Racism and the "utility of belief"

In his memoir Decision Points, George W. Bush said the lowest point of his presidency occurred after Hurricane Katrina, when the rap singer Kanye West accused him during a live TV show of “not caring about black people.”

“I faced a lot of criticism as president,” the nation’s 43rd president, wrote. “But the suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all-time low.”

Later, in an interview on NBC, Bush said, “My record was strong, I felt, when it came to race relations and giving people a chance. And [West’s comment] was a disgusting moment.”

Christopher Driscoll, a visiting assistant professor in the department of religion studies, says Bush’s reaction to West illuminates one aspect of what he calls “white religion.”

“White religion,” Driscoll said in a recent interview, “has alienated us from our own ability to be human. Bush’s response to Kanye is a tragic example of this not because of his own moral failings but because of his tenacious determination to exonerate himself. This is whiteness in practice.

“Racism has been presented to white folks as a problem to be solved, [when it is really] a moral failure for white folks,” Driscoll said. “We can give Bush the benefit of the doubt, but why can’t he stomach the notion that he is biased toward white people and against black people? His comments [in Decision Points] suggest that there’s still a blindness there. He shifts the gaze away from racism and toward white concerns [about being depicted negatively].”

Driscoll, who is white, is the author of White Lies: Race and Uncertainty in the Twilight of American Religion, a book published in November by Routledge.

One goal of the book, he says, is “to free white people up and offer a kind of hospice care to get white people to come to terms with the reality that the self-centeredness, the solipsism seen in [Bush’s reaction to West’s accusation] and in 1,000 other ways, that this is not effective and that it prevents a good response to racism.”

Driscoll defines white religion as “an orientation, a disposition [whose] adherents cannot handle feelings of uncertainty. Limits and uncertainty must be guarded against at all costs. To do this, white religion relies on racism and theism. There’s something quintessentially American about white religion—its rugged individualism—which gets mapped out in racist and theistic terms.”

The adherents of white religion, Driscoll says, also have an inability to accept or come to terms with death. Whiteness and theism, he says, work together “in a host of ways to assume that death can be overcome or denied.” He recounts the fatal shooting in August 2014 of Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson.

“After Michael Brown was shot by Darren Wilson, he lay in the street for four hours. This was similar to what happened after a lynching when dead black bodies were left lying in the street; this was ideology- and identity-based formation: At the moment of the specter of black death, the black body was rendered synonymous with death. This idea was solidified by the emotional effect that the post-lynching scene had on blacks and whites both.

“Look at Michael Brown’s body lying on the street. It enables white folks to distance themselves from death and black people to be identified with it.”

His definition of white religion, Driscoll says, applies only to white Americans, and emerges within American Protestantism, as opposed to white Catholics or Jews.

As for theism, Driscoll says, “I situate theism not as a belief in God but as a belief in the utility of belief…I’m not interested in what white people believe but in what their beliefs are doing in the social world.”

Driscoll’s book is 316 pages long and is divided into two parts titled “Learning to die” and “Learning to die with others.” Each part has three chapters: “In the shadows of whiteness,” “The white man’s god complex” and “Battling white lies” in Part I, and “Accepting the hell of death,” “Rejecting the ‘gift of death’” and “Requiem for whiteness” in Part II. A “post-mortem” is titled “A warning.”

Driscoll says the arguments he presents will strike white people as “complicated and difficult.” He also acknowledges that many white Americans have come to “care genuinely” about matters of race in the 50 years since the heyday of the civil rights movement.

He is no stranger to controversy. Last spring, on his blog, “Shades of White,” he published “The Ten Cracka Commandments.” A website called medium.com published the piece with a different headline, “10 Commandments for White People.”

The inspiration for the blog post, Driscoll wrote, came from the Interplay Hip Hop Symposium, which was held last May at Lehigh and hosted by Kashi Johnson, associate professor of theatre. The hip hop artist Asheru gave the conference’s keynote address and Driscoll lectured about “white appropriation of rap.” Driscoll, Asheru and Johnson later discussed how white people fit into the #BlackLivesMatter movement and wrote the commandments.

The first commandment states, “#AllLivesMatter won’t matter until #BlackLivesMatter. This commandment is a litmus test and the greatest commandment.”

When asked why he chose to use “cracker,” a derogatory term for white people, to headline his blog post, Driscoll said, “There are so many life-and-death situations that many of us are trying to respond to and yet we get bogged down in language. I went with ‘cracker’ because it served as a kind of litmus test—if you can get past the jab, you might be on your way to becoming an ally.”

Another goal of White Lies, he said, is “to focus attention on black thought and its significance for religion studies.

“There are not many white people interested in studying black thought on religion,” he said. “Instead, we invite black people to join an existing conversation.”

Many influential black thinkers in the 20th century, Driscoll said, turned down that invitation and asked instead “for a radical revisiting of sociality.” These included the sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois, the novelists and authors Richard Wright and James Baldwin, theologian James Cone, and historian of religion Charles Long.

The page preceding the introduction to White Lies contains an excerpt from The Fire Next Time, a book of essays by Baldwin.

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time,” Baldwin writes. “Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

“It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life…But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them.”


Story by Kurt Pfitzer