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RADICAL THEOLOGIES AND PHILOSOPHIES
Toward a
Counternarrative Theology
of Race and Whiteness
Studies in Philosophy of Race, Science Fiction
Radical Theologies and Philosophies
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Foreword
With the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016 as president of the United

States of America, our nation metaphysically embraced a new “alchemy of
race,” as Patricia Williams termed it. His ascendency to the presidency on
a platform of little more than white grievance signaled a turning point in
our history whose reverberations will last for generations. The power of
white racial backlash had confounded the hope imagined by so many with
the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States.
Since that time there has been a steady march of these grievance politics
with no ideology save some resembling white nationalism. As of this writ-
ing multicultural education, particularly as it takes the form of teaching
Black history, is being outlawed in several states. Election police forces,
which resemble the White Citizen’s Councils of the mid-twentieth cen-
tury, have been proposed in several states. The franchise (vote) is being
legally suppressed and in many cases stripped in ways transparently aimed
at BIPOC communities. An electoral architecture is being put in place
that will guarantee white minority for at least the next generation. The last
twelve years has seen the political, cultural, and economic racial arrange-
ments of this nation destabilized in favor of a more just vision of an inclu-
sive democracy, and then seen those dreams dashed by the power of racial
nostalgia.
I begin my forward to this book just here because the value of this work
is the invitation it offers to reimagine the work of Constructive Theology
in this specific historical moment. This invitation also entails reimagining
how whiteness is reforming itself in ways that re-call the lethal history
racial oppression in the United States. These invitations are more than
v
vi FOREWORD
timely. They are critically important, because the historical moment in

which we find ourselves is one that the theo-political ramifications of racial
discourses may be a deciding factor in our future as a species. Let me
explain.
In the first instance, it is good to remind ourselves of the socio-political
importance of theology. Whether explicitly noticed or not, theology is the
stuff of community-shaping discourses. Back of every world-shaping ide-
ology and movement is almost always some religious vision of how things
ought to be. Whether expressed in the language of confessional religion or
some variant of the grammar of secularity, the call to invest oneself/our-
selves in righting a world offtrack is a central motivator for social change.
Precisely because race functions as a meta-religious discourse concerned
with the proper ordering of the world, its consequence for the unfolding
of human events cannot be overstated. So, when we have a book such as
this, that delineates for us a particular working of race that implicates the
theological project, as such, in the demonry of white supremacy, it is of
signal importance.
Having been a member of the Workgroup on Constructive Theology
for nearly 16 years and a part of the leadership for eight, I can say without
doubt that the mapping of the racial genealogy of Constructive Theology
as a project offered in this book is groundbreaking in its accuracy. The
book gives language for the greatest challenge of our time, breaking the
bondage of Christian theology and practice to white supremacy. By trac-
ing the discrete pathways by which this bondage transmits itself surrepti-
tiously through enactments of continental philosophy, it offers a significant
opportunity. We can better understand why this progressive movement
with outsize influence in both theological education and religio-cultural
movements shaped by it has at best offered but moral outrage in the face
malevolent whiteness. I would suggest that to the extent that religious
leaders committed to progressive politics who shape movements have
been influenced by the project of Constructive Theology race has been
made a sometime confounding surd for their work. This is of consequence
in our historical moment because of the stakes in this struggle against
malevolent whiteness.
The often-knee-jerk reflex of constructive theologians to focus our
attention on the politics of America in terms of issues of empire and eco-
nomics overlooks an important reality. The United States is at this histori-
cal moment one of the two most influential global actors that will shape
FOREWORD vii
humanity’s response to the climate catastrophe in which we as a species are

engulfed. Whether our internal politics will generate policy responses to
address this catastrophe or remain in a paralyzing political gridlock likely
hangs the fate of humanity. Here is where religion and race elide. To the
extent that religious people and movements shape the policies by which
we order our communal, national, and global lives they either create or
preclude the possibilities to address species level threats. I would are argue
that race, functioning as a religious discourse has mired our national poli-
tics white racial grievance. With the consequence that species level think-
ing and policy are functionally precluded. Thereby likely irrevocably set us
on a path to destruction. Malevolent Whiteness is then not an unfortunate
ideological formation, to which expressions of moral outrage are appropri-
ate. It is a world ending power. The question for Constructive Theology
in this circumstance becomes how to respond to such a power.
With the idea of Philosophy of Race, Baker begins the work of finding
a new philosophical grammar for the project of Constructive Theology. As
I have hoped to suggest this work is critically importantly. I remain
haunted by the last sequence of the film Don’t Look Up! in which the eco-
system of the planet as it exists in our epoch comes to an end. The line
shared by a character in the moments before global annihilation hang in
my memory: At least we tried. Perhaps, if taken seriously, the work to
which Baker calls us in this book will implicate Constructive Theology in
a future in which those words are spoken by none.
Chicago Theological Seminary, Chicago, IL, USA Stephen G. Ray Jr.

2022
Preface
The risk, in taking over a decade to write a book, is that so much can hap-
pen in the span of a decade that your topic and approach could be badly
dated by the time that you are finally finished. Alas, the story of “race” in
the U.S. and so many other post-colonial (in the historical if not ideologi-
cal sense) theaters around the globe is never not timely. Much has hap-
pened since I began work on a project that looked nothing like what this
book has become, but those events that were supposed to forever change
the world have in fact changed precious little. The election of Barack
Obama in the U.S.; the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement; increased
focus on police violence against Black people; new attention paid to the
legacy of the kidnapping of indigenous children and a re-education that
amounted t and mass graves; the rise of white nationalism as a potent
political project on both sides of the Atlantic; the rise of “illiberal democ-
racy” (a convenient new term for fascism, which is always at least in part a
racial project) throughout Europe and now the United States; global
attention to the plight of the Uyghurs; solidarity movements among high
profile athletes around the world, who take a knee in a symbolic stand
against racism before games—the presenting issues may change, but the
underlying problem, rarely properly named, remains the same. And per-
haps the presenting issues, in fact, have not changed, but are simply echoes
of a past that perpetually haunts the present.
ix
x PREFACE
In his classic Faces at the Bottom of the Well, Derrick Bell wrote on the
“permanence of racism.”1 There he argued—in keeping with a dominant
theme of Critical Race Theory—that racism is a permanent feature of the
United States, woven into the very fabric of all law, economics, and poli-
tics. He could have gone beyond this, noting that racism is just as equally
woven into the fabric of the entire idea of the “West,” built on the colonial
carving up of Europe, the Americas, Africa—anything and everything
European powers could conquer and loot. The reality that racism is per-
manent, that it is functionally if not historically ontological, could be dis-
couraging. It could sap the strength of any racial justice movement, any
anti-racist activity, any attempt to really change material and political con-
ditions. But for Bell it should have the opposite effect. Understanding that
no political activity of any kind will ever solve the problem of racism—
where even the very idea of “racism” perpetuates the problem, casting the
structural as merely ideational—can free one up to do anti-racist work
undaunted by the fear of failure. That the struggle is continuous means
that one does not have to strike the blow that will end racism. In the
humility of that recognition, one can then continue to strike blows.
“Continued struggle,” Bell writes, “can bring about unexpected ben-
efits and gains that in themselves justify continued endeavor. We can rec-
ognize miracles we did not plan and value them for what they are, rather
than always measure their worth by their likely contribution to our tradi-
tional goals,”2 where those goals are to finally end racial oppression.
I recently presented a paper on the significance of the permanence of
racism for doing theology at an academic conference, and—echoing a
similar experience described by philosopher George Yancy—the first ques-
tion I was asked involved “hope.” “If you’re right,” a white scholar asked,
“where can we find hope?” Such questions always feel more like accusa-
tions than questions, and in response to such an accusation, George Yancy
replied, “Why do you want hope?”3 For Yancy, this question turned the
accusation back on the accuser. The demand that he supply white people
with hope was an unfunded mandate made in bad faith to deflect from the
real and pressing concerns he had expressed. But, taken at face value, that
1
Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic
Books, 1992).
2
Ibid., 199.
3
George Yancy, Look, a White!: Philosophical Essays on Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2012), 154.
PREFACE xi
question, “Why do you want hope?”, is an important one. Hope buoys

the soul, keeping it afloat in a turbulent sea. Given the necessity of hope,
then, if racism is indeed permanent, where can one find hope? For Bell,
such hope is found in the struggle, not its outcome. The outcome may be
out of our hands, but in the struggle we can find miracles.
In his gracious forward, Stephen G. Ray, Jr. describes this book as “an
invitation,” and that’s exactly what it is. It is an invitation to reimagine
theological method, and in doing so, to imagine new ways of doing theol-
ogy in light of this permanence of racism. In that invitation, and in the
doing of theology, I find some hope. I find hope for theology, in that
Constructive Theology—done differently—may well have a future (which
I do not take for granted), and I find hope that a reimagined theology that
has and deserves to have a future can do some good in the world. Who
knows, perhaps such a theology, such a new theological imagination, can
even manage to see a few miracles?
Glen Ellyn, IL Christopher M. Baker

2022
Abstract
A twofold intervention in theological method, Toward a Counternarrative

Theology of Race and Whiteness argues that, given the centrality of race to
the construction of the modern world, Constructive Theology needs to
take “race” and “whiteness” as primary theological problems, and, in
doing so, turn away from philosophic resources emerging out of German
Transcendental Idealism (which are implicitly and sometimes explicitly
white supremacist) and toward resources from Philosophy of Race. It
develops a genealogy of race that understands “whiteness” as a kind of
secular soteriology, develops a counternarrative theological method
informed by resources from Philosophy of Race, then deploys that method
to read science fiction cinema and superhero stories as culture, racial, and
theological documents that can be critically engaged and redeployed as
counternarratives to dominant racial narratives.
xiii
Contents
1 Introduction 1
I 1
II 2
III 4
IV 5
References 10
2 Constructive Theology and Philosophy of Race, Part I 13

Introduction 13
Genealogy of “Race” and “Whiteness” 20
Falguni A. Sheth and the “Technology of Race” 31
Linda Martín Alcoff and the Future of Whiteness 40
References 48
3 Constructive Theology and Philosophy of Race, Part II 51

Introduction 51
George Yancy: Rendering “Whiteness” Visible 52
Charles W. Mills and White Epistemological Ignorance 67
Emmanuel Chuckwudi Eze and “Vernacular Rationality” 78
References 86
4 Race, Whiteness, and Science Fiction Cinema 89

Introduction 89
Theological Method and Film 91
xv
xvi Contents
Racialization and Representation in American Science Fiction

Cinema: Motifs of “Structured Absence,” “Bad Blood,” and
Post-Racial Eugenics 104
“Structured Absence”: When Worlds Collide and 2001: A
Space Odyssey 105
“Bad Blood”: The Birth of a Nation 108
Post-Racial Eugenics: Blade Runner and Gattaca 111
Conclusion 121
References 123
5 Race, Whiteness, and Superhero Stories125

Introduction 125
Scott McCloud’s Hermeneutic of Comics 129
Superheroes: Grant Morrison’s Supergods 134
Dan Hassler-Forest: Superheroes and Neoliberalism 136
Aldo J. Regaldo: Superheroes and Modernity 142
Adilifu Nama: Black Superheroes and Counternarrative
Possibilities 145
White Savior Motifs 149
“How Hard Is It for a White Man to Enter the Kingdom of
Wakanda?”: Black Panther, Afrofuturism, and the Subversion
of the White Savior Motif 154
References 161
6 Conclusion165
II 167
III 173
References 175
Bibliography177
Index187
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
I
In one of his many descriptions of the atrocities that he witnessed in
Hispaniola, Bartolomé de Las Casas depicts a scene that he attributes to
bloodlust, a “pleasure” found “in inventing all kinds of odd cruelties, the
more cruel the better, with which to spill human blood.”1 In this scene,
Spanish invaders of a “New World” that was decidedly not new, “built a
long gibbet, low enough for the toes to touch the ground and prevent
strangling, and hanged thirteen [natives] at a time to honor Christ Our
Savior and the twelve Apostles.”2 While these people, rounded up for
summary execution for the crime of existing, were “still alive and
hanging,”3 they were then hacked with swords and, still breathing,
wrapped in straw and burned alive.
Las Casas ascribes this act to cruelty, and cruel it certainly was. But
reading it I cannot help but see it also as a kind of liturgical act, an explicit
act of religious devotion. Las Casas himself is explicit about the religious
motivations of the Christian invaders, depicting Christopher Columbus,
1
David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 72.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
C. M. Baker, Toward a Counternarrative Theology of Race and
Whiteness, Radical Theologies and Philosophies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99343-6_1
2 C. M. BAKER
for instance, as “a most jealous keeper of the honor of God,”4 a missionary

