Owning, Being Owned, & Being in Christ
The economism of race, private property, workers rights, mass shootings & resurrecting our buried imago Dei
Maybe it’s our deeply ingrained conviction that we live in a meritocracy. Maybe it’s an unwillingness to think historically about the conditions of the present. Maybe it’s a mix of theological and ideological blinders that simply make certain features of reality invisible. Maybe it’s better just simply described as the hypnosis of whiteness. But whatever the causes, no matter how many #BlackLivesMatter signs show up in the lawns of my progressive white Bostonian neighbors, we seem incapable of thinking about the catastrophe of America’s racialized society through a frame that recognizes the essentially economic character of race.
Or maybe better put, our culture and I personally have a hard time wrapping our minds around the ways race essentializes humanity into economic categories.
Wrestling with our own imaginations’ capacity to acquire this vantage point is an ethical imperative for the people of God in the twenty-first century. Recognizing the economism of race makes us better interpreters of events passing through the news in recent weeks — everything from mass shootings to an obscure labor v. private property law suit that’s reached the Supreme Court — while offering a shovel to dig out of the grave whiteness laid our bodies and body-politic in. In that digging out, we may, bit by bit, resurrect a community of life in the imago Dei.
Becoming Raced, Becoming an Economic Unit
Race was a simple way of organizing what roles people could play in the global economy that emerged during colonialism. Its role was ensuring that all the economic power would be held by the Christians of Western Europe.
It determined…
…who could own property and who could become property.
…who could be a master and who could be chattel.
…who could own and who could be owned.
…who could build wealth and who could become a category of wealth.
…who was capital and who was labor.
It was about control and power and Europe’s will to monopolize them to itself. But, critically, that control was articulated through legal rights of property possession. To do enact that transformation, creation and all her creatures were objectified and commodified beneath the white gaze.
Anibal Quijano, one of the great thinkers who planted the roots of decolonial theory, offers an excellent portrait of the formation of these relationships and their racial character in an essay on Latin America and colonialism:
In the historical process of the constitution of America, all forms of control and exploitation of labor and production, as well as the control of appropriation and distribution of products, revolved around the capital-salary relation and the world market. These forms of labor-control included slavery, serfdom, petty-commodity production, reciprocity, and wages. In such an assemblage, each form of labor control was no mere extension of its historical antecedents.
He goes on to write:
The racist distribution of new social identities was combined, as had been done so successfully in Anglo-America, with a racist distribution of labor and the forms of exploitation of colonial capitalism. This was, above all, through a quasi-exclusive association of whiteness with wages and, of course, with the high-order positions in the colonial administration. Thus each form of labor control was associated with a particular race. Consequently, the control of a specific form of labor could be, at the same time, the control of a specific group of dominated people. A new technology of domination/exploitation, in this case race/labor, was articulated in such a way that the two elements appeared naturally associated. Until now, this strategy has been exceptionally successful. (emphasis mine)
The sorting of people into economic functions based on a racial fiction is itself evil: manipulations of markets to ensure one group of people, running under a made up name (white), could get rich and run things, while another would be terrorized, exploited, and extracted as a dispensable unit of value.
However, limiting someone’s economic options is not the only or deepest level of problem here. Rather, we need to see that to reduce the fullness of a human’s being to an economic function, to the field of economic relations, is itself evil. It’s an evil that plagues both ends of the racial hierarchy and everyone forced to occupy a space in between. Lost was the richness and endless communal and personal variegations through which the imago Dei is poured out timelessly at ever moment through every face, personality, and culture. The melancholy of whites and misery of Blacks endemic to modern life under capitalism (to borrow J. Kameron Carter’s language) is the outflow of being reduced to selves and society reduced to the two-dimensional existence of exploitative economics.
Turning someone into a slave, and keeping them that way, required gratuitous amounts of physical violence. But we cannot overlook the anthropological/ontological violence done to people through this racial-economic essentialization. "The slave is the one commodity like no other," wrote Susan Buck-Morss, "as freedom of property and freedom of person are here in direct contradiction."1 Can we begin to comprehend what living within the bondage of this contradiction does to someone? Black people of African descent suffered horrific and sustained physical, psychological, and spiritual violence for generations. White people too live within the violence done to the fullness of our own natures. We are those who crucified their own imago Dei to gain the world.
