Yours Truly, The KKK

A Story of Whiteness, the Self, Society, & Salvation (A Lenten Journey)

Hello friends,

The sun is shining through blue skies in Boston this Friday as I write this! The little bulbs that poke their pale blue flowers through each March just along the edge of our granite foundation in that little seam of a microclimate where the air and soil are warmed enough by the morning sun have found their way into the light. What a gift they are.

We’re back today to continue our Lenten Journey. The invitation we began with was to finding our way into a spiritual path and practice of “dying to whiteness that we may come alive in the new life, the new creation, the new humanity embodied in the solidaristic way of life practiced by Jesus.” The beginning point of that journey, I suggested in the second reflection, is what the liberation theologian Jon Sobrino called “honesty about the real” and living in fidelity to that reality. We’ve been attempting to ground this spiritual journey in the real world by exploring how whiteness operates in the history and present of a particular place: Fort Bend County, Texas — where I grew up.

We’re picking up the story this week with the way the formation of the self and society are intertwined, both in the construction of whiteness but also in the conversion we’re invited to in the following of Jesus.

Thanks for diving in with me.

“What the wounded captive body immediately does is to [draw attention to] whiteness as a referent of the Owner and the authority to deploy total violence.”

— Denise Ferrera de Silva, Unpayable Debt

“Racism is, thus, not only a problem for blacks who are obliged to suffer it. Nor is it a problem only for those sections of the white working class and those organizations infected by its stain. Nor can it be overcome, as a general virus in the social body, by a heavy dose of liberal inoculation…. [Capital] contains and disables representative class institutions, by neutralizing them—confining them to strategies and struggles which are race-specific, which do not surmount its limits, its barriers.

— Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance”

On August 20, 1921, Father Nesvadba, the priest of St. Michael’s Catholic Parish in Needville, Texas, received a typed letter on heavily embossed letterhead. The Richmond members of the Knights of the Klu Klux Klan had some things to teach the Eastern Europeans papists who recently arrived in the village fifteen miles to their southwest.

Needville was founded by August Schendel twenty-six years after the end of Civil War. Needville was in the heart of Fort Bend County, right where Stephen F. Austin and his fellow 300 colonists originally set up camp in their effort to colonize Texas for Anglo-slaveholders, but being halfway between the Colorado and Brazos Rivers, it wasn’t prime plantation growing land and so had been left largely unsettled by newcomers until the end of the 19th century. On a lark, when Schendel applied to charter my hometown and register a postoffice, he floated the name “Needmore” given the constant lack of goods and services. Unfortunately for Schendel, somebody else sharing his dark sense of humor had beat him to it. Texas already had a Needmore, so the wise folks at the state office sent back the name “Needville” and it stuck.

As landless peasants fled oppression, land closures, and political unrest in the Austrian Empire during the late 19th and early 20th century, Texas became the destination for the greater potion of Czech immigration into the United States (much as it had been a key destination for leftist Germans fleeing the failed revolution of 1848 before them).¹ The young village of Needville became home to many of these Czech peasant immigrants. When my family moved onto five acres ten miles outside of town when I was about fifteen months old, their great-grandchildren became my babysitters, classmates, neighbors and teachers.

Fr. Nesvadba had been doing what only seemed natural to him: holding catechism classes for his Czech parishioners in their native language.² But “native” was not what the ruling whites wanted for the society they were building. Just as they had cleansed these lands of the people indigenous to them, so they also intended to cleanse anyone they viewed as possessing the capacity to become white from trace of ancestral indigeneity. This stripping down of the self into conformity was what it meant to become an American—which was synonymous, in their eyes, with becoming white.

So the KKK wrote a letter to Fr. Nesvadba and his parishioners, letting them know in no uncertain terms what was expected of them.

Xenophobia and patriotism are welded together in the imagination of these warriors for whiteness.

“The aim of every true American citizen is the full Americanization of every individual within the borders of the country. Any agency that tends to build or strengthen bonds to any other country is un-American, and we condemn it.”

There is a salvific structure to this statement. One must die to an old self that was formed by another society (the kingdoms of this world, if you will) in order to come alive to the new self whose location and allegiance is America (the kingdom of heaven, God’s chosen race). The reward for this conversion is acceptance into the Body of the Elect: the opportunity to become “a citizen of the United States.”