“eager to convert the peoples and to see the seed and faith of Jesus Christ
spread everywhere.”5 While the motivations for Spanish conquest may
have been mixed, with a lust for gold and territory a significant factor,
there is no denying either the Christian identity of these Spaniards or the
religious motivations of Columbus himself, whom Tzvetan Todorov
describes as equal parts “evangelizer” and “colonizer”6 who “would prefer
the rough garment of a monk”7 to the trappings of wealth. In such a con-
text, Christian faith is indistinguishable from colonization, and acts moti-
vated by cruelty and bloodlust are indistinguishable from acts of prayer
and devotion. These Christian invaders may have been appalled by tales of
human sacrifice ascribed to the faith of the indigenous populations they
destroyed, but their practice of their own faith required bloodletting and
burnt offerings. How else can you describe the act of burning people alive
“to honor Christ Our Savior and the twelve Apostles” except as a burnt
offering to a Christian god?
II
I learned I was white when I was sixteen. It was not the first time I learned
I was white, but part of being white in a supposedly “colorblind” post-
racial moment in which good white liberals in your suburb whisper race
rather than speak it aloud is that you don’t have to know you’re white.
You don’t have to remember that you are white. You can learn it again and
again and again, and forget it just as many times. When you are surrounded
by whiteness, its very ubiquity hides it from those who don’t want to see
it. As the song says, “No one notices the contrast of white on white.”8 At
least, no one who isn’t looking for it.
I learned I was white when I was in a car alone with a driving instructor.
As he taught me how to drive, he also taught me that I was white by invit-
ing me into the conspiracy of whiteness in the form of unrelenting racist
jokes. If whiteness whispers in public, in private it is screamed aloud
4
Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard
Howard (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 12.
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid., 26.
7
Ibid., 9.
8
Counting Crows, “Round Here,” from August and Everything After, Geffen
Records, 1993.
1 INTRODUCTION 3
(though the supposedly “quiet” part is being said louder and louder as
post-racial colorblindness in the U.S. gives way to resurgent white nation-
alism). Sociologist Joe R. Feagin makes a distinction between the social
“frontstage” and the social “backstage,”9 the public and private. In the
“frontstage,” in public settings, white people feel the need to censor our-
selves, to say only what is socially acceptable. But in the “backstage,” in
smaller groups, there is more freedom to shift from whispering race to
speaking it louder and louder. There is more freedom to effectively out
oneself as racist, and to do so by inviting others into that racism, and thus
into that conspiracy, whiteness.
And so my driving instructor told his jokes. And so I heard them. And
so I was expected to laugh at them, accepting his invitation into the very
whiteness into which I was born. But I did not laugh. Not because I was
good or noble, much less authentically anti-racist, but rather because I was
naïve. I was so unaware of my own whiteness that I was unprepared to
have it shown to me in such an overt, undeniable form.
I do not remember what happened next. I know that I did not laugh. I
know that my failure to laugh created discomfort. I know that I men-
tioned that one of my best friends was Black—a fact that surely should
have shown me my whiteness if I’d cared to see it. I know that he took me
home in silence. I know that I never saw him again. And I know that I
took my confusion and my increasing anger with me to church, a white
mainline Protestant church, where I shared it with my youth pastor. The
more I shared the angrier I became. I had uncovered a scandal, and one
that someone should do something about. And in my anger, in my willful
ignorance masquerading as moral courage, I said several of those four-
letter words one dare not say in such a holy space. There the conversation
changed, and I was shown my whiteness again, in a different way.
“You can’t say those words in church,” he said. “I don’t care what hap-
pened, you simply cannot say those words in church.”
There it was. There was the outrage. There was the scandal. The sacred
space had been defiled not by the story but by the way in which it was told.
And so I was white again, in a sacred space so white that it did not know
it was white any more than I had known I was white. For being white, for
9
Joe R. Feagin, The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-
Framing, 2nd ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 2013), 122–124.
4 C. M. BAKER
an institution no less than a person, is not having to know you are white.
It is getting to forget the realities of race, even and especially if such stra-
tegic “forgetting” is merely performative.
III
When I was still in congregational ministry, I used to tell variations of that
story to white mainline Protestant churches. Invariably, in each congrega-
tion, while there was a general consensus that whatever is meant by “rac-
ism” is bad and wrong, white congregants—like my youth pastor so many
years before—were much more interested in how I told the story than
they were in the content of the story itself. “But there really are words you
can’t say in church,” they would respond, anecdotally confirming that the
profanity of choice four-letter words is more profane than the profaning of
Black bodies and Black dignity.
This points to a moral problem, a problem in the relationship between
whiteness and sin-talk, in which in what one might call the Great Chain of
Sinning, some sins are privileged over others, and that privileging of sin is
decidedly disordered. Relatedly, it also points to a narrative problem.
Within the self-understanding of whiteness, “white” is unconsciously
associated with the good, the pure, the righteous, the holy. The white self-
understanding, then, is an understanding of the good and innocent self,
and the narrative of white institutions—like these white churches—is a
narrative of the unfolding of righteousness in the world.
Yet, as Shannon Sullivan points out,10 there is no “good” way to be
white, and the drive to be seen as “good” is an obstacle to effectively con-
testing and combating racism. To realize this is to be compelled to contest
the narrative of innocence at the very heart of whiteness. In keeping with
a Tillichian understanding of the moral threat of nonbeing, in which the
possibility of moral failing and concurrent condemnation threatens one’s
very self,11 triggering the various deflections that characterize “white
10
Shannon Sullivan, Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2014).
11
Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1952), 51–54.
1 INTRODUCTION 5
fragility.”12 In this case, it triggers a procedural deflection. Where the con-

cern about racism is expressed in an inappropriate way, it may be de facto
dismissed, a form of what Lewis R. Gordon calls “weak institutional bad
faith,”13 which is made manifest in “group denial.”14 Often that “group
denial” is a denial of racism and white complicity altogether. Here, rather,
it is a denial of the importance of racism, making it in effect a secondary
or tertiary priority, lagging far behind the sin of cussing in church.
What, then, might be the response of these congregations to the first
story here, the story of the imposition of Christianity on the Americas,
wherein evangelism and colonization are co-constituted, working together
as part of the same project? More to the point, what might their response
be to the reality that as white churches, they are produced by, participate
in, and benefit from this colonial-religious project?15
IV
Given Christian complicity in the formation of “race” and “whiteness,”
and—as I will argue in Chap. 2—the nature of “whiteness” as a theologi-
cal category, it is imperative to treat “race” and whiteness” not just as
theological problems, but as primary theological problems. Over the past
couple of decades, there has been an emerging body of theological litera-
ture addressing whiteness, and as an addition to that emerging body, I
propose a twofold methodological intervention. Firstly, there is a need for
constructive theological engagements with “race” and “whiteness” to
12
Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2018). DiAngelo’s work itself can be facile and even counterproduc-
tive, an example of performative book club antiracism that capitalizes (literally and quite
handsomely) on the white need to feel better about feeling bad about systemic racism. But
the phrase “white fragility” itself has pithily captured a very real dynamic of whiteness.
13
Lewis R. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books,
1999), 45.
14
Ibid., 48.
15
This connection between whiteness and Christianity, and thus between white supremacy
and Christian supremacy, is helpfully narrated by Jeannine Hill Fletcher in The Sin of White
Supremacy: Christianity, Racism, and Religious Diversity in America (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis
Books, 2017). Shifting from the U.S. to Europe, Talal Asad makes a similar connection in
Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2003). In both cases, whiteness (or, for Asad, Europeanness, though that amounts to
the same thing) is a product of Christianity, and the claims to the supremacy of the suppos-
edly secular identity (“white” or “European”) emerge out of claims to Christian supremacy.
6 C. M. BAKER
draw from new philosophical resources, resources from the emerging field
of Philosophy of Race (or Critical Philosophy of Race16). Constructive
Theology is a conversational discipline, and one that often finds itself in
conversation with philosophy. Yet too often it uncritically borrows from
philosophical sources and traditions—from German Transcendental
Idealism through Phenomenology and Existentialism to Continental
Hermeneutics—that are steeped in racism from their very beginnings.
Secondly, there is a need for constructive theological engagements with
“race” and “whiteness” to attend to narrative, both by understanding the
unfolding of “race” and “whiteness” as narratives themselves and by criti-
cally and constructively engaging cultural narratives such as science fiction
cinema and superhero stories as narrative that either reinforce or subvert
dominant narratives of “race” and “whiteness.”
This volume will describe, not define, “race” and “whiteness.” Each are
related ideational categories connected to but not limited to social, politi-
cal, and economic practices that unjustly advantage some (those con-
structed and categorized as “white”) at the expense of everyone else.
These ideas and practices have particular histories, varying from theater to
theater, ever changing throughout time and place. Their very fluidity
makes it both impossible and counterproductive to define them, as frus-
trating as a lack of definition may be. They are, however, intimately related
to each other, such that at least in Europe and the Americas they cannot
be neatly disentangled.
Both “race” and “whiteness” point to processes. One (both on an indi-
vidual and group level) is made “white.” By contrast, one (both on an
individual and group level) is racialized, is made raced. These processes
unfold in countless ways within countless contexts, and the analyses of
them vary from author to author. While this construction of “race” and
“whiteness” is often treated primarily as a socio-political project, it is also
and especially a narrative project, and one that both projects and reflects,
both constructing reality and mirroring and reinforcing that reality. As
16
Robert Bernasconi proposes using “Critical Philosophy of Race” rather than “Philosophy
of Race” as a way to highlight the “critical” nature of Philosophy of Race. See Robert
Bernasconi, “Critical Philosophy of Race and Philosophical Historiography,” in The
Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race, ed. Paul C. Taylor, Linda Martín Alcoff, and
Luvell Anderson (New York: Routledge, 2018), 3. I use “Philosophy of Race” throughout
this book because that is still the consensus terminology.
1 INTRODUCTION 7
Jane H. Hill17 notes, “whiteness” is so deep as to be embedded in every-

day language, helping to shape the very contours of thought. It is likewise,
as Patricia A. Williams18 observes, buried deep within cultural narratives,
as metaphorical racial language is embedded within film and television,
shaping the public imagination. Hence, the necessity of engaging “race”
and “whiteness” as narratives supported by narratives, requiring a narra-
tive approach that reads popular forms of storytelling, like science fiction
and superhero stories, as both racial and theological documents.
Within this emerging body of theological engagements with “race” and
“whiteness,” there have been a number of promising approaches. Among
white feminist theologians, for instance Jennifer Harvey’s work stands
out. Working principally as a theological ethicist with a pragmatic bent,
she has made a compelling case for the moral necessity of reparations,19
used this argument for material reparations to critique the white liberal
longing for a “reconciliation” that requires far too little from white
people,20 and even offered a helpful guide for how to address racism by
raising anti-racist white children.21 But while her work is a powerful prag-
matic contribution, it is less interested in the philosophic foundations of
whiteness. This is not a limitation, but it does place her work soundly
within Christian social ethics informed by the social sciences rather than
constructive theology.
Within recent Womanist theology, Kelly Brown Douglas’ Stand Your
Ground22 stands out as a work interested in “social-cultural and religious
narratives”23 going back to the very formation of the United States that
give rise to and undergird a “stand-your-ground culture” that “has
17
Jane H. Hill, The Everyday Language of White Racism (Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2008).
18
Patricia J. Williams, Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1997), 28–29.
19
Jennifer Harvey, Whiteness and Morality: Pursuing Racial Justice Through Reparations
and Sovereignty (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
20
Jennifer Harvey, Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation
(Grand Rapids and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014).
21
Jennifer Harvey, Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust
America (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2018).
22
Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Maryknoll,
NY: Orbis Books, 2015).
23
Ibid., xiii.
8 C. M. BAKER
produced and sustained slavery, Black Codes, Jim Crow, lynching, and
other forms of racialized violence against black bodies.”24 Taking the mur-
der of Trayvon Martin as a starting point, she is able to weave together
both a narrative racial history of the United States as built an “Anglo-
Saxon myth” of exceptionalism and a constructive theology that examines
the meaning of God in the midst of this violence against Black bodies as
symbolized in Trayvon Martin’s murder. Further, in her examination of
these “social-cultural and religious narratives” that have shaped racial his-
tory in the U.S., she exposes this “Anglo-Saxon myth” as a tool for the
construction of whiteness, which is thus in turn a kind of mythic narrative
that functions to create a “stand-your-ground” culture that is hostile to
Black life.
This focus on narrative, and on the narrative nature of the construction
of “whiteness,” is a powerful contribution. But she is more interested in
the historic rather than philosophic roots of “whiteness,” and while she
reads history in narrative ways that inform the present moment, she is not
interested in reading popular cultural documents like films and television
shows as theological documents that shape the public imagination.
Both J. Kameron Carter25 and Ellen T. Armour26 engage elements of
the philosophical trajectory from German Transcendental Idealism
through Phenomenology and Existentialism to Continental Hermeneutics
in addressing race, Carter via a sustained engagement with and critique of
Kant, and Armour via a deployment of Derridean deconstruction. Yet
Carter’s engagement with Kant remains at the level of critique, and a cri-
tique that models a Radical Orthodoxy-informed treatment of “modern”
philosophers as failed theologians, and Armour’s deployment of Derrida
demonstrates my contention that approaches to “race” that are dependent
on Continental Philosophy are minimally an awkward fit, and that it would
be better to look elsewhere for philosophic resources.
Ibid.
24
J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
25
26
Ellen T. Armour, Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and the Problem of Difference:
Subverting the Race/Gender Divide (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1999).
1 INTRODUCTION 9
Finally, with a more Postliberal approach, theologians Brian Bantum27

