[Edited 2/23/2019 A point of clarification on this post: the indented portions are quotes from the book by Debby Irving, “Waking Up White.” Along with several other people, some who are posting in public, I’m going through the book chapter-by-chapter, attempting to think out loud what I my responses are and what my desires are. While I am attempting to be truthful, I am also attempting to be sensitive to my friends and family in the wider community, including my friends and family who are of non-European descent. If something I write seems injurious to you, please do let me know—while my intent is one thing, I realize that impact is another, and that impact is simply far more important. I am more than happy to edit or remove content that is offensive to the people who are not at all intended to receive my injury.]
“As I continue to learn about the history of racial categories, I repeatedly came across the description of race as a “social construct” and a “human invention.” If the idea of race was human-made, it begged the questions, What person made it up? When? And why?”
My goodness. This chapter packs a wallop. I’d known some of these ideas myself, having gone into the depths of the internet in order to help myself understand the nature and origins of “race” as a concept with the meaning we roughly hold today. The idea of a “race” of people isn’t new. I do not have enough expertise to go into all the details, but because I was largely raised in a Christianized world, the concept of nations being created by the transcendent God is something I was taught early on; somewhere around middle or high school. If I recall correctly, it was not taught in a way to say that there is a white race and the white race is superior. But the teaching definitely conflated “nation” to mean “ethnic groups,” so that we didn’t study the “nations” of Africa as much as the sub-Saharan Africa as a fairly homogenized set of people with somewhat varied attributes. Europe and the U.S. (and Australia/Canada/New Zealand) were roughly the same “nation” because they were the same ethnos. (Aside: we even had our own blatantly Anglo-centric religion, and no, I do not mean Western Christianity itself as much as British-Israelism, with its fantasy that Britain was the True Jews, the Ten Lost Tribes, and that Jacob’s pillow was the Stone of Scone, of which all British royalty took notice and from which they received their diving mandate. It was used to express the mandate of God for Britain, and by extension, the Anglo peoples, to rule all the world.)
It took some research on my own to uncover the origins of race-as-a-category, and that is only recently. I wasn’t quite as surprised as the author was here, because I’d been seeing more and more that there was a time when “race” was not as fraught with meaning in literature and history, until that time when it was. (European art from the Middle Ages on shows the presence of sub-Saharan Africans, for example, treated as equals in Western Europe and not as strange interlopers whose only two roles are to be servants and entertainment.) And I think that other scholars, such as Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, in “Stamped from the Beginning,” show that this creation of whiteness and white superiority happened earlier and spread widely more quickly than Ms. Irving writes, but the essence of the story here is valid.
But yeah, someone decided that there were “races,” and then someone decided that these races had intrinsic value. And coincidentally, the people who decided that there was a racial hierarchy all happened to be in the highest level of that hierarchy: Caucasian, or “white.”
“Entangled in all of this were white European missionaries bringing Christianity to far-flung parts of the world. Core to their work was the belief that the white, Christian way was the superior way and that ‘taming the heathens’ in order to save their souls required a full-on conversion to Christianity. In this case, the white way was not only better in this world but a requirement for entrance to heaven.”
I do not know if Ms. Irving is a Christian. She does not make it known in her book (so far), and I’d hazard that her faith is what I would term “nominal Christianity”; that is, the general Christianized attitude in Western Europe and white North America where Christmas and Easter are acknowledged as social and political events. (I am totally not saying that she is or is not Christian, and totally not bringing in a hierarchy of religions or even religious devotion. Just that there is a general attitude of calm belief in the proper operations of society that stem from an underlying belief in the God of “In God We Trust” – also “God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.”)
The reason I bring this up, however, is that this statement is profoundly disruptive to this Western Christian concept of “Christian” meaning “good like Jesus” when it’s more akin to meaning “Western and white and entangled with the Empire.” We who live in this Imperial Christian world mostly don’t see this. We accept as normal the creation of the Western world and what we call “civilization” as simply the normal process of world history. This is how it just works. White people leave Europe for adventure and profit. Using technology such as guns and sailing ships, they conquer endless lands in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and from tiny nations they rule vast nations and peoples. The “Doctrine of Discovery” is part of this—the white European pope draws a north-south line through the New World, and the European conquerors (largely) just follow along. A Christian leader speaking for God decides that half the world belongs to Spain and the other half to Portugal. Nihil obstat. Fiat lux.
And it is true that the imposition of Christianity on foreign lands has meant almost always the concomitant imposition of European culture and values, including the value of white supremacy. That’s what Ms. Irving means, I think, by the statement “a requirement for entrance to heaven.” We Christians made the non-European world to be civilized, and lightly “whitened” the indigenous enough to make them submit to white superiority.
