Have You Read The New York Times' "Looking 'White' in the Face"? If Not, You Should

The New York Times has been running a series of conversations/interviews with philosopher Dr. George Yancy. He is an amazing thinker–my frequent use of the phrase “the white gaze” is a direct allusion to his book Black Bodies, White Gazes–who has brought some wonderful folks to his virtual salon at The New York Times. Dr. Yancy is practicing what the best type of public pedagogy should be: serious conversations, about serious topics, with serious thinkers, people who the general public needs to be engaged with and exposed to.

“Looking White in the Face”–which is today’s installment of his column The Stone–features Dr. Thomas Watson of Villanova University.

My religious beliefs, or lack thereof, are a bit nontraditional and most certainly are very vexing to those who are more formal and fundamentalist in their religiosity (as such, I have caused great frustration to such binary thinkers, essentialists, and simple minded religious people; ironically, many of them are so smart in other areas, but so limited by their assured clarity as to run away from those whose values they cannot easily decipher or locate on their simple cognitive map. Political-religious socialization as a child and young adult is one hell of a drug and a type of programming that is not easily undone).

Even while I am an “atheist who believes in God” and one who also does a whole bunch of talking to J.C. Soul Brother Number One (I don’t go for the mumbo jumbo of miracles and such, the mythology of the man and his teachings are sufficient without such things), this beautiful exchange between Yancy and Watson damn near brought me to tears. Call me sentimental…or just moved by powerful ideas:

G.Y.: You’ve argued that true religion or prophetic religion engages the real, involves a process of risk, especially as it demands, as you’ve said, serving those who have been oppressed, marginalized, orphaned. Etymologically, religion comes from “religare,” which means to “bind fast.” I wonder if that process of binding fast is with those who are the strangers, the orphans, the unarmed black men recently killed by police, women who are sexually objectified, the poor, etc. 

That has been felt in a particularly cruel way among black men and women and children, where poverty is the most entrenched and life is the most desperate. The popularity of such cruel ideas, their success in the ballot box, is terrifying to me. The trigger-happy practices of the police, not all police, but too many police, on the streets of black America should alert everyone to how profoundly adrift American democracy has become — attacking the poor as freeloaders and criminals, a distorted and grotesque ideological exaggeration of freedom over equality. The scandal is that the Christian right has too often been complicit with a politics of greed and hatred of the other. 

J.D.C.: Yes, it is, of course. In the gospel Jesus announces his ministry by saying he has come to proclaim good news to the poor and imprisoned and the year of the Jubilee, which meant massive economic redistribution every 50th year! Can you imagine the Christian right voting for that? The great scandal of the United States is that it has produced an anti-gospel, the extremes of appalling wealth and poverty. But instead of playing the prophetic role of Amos denouncing the American Jeroboam, instead of working to close that gap, the policies of the right wing are exacerbating it. 

To be sure, younger evangelicals are becoming critical of their elders on this point, and I am trying to reach them in my own work, and there are also many examples of prophetic religion, like the Catholic parish in a North Philadelphia ghetto that I wrote about in “What Would Jesus Deconstruct?” The secular left, on the other hand, won’t touch religion with a stick and abandons the ground of religion to the right. So both the left and the right have a hand around the throat of prophetic religion.

Do you have any great gems of writing or other nice discoveries regarding matters of public or private concern that you would like to share?