we’ve created and have been complicit in creating. May the problems of whiteness we have created move us to create a better future for those who come after us.

“Many white people would rather do something to address the symptoms we can see than acknowledge our original sin. . . . If we are honest with ourselves, we carry the wounds of white supremacy in our bodies.”6 These words by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove epitomize the problem of whiteness in America. Many Christians who are embedded in white supremacist systems within the church, when confronted with those systems of racism, would rather give away money and look at it from a distance, or, as has often been done, send in missionaries to fix the problem.

Being white-coded, both a descendent of European people and a citizen of the Potawatomi nation, means that though I belong to the Potawatomi, I am also responsible for the ways in which I have participated in the work of white supremacy. Growing up in church, I went on several short-term mission trips, and I showed up at church once a week to participate in F.A.I.T.H. visits, which were door-to-door evangelism to people who attended our church once or twice, just to see if they needed saving and, possibly, community. While our intentions were to care for people, to love people, we instead created systems of colonization through our evangelism and missional programs.

This problem of centering whiteness within Christianity has resulted in the invasion and erasure of cultures all over the world. In 2018 a young man named John Allen Chau traveled to the Sentinelese Islands to Indigenous people living right outside India. Chau, as he described it, was there to save them, because of his deep love for them through Jesus. Chau ignored years of legal protection placed on the Sentinelese peoples, who have remained connected to their own culture and traditions without contact by outsiders and who wish to remain as they have always been. Giving Indigenous peoples the right to be left alone was trumped by one missionary who wanted to “share the love of Christ,” and in doing so, he lost his life to a people who were protecting themselves once again from the outside world.

What happens when white supremacy taints our Christianity so much that we would rather scream the love of God over someone than honor and respect their rights to live peacefully within the communities they have created and maintained for generations? If Christianity is able to de-center itself enough to see that the imprint of Sacred Mystery already belongs all over the earth, to all peoples, it would change the way we treat our human and nonhuman kin.

Instead, the church jumps to addressing a symptom, which often results in missional projects that do not honor the cultures of other people, perpetuating cycles of colonization all over the world. There is certainly a right way to engage with people of other cultures and faiths, and we must see that there is a very real problem of continual colonization. America was founded in part on the image of the “just missionary” who came to save the “heathen,” and flowing out of that was the inability to see humanity in Indigenous peoples all over the world, including Indigenous Africans stolen from their homelands and shipped to the US to be enslaved.

Conversations around whiteness can be very difficult, but it is imperative that we speak openly and honestly with one another. While I believe we should be gentle with one another, we must speak the truth, and the truth is that our church systems, social systems, and our government systems run with white supremacy coursing through their veins. Until we are honest about that, nothing in the church is going to change. Individuals may find ways to decolonize, to return to the space in which all creatures and peoples of this earth are honored for who they are, but within our institutions, we cannot fix what we won’t admit is broken.

The time is now, and the work cannot fall only on Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color. Breaking down systems of toxic patriarchy cannot fall only on women. Breaking down systems of homophobia cannot fall only on our LGBTQ+, two-spirit, and nonbinary kin. Breaking down systems of ableism cannot fall only to disabled people. Breaking down systems of destructive mental-health practices and stigmas cannot fall only on those who are on a journey with mental health. Breaking down systems of terrorizing the earth cannot be the work of Indigenous peoples alone. We must work together, across every divide, and the church must be willing to step into really difficult conversations for the sake of a better future for all things and everyone. Maybe that begins with recognizing that all created things are truly sacred in their beginnings, and maybe then we can truly begin to dismantle systems of oppression.