and Willie James Jennings28 are able to deploy a narrative theological
method that uses story to both interrogate Christian theological complic-
ity in the construction of “race” and offer constructive resources for build-
ing a theology that better understands both Christianity and humanity.
Christian theology properly understood, much like George D. Kelsey29
argued in the middle of the twentieth century, provides a potent counter-
narrative to the narrative of “race.” Yet this kind of project is dependent,
at least implicitly, on the possibility of getting Christianity right. Of find-
ing some kind of innocent expression of Christianity, whether in the past
or in the future, that can address and redress the harms done by the very
construction of “race” and “whiteness” that Christianity is complicit in.
While this may or may not be a viable project, it cannot be my project
precisely because of the association between “whiteness” and innocence.
An attempt to appeal—even implicitly—to some kind of innocent
Christianity—even only conceptually—risks reinforcing the very whiteness
that must be dismantled.
This, then, leaves an opening for the kind of methodological interven-
tion I am proposing. There is indeed a need to engage the possibilities that
Philosophy of Race has for informing constructive theological approaches
to “race” and “whiteness,” serving as a corrective to the influence of racist
philosophies on constructive theology. There is likewise an opening,
within the context of understanding the construction of “race” and
“whiteness” themselves as narratives that shape the imagination, to engage
the kinds of narratives found in science fiction cinema and superhero sto-
ries, and how they can either reinforce or subvert dominant racial
narratives.
In Chap. 2, I will develop my argument that those philosophies that
most often inform Constructive Theology—from German Transcendental
Hermeneutics—are built on an inherently racist foundation. That very
foundation needs to be replaced if Constructive Theology is to be able to
27
Brian Bantum, Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity (Waco,
TX: Baylor University Press, 2010) and Brian Bantum, The Death of Race: Building a New
Christianity in a Racial World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016).
28
Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010).
29
George D. Kelsey, Racism and the Christian Understanding of Man (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1965).
10 C. M. BAKER
responsibly address “race” and “whiteness.” Then I will offer a genealogy

of “race” and “whiteness,” before turning to Falguni A. Sheth and Linda
Martín Alcoff as examples of philosophers whose work can better provide
resources for Constructive Theology.
In Chap. 3, building on Chap. 2, I will examine “whiteness” as an epis-
temological formation, a mode of knowing, un-knowing, and mis-knowing
that crafts a historical, political, racial narrative that reinforces its own
power. Continuing to model how Philosophy of Race provides a better
foundation for Constructive Theology, I will use George Yancy to render
this “whiteness” visible, Charles W. Mills to critically examine it as a kind
of bad faith epistemological ignorance, and Emmanuel Chuckwudi Eze to
begin to offer alternative ways to understand the acts of reasoning and
knowing.
In Chap. 4, drawing on the resources from Philosophy of Race exam-
ined in Chaps. 2 and 3, I will develop and deploy a theological method for
reading movies—specifically science fiction cinema—as cultural docu-
ments with significant implications for constructing and understanding
“race” and “whiteness,” bringing to the fore a relationship between sym-
bol and narrative that can either reinforce or subvert dominant racial nar-
ratives. I will then use Adilifu Nama to read a variety of films in this way.
Finally, in Chap. 5, I will turn my attention to the most dominant cul-
tural narratives today: superhero stories. I will examine what it is about
these stories that has captured the imagination for so long, developing a
hermeneutic of comics informed by Scott McLeod, then turning to Grant
Morrison, Dan Hassler-Forest, and Aldo J. Regaldo to examine the mean-
ings of superheroes and their stories. Then I will use Adilifu Nama again,
this time to examine race and superheroes, before examining the ways in
which Marvel’s Black Panther serves as an example of a counternarrative
that subvert both dominant racial narratives and white savior motifs.
reFerences
Armour, Ellen T. Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and the Problem of Difference:
Subverting the Race/Gender Divide. Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1999.
Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003.
Bantum, Brian. Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity.
Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010.
1 INTRODUCTION 11
———. The Death of Race: Building a New Christianity in a Racial World.

Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016.
Bernasconi, Robert. “Critical Philosophy of Race and Philosophical
Historiography,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race, ed. Paul
C. Taylor, Linda Martín Alcoff, and Luvell Anderson. New York:
Routledge, 2018.
Carter, J. Kameron. Race: A Theological Account. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008.
DiAngelo, Robin. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About
Racism. Boston: Beacon Press, 2018.
Douglas, Kelly Brown. Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God.
Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015.
Feagin, Joe R. The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-
Framing, 2nd ed. New York and London: Routledge, 2013.
Fletcher, Jeannine Hill. The Sin of White Supremacy: Christianity, Racism, and
Religious Diversity in America. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2017.
Gordon, Lewis R. Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Amherst, NY: Humanity
Books, 1999.
Harvey, Jennifer. Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial
Reconciliation. Grand Rapids and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing
Company, 2014.
———. Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America.
Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2018.
———. Whiteness and Morality: Pursuing Racial Justice Through Reparations and
Sovereignty. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Hill, Jane H. The Everyday Language of White Racism. Malden, MA and Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.
Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of
Race. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010.
Kelsey, George D. Racism and the Christian Understanding of Man. New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965.
Stannard, David E. American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Sullivan, Shannon. Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-
Racism. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2014.
Tillich, Paul. The Courage to Be. New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1952.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans.
Richard Howard. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.
Williams, Patricia J. Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997.
CHAPTER 2
Constructive Theology and Philosophy

of Race, Part I
Introduction
Constructive Theology is an inherently correlational discipline, in that it
recognizes both that the theology is not just the only mode of inquiry and
analysis, and that it depends on input from other disciplines, other
approaches to that ephemeral “truth” that may simply be another word
among words invented to contain the uncontainable.
More specifically, Constructive Theology is correlational, and in con-
versation with philosophy. While all manner of disciplines can be brought
into fruitful conversation with theology, philosophy, in the broadest sense,
shares with theology a concern about the ontological structures of reality,
while recognizing that ontology is always constructed, always historically
and contextually situated, and not an ahistorical given. In this sense, the
broadest account of philosophy—a mode of inquiry and analysis not sim-
ply limited to bodies of literature that get lumped together under the
disciplinary category “philosophy”—helps establish an epistemological
framework in which theologies can be either legible or illegible. Where for
Augustine that might have been a kind of Platonism and for Aquinas a
kind of Aristotelianism, for Constructive Theologians today, it is often
various kinds of Continental Hermeneutics, which emerge out of the
movement from German Transcendental Idealism to and through
European Existentialism and Phenomenology.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 13

Switzerland AG 2022
C. M. Baker, Toward a Counternarrative Theology of Race and
Whiteness, Radical Theologies and Philosophies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99343-6_2
14 C. M. BAKER
However, given the history and commitments of those trajectories of

philosophy, it is questionable (at best!) that a theology that aims to respon-
sibly address “race” and “whiteness” as theological constructs can fruit-
fully converse with and draw from such philosophical resources. When
doing theology, philosophical resources—like all other resources that one
draws from in interdisciplinary work—may be viewed as tools. For any
given project, some tools may be helpful, while other tools may be ill-
fitting or even harmful. When considering whether or not a tool is helpful,
one must ask many questions, perhaps the most important of which is,
“What assumptions get smuggled in when uses this tool?”
Simply put, those trajectories of philosophy that emerge out of the
movement from German Transcendental Idealism through Phenomenology
and Existentialism to Continental Hermeneutics—the progeny of Kant
and Hegel—are ill-fitting tools, harmful tools. Theologians—especially
white theologians—who wish to deal responsibly with “race” and “white-
ness,” who wish to both address and redress the harms done by the con-
struction of these categories as Christian theological categories, must put
them down and pick up other tools, other philosophers and philosophies
from outside that lineage.
Part of this is due to the nature of philosophy as a professional academic
discipline, which is largely and not accidentally comprised of white men.
While race and gender representation are issues in every academic disci-
pline, philosophy has lagged far behind other disciplines in including other
races and gender, remaining largely the province of white men. This is so
stark that it cannot be an accident, but rather is rooted in the very conceits
of the discipline itself. As Robert Bernasconi notes, philosophy discipli-
narily concerns itself with arguments that become conveniently divorced
both from the persons making them and the broader context in which
they are made. “The result” of this conceit, he argues, “is a streamlined
version of the history of philosophy … in which the name of a philosopher
is shorthand not for what he or she actually said but for the best argu-
ments that can be constructed for the position.”1 This pushes the question
of “race” and “whiteness” to the side, hedging against the possibility of
critically engaging what philosophers actually said and wrote about “race”
and “whiteness,” and thus methodologically propping up the ongoing
privilege of the white men who have always dominated the discipline. This
1
Robert Bernasconi, “Introduction,” in Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy, ed.
Robert Bernasconi with Sybol Cook (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), 2.
2 CONSTRUCTIVE THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY OF RACE, PART I 15
“streamlined history,” too, helps mask the extent to which racism perme-
ates the very foundations of the discipline.
Bernasconi’s concern above was with the fact that Kantians, for instance,
refuse to acknowledge Kant’s racism and the implications that might have
for the rest of his philosophy. This is a pressing question because, as
Emmanuel Chuckwudi Eze notes, “race” (under the headings of “anthro-
pology” and “physical geography”) was not a mere peripheral concern for
Kant. While philosophy departments today largely concern themselves
with Kant’s “pure” and “practical” reason, throughout his own teaching
career Kant offered more courses concerned with “race” than he did in
logic, metaphysics, or moral philosophy.2 “Race” was at the very center of
his thinking, and his thinking on “race” was both highly racist and integral
with all other aspects of his thinking.
This chapter will argue that whatever else “race” is, it is a category of
inclusion and exclusion. Inclusion into or exclusion from the body politic,
or even humanity3 itself. At the heart of this, in a Kantian framework, is
the question of personhood, and it is here that his thinking on race has
implications for the unfolding of his political philosophy. As Eze notes, for
Kant—following Descartes—reason, rational self-experience and self-
reflection, is what makes a person a person.4 This, thus, is what makes one
a moral agent and gives one moral standing, as the Kantian Categorical
Imperative requires one to be a rational moral agent in order to have
moral standing. This, further, is true not only of individuals, but also of
groups. That is, it is not just a matter of personhood, but a matter of
peoplehood. But while the Kantian Categorical Imperative is viewed as
universal, a deontological basis for liberalism that supplants a consequen-
tialist liberalism,5 the question of personhood, connected with the ques-
tion of who is rational and who is not, draws tight the racial boundaries of
this supposedly universal political ethic.
2
Emmanuel Chuckwudi Eze, ed. Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Malden, MA:
Blackwell Publishing, 1997), 2.
3
The category of humanity here is in and of itself a category of inclusion and exclusion,
conveying personhood and thus creating a self with moral standing, juxtaposed against a
natural world that lacks such standing. This has significant implications for issues of environ-
mental racism that are pressing but beyond the scope of this work.
4
Emmanuel Chuckwudi Eze, Achieving Our Humanity: The Idea of the Postracial Future
(New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 87.
5
Charles W. Mills, “Kant’s Untermenschen,” in Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy,
ed. Andrew Valls (Ithica and London: Cornell University Press, 2005), 172.
16 C. M. BAKER
To challenge a people’s rationality is to challenge their personhood,

and to challenge their personhood is to challenge their moral standing. A
universal ethic would thus exclude them, and thus could remain silent on
the question of the moral value of any acts done to them by more properly
reasoning peoples, at least de facto justifying any number of oppressive
practices. This denial of moral standing, in the form of questioning or
denying altogether the rationality of whole peoples—in and of itself on the
grounds of race—is a form of racialization. And Kant’s writings on race
and especially hierarchical racial differences, at least flirts with such a denial
of personhood. In his writings on “The Negroes of Africa,” for instance,
Kant—in conversation with Hume—dismisses their entire culture, the
entirety of their thought, their religion, their “national feeling” as mere
“trifling.”6 Not a single example of that race, in Kant’s view, has ever
accomplished anything in art or science, or has demonstrated “any other
praiseworthy quality.”7 On these grounds Kant, anticipating the argu-
ments used later in the Antebellum South, justifies slavery: “The Negro
can be disciplined and cultivated, but is never genuinely civilized. He falls
of his own accord into savagery.” They “cannot govern themselves,” and
“thus serve only for slaves.”8
Hegel’s racism, however, makes Kant’s look almost quaint. While it
may be impolitic to say that Hegel was a proto-Nazi, it is not entirely inac-
curate. Hegel’s philosophy of history is teleological, the story of the
unfolding of Reason, the Divine Being, the Infinite Energy of the world,
sometimes going by the name Geist, “Spirit.”9 History is the result of the
birth, growth, maturation of this spirit of reason that both permeates and
transcends natural history. The question of a people –whether under the
heading of “nation” or “race,” where the two are often used interchange-
ably—is a question of history, and the question of history is a question of
spirit. What is the “spirit” of these people? How do they fit within history?
Specifically, within a history that is the unfolding of this larger Geist, this
larger “Spirit” that is both the meaning and direction of history? Are these
peoples part of the unfolding of history, or are they rightly swept aside by
history?
6
Eze, Race and the Enlightenment, 55.
7
Ibid.
8
Mills, “Kant’s Untermenschen,” 174.
9
C.J. Friedrich, “Introduction to the Dover Edition” of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, INC., 1956), 9.
In The Philosophy of History, Hegel lays out this teleological unfolding

