playing in the dark

just borrowed playing in the dark by Toni Morrison from Maia. fascinating enough that it will require a reread in the near future. she writes about how american literature has required the backdrop of the unfree and unenlightened other in black people to define and create the free and independent (white) individual.

thinking about how this same structure works in relation to the missionary enterprise and the pure chosen people of the church. how necessary it is to have the heathen and the damned to define the godly and saved and how racially linked they are in white american christianity. I remember growing up with stories of africfan missionaries and the imagination of them spreading the light of the gospel in the darkness of africa, racially loaded terms for sure and I definatly remember them being passed on exactly as such. remembering too the way that judgement was passed on people who made survival decisions outside of middle class morality that was so clearly equated with christianity. morality that allows for damage done to others at a distance where there is no face allowed to those who are hurt for your benefit, but not for more immediate, and less consequential, slights like shoplifting or fudging an application for assistance.

ave maria

Ave Maria, of the third world, full of grace, all you who know pain, know the anxieties and the subhuman condition of your people, the Lord is with you, with all who suffer, who hunger and thirst for justice, who know neither letters nor figures.

Blessed are you among women, the women of the roads and pueblos, of furrowed faces, of brawny muscles, of calloused hands of forlorn eyes, but with hope.

Blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Because without him, our life and the struggle for human dignity has no meaning.

Sancta Maria, all of you holy, a thousand time holy, by your lives,by the times you carry water, that you smudge your face at the hearth, trusting and hoping in God. He has made you Mother of Goid.

Pray for us sinners, for it is our fault, in one way or another by our egoism and envy, that you joined with the rest of the women and men of the poor, the third world, suffer misery, totalitarian governments,economic repression,wars and blood and hatred.

Now, so that we change, so that there will be a conversion of heart and of all men and women towards your son, our brother.

And at the hour of our death, so that the Lord have mercy on all who have offended him in our brothers and sisters, in the men and women of a world which is struggling desparately for life.

Amen

This prayer I swiped from Megan Mckenna who swiped it from the oral tradition of South America. I think maybe it shows the beginning of where a proper white theology might start in meeting god in the oppressed and being responsible and judged by god through the oppressed… or is it just more white exoticism? I believe that where i stand before god is where i stand before the oppressed, and I know that not one person oppressed by my privilege asked for the role of being the face of god to me.

chosenness and judgement

I think that part of the core of approaching theology from the perspective of privilege and taking seriously the claims of the various liberation and political theologies that god sides with the oppressed is to learn to look at the powers that be and our connection with them as a people who stand under judgement.

chosenness is a powerful biblical theme and has translated itself into the sickest expressions of genocide and history when it is taken on as a mantle by people already privileged and in power (think slavery, manifest destiny, inquisition). no doubt in the bibllical narratives the chosen are often the poor outcasts and slaves, but even there when they are not you get divine genocidal mania (the conquest narratives and the whole of the book of joshua). when white folks appropriate liberation theologies born in anticolonial struggles and say god is for the poor and so am i so i am with god we jump the necessary recognition that if god is for the poor and we benefit from their exploitation then god is necessarily against us and we stand under judgement.

the question becomes how to repent and defect completely from our privileged identities to side with god and the poor. there can be no questions of charity or somehow “pulling the rest of the world up to join us”  we are damned. in racial terms the question for me is how can a blue eyed devil be redeemed. of course oppression is not only racial and it is not only whiteness that is damned all social and identity categories that rest on oppression are damned if god stands with the oppressed.

priveleged folks talk about being allies in the struggle. i think that theologically this is inadequate there is no possibility of reaching out from a damned position (privilege) and joining the people of god. an ally gets to try to be a “good” straight, white, wealthy, western, christian…… but if god is for the oppressed those things don’t exist. can our demons be exorcised? or do we try to be allies and just do damage control?

god of the oppressed and accompaniment work

just finished rereading God of the Oppressed by James Cone. I wish that his chapter on violence and non-violence had been required reading in the trainings for the organization that I used to work for. I did international human rights accompaniment. that is when foreigners mostly white and western drop into low intensity war zones with the idea that their presence will deter violence. the problems with the theory are… well huge. I still dream that there is some possible good in an international presence if that “international” isn’t just another code word for white, but then folks like the ones I worked with would need to rethink their tactics (which mostly are being visible and flashing your white face and/or western passport about while telling oppressed people to be non-violent and morally pure in the face of their oppression) would have to be thrown out and reworked.

when asked about violence Cone’s answer was “who’s violence?” pointing out that the whole racial system (which is necessary for the tactics of the type of accompaniers I worked with) is the violence of white people. he contends that god stands with the oppressed against the oppressor and that the distinction between violence and nonviolence is irrelevant because everyone is violent.

full quiver

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-wicker/full-quiver-theology_b_111239.html

From the Huffington Post an article about a rather clear modern version of christian white supremacy (and overt patriarchy).

I was just doing a few minutes on google.

Al Mohler’s blog has articles in the same month about the problem of the falling birthrate in europe ( and how this spiritual problem will advantage countries like India with higher birth rates and more young peopleas the “population bomb will reshape the world map”) and the “nazi” eugenics of technology to ensure that an embryo does not inherit the breast cancer gene. Is he again worried that those who can afford this technology will be the white european elite? The second article imo raises some interesting and important questions about choosing what life is valuable, but I don’t trust the context at all (stem cell=baby, unimplanted embryo=baby, etc)