The reduction of imago Dei to “homo economicus” was mirrored in the psuedo-theological reduction of God to the Invisible Hand. In the capitalist imagination, the divine movements of the Creator in history were as constrained to the market (with a big ‘M’) as the creatures made in God’s image. The endlessly unfolding truths of both Creator and creature were, to use an economic phrase, externalized—and so they became lost in our calculus of the purposes, practices, and presences of God and humanity. Economic positionality was thereby reinforced as providence.
Of course, economic sorting wasn’t the only reason European colonists invented race—and it definitely isn’t the only impact. My aim here is simply to help us attend to this under appreciated and significant dimension of a racialized anthropology. Cedric Robinson was clearly right in providing us the term “racial capitalism” to get deeper into the totality of the condition that plagues us today. We have yet to adequately listen to him.
The Hidden Performances of Racial Capitalism
The legacy of race’s economic character is alive and active in the ordering our society. Most prominently is the glaring racial wealth gap, primarily driven by de facto racist differences in home ownership, neighborhood segregation that compounds generationally, and (dis)investment from both public and private institutions in those segregated communities. (Note in these examples that, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore has taught us, the oppressive economics of race are always expressed spatially or geographically).
Instead of exploring those subjects, on which a great deal has been written, I would like to briefly call attention to two stories in the news from the past few weeks where “race/labor” was operating. One we all paid close attention to. The other may have sailed beneath your attention. In both examples, the links between race and ownership (to own vs. to be owned) are revealed as the crucial piece of the story if we can bring an adequate hermeneutic to the reading.
First, the story you might have missed.
Out of California, a lawsuit has reached the Supreme Court that was filed by an industrial agriculture company against the United Farm Workers, a union who by state law has the ability to organize on the farmland where the workers are. The corporation is claiming that this a “takings” issue — basically, defined as a situation where some government rule or action leads to the loss of wealth one already has or could potentially make off one’s private property.
As we saw above, freedom in this country has always been measured against the ability to own property and through property to create private wealth. Bear in mind that Jefferson’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was just a slight palatable adaptation of John Locke’s claim in the Second Treatise of Government that all individuals (a key word and a classic racist dog whistle) possess the inalienable rights of “life, liberty, and property.” The supremacy of property ownership—for white land owners like Jefferson—is at the roots of this nation-state’s design. And property ownership in this country has always been measured against the freedom to own another human: just as it was for the people-owners like Jefferson who drafted the Constitution.
The flip side of the coin for this freedom to own has been the freedom from being able to be owned oneself. Whiteness has uniquely coopted both these freedoms to own and extract value, and the freedom from being owned or having their own value extracted. Our legal system is built on it. And the same warped logic applied to black bodies is also tangled up in our relationship with the land. White people have always thought they have a divine right to this land and repeating the spoils they can take from it. The 49er, the Oregon Trail, the Boomer Sooner — all examples of the rapacious greed of white people trying to seize land and wealth through it. It is in this sense that Cheryl Harris made the groundbreaking claim that whiteness itself can be understood as property.
Black and Brown bodies, as in the case of the farm workers considering unionization in this lawsuit (on whose labor this company depends for its ability to make money from the land), have never been seen as having that same right to the land. Nor, despite capitalism’s claim that workers possess the freedom to exchange their labor for wages, has the “ownership of one’s labor” ever even been truly experienced by Black, Indigenous, and other people of color in colonial modernity. Rather, white people, as this case demonstrates, have claimed the right both to own the land and the right to BIPOC labor. "Takings" laws are almost always sick ploys to reproduce and retrench this logic. Abolition was a “takings” issue for slave-owners: it meant a massive dispossession of their wealth through the erasure of one of the largest assets classes (ie, chattel slaves) on this country’s financial ledgers at that time. This loss of wealth, not the violent ownership and exploitation of slaves, was for whites the true injustice. White owners of land and labor continue to squawk about their rights to not have their private property and wealth creation tampered with. We continue to operate within slaveholder imaginations, and the legal system continues to give a hearing to such audacious claims made by whiteness. Indeed, those who have claimed to follow Jesus in this land have often been most wedded to these systems of oppression. As Willie Jennings recently put it, “Christianity has come to operate comfortably within the commodity chain and objectification of creation.”
Here stalks the “race/labor” logic of Quijano, the workings of Robinson’s “racial capitalism,” and the performance of a Christian imagination twisted by whiteness.
A second example of this same right-to-own-and-not-be-owned claimed by whiteness, I argue, is operating beneath the gun culture and mass shooting crisis that’s gripped us in terror, grief and rage again and again.