of history—that is, the unfolding of the life of the “Spirit”—in four pro-
gressive developmental stages, each giving way to the next. This story
begins in “The Oriental World,” typified by China, India, and Persia.
While Hegel begins here because, in his read, it is “oldest”,10 this also
represents an immaturity,11 a kind of childhood of the Spirit that naturally
gives way to the rise of the “Greek World.” This Greek World in turn gives
way to the “Roman World,” which finally gives way to the “German
World,” with German people standing as the culmination of this unfold-
ing of the life and maturation of the Spirit. In this sense, reading Hegel as
offering a historical teleology, Germans are the very culmination of the
purpose of history, and history finds its fulfillment in them. This, in addi-
tion to sounding remarkably like a Nazi reading of history, also sounds
remarkably like the syllabus of many an Intro to Philosophy class, if such a
class even bothers to touch on Asian and Near Eastern philosophy at all.12
This is not merely a matter of representation in a curriculum, though
Bryan W. Van Norden rightly notes the disciplinary impoverishment
brought about by this not-accidentally-racist approach to the field.13 It is
in a very literal sense explicit justification for genocide. Where history is
teleological, purposive, progressive, those peoples who have been left
behind or stand in the way of such history must be swept aside. Faced with
genocide in the Americas, for instance, Hegel argues that the “degenera-
tion” of North American tribes “indicates that they do not have the
strength to join the independent North American states.”14 “Culturally
inferior nations such as these are gradually eroded through contact with
more advanced nations,”15 Hegel notes, in a detached, clinical way. It has
no consequence worth attending to. It is simply a fact of history. The only
10
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Mineola, NY:
Dover Publications, INC., 1956), 116.
11
Because as “oldest,” the philosophies of “The Oriental World” have no ongoing devel-
opment, no future, but have rather been superseded by subsequent philosophies. They have
only a past, a prehistory, and not a present much less a future.
12
Peter K. J. Park makes this argument in Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy:
Racism in the Formation of the Philosophic Canon, 1780-1830 (Albany, NY: State University
of New York Press, 2013). There he notes that the very formation of the academic discipline
“philosophy” depends on the denigration and exclusion of African and Asian philosophies.
13
Bryan W. Van Norden, Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2017).
14
15
Ibid.
18 C. M. BAKER
available options are thus cultural genocide or literal genocide. History, it

seems, does not care which.
Is it any wonder, then, that such a lineage can produce literal Nazis like
Heidegger?16 And is it any wonder that a discipline that tries desperately to
disentangle the person from the position, or even the position from the
position (as the true “Kantianism” or true “Hegelianism” becomes the
best, most charitable description of a set of positions that can somehow be
connected to the writings of Kant or Hegel), can minimize Heidegger’s
Nazism when borrowing from him?
Critically interrogating the legacy of German Transcendental Idealism,
its influence on Existentialism and Phenomenology, and the extent to
which the Continental Hermeneutics on which so much of Constructive
Theology depends, is both important and necessary. But one need not
turn to Kant and Hegel to tell the story of racism at the foundations of
European and Euro-American philosophies. Instead of beginning in
Germany with Kant, one could just as easily begin in France with Descartes
or in England with Hume. The trajectory that emerges from Kant and
Hegel is distinctly but not uniquely defiled. There is no “innocent”
European or Euro-American philosophy to which a responsible
Constructive Theologian may turn to for help. Further, it would be a mis-
take to toss aside whole philosophic lineages based on a genetic fallacy.
Works take on a life of their own as they are read and re-read and re-read
again, interpreted, re-interpreted, and re-interpreted again. I may take
issue with the disciplinary attempt to turn “Kant” and “Hegel” into the
names for the best possible arguments that can be used to support and
modify aspects of their philosophies, but that doesn’t mean that the
approach is wholly invalid. But it is worth beginning here precisely
because of how much of Kant and Hegel linger not just in the field of
16
Despite attempts to sanitize his legacy, Heidegger was in fact a Nazi. Really a Nazi. Not
just for strategic reasons of professional advancement, thought that would be bad enough,
but also ideologically, especially with respect to antisemitism. His “black notebooks” revealed
this in ways that should put the matter to bed. There is a growing body of literature argu-
ing—in part because of these “black notebooks”—that antisemitism was not just incidental
to Heidegger’s thought, but rather a central feature of it. These include but are not limited
to Jean-Luc Nancy, The Banality of Heidegger, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2017); Donatella Di Cesare, Heidegger and the Jews: The Black Notebooks,
trans. Murtha Baca (Cambridge, UK and Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2018); and Adam
Knowles, Heidegger’s Fascist Affinities: A Politics of Silence (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2019).
philosophy—which is disciplinarily disinclined to grapple honestly with

this legacy of explicit racism—but also because of how much they linger in
that lineage of Liberal Theology which in part gives rise to Constructive
Theology. Can one make sense of Schleiermacher without understanding
Kant? Can one make sense of Feuerbach, or of Process Theology, without
understanding Hegel? And the influence goes in more than one direction,
as Hegel’s philosophy of history follows roughly the same pattern as so
many Christian “salvation histories,” complete with matching superses-
sionisms. This historical soteriology, at once racial and religious, is not an
accident. As we shall see, “religion” can in fact be a “racial” category. The
very idea of Europe, and later the United States, is founded among other
things on the racialization of religion. This would not be news to Kant,
whose criticism of Africans included a strong and essentialist critique of
African religions, which were not only “trifling”—a designator that within
his understanding of the “feeling” of a people renders them subhuman—
but “idolatrous.”17 Nor is it news to anyone who understands the twin
meanings of 1492, in which outward European expansion is concurrent
with the purging of the Iberian Peninsula of both Jews and Muslims.
None of this means that good resources cannot be found in philoso-
phies that emerge out of this movement from German Transcendental
Hermeneutics, even if it isn’t an accident that this lineage led to a Nazi like
Heidegger, without whom—as John D. Caputo notes—the story of
hermeneutics cannot be told.18 Nor does it mean that anything that
touches Heidegger is somehow infected by his Nazism. Among many
great acts of interpretive violence, such a position would erase the
Jewishness of Husserl and Arendt. But it does mean that such philosophies
are rarely well equipped to deal with “race” and “whiteness” without con-
siderable modification. Ricouer’s account of evil, for instance, can be made
to apply to matters of “race” and “whiteness.” Indeed, in my own approach
the “race” and “whiteness,” I often put his understanding of the relation-
ship between symbol and narrative to use.19 But there are other, better
sources from philosophers who are not white, who are not as dependent
17
18
John D. Caputo, Hermeneutics: Facts and Interpretation in the Age of Information
(London: Pelican Books, 2018), 23.
19
I owe at least as great a debt to Stephen G. Ray Jr.’s Do Not Harm: Social Sin and
Christian Responsibility (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2003).
20 C. M. BAKER
on the philosophical lineage critiqued above, and who explicitly and criti-
cally address “race” and “whiteness.” Drawing from them contests “white-
ness” more efficiently and effectively on multiple levels.
In this chapter and the next, I will examine the ways in which attention
to Philosophy of Race can help provide a surer foundation for any theol-
ogy that aims to responsibly engage “race” and “whiteness.” By
“Philosophy of Race,” I mean—following Naomi Zack—that subfield of
philosophy that “has primarily emerged out of African American philoso-
phy” but that also reflects “the existence of other nonwhite groups in the
United States and throughout the world,” and that “calls for a shared
discourse about the plurality of racial and ethnic injustices endured and
resisted.”20 Philosophy of Race is a subfield rather than a school, and
reflects a wide array of experiences, influences, and ideological commit-
ments. What it shares in common is that it comes from nonwhite philoso-
phers and takes racism seriously as a primary philosophical subject, just as
here I advocate for Constructive Theology to take “race” and “whiteness”
seriously as primary theological subjects. A theology that intentionally
engages Philosophy of Race is a theology that needs to make only the
transition from philosophy to theology, not the transition from philoso-
phy to “race” to theology. This makes for a better tool not just because it
is more apt for the job, but also because it is much easier to wield.
To model that, in this chapter I will first—in concert with a theological
architecture of “race” and “whiteness”—sketch a rough historical-political
genealogy of “race” and “whiteness.” I will then turn to Falguni A. Sheth’s
political philosophy of race, before finally asking, with Linda Martín
Alcoff, whether or not “whiteness” has any sort of redeemable future.
Genealogy of “Race” and “Whiteness”

In “Drowning in Dirty Water: A Baptismal Theology of Whiteness,”21
with co-author Andrew Wymer, I laid out a theological architecture for
“race” and “whiteness,” which I am drawing from and expanding here.
There I did not make a neat distinction between the categories “race” and
“whiteness” because they emerge together and reinforce each other, with
20
Naomi Zack, Philosophy of Race: An Introduction (London and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018), ix.
21
Andrew Wymer and Chris Baker, “Drowning in Dirty Water: A Baptismal Theology of
Whiteness,” Worship Volume 90 (July 2016), 319-344.
“race” serving as a conceptual and discursive category that helps lend

power to “whiteness.” Much like that “most dangerous myth” of
Montagu,22 where the very idea of “race” is indistinguishable from “rac-
ism,” and always only ever serves to unjustly advantage some at the expense
of others, there is functionally little space between “race” and “white-
ness,” as “race” serves to delineate those “raced” in juxtaposition to an
unraced “white.”
As Richard Dyer notes, racialization means that while others are raced,
white people are “just people.”23 A product of the racialization of others,
this functions in a double sense: As unraced, white people are people qua
people, people in an unqualified way while raced people are people, if at
all, only in a qualified way. Often, they are not people—or, rather, per-
sons—at all. Symbolically, too, “white” functions to make white people
morally and ontologically “just.” These together—a claim to normativity
and a claim to purity—reinforce each other and come together to con-
struct “whiteness” as a soteriological category: “soteriological whiteness.”
Wymer and I described “soteriological whiteness” as “an explicit or
implicit claim to [membership in] a soteriological community (under the
racial signifier “white”) that functions as a kind of realized eschatology
legitimizing the material privileges that come with being constructed and
symbolized as ‘white.’”24 To be “white,” in other words, is in a very real
sense to be “saved” in the here and now, at least with respect to one’s
whiteness.
There is a temptation to speak here of “white privilege,” and to note
that it constitutes a relative rather than absolute privilege. That one may
be privileged in one’s whiteness and yet lack privilege in other areas, such
as gender, class, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, and more. And
this is both true and important to note, especially if “whiteness” is viewed
soteriologically. Indeed, this may cut against the whole notion of “soterio-
logical whiteness” in that while Wymer and I framed it as a “realized
eschatology”—a soteriology made fully or at least mostly manifest in the
present—the relative rather than absolute nature of privilege calls language
of “realization” into question. Here is where Naomi Zack’s concern about
22
Ashley Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, 2nd Edition (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1945).
23
Richard Dyer, White (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 1.
24
Wymer and Baker, “Drowning in Dirty Water,” 321.
22 C. M. BAKER
the misleading nature of language of “white privilege”—whatever good

work such language does—is essential.
“A privilege,” she notes, “is special treatment that goes beyond a
right.”25 But while whiteness may confer privileges, more importantly it
secures not just something in addition to rights, but rights themselves. In
being the ground on which rights are secured, whiteness (or, rather, exclu-
sion from whiteness) is also the ground on which rights are de facto denied.
“It is not so much that being white confers privilege,” Zack writes, “but
that not being white means being without rights in many cases.”26
Including, in an increasingly carceral state with escalating police violence,
the very right to life. “Not fearing that the police will kill your child for no
reason isn’t a privilege. It’s a right.”27 A right conferred to white people at
the expense of nonwhite, especially Black and indigenous people.
It is in this context that Wymer and I wrote of whiteness as a kind of
soteriology, in part because it constitutes a kind of secular salvation, a
“hedge of protection” against unjust state violence. But it is also and espe-
cially important to note that “white” is a theological symbol that comes
with a host of meanings within a Christian theological symbolic structure.
These meanings existed before any European or Euro-American group
claimed to be “white,” and that claim to be “white” is a claim to partici-
pate in and benefit from the meanings associated with the symbol “white.”
And within both this symbolic structure and the manufacture of “race,”
“white” is always joined by and juxtaposed against its opposite, “black”:
The claim to “whiteness” has always been made by communities shaped by

