“God’s revelation has nothing to do with white suburban ministers admonishing their congregation to be nice to black persons. It has nothing to do with voting for open occupancy or holding a memorial service for Martin Luther King, Jr. God’s revelation means a radical encounter with the structures of power which King fought against to his death. It is what happens in a black ghetto when the ghettoized decide to strike against their enemies. In a word, God’s revelation means liberation — nothing more, nothing less.
Only blacks can speak about God in relationship to their liberation. And those who wish to join us in this divine work must be willing to lose their white identity — indeed, destroy it.
There can be no forgiveness of sins without repentance, and no repentance without the gift of faith to struggle with and for the freedom of the oppressed. When whites undergo the true experience of conversion wherein they die to whiteness and are reborn anew in order to struggle against white oppression and for the liberation of the oppressed, there is a place for them in the black struggle of freedom. Here reconciliation becomes God’s gift of blackness through the oppressed of the land."
I'm sharing these words from James Cone today as I think about the Pentecost, observed towards the very beginning of these uprisings, commemorating apostles becoming overcome by the spirit and “baptized by fire.” Since then, property has been burning on American streets; symbols of empire and surveillance are going up in flames.
These images are impossible to look away from and many white Americans are having moments of reckoning: worldviews are coming apart, institutions are being laid bare, and it’s becoming harder to understanding the US as something other than a militarized police state built on forced Black labor to serve the slow killer of capital.
The call to fight against racist oppression is usually wrenching and painful if you are white, and often requires some pretty stark moments of having your understanding of yourself as a “good” person abut everything horrifying that being white in America comes along with. But the good news is that we have a choice: betraying white identity, which does not serve us, and reclaiming our humanity.
I won’t pretend that Dr. Cone’s words are easy - they shouldn’t be, and I have been wrestling with them for years. What I’ve come to understand boils down to this: Being perceived as white grants material benefits. Perceiving oneself as white grants spiritual disintegration.
As Toni Morrison once said, whiteness is a perversion and a profound neurosis. It’s against God. Racial capitalism relies on us believing we are white. Moreover, racial capitalism relies on us believing that we can simply be “allies,” rather than understanding the struggle for Black liberation to be inextricable from the struggle against capital. So our freedom depends on it, from a perspective both material and spiritual.
For the vast majority of us, the “wages of whiteness” are, and have always been, scraps: we’re told to believe we are special so we don’t demand anything better from life, and step on a lot of people in the process. We uphold a system that fucks us so that we can hold onto our belief in our superiority, and we do it for free.
Whiteness, and race generally, exist to maintain property relations and upward wealth distribution. We can transcend it. There is nothing essential or ontological about whiteness - to believe so is fatalism I will not entertain.
