Unlearning White Supremacy: A Spirituality for Racial Liberation

Abstract

There is a growing body of theology written by White theologians (that is, theologians who are racialized as White, as I am) who are critically conscious of our entanglement in the dehumanising, death-dealing dynamics of whiteness. Growing, but still desperately small; and most of what there is, is written from the particular national context of the USA. Unlearning White Supremacy is another such contribution to the field, but it is a significant one, which deserves to be read more widely. Alex Mikulich is a Roman Catholic lay minister and theologian, who writes “as a partner, parent, scholar, and activist,” out of his own “personal, spiritual, and political experience of parenting biracial, African American children and being [a] member of Black Catholic parishes in San Francisco, California; Hartford, Connecticut; and New Orleans, Louisiana” (xv). A reworking of essays written by the author between 2012 and 2021, the book is partly a presentation of the colonial history of anti-Black White Supremacy, and its entanglement with the theology and missionary activity of the Roman Catholic church (Part I); and partly a collection of reflections on the possibilities, for White Christians, of thinking, praying and acting differently (Part II). Mikulich has read widely, and draws on the work of (among others) James Baldwin, W.E.B. DuBois, Walter Mignolo and Pius Onyemechi Adiele (a historian of Roman Catholic involvement in slavery) in the earlier historical sections; and Black Roman Catholic theologians Bryan Massingale and M. Shawn Copeland, White theologians Thomas Merton and Walter Brueggemann in Part II, which concludes with some (important but tangential) reflections on “degrowth” in the company of Pope Francis and economic anthropologist Jason Hickel. Where Part I traces some of the development of a “white habitus” characterised by “[t]he normalization ofWhite physical, social, and moral separation from Black people,” Part II outlines three tactics intended to “unlearn” these “White self-segregating strategies” (49): firstly, engaging experiences of “impasse” as potentially transformative, leading to a deepening of empathy, lament and solidarity; secondly, pursuing a “truthful remembering” which results in reparation, including (but not limited to) economic redistribution; and lastly, embracing an “ecological intimacy” to resist the capitalist “growthism” that is entangled with colonialism’s past and present. It is these three tactics that contribute, for Mikulich, to “a spirituality for racial liberation” (the book’s subtitle), and for this White English Anglican reader they both highlight the gifts and the weaknesses of the book as a whole. One of the particular gifts that this book offers is a brief introduction to the work of Constance FitzGerald, and a reflection on its implications for White Christians. FitzGerald, a White Roman Catholic theologian and Carmelite sister, builds on the writings of St John of the Cross to offer profound reflections on the links between John’s description of the “dark night” and the experience of personal and societal “impasse,” “a limit situation in which there is ‘no way out, no way around, no rational escape from what imprisons one, no possibilities in the situation’.” Mikulich suggests here a profound resonance between