A Personal Reflection

Can we speak of “liberating” white men without laughing or blushing? A personal reflection on “redemptive white male liberation theology.”

(This statement was first written to respond to Ruby Sales’ challenge to a group of white men, gathered for a meeting in Washington, D.C., to discuss white supremacy and what a “redemptive white male liberation theology” might look like.)

My desire for a “redemptive white male liberation theology” arises from the tension I feel living between two incongruous and problematic contexts: my white relatives and friends back at home in Fort Payne, Alabama, in the foothills of Appalachia, many of whom embrace the salvation promised by Donald Trump; and the peculiar subculture of liberal theological schools where most people (of all identities) embrace a salvation promised by what Nancy Fraser has called “progressive neoliberalism.” Both contexts problematize what it might mean to be a white male who desires redemption, though in painfully different ways. How can I be a white man who wants to embrace the radical anti-imperialist (dare I say anti-capitalist?) message of Jesus in either of these contexts? What both places have in common, ironically, is an insistence that I am “white,” a state of being I cannot defend. Isn’t the word “white” now historically and irreversibly married to the word “supremacy”?

In the so-called “progressive” circles where I now live, it is difficult to imagine any kind of social justice that does not reduce us all to the banal “equality” of consumerist spectators, with each of us sharing uniformly the crumbs of power that capitalism sees fit to leave to us. This is the new multicultural, diverse, interracial utopia. This is what now passes as justice. Resting contentedly in our culturally-defined identities, our “brands,” is just one more feature of this bland existence. We gaze into our streaming devices and social media platforms, pleasantly anesthetized while the world burns. 

What if? What if significant numbers of white men—the original colonizing creators of this system—no longer found meaning in it? What if, as the primary beneficiaries of this system, we publicly renounced it as oppressive, even to ourselves? If white men came to reject this existence, which they have craved and created, why would anyone else now wish to pursue it?

Reference

Fraser, Nancy. (2019). The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond. London: Verso.