the unfolding of European Christianities, in which “white” and “black” had
deep symbolic meanings and values long before the invention of “race.”
These symbolic meanings and values, while not entirely stable, are reason-
ably consistent. The white/black dichotomy is wedded to other dichoto-
mies: good/evil, pure/impure, angel/demon, etc. It is within this symbolic
structure, in which “white” and “black” are opposed, with “white” repre-
senting the pure and “black” the defiled, that both the theological signifi-
cance of racialization and the meanings of “white” and “black” … can be
understood.28
25
Quoted in George Yancy, On Race: 34 Conversations in a Time of Crisis (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2017), 182.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid.
28
Wymer and Baker, “Drowning in Dirty Water,” 325-326.
This account of racial/theological symbolism does real work, but it is

limited in that it rests on a white/black dichotomy. Race is too global, too
complicated, and is manifest in too many ways to be fully reduced to that
dichotomy. Such a dichotomy is both functionally and historically at the
root of racialization in the United States, but it is not the only mode of
racialization, and while it must be engaged for race in the U.S. to be
understood, to simply reduce race to “white” and “black” not only erases
many experiences of being raced, but it also presents a conceptual impedi-
ment to understanding the wide array of ways in which race functions. So,
while this section rests on that dichotomy, and while the theological sym-
bolism is important, much more needs to be attended to. Here is where
Philosophy of Race becomes especially useful, as while disciplinarily it
emerges out of Black philosophies largely in the U.S., it has become
broader and more global, even while not losing touch with the impor-
tance of Blackness as a primordial form of racialization, alongside the
racialization of indigenous peoples.
To do the work of correlating Philosophy of Race and a theological
account of “race” and “whiteness,” it is important to sketch out a brief
and fragmentary historical-political genealogy of “race” and “whiteness.”
Because of the practical and conceptual fluidity of “race” and “whiteness,”
such a genealogy will always be both incomplete and inaccurate, like draw-
ing a picture of the wind. But it is important to describe that which cannot
be defined so that you know what you’re talking about, even if you could
talk about it in other ways with equal validity.
To best understand “race” and “racialization,” they must be located
prior to modernity, allowing modernity to be viewed through the lens of
race rather than viewing race through the lens of modernity. It is now all
but taken for granted both that “race” is a “social construct”—a socio-
political fiction—and that it is a recent, distinctly modern one. Beginning
at least with Ashley Montagu, it is largely and rightly assumed by those
scholars who take “racism” seriously that “race” is in fact indistinguishable
from “racism.” That is, that the very idea of “race” is invented, and
invented in modernity, in order to justify those oppressive practices that
comprise systematic racism. It is in this sense that Montagu, writing in the
shadow of World War II, as “racism” is becoming a pressing political prob-
lem in the so-called West, calls “race” not only “pure myth” with “no basis
in scientific fact,” but also “the tragic myth of our tragic era.”29
29
Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth, 8.
24 C. M. BAKER
One can quibble with Montagu’s use of the “tragic,” which risks pass-
ing insufficient moral judgment on an active manifestation of evil, but his
meaning is clear. This idea, the myth of “race,” is simply a justification for
“racism,” where “racism” is “an important ideological weapon of imperi-
alistic politics.”30
This association between “race” and both “modernity”31 and “imperi-
alism” is important in Montagu’s context, where the Western world is
trying to make sense of the Nazi project while also preserving a kind of
distance between the moral atrocities of the Nazis and the political prac-
tices of both other European nations and the United States. The images
emerging from Nazi extermination camps shocked the European and
Euro-American moral conscience. While there were plenty of reasons to
believe that the Nazis would really engage in the genocidal project antici-
pated in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, those images awoke the West to the rela-
tionship between racialization and genocide, which was received as new
even as it had by then been around for centuries, at the very heart of the
project of “Europe,” predicated as it was on racialized distinctions.
The association between “race” and “modernity” is also found in
Hannah Arendt’s account of “race,” which stands alongside Montagu’s as
one of the most influential accounts emerging out of the crisis of World
War II. Like Montagu, Arendt—in locating “race” distinctly in moder-
nity—provides the same distance between Europe as a whole and the racial
project of the Nazis. This is most prevalent in Arendt’s account of “rac-
ism” in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Writing contemporaneously with
Montagu, in the shadow of World War II, Arendt is concerned with the
invention of “racism” rather than “race” per se, but as with Montagu that
can be a distinction without difference, as “race” exists ideationally in
order to justify “racism” as an intersection between anthropological idea
and political practice. “Racism,” she notes, “has been the powerful ideol-
ogy of imperialistic practices since the turn of [the 20th] century.”32 This
wedding of ideology and practice is significant, and follows the pattern
outlined here, where “race” is an invention to legitimate practice. “Every
full-fledged ideology,” she writes, “has been created, continued, and
30
Ibid, 17.
31
While Montagu does not have a theory of “modernity” as such, he does use the word
“modern” to describe “race.”
32
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd Edition (Cleveland: World Pub. Co.,
1958), 158.
improved as a political weapon and not as a theoretical doctrine.”33 Racism,

then, is the ideological weaponization of what she calls “race-thinking.”
To narrate the history of racism, Arendt must narrate both the develop-
ment of “race-thinking” and the ways in which it weds itself to colonial
and imperial practices. In doing so, she rightly narrates differences in form
and function of “race-thinking” in different emerging nation-states in
Europe. But her main focus is on the development of “race-thinking” in
Germany, which emerged as a tool for uniting disparate German states in
the late 19th century.34 In that sense, “race-thinking” is related to national-
ism, in that it is a tool by which nations may be constructed. But she is
careful to note that such nationalism should not be conflated with “a kind
of exaggerated nationalism” which eventually “tends to destroy the body
politic of the nation” by creating internal divisions based on transnational
rather than national categories.35 It forms a nation out of a race rather than
dividing a nation internally on the grounds of race.
In narrating her history of the development of racism, Arendt makes
brief note of slavery in Britain and especially the U.S.; slavery which she
acknowledges “was established on a strict racial basis,”36 though that does
not factor into her understanding of racism. In fact, while “black” slaves—
that is, slaves discursively identified as “black” by Europeans—emerge on
the Iberian Peninsula by the late 13th or early 14th century,37 and while the
Transatlantic slave trade had been active since at least the middle part of
the 16th century, Arendt does not locate racism until the 19th century, with
imperialist projects in India and Africa, almost four centuries after the
onset of European colonial and imperial projects. These risks giving the
impression that racialization and racism are unfortunate exceptions to the
general rule of Europe’s engagement with the rest of the world. Which
may in fact be the point. The location of “race” in modernity, emerging
out of post Holocaust shock and guilt, can be a kind of abjection, casting
the moral horror out of the innocent white self.
This is why it is important to accurately locate the invention of “race.”
It is indisputable that “race” is a distinctive feature of modernity. Indeed,
the story of modernity is in many respects the story of “race,” rendering
33
Ibid, 159.
34
Ibid, 165.
35
Ibid, 161.
36
Ibid, 177.
37
Ronald Segal, The Black Diaspora: Five Centuries of the Black Experience Outside Africa
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 3.
26 C. M. BAKER
facile (to put it charitably) most postmodern critiques of modernity, which

simply amount to another way of being modern. This, in turn, is a major
limitation to using sources from Continental Hermeneutics as primary
dialogue partners when constructing a theology that aims to deal respon-
sibly with “race” and “whiteness.” However, that “race” is a constitutive
and defining aspect of modernity does not mean that “race” is a modern
invention. It is on this point that postmodern attempts to address “race”
and “whiteness” are doomed to fail. In viewing race as a “modern” inven-
tion, they fail to see that rather than modernity giving rise to race, race in
fact gives rise to modernity. To simply address modernity, then, fails to
adequately address race because it gets the causality exactly backward.
Race is not an exceptional feature of modernity that can be done away
with if only modernity can be done away with.
In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Geraldine Heng
notes that all the elements of what we would consider racialization are
already present in Europe by the early 13th century. Elements like “state
experiments in tagging and herding people, and ruling on their bodies
with the violence of law; exterminations of humans under repeating con-
ditions, and disparagement of their bodies as repugnant, disabled, or mon-
strous; … a system of knowledge and value that turns on a visual regime
harvesting its truths from the polarities of skin color, and moralizing on
the superiority and inferiority of color and somatic difference.”38 Contrary
to the common thesis that race is a modern invention, these are all already
present. They are seen, for instance, in the experience of Jews in England
in 1218, who “were forced by law to wear badges on their chests, to set
them apart from the rest of the English population.”39 They are seen in
prevailing church laws, enforced by and in the state, that dictate that “Jews
and Muslims be set apart from Christians by a difference in dress,” a visible
marker of difference that “eroded the economic, religious, occupational,
social, and personal status of English Jews,” who were “finally driven out
of England en masse” in 1290, “the first permanent expulsion in Europe.”40
It would not be the last.
This use of markers of visible identity to delineate race will become
important later when looking at Linda Martín Alcoff’s philosophy. The
38
Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 16.
39
Ibid, 15.
40
Ibid.
visible nature of this marking of difference along the lines of religion—

which is a constitutive element of the racialization of religious identity—is
not accidental. Nor is it divorced from whiteness. Typology of whiteness
is also already present in the European Middle Ages, which carries racial
meaning in the 13th century. In documents like Bartholomeus Anglicus’
De Proprietabius Rerum, there are already elements of racialization later
found in Kant’s geographical anthropology. Not only is race associated
with geography, such that “cold lands produce white folk and hot lands
produce black,” these heuristic markers also have moral value and provide
information on the character of a people. To be from northern Europe,
and thus to be white, is to carry “a visual marker of inner courage, while
the men of Africa, possessing black faces, short bodies, and crisp hair, are
‘cowards of heart’ and ‘guileful.’”41
Looking at thirteenth and fourteenth century, European art and litera-
ture further cements these associations, and places them within a religious
framework. “Black is the color of devils and demons.”42 Further, this
reflects a sexual anxiety prevalent in racialization and applied to the black/
white dichotomy. In “an illustration in six scenes of Cantiga 186 of Las
Cantigas de Santa Maria, commissioned by Alfonso X of Spain between
1252 and 1284,” for instance, the viewer is presented with a scene in
which “judicial vengeance” is performed “on a black-faced Moor who is
found in bed with his [white] mistress.”43 “[B]oth are condemned to the
flames,” Heng notes, “but the fair lady is miraculously saved by the Virgin
Mary herself.” Both the racial and soteriological meanings are clear. “Black
is damned, white is saved.”44
In Spain by the 15th century, you see a similar connection between reli-
gion and racialization, where religion becomes a racial category that is
used as a tool for ongoing internal and external colonial control. This, in
keeping with the conceit of whiteness, also and especially carried with it an
obsession with purity. As María Elena Martínez notes, the category lipieza
de sangre (“purity of blood”) emerging in the Iberian Peninsula alongside
the Spanish Inquisition, then exported to Mexico, was used to establish a
purity of Christian identity freed from the taint of Jewish or Muslim blood.
41
Ibid, 16.
42
Ibid.
43
Ibid.
44
Ibid.
28 C. M. BAKER
This gave rise to the sistema de castas45 in the Spanish Americas as a way to
organize a hierarchical colonial society. Limpieza de sangre constituted a
form of racialization of religion because of an obsession with purity such
that one could not fully convert out of a racially impure category. Within
it, conversos, converts to Christianity, are distinguished from “Old
Christians” with “pure blood.”46 Here a distinction is made, and made on
a biological basis, between members of ostensibly the same religion.
Further, this distinction is made at least in part on a notion of genetic
inheritance, “the idea that ‘Jewishness’ was transmitted in the blood, that
it was a natural, inheritable condition.”47 All of the phenotypical, geologi-
cal, religious, and biological markers that come together to form the cat-
egory “race” and are used to legitimate modes of colonial control are
already present here.
Heng and Martínez are by no means the only scholars to locate “race”
in the European Middle Ages. And some, like Benjamin Isaac, locate it
even earlier. Isaac finds evidence of racism within the Ancient Greek and
Roman Empires. There he identifies prevailing features of race and racism.
As we saw in Heng, there is a kind of “environmental determinism, the
belief in the heritability of acquired characteristics and the important of
lineage.”48 Again, as with Kant’s geographical anthropology, there is a
connection between land, people, and essentialized inheritable traits.
Further, this is connected to an account of the racial purity of a people that
views marriage with “foreigners” to be degrading.
Isaac is concerned about the problem of anachronisms, noting that the
“words ‘race’, ‘racialism’ and ‘racism’ did not occur with their modern
meanings in English until the first decades of the twentieth century,”49
though I wonder how useful it is to fixate on the meanings and usage of
words in a language that hadn’t been invented yet when dealing with
45
The distinction between raza (race) and casta (breed or cast) is both fluid and ambigu-
ous, such that casta can easily be read as both linguistically and functionally as a form of
racialization.
46
María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender
in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 23.
47
Ibid., 28.
48
Benjamin Isaac, “Racism: A Rationalization of Prejudice in Greece and Rome” in The
Origins of Racism in the West, ed. Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 38-39.
49
Ibid., 44.
Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome.50 This concern about anachronistic

