Why Did They Not Know Us?

In the introduction to his book, “The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race,” Rev. Dr. Willie Jennings tells a story about when he was 12 years old, working with his Mother Mary in their well-loved backyard garden.

The Jennings family is Black. As they tend the soil, two white men walk right through their front yard and into the garden, and begin to talk to Mary about their church.

They never ask anything about her, but plow through their rehearsed missionizing speech until his mother interrupts that she is already a Christian, a “pillar,” Jennings notes, of her church with a faith “as unfathomable as the blindness of these men to our Christian lives.”

The Jennings family lived but 200 yards from the white men’s church, and Willie regularly played basketball on the court in the church parking lot.

(There’s no way I can do justice to how Jennings tells this story. Please find this book and read it for yourself!)

Then, Jennings asks the question that has haunted me as a white woman ever since I first read it in December of 2012, in the aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s murder: “Why did they not know us? They should have known us very well.”

“Why did they not know us?”

Jennings speaks not of a superficial knowing but “a wider and deeper order of not knowing, of not sensing, of not imagining.”

Jennings attributes this not to one individual’s choices, but to a deep, destructive systemic distortion in the development of Christianity in the modern, Western world. The development of this “Westernized” Christianity is tied inextricably to the development of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, anti-black racism, genocidal colonization, and the rise of capitalism.

As Jennings brilliantly outlines in his book, white Western Christian theology distorted itself in how it chose to respond (as in, make theological excuses for) those developments.

“Christian theology now operates inside this diseased social imagination,” Jennings says.

We see this in the behavior of the white men who invaded his yard as a child. The men embodied the theology that formed them, a theology of white supremacism reflected in how they occupied space and presumed what they thought they knew about these two Black lives.

“Why did they not know us?”

The question haunts me.

I hear Trayvon asking it. Michael Brown. Rekia Boyd. Eric Garner. Aiyana Jones. Tamir Rice. Mother Emanuel AME. India Clarke. Sandra Bland. Right here in Denver, Marvin Booker, Alonzo Ashley, Paul Castaway, Jessie Hernandez.

“Why did you not know us?”

We do not know, because we embody the theology that forms us. And I am speaking here to my white siblings in the Christian tradition, especially those of us who call ourselves progressive, liberal, justice-seekers.

We too are formed by that same distorted theology.

We lack understanding about how white supremacism taints our theology and thus our structures, our polities, our liturgies, our hymns, and certainly, how we read our sacred text. Like the men in the story, our good intentions are insufficient, and we will perpetuate the very thing we want to abolish.

I use “white supremacism” with intention, because it’s important we name this distortion for what it is: the privileging of certain bodies, of certain ways of knowing, of certain ways of thinking about land, of certain definitions of what is good and proper and beautiful, and what is bad and evil.

We find it in how we police the borders of all these certainties, even certainty itself. We find it in how, like the men in Jennings’ story, we are unable to know, to imagine differently, the neighbor 200 yards away.

It’s not enough to say, “don’t hate,” or to point at ones like Dylann Roof who believe the distortion of white supremacy to actually be truth. We, too, are complicit, and must put our hands to the freedom plow to liberate our selves and our structures of the ways white supremacism permeates us.

The good news for us as white folk is, in fact, right here in this same story, in the impulse of the white men to reach out in an unexpected move of intimacy and connection with their neighbors.

That’s the gift of Christianity and a source for our resistance.

The distortion of white supremacism, of an intimacy that, Jennings says, has “often meant oppression, violence, and death, if not of bodies then most certainly of ways of life, forms of language, and visions of the world,” is not the last word. We can resist that distortion for the intimacy, the ways of knowing, that bring life in witness to “a God who surprises us by love of differences and draws us to new capacities to imagine their reconciliation.”

“Why did they not know us?”

Begin here. Let this question haunt you.

Rev. Anne Dunlap is an ordained United Church of Christ minister serving as a “street pastor” for racial justice and solidarity in the Denver, CO area.  Rev. Dunlap is committed to the work of collective liberation, working in freedom movements with folks across race, gender, and class lines for more than 25 years, with a particular passion for solidarity with Black, immigrant, worker, and indigenous communities.  Anne also serves as adjunct faculty at the Iliff School of Theology, and loves herbal practice, tending goats, and hanging out with friends and her beloved of over 20 years.

Twitter: @FierceRev