White Innocence / White Supremacy

This article starts from the observation that current debates about race and racism are often couched in soteriological terms such as guilt and forgiveness, or confession and exoneration, and it argues that this overlap calls for theological analysis. Using the debate about Achille Mbembe’s disinvitation from the German art festival ‘Ruhrtriennale’ 2020 as a case that is typical of a specifically Western European discourse on race, it first sketches a brief genealogy of the modern/colonial history of religio-racialisation and its intersections with Christian tradition, in which racial categories were forged in soteriological discourses, and in which, in turn, soteriological categories were shaped by racist discourses. It proposes that in this process, Christianity, Whiteness and salvation were conflated in a way that has sponsored White supremacy, disguised as innocence. Engaging with performative race theory, the article concludes by making a constructive proposal for a performative theology of race that can account for the profound intersections between racism and soteriology, but also opens trajectories for transforming hegemonic discourses of race and their theological underpinnings.

The Fires Within Us and the Rivers We Form

This paper is a creative, poetic and experimental intervention in the form of collective reflections and writings on Anthropology, as the discipline we have experienced and/or been a part of within the University. It is also a reflection on the process of how the authors came together to form the River and Fire Collective. As a collective we have studied, worked and taught in more than 15 universities, and the aspects we point to here are fragments of our experiences and observations of the emotionality of the discipline. These are experiences from different forms of Anthropology from Northern Europe and settler-colonial contexts including Great Turtle Island Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand. In a metaphorical manner we invite the reader to our collective fireside dialogues and reflections, to be inspired, to disagree or agree and to continue a process of transformation. The paper sets out to provocatively question whether Anthropology is salvageable or whether one should ‘let it burn’ (Jobson, 2020). Exploring this question is done by way of discussing decolonial potentialities within the discipline(s), the classroom and exploring fire and water as a radical potential to think through the tensions between abolition and transformation. The reflections engage with concepts of decolonization, whiteness/white innocence, knowledge creation and -sharing, the anthropological self, ethics and accountability and language. The paper emphasizes Anthropology’s embeddedness in colonial narratives, structures and legacies and draws attention to how these colonial, able-bodied realities are being continuously reaffirmed through multiple educational practices and methodologies. It suggests that collectivity in writing, thinking and being is part of a healing process for those of us feeling our way through colonial continuities and prospective potentialities of Anthropology.

A hermeneutic of vulnerability: difficult empathy in response to moral injury within whiteness

The purpose of this essay is to expose reader vulnerability by unmasking what is hidden in the reading of a (biblical) text. The working hypothesis is as follows: The mythical norm of reading the biblical text masks the issue of race in biblical hermeneutics in assuming white innocence and hiding a moral injury caused by the imperial agenda of modernity. A hermeneutics of vulnerability is suggested in order to acknowledge the moral injury that the racial implications of the imperial agenda of modernity caused and is still causing. The moral injury is mitigated by a process of difficult or unsettling empathy engendered by a hermeneutic of vulnerability. The arguments are set up as follows: the first section endeavours to figure out what lies behind the projection or construction of white innocence associated with the mythical norm (given the preponderance of race in current discourse in South Africa and the USA). The second section deals with the way a hermeneutic of vulnerability can enable a reader to credibly respond from a position of whiteness to, for example, the pressures from the decolonial turn in the discourse on race, asking what it means to be vulnerable and how one accounts for vulnerability. The third section embroiders on the consequences of accepting and revealing vulnerability, namely to show empathy and more specifically an uneasy or difficult empathy in a racially tense society. Opsomming Die doel van hierdie opstel is om die weerloosheid van die leser bloot te lê deur dit wat verborge is in die lees van ‘n (Bybelse) teks, te ontmasker. Die werkshipotese is soos volg: Die mitiese norm van die lees van die Bybelse teks verbloem die kwessie van ras in die Bybelse hermeneutiek deur die aanname van wit onskuld en die verdoeseling van ‘n etiese wond wat veroorsaak is deur die koloniale agenda van moderniteit. ‘n Hermeneutiek van weerloosheid word voorgestel om dié morele wond raak te sien in terme van rassisme wat deur die koloniale agenda van moderniteit veroorsaak word en nog steeds veroorsaak. Die etiese letsel word egter versag deur ‘n proses van moeilike of ontsetelende empatie wat deur ‘n hermeneutiese kwesbaarheid veroorsaak word. Die argumente word soos volg opgestel: die eerste afdeling poog om uit te vind wat agter ‘n konstruksie van witwees se onskuld lê ten opsigte van die mitiese norm van uitleg (gegewe die oorwig van ras in die huidige diskoers in Suid-Afrika en die VSA). Die tweede afdeling handel oor die manier waarop ‘n hermeneutiek van weerloosheid ‘n leser in staat kan stel om geloofwaardig vanuit ‘n posisie van witwees te reageer op, byvoorbeeld, die druk van die dekoloniale wending in die diskoers oor ras deur te vra wat dit beteken om kwesbaar te wees en hoe neem ‘n mens met kwesbaarheid rekening hou. Die derde afdeling verduidelik wat die gevolge is wanneer weerloosheid aanvaar en erken word, naamlik om empatie en meer spesifiek ‘n ongemaklike of moeilike empatie in rassespanning te toon.

