The Idolatry of White Supremacy

My wife and I were ready for our new adventure as a future clergy couple in New Jersey. In 1993, Sharon and I, along with our Persian cat Kuzak, stuffed our yellow Pontiac Sunbird to begin our ministry at Northside Chapel Community Christian Reformed Church in Paterson, New Jersey. My co-pastor, the late Rev. Stan Vander Klay, found a spacious apartment for us in neighboring Clifton.

I was not aware of the overt racism I would encounter before I moved even one piece of furniture into Clifton, the majority white borough sandwiched between the mostly Latino and African American boroughs of Passaic and Paterson.

I never forgot that white spaces are dangerous for me.

Clifton police trailed the car for several blocks until flashing lights signaled me to stop. The officer asked for my license and registration. I asked him if I had violated any law. He noticed I had an Illinois state plate on the front and a Michigan one on the back. He said the plates were illegal. I told him that I just moved from the Wolverine state today and was on the way to our new apartment only two blocks away. His eyes grew wide as saucers. He said the police had to watch out for non-residents who make trouble. He gave me my license and registration back. He gave a warning to get the right plates sooner than later. Welcome to a white space!

I never forgot that white spaces are dangerous for me. The Clifton incident reminded me of my hometown of Chicago, which was known as the most segregated city in America during my childhood. Each ethnic group protected and patrolled their spaces, from pools and streets, to parks, schools, and shopping areas.

I knew as a kid to stay out of the suburban town of west Cicero after dark. I knew to stay north of the Stevenson Expressway, known as Interstate 55, because some white teenagers looked for unsuspecting black kids who did not understand the unwritten rules of white spaces. For most of the Windy City’s history, racial boundaries were sewn into the fabric of the city before and after the Great Fire of 1871. White supremacy did not die in the flames. It found a way to stay alive in hearts and minds of white Chicagoans.

I knew I had to stay within the black spaces of my Lawndale neighborhood.

What is white supremacy?  I think the answer to that question is pretty simple. It is the centering of white people and practices as the normative way of life, and enforcing that way of life through major institutions. In other words, whiteness* is the sun and everyone else are planets rotating around it.

My experience with the police officer made clear that the white residents of Clifton were the primary concern of his badge and authority. Chicago’s history reflects the same, sad truth. The segregation of Chicago and its suburbs was not done haphazardly. It was planned, endorsed, and executed to maintain white spaces for white lives. I knew I had to stay within the black spaces of my Lawndale neighborhood because white public spaces in and around Chicago were not welcoming to me. Race mattered. Geography mattered.

The men impressed upon him that his African American Baptist faith was inferior to theirs.

Unfortunately, white supremacy is thoroughly religious at its core. African American theologian Willie James Jennings wrote powerfully about an evangelism visit to his home by two representatives from a nearby church, a visit that unveiled the idolatry of white supremacy. The men, from a Dutch Christian Reformed Church, impressed upon him that his African American Baptist faith was inferior to theirs. He wrote,

“Why did these men not know me, not (mother) Mary and (father) Ivory, and not know the multitude of other black Christians who filled this neighborhood that surrounded that church? The foreignness and formality of their speech in our backyard signaled a wider and deeper order of not knowing, not sensing, not imagining….

In the small space of a backyard I witnessed a Christianity familiar to most of us, enclosed in racial and cultural difference, inconsequentially related to its geography, often detached from its surrounding of both people and spaces…we are operating out of a history of relations that exposed a distorted relational imagination (The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, p. 4).”

The men demonstrated that the religious history of Jennings’ family and community religious history was not worth taking the time to understand. They dismissed them as not knowing Jesus the right, or white, way. Jennings witnessed idolatry and white supremacy a through theological lens. For too long, white churches have conflated their understanding of who God is and how God works with who they are and how they work.      

Jennings is on to something. White supremacy is a theologically distorted imagination.

For too long, white churches have conflated their understanding of who God is and how God works with who they are and how they work.

Idolatry, in the Bible, is not a minor violation for bad behavior. Idolatry is a distortion of the imagination that places something else at the center space of life, something other than the true God who desires that we have an exclusive relationship with God alone.

Scripture records Israel's recurring preference for other idols. Once God rescued them from slavery in Egypt, God’s vision for Israel was clearly revealed: “God spoke these words, I am the Lord your God brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in the heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sins of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me” (Exodus 20:1-5) Israel was more concerned with anthropology than theology. Like the idolatrous leanings of ancient Israel, white supremacy is a distorted theological vision that chooses isolation and protectionism over seeking the unity in diversity of God’s people, control over grace, and idolatry over relationship.

The only way to dismantle the idol of white supremacy is with a triune God-centered imagination.

How do we deal with the history of white supremacy? Author James Baldwin asserted, “the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it many ways and history is literally present in all that we do.”  The history of white supremacy is present with us, in all that we do. The only way to dismantle the idol of white supremacy is with a triune God-centered imagination, and a relentless commitment to dethrone it in the church and all other institutions to follow Christ in bringing shalom on God’s terms.  

* Editor's note: Whiteness is more than the color of someone’s skin. When we use the word “whiteness”, we are referring to the system of thinking (and the social structures built on this system of thinking) that values the cultures, bodies, and contributions of people with white skin above those of people of color. The Office of Race Relations has recommended resources for further learning at crcna.org/race/resources

[Photo by Tim Trad on Unsplash]