language causes Isaac to sometimes refer to “proto-racism” rather than
“racism.” Yet Isaac worries about how the qualifier “proto” may detract
from the fact of “racism” in the Ancient world. He wants to be clear that
“proto-racism” is not “a weakened form of racism,” but rather “racism in
the full sense,” albeit in “an early form which precedes Darwin” and is
based on “pre-modern scientific concepts.”51 That he must simultaneously
make and erase the difference between “proto-racism” and “racism” is
indicative of the need to look at the nexus of beliefs and political actions
rather than becoming fixated on the modern meanings of words. The
continuity of beliefs and practices within prevailing imperial powers, and
the ways in which those beliefs and practices are supported by various
kinds of symbols and narratives, is more useful than asking when the first
English speakers uttered the word “race,” and provides us with more
accurate and important information about the invention and function
of “race.”
Turning to the American theater, in American Holocaust, David
E. Stannard also challenges the conceit that race, and thus racism, is a
modern invention. Further, he connects racialization not just with colo-
nial control but also and especially with genocide. And major genocidal
projects in the Americas, it should be noted, both significantly pre-date
and influence the Nazi project, such that they could be read as part of the
same lineage.
In the face of pushback against both his provocative title and his thesis
that genocide in the Americas is an example of pre-modern racialization,
Stannard asks an important question: “Did those European and early
American white colonists treat Indians and Africans the way they did at
least in part because of a racist ideology that had long been in place—or
was Euro-American racism a latter development, even a product of white
versus Indian and white versus black conflict?”52 That is, was race—and
thus racist ideology and concurrent legitimating discourses—operative at
the onset, or did it emerge in a more neutral way after Europeans arrived
in the Americas? This question may seem academic. As Stannard notes,
50
This poses the same problem as unduly fixating on the distinction between casta and
raza when discussing the sistema de castas above.
51
Isaac, “Racism,” 33.
52
David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 269.
30 C. M. BAKER
“to the American native woman having her breasts cut off by sadistically
gleeful Spanish conquistadors, or watching her infant thrown to a pack of
dogs—or the native man about to be impaled on a sword of European
manufacture, or watching his village and his family being burned to cin-
ders by Puritans who boasted that ‘our Mouth [was] filled with Laughter,
and our Tongues with Singing’ while they attempted to exterminate an
entire people from the earth—it no doubt mattered little whether the
genocidal racism of their tormentors had preceded or followed from the
first meetings of their societies.”53 Who cares whether or not race and thus
racist ideologies came before or after such violence? Who cares whether
explicit discourses on race” emerged out of or helped create the condi-
tions of possibility for such violence? Yet to Stannard this is a crucial ques-
tion, because it grapples with the ways in which beliefs and ideologies in
the European Christian imagination may have given rise to a racist geno-
cidal drive, and thus it provides some insight into how—if at all—racist
genocidal projects may be avoided in the future.
Using the works of Winthrop Jordan and Carl N. Degler, Stannard
argues persuasively that there is documentary evidence to believe that
white/European attitudes toward Black and indigenous peoples as early as
the 16th century resemble those attitudes that are later taken to be “rac-
ist.” Further, these attitudes were powerful motivators for both colonial
and genocidal projects, serving to dehumanize despised populations. In
practice, then, there is no significant difference between this and what is
universally recognized as “racism.”
These rebuttals to the thesis that “race” is a modern invention are
worth noting, again, not because “race” isn’t a constitutive element of
modernity (indeed a condition of possibility for modernity) but rather
because they hedge against the possibility of any of the inheritors of these
political projects—the Greek Empire, the Roman Empire, and later
Europe—placing great distance between themselves and manifestations of
racism which are historically the norm rather than the exception. There is
no possibility of a retreat to some premodern innocence. These rebuttals
are also worth noting, when talking about sources, precisely because the
standard way of teaching the history of philosophy (with all the attendant
implications for theology) makes precisely this straight line between
Greece, Rome, the Late European Middle Ages (Scholastics), and early
modern Europe: The so-called Western tradition. To tell this story this
53
Ibid., 269-270.
way is to note that this intellectual history is also the history of the very life
of “race” and “whiteness,” never easily divorceable from those schools of
thought that are taught in a “neutral” way that simply reinforces their
power. Which points, once again, to the need to draw from better philo-
sophic sources when constructing a theology that aims to deal responsibly
with “race” and “whiteness.”
Falguni A. Sheth and the “Technology of Race”

In addition to countering the racist legacy and influence of the philoso-
phies from which Constructive Theology generally draws, and properly
situating the construction of race (and thus the emergence of racism) prior
to the advent of modernity (thus hedging against any attempt to revert to
an innocent, premodern age), resources from Philosophy of Race also pro-
vide an invaluable tool for theologians who wish to address race and
whiteness responsibly: the ability to construct coherent and somewhat
comprehensive theories of race. Falguni A. Sheth’s political philosophy
both demonstrates the need for such theory and provides an excellent
model of it.
It is not novel to say that no intellectual work is ever done out of
nowhere or nothing. Philosophy, theology—these emerge out of various
contexts, various locations. There is no theology, no philosophy, ex nihilo,
pulled from out of nothing. These contexts from which intellectual work
is done are geographical, cultural, political, familial, demographic, etc.
These are not accidentally related to race and racialization. These contexts
are also—related to race and racialization—biographical. And the bio-
graphical—rather than detracting from the ability to do theory –not only
strengthens theory, but serves as the very condition of possibility for doing
it at all.
Falguni A. Sheth reminds us of this as she grounds her own project, and
her crucial distinction between “race” as a purported fact and “racializa-
tion” as a process of imposing “race” on bodies and communities of bod-
ies, in her own personal experience of racialization. “Until 2001,” she tells
George Yancy in an interview about her political philosophy of race, “I
thought of my identity in terms of ethnicity rather than race. I was an
immigrant, and in the American imaginary, immigrants were rarely dis-
cussed in terms of race.”54 That “immigrants were rarely discussed in
54
Quoted in Yancy, On Race, 193.
32 C. M. BAKER
terms of race” may not be entirely accurate, as in an important sense the

story of immigration in the U.S. is also the story of negotiating “race,”
determining who can be incorporated into whiteness, how they can be
incorporated into whiteness, to what extent they can be incorporated into
whiteness, and on what grounds they can be incorporated into whiteness.
But the distinction between “ethnicity” and “race” is also an important
part of that story of race and immigration, with “ethnicity” used as a way
to both soften and qualify “race.”55
The distinction between “ethnicity” and “race” in Sheth’s immigration
experience, however, broke down completely in the aftermath of 9-11,
which made the racialization of Muslims in the U.S.—immigrant or not—
painfully obvious. This forced a shift in Sheth’s approach. “After September
11, 2001, I tried to reconcile what I saw as the profound racist treatment
of people (often Arab, Middle Eastern and South Asian migrants) with a
politically neutral understanding of ‘racial identity.’ But it didn’t work.”56
It didn’t work philosophically, as the tension between a supposedly neutral
approach to “race” in liberalism and the political facts on the ground
became abundantly apparent, and it didn’t work personally for a Muslim
immigrant with brown skin attempting to navigate the process of becom-
ing a U.S. citizen in a post 9-11 climate.57 This fundamentally altered not
only Sheth’s personal self-understanding, as she realized that “race” had
been imposed on her whether she wished it or not, but also her political
philosophy. It is at the root of her important distinction between “race”
and “racialization.” “Through such experiences,” Sheth writes, “I have
come to understand identity not as racial but racialized, through popula-
tions’ relations, and vulnerability, to the state… The political framework of
liberalism, which promises equality and universal protection for ‘all,’
depends on people to believe those promises, so that racial discrimination,
brutality, violence, and dehumanization can be written off as accidental,
incidental, a problem with the application of liberal theory rather than part
of the deep structure of liberalism.”58
55
Hence the category of “ethnic whites,” which reveals that incorporation into whiteness
is a provisional process available to some peoples for some amount of time for some political
purpose.
56
Yancy, On Race, 193.
57
Ibid., 194.
58
Ibid.
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For the peace that is from above....
For the peace of the whole world....
For this holy temple, and for them that with faith....
That this oil may be blessed by the might, and operation, and
descent of the Holy Ghost, let us pray to the Lord.
For the servant of God, name, and for his visitation by God, and
for the coming upon him of the grace of the Holy Ghost, let us pray
to the Lord.
For his deliverance and ours from every affliction, passion, and
want.
Help us, save us, have mercy on us, and keep us, O God....
Commemorating our most holy, most pure....
Then the first of the priests saith the prayer of oil over the cruet.
Note. Be it known that in the great church they pour wine instead
of water into the cruet of prayer-unction.
Let us pray to the Lord.
Lord, have mercy.
O Lord, who, through thy mercy and compassions, healest the
infirmities of our souls and bodies; do thou thyself, O Master, sanctify
this oil, that it may be to them that are anointed therewith for healing,
and for the removal of every passion, of defilement of flesh and
spirit, and of every ill, and that thereby may be glorified thy holy
name, of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, now and
ever, and to ages of ages. Amen.
And the other priests likewise read this prayer, but quietly to
themselves.
And while the prayer is being said by the priests, they sing these
troparia.
Tone iv.
Thou that alone art quick to help, O Christ, make manifest from on
high a speedy visitation to thine ailing servant: deliver him from
sicknesses and bitter pains, and raise him up, that, without ceasing,
he may praise and glorify thee, through the God-bearing one’s
entreaties, O thou sole lover of mankind.
With blinded spiritual eyes to thee, O Christ, I come, as he that
from his birth was blind; and penitentially to thee I cry, Be merciful to
us, thou that alone the good physician art.
Tone iii.
My soul, that, Lord, by every kind of sin and unbecoming deeds is
paralys’d, O by thy godlike intervention do thou raise, as thou of old
a paralytic didst upraise, that I, being sav’d, may cry to thee, Give
healing unto me, O Christ compassionate.
Tone ii.
O just one, as the Lord’s disciple, thou the gospel didst receive; as
martyr, dost possess that which unwritten is; a daring, as God’s
brother, hast; as hierarch, hast to pray: do thou beseech Christ God
to save our souls.
Tone iv.
The Father’s sole-begotten, who is God the Word, in latter days
hath come to us, O James divine, declaring thee first pastor and
instructor of them that of Jerusalem were; a faithful steward too of
ghostly mysteries. Therefore, apostle, we all reverence thee.
Tone iii.
To them of Myra, saint, thou didst appear a hierurgist; for Christ’s
evangel, thou, O venerated one, fulfilling, didst for thy people yield
thy soul, and save the innocent from death. For this cause art thou
sanctified as a great mystic of the grace of God.
The same tone.
O pain-enduring one, that overcame the heathen, in dangers hath
the world thee found a champion great. Therefore, as thou didst
humble Lyev’s pride, and in the strife make Nestor brave, so, saint
Demetrius, pray Christ God to give great mercy unto us.
The same tone.
Thou holy pain-enduring one, physician too, O Pantelimon,
mediate with God the merciful, that he may grant our souls remission
of iniquities.
Tone viii.
Ye saints that were unmercenary and wonders wrought, make
visitation in our weaknesses. Freely ye have receiv’d: O freely give
to us.
Tone ii.
Who can narrate thy mightiness, O virgin one? for thou dost
wonders gush, and pourest cures, and prayest for our souls, O thou
divine and friend of Christ.
Warm advocate and assailless wall, the spring of mercy and the
world’s defence, to thee unceasingly we cry, God-bearing Queen,
prevent thou us, and us from dangers free, thou that alone art quick
to intercede.
Deacon. Let us attend.
The first priest. Peace to all.
Choir. And to thy spirit.
Deacon. Wisdom, let us attend.
Reader, the prokimenon, tone i.
Let thy mercy, O Lord, come upon us like as we have put our trust
in thee.
Verse.
Rejoice, O ye righteous, in the Lord, for praise becometh the
upright.
The epistle.
The lection of the catholic message of James.
And be it known that the epistle is read by the deacon, section lvii,
Brethren, take for an example.... ending, availeth much.[15]
The first priest. Peace to thee. Alleluia.
Tone viii. Verse. I will sing unto thee of mercy and judgment, O
Lord.
The gospel from Luke, section liii.
At that time, a certain lawyer.... ending, do thou likewise.[16]
Then, Have mercy upon us, O God, according to thy great mercy,
we pray thee, hear and have mercy.
Lord, have mercy, thrice.
Furthermore let us pray for mercy, life, peace, health, salvation,
visitation, and forgiveness of sins for the servant of God, name.
That to him may be remitted every iniquity, voluntary and
involuntary, let us pray to the Lord.
And the exclamation.
For a merciful and man-loving God thou art, and to thee we
ascribe glory, to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost,
now and ever, and to ages of ages. Amen.
Deacon. Let us pray to the Lord.
Lord have mercy.
Priest, the prayer.
O thou that art unbeginning, eternal, and in the holy of holies, who
didst send down thine only-begotten Son, who healeth every infirmity
and every wound of our souls and bodies; do thou send down thy
Holy Ghost, and sanctify this oil, and let it be unto thine anointed
servant, name, for a perfect deliverance from his sins, and for the
inheritance of the kingdom of heaven.
Be it known that some say this prayer only thus far, with the
exclamation,
For it is thine to have mercy.....
But others say even unto the end,
For thou art God great and wonderful, who keepest thy testament
and thy mercy unto them that love thee, granting deliverance from
sins through thy holy child, Jesus Christ, who regenerateth us from
sin, enlighteneth the blind, setteth up them that are cast down, loveth
the righteous, and is merciful to sinners, who hath called us out of
darkness and the shadow of death, saying unto them that are in
bonds, Come forth, and to them that are in darkness, Be ye unveiled.
For he hath shined in our hearts the light of the knowledge of his
countenance, in that for our sake he was made manifest upon earth,
and dwelt among men; and to them that accepted thee gave he
power to become the children of God; and hath bestowed upon us a
sonship through the laver of regeneration, and made us to have no
participation in the domination of the devil. For thou wast not pleased
that we should be cleansed through blood, but hast given, through
holy oil, an image of his cross, that we may be a flock of Christ, a
royal priesthood, a holy nation, cleansing us by water, and
sanctifying us by thy holy spirit. Do thou thyself, O Master Lord, give
grace unto us in this thy service, as thou didst give unto Moses, thine
accepted, and unto Samuel, thy beloved, and unto John, thine elect,
and unto all who in every generation have been acceptable unto
thee. And so make us to be ministers of thy new testament upon this
oil, which thou hast made thine own through the precious blood of
thy Christ, that, putting away worldly lusts, we may die unto sin and
live unto righteousness, so that we may be led of the proposed oil to
be invested in him with the anointing of sanctification. May this oil, O
Lord, be an oil of gladness, an oil of sanctification, a royal investiture,
a cuirass of power, an averting of every diabolical operation, an
inviolable seal, a rejoicing of the heart, an eternal joy, that they that
are anointed with this oil of regeneration may be terrible to
adversaries, and may shine in the brightness of thy saints, having no
spot or wrinkle; and may they attain unto thine eternal rest, and gain
the prize of the calling from on high.
For it is thine to have mercy, and to save us, O our God, and to
thee we ascribe glory, with thine only-begotten Son, and with thy
most holy, and good, and life-creating Spirit, now and ever, and to
ages of ages, Amen.
And after the prayer; the priest taketh a twig, and, dipping it in the
holy oil, anointeth the sick person in the form of a cross, on the
forehead, on the nostrils, on the cheeks, on the lips, on the breast,
on the hands on both sides, saying this prayer.
Holy Father, physician of souls and bodies, who didst send thine
only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who healeth every
infirmity, and delivereth from death; do thou heal thy servant, name,
from the bodily and spiritual weakness that presseth upon him, and
quicken him by the grace of thy Christ; through the prayers of our
most holy Lady, the God-bearing and ever-virgin Mary; through the
intercession of the honourable, heavenly bodiless powers; through
the power of the precious and life-effecting cross; of the honourable
glorious prophet, Forerunner, and Baptist John; of the holy, glorious,
and all-praised apostles; of the holy glorious, and excellently
victorious martyrs; of our venerable and god-bearing fathers; of the
holy and unmercenary physicians, Cosmas and Damian, Cyrus and
John, Pantelimon and Hermolaus, Sampson and Diomed, Photius
and Anicetas; of the holy and righteous god-progenitors, Joakim and
Anna, and of all the Saints.
For thou art the fount of healing, O our God, and to thee we
ascribe glory, with thine only-begotten Son, and with thy
consubstantial Spirit, now and ever, and to ages of ages. Amen.
This prayer is said by each priest after he hath said his gospel and
prayer, while he anointeth the sick person with oil.
The second priest. Peace to all.
Prokimenon, tone ii.
The Lord is my strength and song, and is become for salvation
unto me.
Verse. When thou chastenest, thou hast chastened me, O Lord;
but thou hast not given me up unto death.
The epistle to the Romans, section cxvi.
Brethren, we that are strong ought.... ending, received us to the
glory of God.[17]
The second priest. Peace to thee.
Alleluia, tone v.
Verse. I will sing of thy mercy, O Lord, for ever.
The second priest.
The gospel from Luke, section xciv.
At that time, Jesus passed through.... ending, to save that which
was lost.[18]
And the deacon.
Have mercy upon us, O God.... Page 98.
Furthermore let us pray for mercy, life....
That to him may be remitted....
For a merciful and man-loving God....
Priest, the prayer.
O God, great and most high, who art worshipped by all creation, thou
true fountain of wisdom, and impenetrable depth of goodness, and
boundless ocean of benignity; do thou thyself, O man-loving Master,
O God of things eternal and wonderful, whom none among men by
thinking can comprehend, look upon us, and hearken unto us, thine
unworthy servants, and wheresoever in thy great name we bring this
oil, do thou send down thy gift of healing, and the remission of sins,
and heal him in the plentitude of thy mercy. Yea, O Lord, thou good
physician, thou sole merciful one and lover of mankind, who
repentest thee concerning our ills, who knowest that the intention of
man inclineth unto evil from his youth up, who desirest not the death
of a sinner, but that he should return and live, who for the salvation
of sinners, being God, becamest man, and for thy creature wast
thyself created: thou art he that hath said, I came not to call the
righteous but sinners to repentance: thou art he that hath sought the
lost sheep: thou art he that hath diligently sought the lost drachma,
and found it: thou art he that hath said, He that cometh unto me I will
in no wise cast out: thou art he that did not loathe the sinful woman,
who watered thy revered feet with tears: thou art he that hath said,
As often as thou fallest, arise, and be saved: thou art he that hath
said, There is joy in heaven over, one sinner that repenteth: do thou
thyself, O benign Master, look down from the height of thy sanctuary,
visiting us, thy sinful and unworthy servants, at this hour, with the
grace of thy Holy Ghost, and be present with thy servant, name, who
acknowledgeth his iniquities, and in faith draweth nigh unto thee;
and, accepting him in thine own love to man, in whatsoever he hath
offended, by word, or deed, or intention, making remission, do thou
cleanse him, and make him pure from every sin, and, being ever
present with him, keep the remaining time of his life, that walking in
thy statutes, he may never become a derision to the devil, so that in
him may be glorified thy most holy name.
Exclamation.
For it is thine to have mercy, and to save us, O Christ God, and to
thee we ascribe glory, with thine unbeginning Father, and with thy
most holy, and good, and life-creating Spirit, now and ever, and to
ages of ages. Amen.
And after the prayer the second priest straightway taketh a second
twig, and, dipping it in the holy oil, anointeth the sick person, saying
the prayer,
Holy Father, physician of souls and bodies....
Vide page 101.
And the deacon. Let us attend.
The third priest. Peace to all.
Prokimenon, tone iii.
The Lord is my light, and my Saviour, whom shall I fear?
Verse. The Lord is the defence of my life, of whom shall I be
afraid.
The epistle to the Corinthians, section cliii.
Brethren, ye are the body of Christ.... ending, Charity never faileth.
[19]
The third priest. Peace to thee.

