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Constructing a Minoritized Approach: Racialized Readers and Reading Locations

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The Politics of Race and Ethnicity in Matthew's Passion Narrative

Abstract

This chapter suggests that the ideology of white invisibility can be detected in constructive efforts to diversify contemporary biblical scholarship. The point of departure for this critique is an important article by Jeffrey Siker. The primary focus of his essay is the interaction between the quest for the historical Jesus and two minoritized and racialized representations of Jesus: James Cone’s black Jesus and Virgilio Elizondo’s mestizo Jesus. Siker helpfully frames the thorny problematic of competing representations of the white, black, brown, red, and yellow Jesuses. Nevertheless, his critique succumbs to a deracializing logic that unwittingly reinscribes the ideology of white invisibility. Identifying the strengths and limitations of Siker’s analysis not only renders visible the ideology of white invisibility, but also points to ways of moving beyond the impasse of competing representations. This critique sets the stage for an alternative reading of Jesus’ crucifixion as a racialized-other in Matthew’s passion narrative.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Jeffrey Siker, “Historicizing a Racialized Jesus: Case Studies in the ‘Black Christ,’ the ‘Mestizo Christ,’ and White Critique,” Biblical Interpretation 15 (2007), 26–53.

  2. 2.

    White invisibility is a key tenet of whiteness studies that finds apt expression in the oft-cited words of Toni Morrison: “In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate” (cited in David Crystal and Hilary Crystal, Words on Words: Quotations about Language and Languages [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000], 221). For more on white invisibility, see: Steve Garner, Whiteness: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2007); Michael K. Brown, Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Ashley W. Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, eds., White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism (New York: Routledge, 2003).

  3. 3.

    Siker, “Historicizing a Racialized Jesus,” 27.

  4. 4.

    Shawn Kelley, Racializing Jesus: Race, Ideology, and the Formation of Modern Biblical Scholarship (New York: Routledge, 2002), 220.

  5. 5.

    James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed (New York: Seabury, 1975), 115; cited in Siker, “Historicizing a Racialized Jesus,” 31.

  6. 6.

    Siker, “Historicizing a Racialized Jesus,” 32, emphasis original.

  7. 7.

    Siker regards this connection to be based, more strictly, on class rather than on race (“Historicizing a Racialized Jesus,” 32).

  8. 8.

    Siker, “Historicizing a Racialized Jesus,” 32.

  9. 9.

    Siker, “Historicizing a Racialized Jesus,” 33, emphasis original.

  10. 10.

    Siker, “Historicizing a Racialized Jesus,” 50.

  11. 11.

    For a critique of mestizo as a romanticized category that overlooks the history of violence surrounding racial intermixture, see: Néstor Medina, Mestizaje: (Re)mapping Race, Culture, and Faith in Latina/o Catholicism (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2009). Mestizo is one of many cultural terms (hapa, hafu, mulatto) and theories (biracial, multiracial, transracial) for describing the phenomenon of mixed races. For an overview of mixed-race studies and critical ethnic studies, see: Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, ‘Mixed Race’ Studies: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004). See also two new journals that have to do with this interrogation and exploration: Journal of Critical Mixed Raced Studies (University of California, Santa Barbara’s Department of Sociology) and Journal of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association (University of Minnesota Press).

  12. 12.

    Virgilio P. Elizondo, The Future Is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2000), 79; cited in Siker, “Historicizing a Racialized Jesus,” 36, 38.

  13. 13.

    Siker, “Historicizing a Racialized Jesus,” 32, 40–2.

  14. 14.

    Siker, “Historicizing a Racialized Jesus,” 46.

  15. 15.

    Siker, “Historicizing a Racialized Jesus,” 38–43.

  16. 16.

    For historical arguments that Jesus was an Afro-Asiatic black man, see: Cain Hope Felder, “Cultural Ideology, Afrocentrism, and Biblical Interpretation,” in Black Theology: A Documentary History, eds. James H. Cone and Gayraud Wilmore (2 vols.; Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993), vol. 1, 184–95; here 192. See also Julian Kunnie, “Jesus in Black Theology: The Ancient Ancestor Visits,” in The Cambridge Companion to Black Theology, eds. Dwight N. Hopkins and Edward P. Antonio, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 94–110; here 95.

  17. 17.

    Victor Anderson uses the term “ontological blackness” to designate an essentialized black identity that has been created by whiteness. He argues that the black theology project paradoxically opposes and yet is predicated on whiteness. In this way, white racial ideology functions as the sine qua non of ontological blackness, rendering any constructive endeavor that uncritically utilizes the category of blackness problematic. See: Victor Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1995), 91–92; cf. idem, “Ontological Blackness in Theology” in African American Religious Thought: An Anthology, eds. Cornel West and Eddie S. Glaude, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 893–920. For further discussion, see: Trevor Eppehimer, “Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness and James Cone’s Black Theology: A Discussion” Black Theology 4.1 (2006), 87–106.

  18. 18.

    Mary C. Boys, Has God Only One Blessing? Judaism as a Source of Christian Self-Understanding (New York: Paulist, 2000), 314–15.

  19. 19.

    Jean -Pierre Ruiz, Readings from the Edges: The Bible and People on the Move (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2011), 13–23. For a rebuttal, see: Michael Lee, “The Galilean Jesus as Faithful Dissenter: Latino/a Christology and the Dynamics of Exclusion,” in Jesus in the Hispanic Community: Images of Christ from Theology to Popular Religion, eds. Harold J. Recinos and Hugo Magallanes, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010), 16–37.

  20. 20.

    Siker, “Historicizing a Racialized Jesus,” 51, emphasis mine.

