On the arrogance of white people
[These views are mine alone and do not represent the views of my employer or anyone else]
I’m not supposed to write about white people, even though I am a white person.
I can write about whiteness if I talk about glory, and stick to the idea of white civilization and white vulnerability. I could talk about white pride and insist other people stole the idea of pride from me and I want it back.
But I can’t talk about white shame. And, while white collectivity becomes very important when talking about the presumed accomplishments of white people, I am not to generalize about, say, the tendency of white people to ignore racism or to act in racist ways.
Some white people get bent out of shape when they feel blamed for sins of the past, especially slavery. They don’t want to talk about the economic hardship too many Black Americans still experience as the long-term aftereffects of their ancestors being made slaves. Some white Americans didn’t pay attention in history class or have too little imagination to understand how Black people in America could experience the economic and social effects of slavery over such a long period of time. And they don’t want to learn.
While it is true that Americans alive today are not directly responsible for the sins of white slave owners in the past, many of us white people in America have ancestors who did own slaves. The racist attitudes of these family members have been passed down across the generations—along with the wealth amassed by those ancestors in the form of direct inheritance and deep-seated power structures, class-based marriage practices that reinforce wealth, and benefits derived from better funded schools. Perhaps this is one of Trump’s points of popularity. As a family of recent immigrants, his family has benefited from existing racist policies without having a direct family history of owning Black people. So Trump is a terrific example of “don’t blame me!” He benefits from white structures of power and racism without the nasty nineteenth-century ancestral history. All white people in America, even Trump, benefit from slavery’s aftereffects. But this is the conversation we are not supposed to have. Why not?
Responsibility remains for injustice even if we aren’t sure how to repair things. We should care enough to try. This is what many Americans used to talk about as an ideal—how to create a community in which all sorts of people get a fair shake, where with hard work anyone can build a life they can be proud of. This is the excitement that the election of Zohran Momdani is having upon New Yorkers: the chance to show we can do better for each other.
White shame interferes with the ideal. Some white people feel personally blamed for benefits they enjoy today. Some know there is shame involved in America’s history around race—and that makes them angry. So they act like only direct personal responsibility—i.e. owning slaves themselves—would make them accountable. Otherwise, slavery is irrelevant history, a distraction from what America should be today. The individualization of moral responsibility is a longstanding Christian habit. It erases historical trajectories and complex interrelational patterns. This individualization dovetails nicely with capitalism, which also claims to reward and punish on purely immediate, individual grounds. Where does this habit come from?
Judaism—from whence Christianity emerged—taught about the sins of the fathers being passed on to their sons (ignore the misogyny for now). Jews don’t believe in original sin, the sort that each person carries by birth, and which damns each person to eternal hellfire. Instead, they embrace a more corporate sense of justice and responsibility grounded in a community of care. The “people” sin before God, and the people can make things right together. Going it alone is not ideal.
By contrast, Christians have long insisted on individual responsibility before God. Catholics and Protestants alike believe in original sin, paring the human-divine relationship down to each person’s encounter with God. This can be comforting—as when Martin Luther found relief in the idea that even in his sinfulness God loved him—or it can be terrifying—as when Jonathan Edwards warned his listeners that God could dangle them over hellfire like a spider being crisped.
These days, though, many Christians are leaning into the bright side, claiming that God loves them in particular, and that he forgave them before they were even born for any wrong they might end up doing. I think of the documentary “Friends of God” (2012) which begins with thousands of evangelicals at Joel Osteen’s megachurch with their hands in the air singing “I am a friend of God, he calls me friend!” God loves me, no matter what I do.
The Christians who buy into this system call it predestination, and almost always place themselves in the category of those who were chosen by God—predestined—for earthly and heavenly rewards before they ever appeared (fully spiritually formed) in some woman’s uterus. How can white people be blamed for the impact of slavery if God chose them for a good life before they even knew what slavery was?
Trump is the perfect example of the presumption of divine election combined with predetermined white innocence. Some Christians have identified Trump as a “Cyrus” figure, that is, a kind of king like the ancient Persian King Cyrus, who God used for good purposes. We are to allow Cyrus his peccadillos since God has chosen him for a noble purpose despite them. People often remark on Trump’s Teflon sense of accountability. Right now some of us are thinking that maybe the Epstein files will finally hold Trump accountable for something. If he really raped young girls, then maybe, at last, people will see his moral turpitude. But why would they?
The whole point is to hold him blameless, to make him a lily-white meritorious victim held blameless before God. Trump didn’t own slaves. He also didn’t rape any young girls, and he didn’t ever do a single racist thing. We know because God chose him before he was born. Because Trump’s chosenness comes first—as a powerful symbol of white election more generally—any moral failure of his is not a real failure. Racism itself is the hoax. The Epstein Files are a hoax. This is why “Russia” is a hoax too. Anything suggesting Trump’s moral responsibility is a hoax. We know it is a hoax because God has already decided that Trump is A-OK. God chose Trump (as God chose whiteness more generally) for a special purpose before he was even born. The presumption of white innocence makes the Holocaust a hoax for some neo-Nazis for the same reason. Trump’s Teflon spills over onto those around him. Nobody is responsible for anybody else, roasting flesh or no. If you didn’t do it with your own two hands, you are blameless—if you are white.