I know in school we learned this, but we learned this as discovery and adventure. God, Gold, and Glory. I didn’t connect the dots that the conquering and the Christianization were not only done simultaneously, but that Christianity itself was the impetus to bring the sword to the heathen.
Sometimes we talk about the faith of Mohammad being spread by the sword, but I’m here to tell you that Christians used the same techniques, but for what they thought were better reasons.
“As classifications and theories changed, the only constant remained the idea of white as an immutable category, distinct and superior.”
This is something I’d figured out on my own during my research. I kinda suspected this idea that “Caucasian” was always number one, even as I didn’t see that the categories did shift from names such as “Mongolian” and “Ethiopian” to “Asian” and “Sub-Saharan African.” I do remember the books from my childhood—my parents were not rich, but we had plenty of books in the house, all of which I had access to, including the complete set of reprints of Scientific America up through the 1950s as well as several sets of encyclopedias, one with beautiful full-color drawings, including the drawings that went along with these descriptions such as “Malay” and “Ethiop” and “Mongol.” It’s funny to me now that while they did mention “Caucasians,” I never really saw that the origins were 2500 miles away from Western Europe—like saying a typical resident of New York City is the perfect placeholder for a white hipster in Seattle. (And just now, in looking up reprints of those images, I see that they are fairly white supremacist in that white people look majestic and proud, and non-white races tend to look like savages, becoming more brutish in appearance the further down the race-hierarchy you go. I won’t even link to them, they’re so disturbing.)
“I found myself passing harsh judgment on those who’d begun the cycle of whites revering whites. And then, with no small amount of horror and shame, I realized I’d been doing the same thing. I’d long ‘othered’ people of color, wanting to help and fix them. My thinking definitely fell along the lines of If only they could be more like me.”
This. This right here is where I stopped in my tracks, because this is me right now. I am going to be as transparent as I can be: I think this. I think that if only my community of color could be seen as having qualities we admire in white people, then good-hearted white people will of course see the similarities and connections, and more easily release their racist beliefs.
Boy howdy, I was not expecting this revelation about me. Now I just might not continue reading this book!
I think this is an important thing when dealing with whiteness and with otherness. Perhaps the goal of breaking whiteness and breaking racism isn’t to simply become more in common. Perhaps the goal should be more along the lines of understanding our differences, accepting these differences just as they are—and loving these differences, just as they are. Not interpolating whiteness and non-whiteness. Something different, something that I can almost see but that is still hazy.
“When I got honest with myself, I had to own up to the fact that I’d bought into the myth of white superiority, silently and privately, explaining to myself the pattern of white dominance I observed as a natural outgrowth of biologically wired superior white intelligence and ability. Like a fish unable to recognize its surrounding waters, I’d never noticed the culture of white superiority in which I now understood I’d been soaking.”
Another deeply significant line that is almost casually thrown out there. I want to put arrows on this and say “THIS!”
We can’t easily see our whiteness if we remain in whiteness and look at whiteness. We have to somehow get out, get away, see it from a distance. A fish does not know it’s swimming in water and I do not know that I am swimming in air, but when we exchange places, we find this out immediately. Perhaps this is one reason (albeit a very poor one) to include a diverse range of people in our lives and our experiences: so that we can get a glimpse of the other.
Now with that said, I don’t think this a perfect analogy and I don’t think that diversity qua diversity is going to fix this. I’ll just point out that our friends in the BBIPOC community do not really have to exchange places with us in order to understand the burden of our whiteness. I imagine that their burden of living with white people and with that whiteness is more than enough for the doctorate degree in “what is whiteness.” But I’m thinking that maybe for us, for white people, we need more than just books and movies and music to help us understand our whiteness as seen from someone outside our whiteness.
That does make it sound mercenary, to be honest. “We white people need to get friends and acquaintaces of color for our own healing and development.” But I just don’t know, and I’m open for ideas that maintain dignity and also that bring comprehension.
Questions
Prior to reading this chapter, what did you know about the history of naming the races?
I’d done my own research, mostly in the last five years, but I had some knowledge from my childhood about the different names as well as the fact that the names of the races have shifted over time. My awareness of the placement of “Caucasian” or “white” as the top value, from the very origins, however, is fairly new. I didn’t really see that until recently.
How do you now feel about the term “Caucasian”?
It’s really a useless term. It’s a direct signifier for “superior” versus a description of any racial category. The so-called “white race” doesn’t come from Caucasus, and the closer you get to the actual Caucasian center the less “Caucasian” the people appear. “Aryan” has been used as a replacement, but Aryans in Western and South Asia can be quite dark and quite dissimilar to Western Europeans. Between Kerala, India and Kerava, Finland is about 4300 miles, and there is a similar distance in skin tones, but both nations are considered “Aryan.”
As long as we have the idea of races, I don’t know of another term to use. I realize that maybe we shouldn’t have the terms, but what term isn’t equally hobbled by inaccuracy and imaginary value? They all tend to point out the centrality and the superiority of those from European origin.
