Have you noticed that I begin these newsletters each time with the same greeting: Hello friends? There’s a reason for that (beyond the fact that I sometimes want to say “hey fam” but it sounds too appropriative coming from me).
As we bring this Lenten Journey to a close here on Maundy Thursday and meditate one more time on the spiritual-political call to put whiteness to death, my deeper reasons will hopefully become clear.
If you missed the first few posts in this series here they are:
Facing Death to Enter Life: When Bones Rise & Whiteness is Called to Die
Facing the Real: History’s Presence & the Spirituality of Liberation
Yours Truly, the KKK: A Story of Whiteness, the Self, Society, and Salvation
As always I’m so grateful you’re here and I would love to hear from you in the comments.
Peace, joy, and justice,
Nathan
“What interests me is not the plot of the oppressor and the oppressed that the halting of history might stop or reverse…Because she stands with her lacerated back to the ‘brutal lash',’ the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation’s confrontational stance is best described as refusal rather than merely oppositional. For she does not face the Owner and seek his destruction or his recognition or to take his place. For her, the scene, its context, and its sole player, as Fanon explained, must come to an end.”
— Denise Ferrera de Silva, Unpayable Debt
“On one hand, [my] teaching experience exposes the power of the inherited narratives we live by. They help people make sense of the world, from their ethical reasoning to their response to present day challenges. On the other hand, telling more truthful stories must be accompanied with radical belonging that breaks the captivity of white identity. This radical belonging must be capable of cultivating a genuine, non-sentimental, love with and for others, leading to compassionate solidarity.”
— Drew G. I. Hart, “Myth, Belonging, and Comparative Ethics” in Reparations and the Theological Disciplines
In likely the same year Jesus was born, just four miles away from Nazareth in the city of Sephoris, a Jewish rebel named Judas1 organized an armed revolt against Israel’s Roman colonizers. Herod the Great had passed and in that political vacuum the Hebrew people once again rose up for liberation.
The Jewish historian and Roman sympathizer Josephus described the tragic aftermath:
“Varus at once sent a detachment of his army into the region of Galilee adjoining Ptolemais, under the command of his friend Gaius; the latter routed all who opposed him, captured and burnt the city of Sephoris and reduced its inhabitants to slavery.” 2
Jesus, a poor Palestinian Jew living under Roman occupation, grew up knowing what it was like for a colonizer to make slaves of your people—and longing for something better.
It is Passover—Thursday night. In the morning Jesus will be arrested. The fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of John opens an extended window into the specific intentions Jesus soaked these final moments in for his disciples. His final chance to convey the center of his way of life.
At the start of dinner he washes the feet of all twelve, a shocking social transgression of a free man performing the function of a slave. He tells the disciples that if he, whom they call Rabbi and Lord would wash their feet, then surely they should do likewise for one another. Surely, Jesus enjoins, you can be as tender with care and as disregarding of these social hierarchies as me.
Jesus graciously speaks with Judas, telling him to go and do what he needs to do. He levels with Peter and encourages the disciples, assuring them that they have a place with God, that they have encountered the Father through him, and that his Spirit will always be with them.
It is an anxious time. The forces of violence have been gathering against Jesus in the build up to their arrival in Jerusalem. Jesus does everything he can to reassure his closest companions that they are loved, that they belong, and that from the foundation of this beloved belonging they can be faithful to continue following what Jesus has taught them, that there is a way of life they have apprenticed to which can and must continue even when Jesus is no longer physically present.
Then Jesus’s final teaching to his disciples reaches its climax.
He comes back to the ground of all he sought to teach them by word and action. “This is my commandment.” Here is the distillation of the law and the prophets as I have sought to translate them for you. “That you love one another as I have loved you.”
What does that love look like? Jesus will show them its apotheosis in the coming days, but he tells them right now. “No one has greater love than this, than to lay one’s life down for one’s friends.”3
Why? What is it about friendship love that is so radical? Isn’t laying down our lives for the people we already love the easy part? Why is love’s superlative not applied to enemies?
The answer comes in the very next sentence. Jesus drives home his meaning.