We must hold the individual white person (men in particular) blameless for anything they might have done wrong by evoking God’s special love for them. This love is made evident precisely in their ability to slip accountability. Trump is special because he represents a religious system that so many white people embrace: I personally didn’t do it (own slaves, kill Native Americans, roast Jews, etc.). God has forgiven me for any sins I personally have committed. I have been elected for success and wealth. The most important thing is to erase the past’s impact on the present. White people have only a noble history (see the monuments to brave Civil War heroes?). White people are religious (see Trump holding up a Bible for the press?). White people are good (see how angry they are about the people they think are bad?).
There’s a term for Trump’s Teflon morality in religious scholarship: Antinomianism. It’s when people take the idea of grace and forgiveness to mean they have a clean slate no matter what they do because God has already forgiven them. They can break any human law because God stops them from breaking any divine laws. Even if they manage to break both divine laws and human laws, they are preemptively forgiven by God because they have a free pass (what we could call “grace”). Trump’s grace is a big, big problem right now because it’s allowing millions of people who claim to be Christians to excuse horrific acts—even those they personally witness. It exploits the idea of God’s generosity to make room for cruelty, grift, even rape. Trump can do no wrong by God’s own design. I used to think that what was at stake in this theology was Christianity itself—but now I think what is being protected is not Christianity (which can be practiced lots of more generous, humble ways) but whiteness itself. God loves whiteness, and Trump is meant to be the proof of that.
To be white is to be authentically American. America the “Christian” country is America the blessed: “God shed his grace on thee.” Like a disembodied divine skin, God shed his grace onto white America, evoking the antinomian impulse that allows preemptive innocence so precious that millions will angrily refuse to even consider Trump might have “grabbed the pussy” of teenage girls. How could he? He was elect(ed) by God. His specialness is unassailable, impenetrable, unlike the young women he allegedly fingered.
This warped Christianity is very dangerous because it sanctifies disdain and discrimination. And it is being exploited alongside the good faith that America’s founders had in the idea of moral clarity. The hope that people would at least try to be decent. The belief that leaders would only be elected by a majority if they had some sense of moral dignity. But if whiteness matters more than basic decency in the hierarchy of values, then we owe each other nothing.
We are in a topsy turvy world where a loss of white dominance is presented—and too often experienced—as discrimination. Reduced privilege seems like injury when it forces you to zoom out and see yourself as one body in a sea of bodies of all colors, shapes, origins. It seems anti-religious when it refuses the Christian presumption of special individualism. It seems an evil sort of “socialism” when it places us in relationship to one another with the expectation of equal rights.
Yet what we most need right now is accountability to each other. Christianity can offer that, of course. But we don’t need Christianity to get there. We simply need to look at each other as humans with value and dignity. This approach requires no heavenly sanction—but getting there through the Bible or Quran or any other means is fine with me. Maybe this expectation of relationship is why Trump and his cronies hate the United Nations so much. Whatever people may think of the actions of the United Nations, the professed ideal is human value and dignity for all.
The idea that Christians are good because they are saved transfers to views about guns too. If guns are viewed as symbols for broader American values and beliefs, they accurately represent the atomized view of responsibility before God. I talk about this in my new book, Cowboy Apocalypse: Religion and the Myth of the Vigilante Messiah. My gun is my personal defense mechanism against moral assault. The shots I fire protect me—my goodness, my morality, my whiteness. I can walk around with my gun in public view where you can see with your own eyeballs that might makes right if white. Right makes might if white. And God wants me—the good guy—to protect myself from you, the bad guy. God would have made you more powerful if he loved you more. Also, you’d be white like me. The arrogance of white people.
We see the deeply racist connotations of this American system of religion in the treatment today of Somali citizens in America, in self-declared “journalist” Nick Shirley’s ridiculous exposé videos in which he presents a warped, preexisting narrative of Somali malfeasance. Somalis have become a favored target of weaponized whiteness recently because they are not white, and because some of them are proudly Muslim—and therefore easy representatives of the “other.” Right wing calls to “ban” a thing called “Sharia law” from America have ramped up again on social media, feeding into the preexisting narrative being pushed that America is somehow most authentically white and most originally Christian. This is the impetus behind J.D. Vance telling wife Usha she ought to convert.
Our moral choices do shape how we exist in relation to one another. In a very real sense, the sins of fathers do pass on to sons (and daughters) in the form of faulty moral guidelines and lies about what love is and how to live well. America has been in denial about its sordid history for a very long time. The choice to keep our moral failures hidden shapes our policy, our economic decisions, our culture, and our religion. The longer arrogance is defined as religious righteousness, the more its defenders are shaped by narrow strictures of what is good and the less able they are to be in loving relationship with others. We need each other. I feel the shame and isolation that Trump won't feel.
The impact of atomized morality today is a decimated planet in the throes of climate migrations, with bombs flung back and forth amidst vulnerable populations. We can’t protect young women because it’s more important to protect whiteness. We aren’t talking about climate change much these days because people are too busy using guns and bombs on each other and waiting for the next stomp from Trump’s administration. To let go of white election would be to let go of the belief that God loves powerful white people best, and to sit, open-mouthed and horrified, at how broken the world really is. We must learn to love each other, but how on earth do we do that?