For context on this series, see my kick-off post here:
To follow along with the others, see also:
Di Brown “Nixie” at https://dianabrown.net/blog-challenge-waking-up-white/
This chapter: https://dianabrown.net/waking-up-white-chapter-9/
Dawn Claflin at https://dawnclaflin.wordpress.com/
“And it is true that the imposition of Christianity on foreign lands has meant almost always the concomitant imposition of European culture and values, including the value of white supremacy. ”
Did it ever occur to you (as it just did to me) that Christianity has never caught on in the land of its birth? There is some evidence to suggest that the disciples who actually *met Jesus held a slightly different view of his teachings than the one converted Roman citizen who only met him after his death (in an encounter which could indeed be a vision – or a schizophrenic hallucination, which is also consistent with the descriptions we have of the event). But the Roman citizen took his version back to Rome, where it caught on – and it spread from there. At the Nicean Council, books of the bible with greater historicity were abandoned when they did not fit the Roman religio-political position on what Christ’s story should be. Just when, exactly, in that timeline did art start reflecting Jesus as a European guy, and what did he look like before that?
What do you suppose would be the irony if we were to discover that the religion that has formed the basis for some of the most significant and long-running colonial invasion, cultural appropriation, and erasure was, in fact, itself, a product of colonial appropriation and erasure…
There’s a lot to be said about discussing the idea behind the religion of Jesus (that is, the religion that he is recorded as saying) vs. the religion of Jesus-ists (that is to say, the religion that others have created for various reasons, reasons that can be good or bad or mixed). The texts we have today are what we have, and if we want to figure out the religion that those texts teach, then we look at the texts first. (The inclusion/exclusion and order of the books we have now as “sacred texts” isn’t the point here — the point is that the texts have a story, so understanding the text of that story is how we understand the story, just as if we stick solely to the tales of the Brothers Grimm, then the tales we investigate and retell from their stories are most faithful when they stick with the text. Their basis in fact or history isn’t the point of reading the text faithfully.)
Given what we have in the texts about Jesus, there is a religion in those books (and in the book of Acts “It is better to give than to receive,” besides the encounter with Paul) and in the book of the Revelation of John) that appears to be different or parallel or at least alongside the religion that developed from Paul’s writings. I remember way, way back when I first decided to follow Jesus as Lord (about 1968 or 69, IIRC), and I read through the New Testament, I was puzzled how the words of Paul and the words/works of Jesus weren’t exactly comparable. Not that I thought one was right and one was wrong. But that the books of the gospels (the books that tell us what we know of Jesus during his life and death and resurrected life for seven weeks after) tell of a Jesus who says and does things, good things, good words, and the letters (essays / directions) of Paul to the assemblies that were growing up in the Roman Empire. Now, the letters of Paul were earliest, based upon textual analysis, and the gospels were written later. Perhaps the earliest forms of the Gospel of Mark was in the 60s C.E., and the earliest forms of Paul’s letters were in the 40s C.E., but the church created/collated the texts in the New Testament in the first few centuries as a means to give structure to church beliefs and behaviors.
What is weird to me is that the directions on the order of the church (much like bylaws are of an organization) because the focus of the church in later years as a result of the Protestant Revolution in the 1500s. Between Jesus’ death and the Renaissance/Enlightenment/Rise of Protestantism, “church” was mostly an assembly of people brought in to hear the words of the rituals coupled with strong reminders to obey church teachings, all under the aegis of the crucified Jesus. There were some elements of what we think of as “house churches” (intimate gatherings of people in small groups to share of their experiences in faith) all along, even during the rise of the hierarchical structures of the church and the reactions of the Protestant Revolution, but mostly “church” was listening to a speaker as he performed the rituals, or listening to a speaker while he exegeted the bylaws of the church.
Lost or de-emphasized, in my opinion, was the religion of Jesus, who said himself that he came to establish the Kingdom of God, a place where justice and righteousness and mercy and healing and hope would prevail. He gave a model for us to follow and told us, right in our texts, what we are to do. Be kind to orphans and widows. Take care of children. Heal the sick, the blind, and the lame. Raise the dead, and be forgiving. Not much there about rituals and exegesis as the form of church.
If the Kingdom is about mercy and justice, then there aren’t any grounds for colonization. The earliest church spread by word of mouth and by answered need. Whether one believes in a Jesus as existing, the church did exist and did arise in the first century C.E., and its existence means that something was there that would inspire people to evangelize it. (I’m totally not trying to make the case for “my religion.” Just pointing out that questions about Jesus’ existence are different than questions about the emergence of the church in the first century.
