White Privilege, Black Bodies, George Yancy, and a World Pervaded by Sin and Temptation

Philosopher George Yancy and the Christian subtext to our discourse on white privilege and black bodies

On Christmas Eve 2015, philosopher George Yancy published an end-of-year column on “The Stone,” the philosophy blog of the The New York Times. 

“Dear White America,” as he titled his column, was meant to be a culmination of his year-long exploration of race and philosophy, and also a statement of Yancy’s own most current answer to the question of what his white readers most needed to hear. His message was a provocative one, that his white readers were complicit in a pervasive system of white supremacy and privilege, and that they were called to do battle with their complicity if they hoped to live a truly ethical life. What was most striking about the column, however, wasn’t anything he had to say about black and white. It’s what he said before he even got deep into the race matters.

“What if I told you,” he wrote, “that I’m sexist? Well, I am. Yes. I said it and I mean just that.”

In one sense this confession was a rhetorical maneuver. Yancy was offering up his own complicity with patriarchal oppression as a means of preparing his white readers for a message on their own complicity with racist oppression. He was trying to disarm them by leading with his own weakness, and also to model the kind of self-interrogation he hoped to elicit.

Yet as this modeling proceeded, it became clear that it was much more than just a rhetorical or strategic device for Yancy. For paragraph after paragraph, he dwelled to a punishing degree on his failures, on the temptations to failure, on the systems of patriarchal oppression and dehumanization within which he’d been nurtured and conditioned and formed.  

“As a sexist,” he wrote, “I have failed women. I have failed to speak out when I should have. I have failed to engage critically and extensively their pain and suffering in my writing. I have failed to transcend the rigidity of gender roles in my own life. I have failed to challenge those poisonous assumptions that women are ‘inferior’ to men or to speak out loudly in the company of male philosophers who believe that feminist philosophy is just a nonphilosophical fad. I have been complicit with, and have allowed myself to be seduced by, a country that makes billions of dollars from sexually objectifying women, from pornography, commercials, video games, to Hollywood movies. I am not innocent.”

He went on: “I have been fed a poisonous diet of images that fragment women into mere body parts. I have also been complicit with a dominant male narrative that says that women enjoy being treated like sexual toys. In our collective male imagination, women are ‘things’ to be used for our visual and physical titillation. And even as I know how poisonous and false these sexist assumptions are, I am often ambushed by my own hidden sexism. I continue to see women through the male gaze that belies my best intentions not to sexually objectify them. Our collective male erotic feelings and fantasies are complicit in the degradation of women.”¹

As a means of disarming skeptical white readers, this litany was less effective than Yancy may have hoped. He was deluged with hate mail. The conservative media briefly targeted him as their hate-whitey, social justice warrior du jour. His fellow contributors to “The Stone” were sufficiently alarmed by the attacks on him that they felt obligated to publish a public letter defending his right to free speech.

What his confession did do, though, was reveal something important about Yancy’s moral worldview. For while his explicit concepts were drawn from contemporary left-wing academic theories—feminist discussions of patriarchy, Foucauldian analyses of discourses of power, Marxist takes on the subtle workings of capital—beneath all that was a much older set of concepts and metaphors.

Yancy was talking about sin. He was talking about a world pervaded by sin and temptation, by people born into sin and weakness and frailty. Sin is in the air we breathe. It’s woven into every action we take, every thought we think, every breath we inhale and exhale. As men we are born into the original sin of patriarchy. As white people we are born into the original sin of whiteness. In this sin-suffused, fundamentally Christian moral world, the would-be righteous soul is called to dwell on his sins, to do battle with them, to aspire in the context of a fallen world to emulate Jesus, Christ and savior.

There was no Christ or God mentioned in Yancy’s essay, and there was nothing exclusively Christian about the concepts. As non-Christians, we can certainly contemplate our complicity in systems of oppression and the subtle ways in which our thoughts and desires betray our values. The language, though, had a Christian vibe to it, and the interiority of the moral psychology felt Christian in its origins (rather than, say, Jewish or pagan). It’s in the thoughts and desires banging around in our head where wrong most significantly resides.

With Yancy, as it happened, there was no need to read too esoterically. From his start as writer, as a columnist for The Philadelphia Tribune, he has been explicit about his Christian faith and about the role that religion has played in his moral and philosophical development.

His columns for the Tribune contemplated the nature of God, reckoned with the theologies of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Paul Tillich, and investigated the arguments for intelligent design. Among his early academic articles were studies of explicitly Christian thinkers like feminist philosopher and theologian Jaquelyn Grant and philosopher of religion Cornel West.

In The Philosophical I, a volume of autobiographical essays by philosophers that he edited in 2002, Yancy wrote directly of his own childhood diet of prayer, and of how he learned from watching and emulating his mother the ways in which faith could sustain both the individual, in her daily struggle to keep her head up, and the race in its collective struggle to overcome.

“She taught me how to pray,” he wrote, “how to give thanks for little things, how to ask God to bless my family, my sister, my friends, even my enemies. As a matter of fact, I can recall my mother in prayer throughout any single day, tears flowing, while giving thanks. She was a prayer-warrior. Like Saint Augustine’s mother, Monica, my mother constantly prayed for the salvation of my soul. Like John Dewey’s mother, Lucina, she was filled with religious zeal. My mother wanted to make sure that my life was right with Jesus.”

