It is undoubtedly the case that the author of what will be a highly influential text, Willie James Jennings, is one of the great theologians of the early part of the 21st century. Jennings’ After Whiteness was published against the backdrop the resurgence of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. My point of departure in assessing the significance of After Whiteness is the deeply embedded nature of empire and the surreptitious whiteness the foreshadows the existence of Christianity across it 2000-year history.Footnote 1 After Whiteness speaks to the necessity of recognising the issues of power in the construction of epistemology and empire that define the development of Christianity across three quarters of its life, where the church was the primary institution that helped to define truth and the rationale for what it meant to be human.
In After Whiteness, Jennings critiques the phenomenon of whiteness, arguing how the conflation of European mastery, white male, colonial power, and the internalisation of notions of white superiority becomes the means by which epistemology is developed. Jennings illustrates how whiteness became conjoined with patriarchy and colonialism to unleash an ethic of mastery, self-sufficiency and control, as the defining elements for what constitutes notions of development and progress. Jennings’ work, which is aimed primarily at theological education, distils the means by which the production of knowledge and pedagogical insights on the craft of ministry has been informed by coloniality and whiteness. Jennings is clear that this analysis is not about white people per se. Rather, it is the epistemological underpinning of a set of theo-cultural constructs, systems and practices that govern how theology and education operate in the West, and which inform our ways of being and our praxis.
The book commences with a prologue in which the author offers a poetic vignette of his formative narrative and concomitant experiences that have informed his scholarly development. For those used to the dense intellectual prose and the formidable conceptualisation of his magisterial book, The Christian Imagination (Yale University Press, 2010), this initial section of After Whiteness, indeed the whole book itself, will come as something of a surprise. In this opening section James speaks personally and movingly on the broader hinterland that has shaped his intellectual growth and more specifically, that which gives rise to this specific book.
In charting the epistemological framing of this work, Jennings outlines the intentionality of this text as that which is seeking to reform and reconceptualise the very nature of theological education. In outlining what is at stake he writes, ‘The argument for cultural sovereignty in theological education grows out of collapsing the struggle against whiteness into a struggle for personhood. This is understandable, given the ways whiteness has historically destroyed a reality of people for so many groups’ (p.10). One of the many great insights I took from this work was the extent to which a cult of mastery, self-sufficiency, and top-down notions of patrician control, all executed under the aegis of whiteness, has stymied the emotional and intellectual agency of people racialised as white as much as it has traduced those racialised as the ‘other’.
The whole book, in many respects, is summed in chapter 1, which is entitled ‘Fragments’. Like the remainder of the book, the author uses poetry, narrative vignettes, and theological reflection, to outline the problems a neo-colonial ethic of whiteness has caused for the task of forming men and women into the mind of Christ through the medium of theological education. After Whiteness deploys an eclectic set of optics by which our gaze onto the mechanics of theological education is laid bare. What comes into clear view is the way in which the phenomenological framing of whiteness has become the template on which all our axiomatic assumptions on what constitutes theological normality are predicated. This ethic of neo-colonial mastery, which represents the foundational creation of whiteness, finds expression in a variety of modes, be they Christian formation, pedagogy, the intellectual expertise of one's subject, the subject-content of curricula purity or the ethic of patronage around candidature for ministry.
After Whiteness will become in its own way every bit as influential as his earlier and now classic, The Christian Imagination. It is in many respects an admirable sequel, but it is other ways so much more: a heartfelt cri de cœur for a more reflective and self-aware mode of theological education; one that will enable all human beings to flourish and not primarily those racialised as white!
