After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging

Abstract

In After Whiteness, Jennings critiques the phenomenon of Whiteness, arguing how the conflation of European mastery, White male, colonial power, and the internalisation of notions of White superiority becomes the means by which epistemology is developed. Jennings illustrates howWhiteness became conjoined with patriarchy and colonialism to unleash an ethic of mastery, self-sufficiency, and control, as the defining elements for what constitutes notions of development and progress. Jennings’ work, which is aimed primarily at Theological education, distils the means by which the production of knowledge and pedagogical insights on the craft of ministry, has been informed by coloniality and Whiteness. Jennings is clear that this analysis is not about White people per se. Rather, it is the epistemological underpinning of a set of theo-cultural constructs, systems and practices that govern how theology and education operate in the west and which inform our ways of being and our praxis (pp. 23–156). One of the many great insights I took from this work was the extent to which a cult of mastery, self-sufficiency, and top-down notions of patrician control, all executed under the aegis of whiteness has stymied the emotional and intellectual agency of people racialised as White as much as it has traduced those racialised as the ‘other’. The whole book, in many respects, is summed in Chapter 1, which is entitled ‘Fragments’. Like the remainder of the book, the author uses poetry, narrative vignettes, and theological reflection, to outline the problems a neo-colonial ethic of whiteness has caused for the task of forming men and women into the mind of Christ through the medium of theological education. After Whiteness will become in its own way, every bit as influential as his earlier and now classic, The Christian Imagination. After Whiteness is, in many respects, an admirable sequel, but it is in other ways, so much more. It is an heartfelt cri de cœur for a more reflective and self-aware mode of theological education; one that will enable all human beings to flourish and not primarily those racialised as White!