Christ Divided

Antiblackness as Corporate Vice

Katie Walker Grimes

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781506427997
• eBook ISBN: 9781506438535
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

Bringing the wisdom of generations of black Catholics into conversation with contemporary scholarly accounts of racism, Christ Divided diagnoses "antiblackness supremacy" as a corporate vice that inhabits the body of Christ. Antiblackness supremacy operates as a unique form of oppression: it arises from the enduring association of blackness with slave status and plays a foundational role in processes of racialization and racial hierarchy in the United States. In fact, since non-black people often amass power at the expense of black people, much of "white supremacy" is more accurately described as "antiblackness supremacy."

In addition to introducing a new framework of racial analysis, this book proposes a new approach to virtue ethics. Anti-blackness supremacy inhabits not just the biased mind and the individual body, it also resides in the corporate body of the church. But due to the porosity of Christ's body, the church cannot reform itself from within. Antiblackness supremacy has twisted even baptism and the Eucharist in its image. In response, the theory of corporate virtue outlined here contemplates the conditions under which the church's corporately vicious and necessarily porous body can be made to "do the right thing."

II

Diagnosing the Corporate Habits of Antiblackness Supremacy

More than just a structure of injustice, the spatialized U.S.-American afterlife of slavery functions as a habitat for vice. Offering an interdisciplinary description of these vicious antiblack racial habits, I attempt to overturn regnant notions of virtue and vice. I will do so by redirecting the moral gaze first from blacks to whites and then from the words of white folks to their bodies. First, because merely inhabiting the racially segregated space of the United States puts all nonblack people, but especially whites, on a trajectory of antiblack habituation, nonblack people both acquire and exercise the vice of antiblackness supremacy through their bodies. This vice does not simply reside in “the souls of white folks” as traditional accounts of Thomistic virtue theory would suggest.^[1] Second, many scholars have debated the extent to which racial segregation has made black people behave badly; but they have generally failed to adequately describe the ways in which nonblack people have been corrupted by their voluntary spatial isolation from black people.^[2] This book aims to do just that.

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1. W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: The Givens Collection (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004). ↵
   
2. Jamie T. Phelps, “Communion Ecclesiology and Black Liberation Theology,” Theological Studies 61, no. 4 (2000): 673. ↵
   

4

Inverting Virtue

In recent decades, a good deal of scholarly attention has been accorded to assessing, justifying, and quantifying the alleged social pathologies of the black urban poor. On the right, Bell Curve proponents like Charles Murray depict black people as intellectually deficient and culturally backward and blame the welfare state for rewarding the bad habits of the black poor.^[1] On the left, scholars like William Julius Wilson, Douglas Massey, and Nancy Denton disagree with their conservative counterparts not on whether black people behave badly but why they do so. While conservatives argue that black people are poor because they possess bad habits, these liberals believe they possess bad habits because they are poor. In this way, Wilson blames the alleged sexual irresponsibility and criminality of impoverished black people on the out-migration of jobs and middle-class black people from their residential spaces, and Massey and Denton similarly attribute black pathologies to their spatial separation from whites.^[2]

But, instead of taking a side in the debate about “the culture of poverty,” this book initiates a new conversation about virtue and vice.^[3] According to traditional virtue theory, vices impede an individual’s capacity to pursue flourishing. But as moral philosopher Lisa Tessman demonstrates, vices of domination uniquely allow their bearers to amass power and privilege. In enacting white mastership, whites maldistribute flourishing and reinforce life-depriving color lines.^[4] As detailed in the preceding chapter, whites have unleashed repeated racial violence against black people in order to preserve the segregationist status quo. Stretching back to the colonial era, when whites received permission to inflict violence on unruly black slaves with impunity, to the unpunished killing of unarmed black youth by police officers and their vigilante imitators, white racial violence comprises a deeply rooted racial habit. This chapter therefore urges ethicists and political scientists to spend significantly less time pondering why the urban black poor allegedly exhibit such high levels of social pathologies and much more time diagnosing the habits of antiblackness supremacy as “vices of domination.” While even liberals like Massey and Denton perceive black people as singularly behaviorally impacted by their spatial isolation, this study uncovers white people as morally blighted by their strategic spatial isolation from and domination over black people.

This approach also shifts scholarly focus from white people’s words to their bodies. Because the vices of antiblackness supremacy largely emerge from white and other nonblack people’s embodied interaction with the spatial afterlife of slavery, we cannot adequately describe the moral life of racism if we do not accurately understand the role the body plays in racial habituation.

Like other forms of habituation, racial formation therefore occurs primarily through the ordinary place-based activities of daily life.^[5] Human beings form habits through their bodies’ daily and pre-rational encounter with the surrounding social and material environment.^[6] As previously detailed, whites move into the least black neighborhoods possible, regardless of affordability, and they flee neighborhoods containing more than a token number of black people, even when these black residents are affluent. Whites avoid even fleeting entrance into predominately black neighborhoods, perceiving them as sites of danger and predation.

Antiblackness supremacy also relies upon automated and embodied habits of perception: antiblack forms of racial classification survive only if human beings learn to perceive human bodies in accordance with white supremacy’s classificatory schema.^[7] These perceptual habits do not just reflect reality; they serve to shape it. In addition to hating members of other racial groups because they look different, individuals also perceive members of other racial groups as different to the extent that they first hate them: scientists have found that people who harbor higher levels of pro-white bias, even when implicit, tend to exaggerate the physical differences between black and white faces.^[8] In order to preserve the association between blackness and slave status, antiblackness strives to make black and white bodies appear more different than they are.

In addition to accruing through the body, the habits of antiblackness supremacy are expressed through them. Unsurprisingly, then, although whites frequently deny bias with their mouths, they consistently express aversion to blackness with their bodies. A turn-of-the-century study into the behavior and beliefs of whites illustrates the embodied character of white racial bias. While ninety-two percent of college students surveyed in the late 1990s expressed “no objection to” inviting a black friend over for dinner, nearly seventy percent of these students admitted they had not recently “invited a [single] black person for lunch or dinner.”^[9] Residential segregation and the racial habitus it generates make these statistics unsurprising: “only four of the college students interviewed reported having resided in neighborhoods with a significant black or minority presence.”^[10]

White people similarly feel race in their bodies even if they do not perceive it with their minds. When whites accidentally find themselves in black space, their bodies betray them. They may sweat, press down on the gas pedal, or clutch their purse.^[11] White women feel afraid when black men walk towards them on the sidewalk; white moto...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Defining White Supremacy and Antiblackness Supremacy
• Diagnosing the Corporate Habits of Antiblackness Supremacy
• Antiblackness Supremacy and the Sacraments of Initiation
• Re-habituating the Corporate Body of Christ
• Bibliography
• Index