Deacon. Wisdom. Alleluia, tone ii.
Verse. In thee, O Lord, have I trusted, let me never be
confounded.
The third priest readeth.
The gospel from Matthew, section xxxiv. from the paragraph,
At that time, Jesus called.... ending, freely give.[20]
And the deacon straightway saith this ectenia.
Have mercy upon us, O God....
And, with a loud voice, For a merciful....
The priest saith the prayer.
Master Almighty, holy King, who chastenest, and killest not, who
supportest them that are falling, and settest up them that are cast
down, who restorest the bodily afflictions of men; we entreat thee, O
our God, that thou wouldest send down thy mercy upon this oil, and
upon them that are anointed therewith in thy name, that it may be to
them for the healing of soul and body, and for the cleansing and
removal of every passion, and of every sickness and wound, and of
every defilement of flesh and spirit. Yea, O Lord, send down from
heaven thy healing power; touch the body; allay the fever; soothe the
suffering; and banish every lurking weakness. Be the physician of
thy servant, name, raise him from a bed of suffering, and from a
couch of ailment whole and perfectly restored, granting him in thy
church to be acceptable, and one that doeth thy will.
Exclamation.
For it is thine to have mercy and to save us, O our God, and to
thee we ascribe glory, to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy
Ghost, now and ever, and to ages of ages. Amen.
And after the prayer the third priest taketh a third twig, and,
dipping it in the holy oil, anointeth the sick person, saying the prayer,
Vide page 101.
The fourth priest.
Peace to all.
Prokimenon, tone iv.
In whatsover day that I call upon thee, O hearken unto me
speedily.
Verse. O Lord, hearken unto my prayer, and unto my crying.
The epistle to the Corinthians, section clxxxii.
Brethren, ye are the temple.... ending, holiness in the fear of God.
[21]
Priest. Peace to thee.

Alleluia, tone ii.
Verse. I waited patiently for the Lord, and he inclined unto me.
The fourth priest.
The gospel from Matthew, section xxvi.
At that time, Jesus came into Peter’s house.... ending, his
disciples followed him.[22]
And the deacon. Have mercy upon us, O God....
Page 98.
And the exclamation, For a merciful....
Priest, the prayer.
O good and man-loving, benign and most merciful Lord, great in
mercy and plenteous in goodness, O Father of compassions and
God of every consolation, who hast empowered us, through thy holy
apostles, to heal the weaknesses of the people by prayer with oil; do
thou thyself appoint this oil for the healing of them that are anointed
therewith, for the alleviation of every sickness and every wound, for
deliverance from evils of them that expect salvation that is from thee.
Yea, O Master, Lord our God, we beseech thee, thou almighty one,
to save us all, and, thou that alone art the physician of souls and
bodies, to sanctify us all; thou that healest every sickness, do thou
heal thy servant, name; raise him from the bed of suffering through
the mercy of thy grace; visit him through thy mercy and
compassions; remove from him every ailment and weakness, that,
being raised by thy mighty hand, he may serve thee with all
thanksgiving, as also that we, now participating in thine unspeakable
love to man, may sing and glorify thee, who doest great and
wonderful, glorious and transcendent things.
For it is thine to have mercy, and to save us, O our God....
And after the prayer the fourth priest straightway taketh a fourth
twig, and, dipping it in the holy oil, anointeth the sick person, saying
the prayer,
Holy Father, physician of souls.... Vide page 101.
The fifth priest. Peace to all.
Prokimenon, tone v.
Thou, O Lord, shalt keep us and shalt protect us, from this
generation, and for ever.
Verse. Save me, O Lord, for the righteous are become few.
Deacon. Wisdom.
The epistle to the Corinthians, section clxviii.
Brethren, we would not have you ignorant.... ending, by many on
our behalf.[23]
Priest. Peace to thee.
Alleluia, tone v.
Verse. I will sing of thy mercy, O Lord, for ever.
The gospel from Matthew, section cvi.
The Lord spake this parable, Then shall the kingdom.... ending,
wherein the Son of man cometh.[24]
And the deacon.
Have mercy upon us, O God.... Page 98.
And the exclamation.
For a merciful....
Priest, this prayer.
O Lord our God, who chastenest and again healest, who raisest the
poor from the earth, and liftest up the beggar from the dunghill, O
Father of the orphans, and haven of the tempest-tost, and physician
of them that are sick; who painlessly bearest our weaknesses, and
takest away our sicknesses; who shewest mercy with gentleness,
overlookest transgressions, and takest away unrighteousness; who
art quick to help and slow to anger; who didst breathe upon thy
disciples, and say, Receive ye the Holy Ghost, whosoever sins ye
remit, they are remitted unto them; who acceptest the repentance of
sinners, and hast power to forgive many and grievous sins, and
vouchsafest healing unto all that continue in weakness and
protracted sickness; who me also, thine humble, sinful, and unworthy
servant, involved in many sins, and overwhelmed with lusts of
pleasures, hast called to the holy and exceeding great degree of the
priesthood, and to enter in within the veil into the holy of holies,
where the holy Angels desire to stoop to look, and hear the
evangelical voice of the Lord God, and behold as eye-witnesses the
presence of the holy oblation, and be enraptured with the divine and
sacred liturgy; who hast counted me worthy to minister the sacred
rite of thy most heavenly mystery, and to offer unto thee gifts and
sacrifices for our sins, and for the ignorances of the people, and to
mediate for thy rational flock, that, through thy great and
unspeakable love to man, thou mayest cleanse their iniquities; do
thou thyself, O most good King, attend unto my prayer at this hour,
and on this holy day, and in every time and place, and accept the
voice of my prayer, and grant healing unto thy servant, name, who is
in weakness of soul and body, vouchsafing unto him remission of
sins and forgiveness of voluntary and involuntary iniquities: heal his
incurable wounds, and every sickness and every sore, bestowing
upon him spiritual healing. It was thou who didst touch the mother-in-
law of Peter, and the fever left her, and she arose and ministered
unto thee: do thou thyself, O Master, bestow a remedy upon thy
servant, name, and an alleviation of every mortal pain, and
remember thine abundant compassions, and thy mercy. Remember
that the intention of man inclineth constantly toward evil from his
youth up, and that none is to be found sinless upon earth; for thou
alone art without sin, who didst come and save the race of men, and
deliver us from the servitude of the enemy. For if thou shouldest
enter into judgment with thy servants, there is none that would be
found pure from defilement, but every mouth would be shut, not
having wherewith to answer; for all our righteousness is as filthy rags
before thee. For this cause remember not, Lord, the sins of our
youth; for thou art the hope of the hopeless, and the rest of them that
are weary and heavy-laden with transgressions, and to thee we
ascribe glory, with thine unbeginning Father, and with thy most holy,
and good, and life-creating Spirit, now and ever, and to ages of ages.
Amen.
And after the prayer the fifth priest straightway taketh a fifth twig,
and, dipping it in the holy oil, anointeth the sick person, saying the
prayer,
Vide page 101.
And the sixth priest. Peace to all.
Prokimenon, tone vi.
Have mercy upon me, O God, according to great mercy.
Verse. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit
within me.
The epistle to the Galatians, section ccxiii.
Brethren, the fruit of the spirit.... ending, so fulfil the law of Christ.
[25]
The sixth priest. Peace to thee.

