I hate to break promises! Well, perhaps, I’m not breaking my promise. I’m just not able to fulfill it to the degree I had hoped. In the previous post “Race, Gender, and Identity…Oh My,” I promised to reflect next on Willie Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Eerdmans, 2020). I re-read the book this morning—It’s only 115 pages long—and I came away a second time with that I-don’t-get-it feeling. In part, it’s that perplexity I want to explore in this essay.
At present, Jennings is an associate professor of theology and Africana studies at Yale University. He also taught at Duke University Divinity School and served as an associate dean while at Duke. His latest book focuses on theological education at seminaries and divinity schools. As someone who has written several books and hundreds of essays, I understand an author’s and a publisher’s desire to select a title that is both descriptive and provocative. Authors want to be read and publishers want to make money. “After Whiteness” is provocative.
Jennings lets us know in the Preface that “whiteness” is not completely synonymous with being white. For Jennings, whiteness is an ideal image of a fully developed human being constructed by Europeans over centuries. This ideal is embodied in the individual white male who has mastered himself and others (especially white females and all non-white people) through scientific reason and technology. He is self-sufficient, analytical, heterosexual, and individualistic, and he objectivizes everything and everyone. According to Jennings, this ideal human being serves as a mold into which Western education—specifically Western theological education—attempts to squeeze everyone. Switching metaphors, the theological school is Procrustean bed in which those who do not naturally fit—women and people of color—are trimmed and shaped according to the ideal pattern. Note the violence in the language. Those for whom whiteness is simply the truth view this educational process as civilizing, uplifting, and empowering.
When I say of Jennings’s book “I don’t get it,” I do not mean that I disagree with him. In fact, I’ve long resisted the ideal he describes as “whiteness,” and I think theological education is long overdue for a radical reformation. I hope to voice my critique of the state of theological education in future essays. What I mean by “I don’t get it” is that Jennings presents his critique and offers his vision as a series of extended metaphors and vignettes. They convey a mood and articulate feelings, but I don’t see a clear vision of the new community of belonging of which Jennings dreams. The book’s subtitle indicates that Jennings’s alternative to whiteness is belonging. From what I read in the book, this community of belonging will be founded on a decision for mutual acceptance of everyone’s identity, their experience, and their stories. What I don’t get is how this book, with its metaphors and stories, offers a critique of “whiteness” (as defined by Jennings) that meets whiteness on its own turf and demonstrates its theological and ethical weaknesses. Perhaps my assessment on this score says as much about me as it does about Jennings. After all, to meet whiteness on its own turf and use its own weapons against it would be to grant it a kind of legitimacy.
I wondered briefly why Jennings used the term “whiteness” in his title only to explain in the Preface that he did not mean “white people.” It’s an eye-catching title, to be sure, and publishers love that sort of thing. But is there more to it? To use the term “whiteness” to describe the Western rational and scientific approach to education, whatever the term’s descriptive truth, seems to me akin to Ibram Kendi’s use of the terms “racism” and “racist” to designate those who decline to support his political policies. That is to say, it tars those who support traditional Western theological education with a term loaded with negative moral implications. Those who support traditional Western theological education, consciously or unconsciously, support whiteness. And surely no one who supports whiteness, with its oblique connection to white supremacy and white privilege, can be a good person.
What I longed to hear but did not was a critique of “whiteness” from a deeply Christian perspective, a stance of profound humility, repentance, faith, hope, and love rooted in the crucified and risen Jesus, empowered by the life-giving Holy Spirit, and directed to the God who is and shall be all in all. I did not see a vision of unity vivid enough, power enough, or profound enough to create Jennings’s desired community of belonging…a vision in which “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28). For sure, the unity spoken of by Paul is not that of universal conformity to the ideal of the white male, self-sufficient, isolated, and masterful. Nor is it a unity created by everyone agreeing to accept everyone’s natural and self-chosen identity. It is the unity forged between Jesus Christ and everyone who by giving themselves to Christ are given a new identity as images of Christ who is the Image of God.
ifaqtheology 
A Review of a Non-Review Review
It seems to me that Jennings’s use of metaphors, vignettes, poetry and other literary forms is precisely because there is no “clear vision” of the faith community available to us in the way you seek. Acknowledging the fragmented nature of our knowing but at the same time the God who “works with these fragments, moving in the spaces between them to form communion with us” is Jennings’s point (34). Attaining belonging therefore is aspiration for this God created communion, rather than the compositions determined by whiteness.
The term whiteness has been in use in “whiteness studies” and other fields for many years now. Theologians who are familiar with James Cone were introduced to it in his early books, and it has been deployed in Cheryl Harris’s groundbreaking essay at the Harvard Law Review (1993) called “Whiteness as Property.” With these facts noted, I find myself in agreement with you that your “assessment says more about you” than Willie Jennings and his efforts to address these intractable problems.