Lurking behind the typeface and filigreed letterhead is both threat and reward. The reward is American citizenship and the globally promoted fruits of whiteness in America: land, prosperity, and freedom. The threat is more implicit. No doubt the reputation of the KKK preceded them. The Klan burst on the Texas scene a year earlier at a parade for veterans of the Confederate Army in October 1920. They quickly surged to power, effectively controlling the Texas state legislature, by recruiting millions around their nativist-fueled ideology centered on “the supremacy of a racialized Anglo-Saxon American identity, defined in terms of contemporary pseudo-scientific racial ideology as white, Protestant, native-born, and anti-radical.”³ Texas had the sixth most recorded lynchings of any state. Four of those lynchings happened in the county I grew up in.⁴ While the KKK wrote stern letters to the Czech Catholics of Needville, they were demonstrating to the non-white residents of the county that, though whites may no longer be allowed to own Black people, whiteness still means possessing, as Denise Ferrera de Silva put it, “the authority to deploy total violence.”

Yours truly, the KKK. 

Here’s where we tend to get stuck. We conflate becoming “white” with becoming “racist.” When we get those two concepts mixed up, we lose track of the kind of transformations that are truly being asked of us by the Jesus who was nailed to a cross as a revolutionary criminal by Roman soldiers.

What was happening to those Czech immigrants in Needville wasn’t simply a matter of being coerced and bribed into certain prejudiced beliefs and behaviors. The keyword “citizen” in that letter is, again, the giveaway. Whiteness is not only a matter of individuals who think and act in certain bigoted ways. Which is why Stuart Hall says in the quote at the top of this essay that the structural racism of whiteness cannot be “overcome, as a general virus in the social body, by a heavy dose of liberal inoculation.” The transformation we are invited to—this death and resurrection we have the opportunity to participate in—cannot be achieved simply by reading the right books and getting educated to see the world in the “right” ways.

Becoming white is to be immersed into a great surging tide and swimming with its flow. One may be tossed in the tide, stride into it, or wake up already there. Either way, whiteness is both the tide and the swimmers. Many it breaks against the rocks, carnage sucked from view by the undertow. From the greatest numbers life itself is extracted for the source of the tide’s ceaseless, crushing power. Others it allows to battle with the waves, nearly drowning but grateful to be carried forward. Some seem to become one with the surf as they coast toward their destinations. A few are lifted by the waves to ride above the roiling waters as kings.

The tide is the colonial racial capitalist political economy. Whiteness is vested by the political economy as a set of legal rights: political, civil, and economic.

How did this work for the Czech immigrants of Needville? We already saw how the plantation economy morphed into the convict leasing system and prison farms that were still growing cotton at the tips of hoes wielded by Black men during my childhood. But this was only the tip of the spear of a vast political architecture erected to ensure white supremacy.

If the new immigrants wished to acquire the “American citizenship” the KKK were offering, they would be doing so within a system designed exclusively for white power. At the end of the 1880s, white supremacists in Fort Bend County put a violent to the remarkable multi-racial coalition that had led local government for two decades after the Civil War. The Reconstruction hope of an egalitarian multi-racial democracy lasted in Fort Bend a full decade after Union troops were recalled north — one of the most remarkable stories to come out of the south of what other paths could have been taken (and a story we will look more closely at another day). When white supremacists murdered their way out of that arrangement, they preceded to establish in the county a whites-only primary system (barring Blacks, Mexicans, and Jews from voting) which ensured their racial supremacy for the next 65 years. It would not be overturned until local Black leaders Willie Melton and Arizona Fleming joined the Black Civil Rights suffrage movement through the case Terry v. Adams which, after multiple appeals and denials, finally reached the US Supreme Court in May of 1953 as the nation’s last major civil rights voting case. By then, my dad was already out of high school.

Does any of this continue to apply today? Haven’t we overcome all of this? Racial wealth inequality is the most obvious example that proves the answer is no. The continued disproportionate incarceration of Black and Brown people the other. But one more brief example seems to follow most closely from these stories. Just last year, the US Justice Department resolved a case against Fort Bend County whose courts were failing to provide interpreters to immigrants brought to trial with “limited English proficiency.”⁵

Where I come from, the political powers that be were continuing to maintain what the KKK wrote 100 years earlier to a priest in Needville, “English is the universal language of our country.” No English, no rights of whiteness (legal representation and a fair trial). With the rights of whiteness, the right to throw the violent force of the state against Black and Brown bodies and call it “justice” (via the courts, police, and prison system).

The tides of whiteness roll on.

I know this is probably the oddest Lent devotional you have ever read. We (white Christians) have not been trained to think about our spiritual lives or discipleship through the contexts of history, much less political-economy.