“I do not call you slaves any longer, because the slave does not know what the master is doing, but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.”
This friendship-love Jesus invites his disciples to is far more than a minor shift in their interpersonal relationships. Jesus has in mind the very abolition of slavery, and with it, as the Kingdom of God is born through the life of his followers, the abolition of the whole system of dominating violence on which the Kingdom of Rome was built. Imperialistic oppression will be supplanted by beloved community.
This man who grew up seeing his neighbors reduced to slavery goes to great efforts in his final teaching to his disciples to remind them what his project is all about: forming people who form a community that practices an ethic of friendship-love which is an abolitionist alternative to the ethics of Rome’s slave-based political economy.
Rome built its legal framework and social systems around the cornerstone of the paternalistic master and the household he ruled. At the heart of Roman law sat the famila whose life and legal existence began in the dominion of the patērfamilias. The patēr, Latin for ‘father,’ held absolute power over the domus, meaning ‘household.’ According to David Graeber and David Wengrow, domus is the root word for “not only ‘domestic’ and ‘domesticated’ but dominium, which was the technical term for the emperor’s sovereignty as well as a citizen’s power over private property.” Across from the body of the paterfamilias, toiling beneath the dominium of the father as an object of property, was the body of the famulus—literally the “house slave.”4 The power and supremacy of the male master becomes the starting assumption from which the rest of the politics, economy, culture, and all community dynamics flow.
The theologian Willie J. Jennings calls the Roman patērfamilias a “social system of rule formed around the body of the father-master as the fount from which flowed the life and logic of a social order.” The crux of the problem which will come to destroy relationships among humans, with the land, with other creatures, and ultimately with God, is at root a problem of power bound up in the concept of property and the exclusive right of the patērfamilias to possess property absolutely.
“The Roman Law conception of natural freedom is essentially based on the power of the individual (by implication, a male head of household) to dispose of his property as he sees fit. In Roman Law property isn’t even exactly a right, since rights are negotiated with others and involve mutual obligations; it’s simply power—the blunt reality that someone in possession of a thing can do anything he wants with it, except that which is limited ‘by force of law.’...It also implies that property is not a set of understandings between people over who gets to use or look after things, but rather a relation between a person and an object characterized by absolute power….The reason it is possible to imagine property as a relationship of domination between a person and a thing is because, in Roman Law, the power of the mater rendered the slave a thing (res, meaning an object), not a person with social rights or legal obligations to anyone else.”5
When Jesus says we are no longer inside of the master/father-to-slave relationship, but within a friend-to-friend relationship, he is aiming a burning arrow at the entire straw house of Roman society. What Jesus is enacting here is sweeping and all-encompassing. We can’t trace every aspect of it, so in this table I’m attempting the beginning of a summary on the shift from one mode of social life toward a radical alternative.
From the moment they walked into the upper room, Jesus has been rejecting the hierarchies of dominion and subservience expected from their society, scrubbing dirt off the feet of his friends as though it were the most sacred rite of a high priest. Nothing private has been withheld. The boundaries have been dissolved. No mystery remains locked behind a paywall. Everything Jesus received from his intimate communion with the Father he shared with his friends. What was once the private domain of the Father has been made into a common inheritance for all by Jesus — he has moved the mysteries of God from private property into the creative commons.
Friends, Jesus announces that you are neither master nor slave. Such roles make no sense anymore. The plantation is abolished. The commons have been restored. Creation can dance and sing as one.
And yet the power of men to “dispose of his property as he sees fit” remains with us. In battered homes. In sexually abusive workplaces. In Black and Brown neighborhoods alternatingly discarded and gentrified. In churches where the pastor’s word is law. In whole nations exploited and despoiled for their “natural resources.” It is a relational catastrophe we have yet to escape.
It was this horrific imagination inherited from the patērfamilias of Rome that European Christians ingested, metabolizing it through the colonial era and the African slave trade into what Jennings called the “racial patērfamilias.” Or what we have been calling here: whiteness. Even after the emancipation of slaves and ostensible abolition of slavery, the plantation ethics of dominium continued as the relational norm. It was that racialized norm that led freed slaves to be re-enslaved through convict leasing in my hometown, and for ninety-five of their bodies to be “disposed of [as] property” into the unmarked dirt until they were dug up a century later by a backhoe (see first post in series).