  21. 21.

    Siker, “Historicizing a Racialized Jesus,” 27.

  22. 22.

    The very title of the essay (“Historicizing a Racialized Jesus”) suggests that behind the racializing act lies a pure, untarnished Jesus who has been problematically historicized by minority scholars.

  23. 23.

    Randall C. Bailey, Tat-siong Benny Liew, and Fernando F. Segovia, “Toward Minority Biblical Criticism: Framework, Contours, Dynamics” in They Were All Together in One Place: Toward Minority Biblical Criticism (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009), 3–46.

  24. 24.

    For an excellent treatment of racialization and ethnicization through the dialectic of self and other, see: Robert Miles and Malcolm Brown, Racism (New York: Routledge, 2004), 87–113.

  25. 25.

    Bailey, Liew, and Segovia, “Toward Minority Biblical Criticism,” 6, 11–13. The model of minoritization that they develop dovetails with Foucault’s notion of biopower (Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 [trans. David Macey; London: Penguin, 2003], 254–55). See further: Ellen K. Feder, “Of Monkeys and Men: Disciplinary Power and the Reproduction of Race,” Family Bonds: Genealogies of Race and Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 69–85.

  26. 26.

    Neil T. Gotanda, “Citizenship Nullification: The Impossibility of Asian American Politics,” in Asian Americans and Politics: Perspectives, Experiences, Prospects, ed. Gordon H. Chang, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 98.

  27. 27.

    Bailey, Liew, and Segovia, “Toward Minority Biblical Criticism,” 9–13.

  28. 28.

    Hence, my preference for the accurate but awkward term “dominantization” rather than “majoritization.”

  29. 29.

    Woody Doane, “Rethinking Whiteness Studies,” in White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, eds. Ashley W. Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, (New York: Routledge, 2003), 3–18.

  30. 30.

    Siker, “Historicizing a Racialized Jesus,” 32.

  31. 31.

    Siker, “Historicizing a Racialized Jesus,” 51.

  32. 32.

    Or, as Margaret L. Andersen says, “Whiteness just is; no white person is seen as representing their race” (“Whitewashing Race: A Critical Perspective on Whiteness,” in White Out, 26).

  33. 33.

    Interestingly, Siker does offer a footnote for third-wave scholarship on the historical Jesus, referring to James Dunn, N. T. Wright, John Meier, Bart Ehrman, Dale Allison, Luke Timothy Johnson, E. P. Sanders, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, and Ben Meyer—all white male scholars. See: Siker, “Historicizing a Racialized Jesus,” 29 n. 3.

  34. 34.

    Or, to adapt Toni Morrison’s saying quoted earlier: In this country, “Jesus” means the white Jesus; every other Jesus has to hyphenate.

  35. 35.

    Siker, “Historicizing a Racialized Jesus,” 52.

  36. 36.

    For positive examples, see: Kelley, Racializing Jesus, xi; Denise K. Buell and Caroline Johnson Hodge, “The Politics of Interpretation: The Rhetoric of Race and Ethnicity in Paul,” Journal of Biblical Literature 123 (2004), 235–51; here 235–36.

  37. 37.

    Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation (New York: Continuum, 2000), 23.

  38. 38.

    By ideology here, I do not mean the classical Marxist sense of false consciousness. It is not as though dominant scholarship operates under some sort of naiveté that newly proven scholarly data will once and for all debunk. It is not as though, according to Marx’s classic formulation, “Sie wissen das nicht aber sie tun es” (“they do not know it, but they are doing it”). Rather, to quote Peter Sloterdijk, my point is that “they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it” (Critique of Cynical Reason [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987]; cited in Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology [London: Verso, 1989], 28). In fact, as the many references to the problem of racism and whiteness throughout Siker’s essay indicate, he is all too aware of the deracializing privilege whiteness confers. Yet something else remains—something deeper, something more elusive, something beyond and beneath the so-called facts of history. Žižek names the underlying problem as a newer form of ideology as cynicism, which may very well be applicable here. Žižek writes, “Cynical reason is no longer naïve, but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it” (Sublime Object of Ideology, 29).

  39. 39.

    Mark A. Powell, Jesus as a Figure in History: How Modern Historians View the Man from Galilee (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998), 77.

  40. 40.

    For a more generous reading of Cone’s black Jesus, see: Karen Teel, “What Jesus Wouldn’t Do: A White Theologian Engages Whiteness,” in Christology and Whiteness: What Would Jesus Do?, ed. George Yancy, (New York: Routledge, 2012), 19–36. For Elizondo, see Rubén R. Rodríguez, Racism and God-Talk: A Latino/a Perspective (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 84–95.

  41. 41.

    Siker, “Historicizing a Racialized Jesus,” 48.

  42. 42.

    Siker, “Historicizing a Racialized Jesus,” 50.

  43. 43.

    Siker, “Historicizing a Racialized Jesus,” 50.

  44. 44.

    Rubén Rumbaut, “Pigments of Our Imagination: On the Racialization and Racial Identities of ‘Hispanics’ and ‘Latinos,’ ” in How the U.S. Racializes Latinos: White Hegemony and Its Consequences, eds. José A. Cobas, Jorge Duany, and Joe R. Feagin, (Boulder: Paradigm, 2009), 15–36.

  45. 45.

    Bailey, Liew, and Segovia, “Toward Minority Biblical Criticism,” 13 n. 7.

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  1. Belmont University, Nashville, TN, USA

    Wongi Park

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Park, W. (2019). Constructing a Minoritized Approach: Racialized Readers and Reading Locations. In: The Politics of Race and Ethnicity in Matthew's Passion Narrative. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02378-2_4

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