And yet the Jesus who overturned the money changers tables and drove them out of the temple was not simply rebuking the unjust behaviors of a few individuals. He was targeting an entire political economy that wove financiers and the wealthy to political leaders and religious elite (between whom there were no fine lines). He knew his God and he knew his people’s history. He knew the colonizing imperial political economy in which his people had been absorbed, how some were slaughtered by it while others—through threat and bribe—had chosen to align themselves to it. And he knew that his faith required him to overthrow that social order and build something new in which the first would become last and the last first, in which the poor would inherit the earth, the mourners would be comforted, and the hungry filled. Walking into Jerusalem as the bearer of this new order and flipping those tables were the last straws that got him killed.

Can we see our own world as clearly as Jesus did? Is this not what Lent is for? We are here to prepare for the communion of the resurrection and the life of the new creation by relinquishing all that binds us to the brokenness and violences of the world as it has been. This includes the ways this world build for whiteness lives (as a way of death) both within us as a false self and around us in social structures.

In weeks prior I invited us to face the reality of death thinly buried beneath the surface our lives are built on. I urged us to adopt a spirituality that lives with fidelity to this harsh reality so that we may pass through death to enter into life.

Friends, when you face reality you are offered a choice.

The reality is that we live in a world designed for white supremacy built on unimaginable violence.

The choice is whether or not we will swim with the currents of this evil tide, or whether we will struggle against it, build levies of resistance to it so that all that is good and beautiful will not be washed away, seek to drain it of its power until the waters flow toward life for all creation instead of only those fortunate few, and risk being drowned in the process. Is this not the baptism we accepted? To be plunged into that from which we may never rise for the sake of love with nothing but faith and hope to cling to?

Salvation is not individualistic. It is a collective project. The community of the saved is distinguished by their rejection of the social order of domination and, in its place, the spirit of love and grace through which they form a new order in which exclusionary rights, hierarchies, and property arrangements are abolished. Dying to whiteness is not something we can do alone. It requires communities learning not only to think and behave differently, but who organize themselves to tear down the structures of supremacy we have inherited and build the beloved community in its place.

Rejecting whiteness is rejecting rights and freedoms based on ownership and violence, choosing communalism, nonviolence, and solidarity, and following the implications of that choice wherever it leads. Repentance, dear ones, is a political project.

Does that sound too simplistic? Too radical? Too impractical?

Or have we forgotten that lent is a journey toward the cross?

---

---

One more quick thing before you go! Last week I had the opportunity to join my fellow co-op leaders for a lobby day at the Massachusetts State House with the Coalition for Worker Ownership & Power. It was a huge honor to be invited to speak at the press conference on behalf of this incredible group and the solidarity economy movement we stand for (what, for me, the political economy of the beloved community concretely looks like!). You can watch my brief speech in the video above.

We made two budget asks of legislators:

• Provide adequate funding ($650,000) for the Massachusetts Employee Ownership Center. A bill authorizing this crucial office was passed in 2022 but the funding mandated by that legislation was not included in the Governor’s proposed budget.

• Preserve the funding request in the current budget proposal for the Small Business Technical Assistance Program (SBTA) run by MGCC at $7.5 million.

If you live in MA, help us tell our legislatures that this funding should be in their priorities when they go to the Ways & Means committee. You can find who your legislators are and how to contact them here.

Curious why worker-ownership matters so much to building the beloved community and a just economy? Check this out.

1. The story of these Germans, many of whom were staunch opponents of slavery and held starkly divergent politics from the Anglo settlers further to the east who established the Texas Republic, is fascinating and was told in depth by the abolitionist journalist (and, later, father of landscape architecture) Fredrick Law Olmsted in his book A Journey Through Texas published on the eve of Civil War in 1857. I learned about this story from the excellent Olmsted biography Genius of Place. The towns these German immigrants built in the Texas Hill Country west of Austin and San Antonio continue to have a distinct culture and are among the most beautiful places to visit in the state — though, like all settlers, this tale most also be complicated by the violence against and expropriation from Native peoples.

2. I may be one of the only Protestants to ever sing in the choir loft at St. Michael’s Catholic Church. Dating one of the parish youth group’s brightest members had some weird perks lol.

3. Katherine Kuehler Walters, “THE 1920s TEXAS KU KLUX KLAN REVISITED: WHITE SUPREMACY AND STRUCTURAL POWER IN A RURAL COUNTY.” PhD Dissertation at Texas A&M University, 2018. For the political power of the KKK in 1920s Texas, see Robert Perkonson’s Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire.

4. https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/explore ; Bear in mind, as I pointed out in the first post in this Lenten series, that while the extrajudicial killings of the KKK and white supremacists through lynchings were a key component of their ability to rule through terror, the state was responsible for vastly larger proportion of violence and death against Black people during this period (over 30,000 across the south were killed by the convict leasing system alone).

5. US Justice Department Press Release, “Justice Department Announces Final Resolution of Language Access Civil Rights Matter in Fort Bend County, Texas.”