Kelly Brown Douglas confronts the history which not only brought us Stand Your Ground laws, but undergirds a constant struggle for continued oppression.
This Lent, we read Stand Your Ground by Kelly Brown Douglas, Dean of Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary.
This small, entirely white group of intellectually curious people had waded through the challenging question of whiteness and violence in American culture. So when we gathered for our last conversation about the book, I was conscious that the most persistent question in the room was “what can we do?”
How are we to share what we’ve learned?
I encouraged the group to do what I did. Over the course of the reading, I wrote up 300-word summaries of each chapter. [If you’d like to see them all, you can find links to them below.] And what I was going to do next was write a 300-word summary of the whole book.
Of course, this isn’t easy. But it is predicated on the idea of practice: that we must practice speaking of our culture in these ways so that we come to understand what is truly there.
So part of the challenge is crafting a solid, understandable message.
But there’s a rub. And this is really, really important. Not everybody will hear the message you share. They’ll only hear what they want to hear. And we have to be OK with that.
That doesn’t make it a poorly-crafted message, however. But there is some value in recognizing what is actually happening with them. If for no other reason than to understand why a cogent message goes unheard.
Talking Whiteness
Douglas uses “whiteness” as a sociological term to describe the inherent cultural expectations of what it means to not only be white but when cultural advantage is given to what she calls “Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism.”
In other words, whiteness doesn’t begin as a response to skin color. It begins with the cultural superiority of a given group, maintained through history, which therefore made manifest a racial distinction.
This is what Douglas is talking about when she speaks about whiteness. But some won’t let her get that far. They will interrupt and reject before she’s even finished her sentence.
Let’s pause briefly to recognize the dynamic.
It may seem like there is pressure on the speaker in this situation (Douglas) to not upset the person with whom she is speaking. There most certainly is some. But there should be an understanding that there is equal pressure on the hearer to listen to her definition before speaking or rejecting.
And where this rejection will come from is to create and demand a superior definition replace Douglas’s definition for whiteness in the conversation. They want the word to mean something else, even as she is sharing a neutral and academic definition of a historical phenomenon.
The debate begins, not on the merit of the argument, but from a semantic aspect of modern concepts of race only.
In other words, the debate in many of these conversations is not between the speaker who says “I’m using whiteness to speak to the particular cultural dominance of Anglo-Saxons, reflected in both the color of skin and in European cultural motifs” and the hearer “you’re calling white people bad.”
This response is beyond bad faith.
It is the abject refusal to have a genuine and honest conversation.
Nor is it fair to classify this as simply “both sides hear the word differently.” One side is trying to speak in common language and academically-accepted norms and the other refuses to accept the terms of the conversation before its even begun. And at the same time, demanding completely different terms.
The problem is not found in what was said or what was heard. It comes in the twisting of the interaction to distort what is being said.
Conversation partners listen to each other and respond respectfully.
It’s hard.
There’s no question about that. But obstructing conversation at the root isn’t an option in any productive dialogue.
The challenge of discussing whiteness is that race and culture are tied together. And for many, cutting culture out of the conversation from the start allows for a smoother conversation. But it does so at the expense of the very force which empowers racism in our country.
Talking about race without talking about culture allows the power disparity to remain in place. Or worse. It honors and enshrines a singular cultural superiority as necessary for our society to function.
This is the root of the book.
Douglas is exposing why our conversations around race look like such utter nonsense when given their historic context. But diving into both that historic context and the incredible arguments used to maintain the status quo requires both a generous spirit and a full immersion into the way reasonable-sounding arguments are anything but reasonably-applied.
So to describe the content of the book in a few short paragraphs is a deep challenge for those of us raised on a diet of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism and a normalized Manifest Destiny war mindset.
Not only are we afraid to confront our own beliefs or to speak honestly with our neighbors, but we’re overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenge and the rigidity of the opposition.
As I’ve tried over and over to summarize the book to my white middle class neighbors, it comes with great difficulty and sputtering challenges. Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism has been so thoroughly accepted that seeing through its veil feels wrong and disorienting.
Attempting to put the root of the book into my own words, however, seems all the more necessary given the stakes of doing nothing or believing my own sharing of these concepts is insufficient.
We have to internalize and materialize this; precisely because the material goes against a historical revision we wrote over centuries to protect our fragile egos.
So let us not begin with the people who struggle with the word whiteness, but with those questions Douglas asks. Those questions which have no justifiable response in a just society.
In Part 1 we will unearth whiteness.
Then in Part 2, we will bring new life to the dead.
The Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis read the same book together for Lent. Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God by Kelly Brown Douglas. We’re gathering in local communities to discuss the book or reading independently.
As part of my own discipline of reading the book and preparing for the discussion, I summarized each chapter in fewer than 300 words.
Chapters