Exculpating Injustice: Coroner Constructions of White Innocence in the Postbellum South

Research notes the broad complicity of white public officials in historical racial violence and repression. These discussions emphasize the role of criminal justice actors in perpetrating and enabling this repression. Extending this assessment, the authors examine coroners’ facilitation of white racial dominance through administrative performances constructing white innocence. Using cases from post-Emancipation South Carolina, the authors document race-related patterns of exculpatory effort, through the omission and curation of evidence amid the post-Reconstruction rise of white supremacist redemption. The authors theorize that these exculpatory efforts helped sustain an ideology of white innocence and institutional legitimacy by constructing a white “law-abiding” public. The authors argue that such coroner misconduct not only degrades the rule of law but has broader implications, including its corruption of the corpus of mortality and crime data. Finally, the authors suggest that these administrative performances persist in present-day coroner reporting, including in the exculpation of racist police violence.

Colonialism, Race, and White Innocence in Finnish Children’s Literature: Anni Swan’s 1920s’ Serial “Uutisasukkaana Austraaliassa”

This chapter focuses on colonialism, race, and White innocence in Finnish 1920s’ children’s literature, arguing that children’s literature was an influential channel through which colonial discourse and public colonial imagination were created, consumed, and circulated in Finland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As an example of such literature, Merivirta examines the Finnish children’s author Anni Swan’s serial “Uutisasukkaana Austraaliassa” (“Living as Settlers in Australia”, 1926). The serial depicts a Finnish settler family’s life in Queensland, focusing on their encounters with First Nations people. The chapter explores how colonialism and race in the Australian context are depicted and racial and cultural hierarchies constructed in Swan’s text. The chapter shows that Swan’s text circulates a number of common European and American colonial tropes and portrays Finnish settler colonialism in Australia as innocent and noncolonial.

“Problem Children” and “Children with Problems”: Discipline and Innocence in a Gentrifying Elementary School

This article examines the ways Hazel, a white girl entering kindergarten, became known as a child with a problem rather than a problem child in her gentrifying school. Building on a year of classroom observations and interviews with students, school staff, and parents, author Alexandra Freidus identifies the role of racialized discourses related to disposition, medicalization, family, and community in shaping Hazel’s reputation and contrasts Hazel’s reputation with that of Marquise, a Black boy in her class. Hazel’s and Marquise’s storylines teach us that to fully understand and address the differences in how Black and white children are disciplined, we need to look closely at the allowances and affordances we make for some students, as well as how we disproportionately punish others. By examining the ways educators in a gentrifying school construct white innocence and Black culpability, this study illustrates the relational nature of the “school discipline gap” and helps us understand how and why some children are disproportionately subject to surveillance and exclusion and others are not.

Speculating Ancestor(ie)s: The Cavernous Memory of White Innocence and Fluid Embodiments of Afrofuturist Memory-Work

Enduring legacies of racial violence signal the need to reconcile with the past. This paper comparatively explores various speculative works that either reinforce a paradigm of White innocence that serves to deny such legacies or center critical dialogue between the past and present. It draws on a range of theoretical works, including Seshadri-Crooks’s (2000) Lacanian analysis of race, Taylor’s (2003) notion of the body as repertoire for embodied knowledge, Wright’s (2015) concept of Black epiphenomenal time, and Hartman’s (2008b) method of ‘critical fabulation.’ Through an analysis of the narrative tropes of caves and mirrors in the Star Wars Skywalker saga (1977–1983; 2015–2019), this paper firstly unpacks the bounded individualism that permits protagonists Luke and Rey Skywalker to refute their evil Sith lord ancestry and prevail as heroes. It then turns to the works Black Panther (2018) and Watchmen (2019) to comparatively examine Afrofuturist narrative strategies of collectivity, embodiment, and non-linear temporality that destabilize bounded notions of self and time to reckon with the complexities of the past. It concludes that speculative approaches to ancestral (dis)connections are indicative of epistemological frameworks that can either circumvent or forefront ongoing demands to grapple with the past.

“All lives matter”: How districts co-opt equity language and maintain the status quo

The term “equity” is widely used by educational policy makers to describe myriad programs and practices aimed at closing the supposed racial achievement gap. Research about the way equity has been used in these policies typically explores how policy actors with low will and capacity frame and implement their reforms. Few studies, however, explore equity-oriented reforms initiated and supported by policy makers who claim to fervently support educational equity. The purpose of this critical policy analysis was to examine how the rhetoric used by equity-supportive policy actors may have reinforced neoliberal ideas and inadvertently maintained white innocence and color-blind racism. Examining the Community Schools policy in New York City schools, this study found that some equity initiatives are circumscribed by their focus on “all lives”, which can unwittingly reinforce the status quo in schools.