On that fateful night a year and a half ago, George Zimmerman did not see Trayvon Martin, the human being. He did not see Trayvon Martin, a young, 17-year-old child on his way home from the convenience store with Skittles and a soft-drink and talking on his cell phone with his friend. Instead, all that Zimmerman could see was a hooded threat. And so, he deputized himself to be the police, and in that capacity shot Trayvon Martin dead. But more than just deputizing himself to act with police power (and this is the crucial point of Dr. Butler’s reflections), he deputized himself to stand in the place of god, to act in god’s name and with divine or sovereign power (remember Zimmerman’s words to Sean Hannity that shooting Trayvon Martin was “God’s will”), and finally, not just to act as god but to be a god, a god who could judge and act with the power of life and death—or more accurately, with the power of death and under the protection of law. But who is this god in whose name Zimmerman acted under the cover of law on that dusky Florida night? This is the question Dr. Butler rightly—and to the discomfort of many—is raising. Her answer: it’s the “American god,” who is nothing less than “a white racist god . . . carrying a gun and stalking young black men.” Where is God for Trayvon Martin and his family? Where is the goodness and justice of God for Marissa Alexander, the African-American woman who is presently serving a 20-year prison sentence for shooting a warning shot to ward off her abusive husband from attacking her? She “stood her ground,” shoots and kills no one, but gets 20 years in prison. Zimmerman shoots and in fact kills Trayvon Martin and is acquitted. This is Dr. Butler’s question. But there’s also an implied question here that I’m trying to smoke out. Who is the god behind U.S. society; behind its system of laws, behind a criminal justice system that in effect tried Trayvon Martin from the grave for his own murder and found him guilty even as it found Zimmerman not guilty? Who is the god that stands religiously and symbolically behind the historic association of blackness—and especially black men—with criminality. Toni Morrison talked about this in a different context but her words echo powerfully here: “Blackness and criminality are merged in the minds of most white Americans.” In forcing these uncomfortable questions on us, Professor Butler is saying that we must reckon with the legal, social, historical, and finally the religious, entanglements of Christianity with whiteness. So entwined has the racial imagination, the imaginary of whiteness, become with Christianity in the religious underwriting of U.S. society that the question is no longer the question Why god? It is now, Which god? Which god is being talked about and enacted when the word “god” is invoked? Which god was Zimmerman invoking to Sean Hannity? What I’m in effect calling for is a Christianity uncoupled from this nation-state project, from the project of social purity or “proper” Americanness, with its (racially inflected) legal protocols and its vision of racialized criminality and institutions of incarceration. I’m calling for a Christianity that no longer provides religious sanction or the cloak of righteousness to the political project of U.S. sovereignty and its vision of who is normal (and in the right place) and who is abnormal (and thus out of place). I’m calling for a Christianity whose animating logic is no longer tied to that false “god-man.” The “god” of (or that is) whiteness is a god toward which we must be thoroughgoing at. If Christianity in this country and in our times is to have a future, it must be a Christianity beyond (the reigning) Christianity (and its god of anti-blackness). It must be a Christianity no longer centered in a normalizing whiteness. It must be a Christianity of a Not-Yet social order that is emerging right now in our midst (which is why there’s so much racial backlash in our so-called “postracial” moment).
Posted on: Thu, 01 Aug 2013 21:12:47 +0000
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