Amidst the many specifics swirling around the shootings in Atlanta and Boulder (and last night, in my college town of Bryan, TX), we must force ourselves to look again and see yet another iteration of this imagined divine right of white people to own whatever property they want and to take whatever lives they desire.
The obsession over the Second Amendment and its nonsensical application to the AR-15—a weapon that’s only good for hunting people—is only possible within a culture born from a history of people who made themselves white in order to have ultimate authority to do what they will with Black and Brown bodies. You cannot skim the literature on slavery without being assaulted by tales of white Christian slaveowners using darker bodies for sex and hunting dark bodies if and when they tried to run. That same violent lust for power mythologized the lands and peoples east of Europe into the Orient. Two weeks ago, we watched in horror as a misogynistic racial imagination poured its amalgamation of sexual and violent lust out on six Asian bodies. Notice that the shooter did so precisely at economic sites, at places he believed to be markets for the (sexual) possession of non-white bodies: a desire he claims his own body to be so consumed with that the only solution was the annihilation of others. Here is the lust of Manifest Destiny reborn. The lust of Columbus who saw the new world as a naked virgin. The lust of settlers who knew no option but genocide by germ and firearms so as to take possession of their “natural rights.”
Today we find their right to possess and the right to do violence applied to property law for fire arms, even as the body count grows. Just yesterday, Tennessee signed into law the right to carry guns without permits or training.
We are yet a nation warped by those who practice colonial religion.
Being in Christ and the End of Violent Possession
Is there hope? Looking back in remembrance of the dark Jesus body of Jesus that was hunted down, abused, and executed; is there hope for a resurrected people who live out all the diverse wonders of the imago Dei dancing through bodies of every shade and shape?
The great Womanist theologian M. Shawn Copeland believes there is. “The memory of the Jewish Jesus,” she writes, “and the memory of the black (chattel) body coalesce as memories of a past that is not over, that must be encountered and confronted in the here and now even as they open onto hope and future life.”2 It is only through this dual facing of the imperially crucified Jesus and the Black and Brown bodies crucified under our own racial-imperial order that we can encounter the full extent of the idolatrous way of death fashioned by whiteness in colonial modernity, lament the suffering and distortions of collective life it has brought, and enter the liberating praxis found in the resurrected Christ who restores imago Dei through loving union with Creator and creation.
In Christ where there is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, the economic hierarchization of race is abolished. J. Kameron Carter has proposed this transformation as the movement from racialized to covenantal being. He writes,
This way of being in the world, the way of Christ’s flesh, is also a new mode of sociality, of life together. It is life in God’s covenant….According to this fuller vision of Christ, the flesh of Jesus is social reality, a space into which one enters by the action of the Spirit. As the one who transfigures social reality by drawing creation into the space of Christ’s flesh, the Spirit of Christ is the architect of a new mode of life together, that of the ecclesia, the church of Christ.3
Carter turns to the seventh-century theologian Maximus the Confessor as a guide for how our reworked humanity is a reworking of our notions of self and our ways of making life together:
Maximus conceives of human nature as being reopened in Christ, not simply to God but also to itself. Christ reopens humanity to embrace the many that is constitutive of created human nature and of creation itself. In this sense Christ reintegrates human nature, enacting it no longer within an order of tyrannical division but, rather, in an order of ‘peaceful difference,’ the one-many structure of creation.4
As humanity is “reopened in Christ,” we re-encounter the goodness and plurality of our own self freed from the roles prescripted by white supremacy’s economic and ontological totalitarianism. In that liberating process, the right to possess property recedes from the center of social structuring—all that is enclosed is reopened as the commons in the new communion. The right to possess other people becomes unimaginable.
In the realm of social and ecological relationships, Willie Jennings describes this as a movement from the colonizer’s imagination of possession of objects as “break, separation, and enclosure” toward an indigenous imagination that imagined itself possessed by the love of an animate landscape in “continuum, connection, and overlap.”
The intimacy of communion God yearns for us to experience with the Other is not for sale on the commodity markets of capitalism into which our very bodies and beings have been compressed. White supremacy is put to death as we come alive in Christ. The death of that old self must mean the death the violent economic order of possession through which whiteness constituted itself—and, in the resurrection, reimagining together a community of shalom.
Quoted in Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience, 86.
Ibid, 97.
Carter, Race: A Theological Account, 338.
Ibid, 351.