The Myth of Reconciliation?

#BLACKLIVESMATTER is being touted as our uniquely contemporary civil rights movement. Yet it bears striking resemblance to the black power movement of decades past.

Who can represent #BlackLivesMatter, be involved, or be its leaders? It’s clear that black people can. Can others? And what sorts of black folks? Ben Carson? Cornel West? Two of the three co-founders are queer black women. And what about the role of the faith community, of clergy? The movement’s incredible racial justice work notwithstanding, it puts on display the identity politics that continue to complicate the body politic in contemporary American life.

Jennifer Harvey’s Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation (Eerdmans) is one of the most significant recent books addressing identity and politics, focusing on the intersections of race, anti-racism, and religion. In its pages, Harvey, an American Baptist minister and associate professor of religion at Drake University, deconstructs reconciliation as a paradigm and offers a constructive practical vision of reparations. Harvey’s work in trying to make sense of her own embodied white identity—through her studies at Union Theological Seminary and service in a host of ministry settings addressing racial justice—provides background that allows her to explore multiple racial justice issues, making her book relevant for an intercultural audience.

Harvey’s thesis is clear: Reconciliation as a paradigm has failed to address racial injustice in the U.S., and the church needs to shift to a reparations paradigm to better address our racial situation. In a reconciliation paradigm, racial separation denotes racism, making diversity and togetherness the primary criteria for determining racial righteousness in the church. Issues related to structural justice are significant within visions of reconciliation, but they take a back seat to the ultimate concern of inclusion.

Harvey often asks students: What would be the difference in their responses to seeing a group of African-American students walking across campus, carrying signs that stated “Black is Beautiful” versus white students carrying signs that stated “White is Beautiful”? Almost universally Harvey’s students have a positive and supportive response for African-American students, interpreting this as a demonstration of community pride. But the students respond with disapproval of such an activity among white students, associating it with white supremacy or the KKK. This exercise exposes the incoherence of our understanding of reconciliation-as-diversity. As Harvey explains, our racial identities are not parallel, and so inclusion cannot be the main focus in addressing structural injustices.

Harvey credits Christian Community Development Association founder John Perkins for having one of the more consistent visions of reconciliation. Within CCDA’s three Rs, reconciliation is only possible to the extent that relocation and redistribution of wealth are realized. CCDA is an exception, and even within these prophetic evangelical circles, lament about racial division dominates discourse about race work. Harvey invites us to put a moratorium on talk about reconciliation that assumes that to reach its vision of togetherness all races have the same ethical responsibility in cultivating trust. A reconciliation paradigm doesn’t clearly challenge us to emphasize that we may all need to do racial justice work, but we do it differently, based on particular histories and material conditions.

For white folks this means that there’s no way to address their racial identity apart from addressing white supremacy. What is so dangerous about white supremacy is that it can be rendered invisible when white people are silent about or trivialize whiteness. Harvey defines whiteness as the “particular problem of white people’s unique relationship as perpetrators and beneficiaries to supremacist racial structures. ... [It] is also larger and more powerful than the individual white person, having taken on a life of its own.” A reparations paradigm not only entails the naming of whiteness but also demands white moral agency through repair, reimbursement, and repentance for racial injustice.

Harvey situates her reparations paradigm in the black power movement of the late 1960s and ’70s, contending that a return to this historical period is the key to unlocking a more racially just future. The movement, radically embraced by much of the black church at the time, said “no” to integration and visions of diversity. The problem of the “color line” in America was power, not segregation and separateness. Specifically, the “Black Manifesto” prepared by civil rights leader James Forman and adopted by the National Black Economic Development Conference in 1969 confronted white power and white supremacy by demanding financial reparations from white churches and synagogues for black enslavement and oppression—leading to its overwhelming rejection by white Christians.

HARVEY’S CRITIQUE of reconciliation focuses on the politico-economic structural failures of whiteness, which she believes a black power reparation paradigm addresses. She leaves the aesthetic-structural dimension of whiteness virtually unaddressed, a dimension that reconciliation paradigms have sought to unmask, even if unsuccessfully (as Harvey illustrates throughout the book). The expansive and elusive power of whiteness is found in the intersections of these different structural dimensions. Harvey’s book is confident in black power and reparations as paradigm-shifters for future racial righteousness, but this may be a shortcoming because of their potential of actually reinforcing whiteness.

Harvey gives the reparations paradigm contemporary practical relevance. She contends that it has broad application beyond black-white racial issues—that it is adaptable to diverse settings of racial injustice. Harvey applies the paradigm to several issues, including environmental racism and land-rights struggles among Native Americans, immigration, and mass incarceration. Racial groups can do justice work on systems and environments immediately, right where they are, without having to wait for others to show up. Careful to note that she is not advocating a separationist model, Harvey emphasizes that it is essential that all people—wherever they are—engage in anti-racism work. This challenges a common excuse made by white folks when they are silent or uninvolved on racial justice matters, claiming it is because persons of color are not leading or present.

It is rare to find anti-racism discourses by white folks that engage history and structures, and that listen with respect to black voices that are usually seen as “radical” within most white spaces. Harvey presents a compelling case that “reparations work” has the capacity to overcome the impasses and shallowness that “reconciliation work” has created, and make significant material and structural changes that produce deeply meaningful and just interracial relationships along the journey. Dear White Christians addresses whiteness head-on and tells the too-often-ignored story of black power. Though not unique in its critique, it might be one of the clearest and most succinct diagnoses of the inadequacies of the popular reconciliation paradigm.

Additional Reading
... on racial identity, religion, and culture

The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, by Willie James Jennings (Yale University Press)

Race: A Theological Account, by J. Kameron Carter (Oxford University Press)

Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being, by M. Shawn Copeland (Fortress Press)

We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity, by Tommie Shelby (Belknap Press)

Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism, by Victor Anderson (Continuum)

Creative Exchange: A Constructive Theology of African American Religious Experience, by Victor Anderson (Fortress Press)