Deacon. Wisdom, let us attend.
Alleluia, tone vi.
Verse. Blessed is the man that feareth the Lord, in his
commandments he rejoiceth exceedingly.
Deacon. Wisdom, standing, let us hear the holy gospel.
The gospel from Matthew, section lxii.
At that time, Jesus went.... ending, from that very hour.[26]
And the deacon.
Have mercy upon us, O God....
Exclamation. For a merciful...
The priest, this prayer.
We give thanks unto thee, O Lord our God, thou good lover of
mankind, and physician of our souls and bodies, who painlessly
bearest our sicknesses, and by whose stripes we have all been
healed; thou good shepherd, who camest to seek the wandering
sheep; who givest consolation unto the faint-hearted, and life unto
them that are broken down; who didst heal the source of the issue of
blood that had lasted twelve years; who didst deliver the daughter of
the Chananitish woman from the ruthless demon; who didst forgive
the debt unto the two debtors, and give remission unto the sinful
woman; who didst bestow healing upon the paralytic, with the
remission of his sins; who didst justify the publican by a word, and
didst accept the thief in his last confession; who takest away the sins
of the world, and wast nailed on the cross; to thee we pray, and thee
we beseech, Do thou thyself, O God, in thy goodness, loosen,
forgive, and pardon the transgressions and sins of thy servant,
name, and his voluntary and involuntary iniquities, those in
knowledge and in ignorance, those by trespass and disobedience,
those by night and by day; or if he be under the curse of a priest, or
of a father or a mother; or if by the glance of the eye, or a movement
of the eyelid; or by the contact of adultery, or the tasting of
prodigality, or in any excitement of flesh and spirit he have estranged
himself from thy will, and from thy holiness. And if he have sinned,
and in like manner we also, as the good God that rememberest not
evil and the lover of mankind, do thou pardon, not leaving him and
us to fall into a dissolute life, neither to walk in ways of destruction.
Yea, O Master Lord, hear me, a sinner, at this hour on behalf of thy
servant, name, and overlook, as the God that rememberest not evil,
all his iniquities; deliver him from eternal torment; fill his mouth with
thy praise; open his lips to the glorification of thy name; extend his
hands to the doing of thy commandments; direct his feet in the path
of thy gospel, confirming all his members and his intention by thy
grace. For thou art our God, who, by thy holy apostles, hast
commanded us, saying, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth, shall be
bound in the heavens, and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall
be loosed in the heavens; and again, Unto whomsoever ye remit
sins, they are remitted unto them, and, If ye bind them, they are
bound. And, as thou didst hearken unto Ezekias in the affliction of
his soul in the hour of his death, and didst not despise his prayer, so
hearken unto me, thine humble, and sinful, and unworthy servant at
this hour. For thou, O Lord Jesus Christ, art he that, in thy goodness
and love to man, biddeth to forgive until seventy times seven them
that fall into sins; and thou repentest thee concerning our evils, and
rejoicest over the return of the wanderer. For, as is thy greatness, so
also is thy mercy, and to thee we ascribe glory, with thine
unbeginning Father, and with thy most holy, and good, and life-
creating Spirit, now and ever, and to ages of ages. Amen.
And after the prayer the sixth priest straightway taketh a sixth twig,
and, dipping it in the holy oil, anointeth the sick person, saying the
prayer,
Vide page 101.
And the seventh priest. Peace to all.
Prokimenon, tone vii.
O Lord, rebuke me not in thy fury, neither chasten me in thine
anger.
Verse. Have mercy upon me, O Lord, for I am weak.
The epistle to the Thessalonians, section cclxxiii.
Brethren, we exhort you.... ending, the coming of our Lord Jesus
Christ.[27]
And the seventh priest. Peace to thee.
Deacon. Wisdom.
Alleluia, tone vii.
Verse. The Lord hear thee in the day of trouble, the name of the
God of Jacob defend thee.
The gospel from Matthew, section xxx.
At that time, Jesus, passing by.... ending, sinners to repentance.
[28]

And the exclamation. For a merciful....
The deacon saith, Let us pray to the Lord.
The priest, this prayer.
O Master, Lord our God, physician of souls and bodies, who
restorest from long-continued sufferings, healest every sickness and
every wound among the people, willest that all men should be saved
and come to a knowledge of the truth, and desirest not the death of a
sinner, but that he should return and live. For, thou, Lord, in the old
testament didst appoint repentance unto sinners, to David, and to
the Ninevites, and to them that were before these; but during the
course of thine incarnate dispensation, didst not call the righteous
but sinners to repentance, even accepting the publican, the harlot,
the thief, and the blaspheming persecutor, the great Paul, through
repentance. Thou, through repentance, didst accept Peter, the
leader and thine apostle, who denied thee thrice, and didst make
promise unto him, saying, Thou art Peter, and upon this rock will I
build my church, and the gates of hades shall not prevail against it,
and I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Wherefore
we also, O good one and the lover of mankind, being bold according
to thine undeceiving promises, pray unto thee, and supplicate at this
hour. Hearken unto our prayer and accept it as incense offered unto
thee, and visit thy servant, name, and if he have sinned by word, or
deed, or intention, or in the night, or in the day, if he be under the
curse of a priest, or be fallen under his own curse, or be embittered
by a curse, and have forsworn himself, we supplicate thee, and to
thee we pray, Pardon, forgive, and loosen him, O God, overlooking
his transgressions, and the sins which in knowledge and in
ignorance have been done by him. And in whatsoever he have
transgressed thy commandments, or have sinned, because he
beareth flesh and liveth in the world, or because of the operation of
the devil, do thou thyself, as the good and man-loving God, loosen
him; for there is no man that liveth and sinneth not: thou only art
without sin, thy righteousness is an everlasting righteousness, and
thy word is the truth. For thou didst not form man for destruction, but
for the keeping of thy commandments, and for the inheritance of life
incorruptible, and to thee we ascribe glory, with the Father, and with
the Holy Ghost, now and ever, and to ages of ages. Amen.
And after the prayer the seventh priest taketh a seventh twig, and,
dipping it in the holy oil, anointeth the sick person, saying the prayer,
Vide page 101.
And after this, the sick person that receiveth the sacred unction, if
he be able, cometh himself into the midst of the priests, or, held by
his own people, standeth, or sitteth. And if he be not able, the priests
themselves stand around him lying on the bed. And the president,
taking the holy gospel and opening it, layeth the text upon the head
of the sick person, the book being held by all the priests. And he that
is the leader doth not lay on his hand, but he saith this prayer with a
loud voice.
O Holy King, O loving-kind and most merciful Lord Jesus Christ, Son
and Word of the living God, who desirest not the death of a sinner,
but that he should return and live; I lay not my sinful hand upon the
head of him that cometh to thee in sins, and beseecheth of thee
through us remission of sins, but thy strong and mighty hand which
is in this holy gospel which my fellow-ministers hold upon the head of
thy servant, name, and I pray with them and entreat thy merciful love
to man, which remembereth not evil, O God, our Saviour, who,
through thy prophet Nathan, didst grant remission of his iniquities
unto the repentant David, and didst accept the prayer of repentance
of Manasse; and do thou thyself, in thy wonted love to man, accept
thy servant, name, who bewaileth on account of his own offences,
and overlook all his iniquities. For thou art our God, who hast bidden
to forgive until seventy times seven them that have fallen into sins;
for as is thy greatness, so also is thy mercy, and to thee is due every
glory, honour, and worship, now and ever, and to ages of ages.
Amen.
And taking the gospel from the head of the sick person, they
present it to him to kiss.
And that to him may be remitted....
Exclamation.
For a merciful and man-loving....
Then they sing, Glory, idiomelon, tone iv.
Having a fountain of remedies, O holy unmercenary ones, ye
bestow healings unto all that are in need, as being counted worthy of
mighty gifts from the ever-flowing fountain of our Saviour. For the
Lord hath said unto you, as unto co-emulators of the apostles,
Behold, I have given unto you power over unclean spirits, so as to
cast them out, and to heal every sickness and every wound.
Therefore in his commandments having virtuously liv’d, freely ye
receiv’d, freely ye bestow, healing the sufferings of our souls and
bodies.
Both now, tone the same.
Attend unto the supplications of thy servants, thou altogether
undefiled one, quelling the uprisings of evils against us, and
releasing us from every affliction; for thee we have alone a sure and
certain confirmation, and we have gain’d thy mediation that we may
not be put to shame, O Queen, who call upon thee. Be instant in
supplication for them that faithfully exclaim to thee, Hail, Queen, thou
aid of all, the joy and safeguard, and salvation of our souls.
Glory. Both now. Lord, have mercy, thrice. Bless.
And the dismissal.
Christ our true God, through the prayers of his most pure Mother,
through the power of the honourable and life-effecting cross, of the
holy, glorious, and all-praised James, apostle and first highpriest of
Jerusalem, the brother of God, and of all the Saints, save us and
have mercy upon us, as being good and the lover of mankind.
And he that receiveth the prayer oil maketh reverence, saying,
Bless me, holy fathers, and forgive me, a sinner.
Thrice.
And, having received from them blessing and forgiveness, he
departeth, thanking God.

Toward A Counternarrative Theology of Race and Whiteness Studies in Philosophy of Race Science Fiction Cinema and Superhero Stories Christopher M Baker All Chapter

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Toward a Counternarrative Theology of

Race and Whiteness: Studies in

More information about this series at

ISSN 2634-663X ISSN 2634-6648 (electronic)

Cover art by Rachael Baker

With the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016 as president of the United

timely. They are critically important, because the historical moment in

humanity’s response to the climate catastrophe in which we as a species are

Chicago Theological Seminary, Chicago, IL, USA Stephen G. Ray Jr.

question, “Why do you want hope?”, is an important one. Hope buoys

Glen Ellyn, IL Christopher M. Baker

A twofold intervention in theological method, Toward a Counternarrative

2 Constructive Theology and Philosophy of Race, Part I 13

3 Constructive Theology and Philosophy of Race, Part II 51

4 Race, Whiteness, and Science Fiction Cinema 89

Racialization and Representation in American Science Fiction

5 Race, Whiteness, and Superhero Stories125

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

for instance, as “a most jealous keeper of the honor of God,”4 a missionary

fragility.”12 In this case, it triggers a procedural deflection. Where the con-

Jane H. Hill17 notes, “whiteness” is so deep as to be embedded in every-

Finally, with a more Postliberal approach, theologians Brian Bantum27

responsibly address “race” and “whiteness.” Then I will offer a genealogy

———. The Death of Race: Building a New Christianity in a Racial World.

Constructive Theology and Philosophy

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 13

However, given the history and commitments of those trajectories of

To challenge a people’s rationality is to challenge their personhood,

In The Philosophy of History, Hegel lays out this teleological unfolding

available options are thus cultural genocide or literal genocide. History, it

philosophy—which is disciplinarily disinclined to grapple honestly with

Genealogy of “Race” and “Whiteness”

“race” serving as a conceptual and discursive category that helps lend

the misleading nature of language of “white privilege”—whatever good

The claim to “whiteness” has always been made by communities shaped by

This account of racial/theological symbolism does real work, but it is

improved as a political weapon and not as a theoretical doctrine.”33 Racism,

facile (to put it charitably) most postmodern critiques of modernity, which

visible nature of this marking of difference along the lines of religion—

Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome.50 This concern about anachronistic

Falguni A. Sheth and the “Technology of Race”

terms of race” may not be entirely accurate, as in an important sense the

The third priest. Peace to thee.

Priest. Peace to thee.

The sixth priest. Peace to thee.

And the deacon. Have mercy upon us, O God....

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Chicago Theological Seminary, Chicago, IL, USA Stephen G. Ray Jr.

Glen Ellyn, IL Christopher M. Baker

2 Constructive Theology and Philosophy of Race, Part I 13

3 Constructive Theology and Philosophy of Race, Part II 51

4 Race, Whiteness, and Science Fiction Cinema 89

5 Race, Whiteness, and Superhero Stories125