White supremacy’s wee little men

When a word gets repeated enough it tends to lose some of its power. Words like racism, White supremacy, structural inequity—to those whose lives are less directly impacted by the realities these words point to, it can feel like they flooded suddenly into public consciousness. Books on race and White privilege shot onto the New York Times best-seller lists. And then, as such words seemed to be more widely accepted, their power and implication seemed to vanish, to dissipate like water poured on a hot skillet, transforming from drops to vapor to nothingness in a blink of an eye.

While the wider reckoning with racism in the United States came at a critical moment, so too did the inevitable backlash—the organization of denials and misdirection, the claims of censorship, the efforts to ban books, and the mystifying fear of the phantasm people refer to as “critical race theory.” The specter of race continues to haunt us. But how do we begin to face a ghost that so easi­ly takes our resistance, absorbs it, and spits it out into mist?

These are questions of faith. While the subjects of structural inequality and violence have clear sociological, historical, and psychological aspects, these are also theological questions, questions of who we believe ourselves and God to be. Desmond Tutu reminded us of the concept of ubuntu, that we “belong in a bundle of life.” Racism continues to haunt us and our faith—not simply for the ways it demonizes certain people but perhaps more profoundly for the way it normalizes certain other people. Within these dynamics of power, something happens to those whose lives sit inside the frame of normal, beautiful, strong, intelligent—or at least not ugly and poor like those others.