Your hasty turn to Ibram Kendi, whose agenda is quite different from Jennings’s program, is the real tell, however. Whether unconscious or deliberate, at this point the reader is introduced to your decision to place Jennings’s important theological work in a peculiar kind of company, tarring it and poisoning the well for your readers. You then turn to your final summation aimed at explaining what Ron Highfield “longed to hear,” rather than what Willie Jennings addresses in the book! Pining for clarity, for more inciteful discussions of Christianity, for more vivid perspective into humility, repentance, faith, hope and love, you model for readers of your blog the precise problem with ‘white self-sufficient masculinity’ and its aspirations to create the very compositions “After Whiteness” is designed to confront: its resolute blindness, its power valences, and most of all its dissembling appropriation of the Gospel of Christ to maintain the status quo.
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I don’t see any commensurability between the position from which you criticize my position and my position. And that seems to be your point. Your critical reply seems to do no more than out another human being as an unconscious proponent of “white self-sufficient masculinity”? Why even reply? Why would Jennings take the trouble to write a book published by Eerdmans? But if Jennings and you actually care about being understood or finding common ground, labeling those whom you want to reach with such names does not seem to fit the aim. But if you think there is room for mutual understanding, the idea of truth, reason, facts, common humanity, justice, and normative texts seem necessary. Yet, that contention is precisely what you criticize me for “pining” for.
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A Review of a Non-Review Review
It seems to me that Jennings’s use of metaphors, vignettes, poetry and other literary forms is precisely because there is no “clear vision” of the faith community available to us in the way you seek. Acknowledging the fragmented nature of our knowing but at the same time the God who “works with these fragments, moving in the spaces between them to form communion with us” is Jennings’s point (34). Attaining belonging therefore is aspiration for this God created communion, rather than the compositions determined by whiteness.
The term whiteness has been in use in “whiteness studies” and other fields for many years now. Theologians who are familiar with James Cone were introduced to it in his early books, and it has been deployed in Cheryl Harris’s groundbreaking essay at the Harvard Law Review (1993) called “Whiteness as Property.” With these facts noted, I find myself in agreement with you that your “assessment says more about you” than Willie Jennings and his efforts to address these intractable problems.
Your hasty turn to Ibram Kendi, whose agenda is quite different from Jennings’s program, is the real tell, however. Whether unconscious or deliberate, at this point the reader is introduced to your decision to place Jennings’s important theological work in a peculiar kind of company, tarring it and poisoning the well for your readers. You then turn to your final summation aimed at explaining what Ron Highfield “longed to hear,” rather than what Willie Jennings actually addresses in the book! Pining for clarity, for more insightful discussions of Christianity, for more vivid perspective into humility, repentance, faith, hope and love, you model for readers of your blog the precise problem with ‘white self-sufficient masculinity’ and its aspirations to create the very compositions After Whiteness is designed to confront: its resolute blindness, its power valences, and most of all its dissembling appropriation of the Gospel of Christ to maintain the status quo.
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Why of course you don’t see it. As you noted, your first review and subsequent response say more about you than Jennings (or even my critical comments). You simply don’t get it. You are unable to see the consonance between my criticisms of your patronizing “Non-Review Review” and what Jennings is attempting because you presume to know what the author intends. The mere decision to locate Jennings in a category with Ibram Kendi, an agnostic historian, evidences my point. What do Jennings and Kendi have in common? Why locate Jennings in the category of liberal identity politics? Why would you assume Jennings’s book does not belong at Eerdmans?
What I hear is a theologian who has no interest in the hermeneutic spadework necessary to understand these matters, a theologian who doesn’t wrestle with the fragments, and based on your blog, a theologian who doesn’t care about such things. Why would you? Jennings, on the other hand, uses the term to evoke what he identifies as a theological ecology. “White self-sufficient masculinity,” like “whiteness,” is designed to provoke discourse around colonization and decolonization, not to prevent it. Even when reading the book in a cursory fashion, the reader is presented with the comprehensive extension of the term made accessible through examples of people of color, women, and other marginalized people who also perform the same white masculinity. He is not demonizing Western theological education; he is identifying its exclusionary logic. But somehow you are personally offended, and you fail to see the danger of the political world he is identifying. Somehow Jennings’s usage prohibits conversation, and lo and behold, you have become its moral victim, resisting the difficult hermeneutic groundwork necessary for our common growth. The very opposite of the author’s intent. How else, other than “resolute blindness,” can one describe such dissembling as you clever priests crave insight to satisfy the intellectual vision you have already cast for yourselves?
Praise God, however, for the Spirit of Christ “works with these fragments, moving in the spaces between them to form communion with us [all].”
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Readers of my review will have to judge for themselves. I doubt that further defense of myself will make the outcome any different. I have one more thing for readers to judge: You speak of the “Spirit of Christ” working with the fragments. Indeed, Christ’s Spirit works with broken fragments–for that is all we are. I ask readers to read your critiques of my inner spirit (which you discern as “resolute blindness,” “clever priests,” “dissembling”) and then read Paul’s description of the Spirit of Christ…do they breathe the same spirit?
“Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, 2 then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. 3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, 4 not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.
5 In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
6 Who, being in very nature[a] God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
7 rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature[b] of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
8 And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.” (Phil 2:1-11)
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