Without a need for order and hierarchy, and without the need for the hierarchy of the church to “rule” over people (thank you very much, Constantine), there would be no impetus for colonization. No “Doctrine of Discovery.” No demands to “retake the Holy Land from the Musselman!” (And likely no antagonism of Christians, Jews, and pagans in Arabia that led to the synthesism of religions to form the Islamic religion, which means no Crusades and no conquering of Africa, West and South Asia, Southern Europe, and the islands of the Pacific).
Not saying my views are correct. But a religion that’s created to be a form of control and hierarchy is going to use that model to control and stratify society. And that religion is going to want to have the state help it establish its control.
As far as the Jesus of the texts and the earliest stories and earliest teachings, we can look to art, because we do not have his writings. He was depicted by the earliest Christians as looking like them. For the Romans, the earliest mosaics show a common Roman citizen–that is, not dressed in splendor or gold. For the Ethiopians of the second and third centuries C.E., he was a black man with black disciples. The very earliest Roman drawings show him as a man with a calm face, but not one of blissful serenity disconnected with the world. But definitely Mediterranean. And he hadn’t become flattened as an icon. He was still identifiable as a human. Later when it became apparent that to treat Jesus as human was to dishonor him did it become necessary to ennoble him and illuminate him and flatten him and separate him. We picked up the nimbus to identify him as “holy” and used that nimbus on others around him who also needed to be “holy.” The texts don’t show him or his followers or his disciples/students or his family that way. The texts show them as quarreling and fighting and disbelieving him and mocking him and demanding that he behave.
As far as “catching on,” the earliest church was broadly established across the Middle East and Northern Africa. Some of the greatest theologians are from North Africa, and may have been of black or Berber descent. (I don’t have my notes in front of me.) What wiped out the church was the energy of Islam–a faith that appeared to be clean and simple and non-hierarchical, in my opinion, compared to the frozen Roman hierarchy of the late Roman Empire / early Middle Ages. But if Islam arose and conquered, there must have been something irresistible besides just the sword of conversion.I suspect one draw was the comparison between a flat, lifeless faith and a dynamic, energized one that had a simple credo: “there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.” That was way, way simpler than the “cold Christs and tangled Trinities” of the Christian faith.
My belief is that people believe what confirms who they think they are. And people often bring into their formal faith a lot of themselves, and make their faith their home. Sometimes the doctrines aren’t the selling point. Sometimes the selling point seems to be how the faith validates our beliefs about ourselves.
The Christianity that conquered the world is not the faith I can deduce from the texts, but it is the faith that I can connect, dot to dot, action to conclusion, from the idea that the Western European nation state had the right to conquer all other nation states, and God was adduced to give moral authority for that.
“Later when it became apparent that to treat Jesus as human was to dishonor him ”
This is not apparent to me. 🙂 Seems more like a purposeful decision to create a specified effect.
Do you have origin timelines for the “apocryphal” texts? Just curious.
But those are trivia. The mic drops with that last paragraph. Boom.
I haven’t investigated them, whether the “true” apocrypha (still included in some editions of the sacred texts) or just pseudoepiphigra (presumed to be written by apostles, disciples, family members, or just people involved in the way, and seldom included, if ever, in the collections). [ETA: found a link to a site with a wealth of links to the texts, whether ancient or modern. http://www.pseudepigrapha.com/ is the link. Also, Wikipedia has a good run-down on Apocrypha, Pseudoepiphigra, Deuterocanonical, and Antilegonomena, all terms used for books/writings that had varying degrees of acceptance.]
It’s an interesting topic to explore.
One of my high school buddies was honestly shocked when I told him that the Bible in his hands literally didn’t arrive in Shakespearian English bound in calfskin but was originally collections of sheepskin scrolls and papyri. Even verse marks and chapter breaks weren’t made until the early to mid 2nd millennium. The older texts in Greek were written not just in all caps with no spaces or syntax marks (periods, commas), but in some cases the lines in the documents were written in alternating directions, left to right, right to left, left to right, right to left…
And if you’re in to Alt-History, I think you’d really like Steven Barnes’ series on the world where Western Europe didn’t rise, but instead Egypt and black Africa did, and they conquered the Western Continents. Some of it is a bit too on the nose–the black Africans set up a system of slavery in the New World much like the Europeans did–but there are significant and interesting differences in the implementation of civilization because of the tremendous differences in culture and philosophy in the conquering lands (which, of course, were never split up by European colonizers).
ETA: Lion’s Blood, Zulu Heart. Nice work. He also contributed to The Legacy of Heorot, one of the few sci-fi books I can’t read because it is just too gruesome in spots. And yet the book’s theme is leaps out at you. Street Lethal was interesting. And I just discovered he novelized “Far Beyond the Stars,” my absolutely favorite episode of DS9, an episode that only makes sense if you watch the entire series first.
Hope always breaks my heart. And hope always restores my soul.
ooh! Thanks for the recommendation!