Whiteness is the assumption of dominion (i.e., sovereignty) and the conviction that dominion—whether mine or someone else’s—is the only way the world could ever be run. It is also a confused form of belonging: of drawing a thin circle around those with similar pigment to determine whom one is equal to, responsible for, protective of and capable of loving. Whiteness is a collapsed and inverted solidarity which links arms only with those it (mis)perceives to be its own kind.
Abolition friendship rooted in agapē love is the refusal to play that game at all.6 Refusal, as Denise Ferrera de Silva names in the first epithet for this essay, brings the whole problematic dynamic of oppressed and oppressors “to an end.”
As we sought to face the real on this journey toward the cross, my hope was that what we found there were “more truthful stories.” Hearing and believing those stories reorients our whole sense of the world and who we are in it. They require a conversion from a way of death toward a way of life. They call us to a spirituality of fidelity to the truth—and that requires radical shifts in our lives, beginning with practical acts of solidarity with the oppressed in their struggle for life and liberation. We grappled with the tide of whiteness in which our identities and societies have been caught, the political and economic forces that lift some up while drowning others. Which brought us to a choice. And we were reminded that, along this journey there is grace and there is the joy that other ways of abundant life have been tried and remain available.
James Baldwin said once that “as long as you think you’re white, there’s no hope for you.” With Jesus at the last supper, I think he would agree that as long as you think the only options are to be a master or a slave, there’s no hope for you either.7
In order to break free of the bondage whiteness holds on our moral imaginations, as Drew Hart beautifully describes, we must find our way into a “radical belonging that breaks the captivity of white identity” and graciously makes us “capable of cultivating a genuine, non-sentimental, love with and for others, leading to compassionate solidarity.”
This, I believe, is what Jesus offered when he said you are slaves no more. But neither are you masters. We are friends. Love each other.8
When we remember Jesus’ teaching to love one another as he loved us, when we remember his broken body and shed blood, and when we recall his crucified body through the light of the crucified peoples of our own time, we are drawn into a communion that reforms our identity, relocates our belonging, and redirects our solidarity.
This, then, may ultimately be how whiteness is put to death: when we lay down our lives for our friends.
If you would like to continue these meditations through the next couple of days, here are a few essays from previous holy weeks.
Friday Reading
Saturday Reading
Not the disciple, just a common name.
Jesus & Empire, John Dominic Crossan
Note that John’s gospel uses the Greek word agapē here in the context of describing friendship-love. This is an important key to overturning the slave-master context. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics holds friendship in high regard, but locates friendship not in the context of agapē but philia love. Aristotle names three types of friends: friendships of pleasure, of utility, and of virtue (the latter ostensibly being the highest form of friendship). Aristotelian virtue ethics, crucially for the discussion here, was a system of cultivating virtues as a mode of self-mastery which in turn establishes the virtuous person as one with the right to wield mastery over others. Virtue in this system is thus part-and-parcel of building the plantation relational-ethical matrix. Friendship in Aristotle, then, must be read as occurring between those who exist within the boundaries of the virtuous—friendship would by definition never be extended to slaves. Jesus’ practical theology of friendship can be read, I’m suggesting (though, admittedly, well beyond my claim to expertise), as a liberatory counter-ethic to Aristotelian friendship.
Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything. 510
Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything. 508-509.
With the phrase “abolition friendship” some readers may have already picked up that I’m playing with and expanding on W.E.B du Bois’s notion of “abolition democracy.”
See: Nietzsche
I want to be clear: this statement on friendship is not “go be nice and have Black friends.” Hopefully that’s not a possible takeaway if you’ve been reading this series. This sort of friendship on the interpersonal level could only be possible through enormous reparational restitution and an act of God. Rather, I’m primarily interested in abolition friendship as a sociopolitical paradigm that begins in our intimate relationships and spread like a fractal (or like yeast in dough or a mustard seed through a garden) across the whole of human social life.