By the time he published his most extended investigation of Christianity and race, the 2012 anthology Christology and Whiteness: What Would Jesus Do?, Yancy’s was no longer the faith of his mother. It was the faith of a philosopher—skeptical, ambivalent, Christian more in its rhythms and substructural contours than in any specific doctrinal commitments or belief statements. It was also political, and fused almost completely with Yancy’s understanding of the history and political struggle of his people. His faith and faith commitments were rooted in the accumulated meaning of “that long and painful history of weeping black bodies that have waited for someone more.”

For Yancy, as for many of the contributors to Christology and Whiteness, that long history of weeping black bodies imposes a harsh burden on those who would endeavor to become, as white Christians, good Christians. One must support and join the black struggle for freedom and equality. One must seek out, and recognize, how His light burns most fiercely in the lives and struggles of the most vulnerable, marginalized, and oppressed. Perhaps most radically, one must raise up to conscious awareness all the subtle and imbricated ways in which white people have “raced” the world, and then wage a perpetual spiritual struggle against them.

I have an intuition that Yancy is an important subterranean influence on the changes we’ve seen, over the past decade, in the ways that we talk about race and racism in America. I can’t really substantiate this. Yancy doesn’t have the profile of black New York Times colleagues like Nikole Hannah Jones, Charles Blow, and Jamelle Bouie, much less the genuine celebrity of figures like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi. He’s not often referenced in their work, nor in the race-related bestsellers of the last five to ten years. He did have a key post at the Times, however, in those few years after the shooting of Trayvon Martin, when the nation was on the lookout for people who already knew what they were talking about when it came to race. And unlike most of his Black Times colleagues, he was able to push ideas and language into the discourse as both a journalist and as an academic, via both the Times and his extraordinarily deep corpus of scholarly books and articles. Search up his Google mentions over any past month or year, and the profusion of links conjures the sense of a man of almost extra-human energy and productivity. He’s here, he’s there, he’s every-fucking-where. To all of this work, journalistic and academic, Yancy brings his authorial voice, which has an almost assaultative intensity.

Here he is, for instance, in the second chapter of his 2008 book (revised and reprinted in 2017) Black Bodies, White Gazes, writing about the effect on his “Black body” of not just his day-to-day interactions with the white world but the whole system of meaning and signification through which he is forced to move at every second, even when he’s physically away from the white world. From this prison, writes Yancy, there is no escape:

“The Black body has been confiscated. This confiscation occurred in the form of the past brutal enslavement of Black bodies, the cruel and sadistic lynching of Black bodies, the sexual molestation of Black bodies on Southern plantations, the literal breeding of Black bodies for white exploitation, and the unethical experimentation on Black bodies during the horrific ‘Tuskegee Syphilis Study.’ …The corporeal integrity of my Black body undergoes an onslaught as the white imaginary, which centuries of white hegemony have structured and shaped, ruminates over my dark flesh and vomits me out.”

I’ve spent a fair amount of time reading Yancy, and can testify to the effect on the brain of paragraph after paragraph (after paragraph) of relentless sentences like these. It reminds me of my experience reading Heidegger in college, where the influence was less a matter of specific ideas or formulations lodging in my consciousness than in the transmission of the emotional quality of a worldview. I can’t say precisely how I’ve been affected by Yancy, but I don’t doubt that my sense of the intellectual atmosphere has been imprinted by the claustrophobic intensity of his work.

I thought of this when trying, recently, to get some kind of handle on how the phrase “black bodies” has so rapidly come into our language as a substitute for “black people.” A quick search of The New York Times revealed that it was Yancy, more than anyone else, who was at the vanguard of this process. Here he is, for instance, in September of 2013, remembering an incident from his childhood when he was menaced by a cop for walking down the street with a suspicious object (a telescope) under his arm:

“Man, I almost blew you away!”

Those were the terrifying words of a white police officer — one of those who policed black bodies in low income areas in North Philadelphia in the late 1970s.”

The following year, interviewing the philosopher Naomi Zack, he writes: “The fear of black bodies — the racist mythopoetic constructions of black bodies — has been perpetuated throughout the history of America.” A month later, interviewing Judith Butler, he asks her about white bodies, “about how whiteness and white bodies are valorized.. [about] whiteness as ‘a stylized repetition of acts’ that solidifies and privileges white bodies.”

Again and again, over a few key years, Yancy mainlined that particular usage of “black bodies” into the public conversation. He didn’t invent it out of whole cloth. It’s a gloss on work by other theorists, in particular the French-Martinique anti-colonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. Nor has he been its primary popularizer; that has almost certainly been Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose 2015 book Between the World and Me is soaked in the rhetoric of “black bodies.”² Yancy, however, was one of the earliest and most prominent writers in the post-Trayvon discourse to recognize the charge that “black bodies” packs, less perhaps because of the tradition of (often rather abstruse) theory behind it than because of how viscerally it evokes our history of slavery, lynching, coercive segregation, and police brutality. Black bodies are bodies that have been sold, chained, hung, whipped, firehosed, assailed by police dogs, shot, and suffocated to death. “Southern trees bear a strange fruit,” goes the famous dirge. “Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

Yancy may also be the writer in whom the Christian notes of the phrase “black bodies” are rendered most audible.  The blood and body of Christ, the crucifixion, the crown of thorns, the brutal progress through the stations of the cross. Yancy is too much the Christian to believe that black people are any less born into sin than any other race of people, but he does seem to sometimes imply that at this moment on Earth it is the spectacle of beaten black bodies that most richly reveals the image of Christ to us, and that black people are most Christ-like in their capacities as abused, suffering bodies. 

This inversion of the old racist tropes of whiteness as pureness and blackness as contamination isn’t the rosetta stone for grasping the truth of our current discourse on race and racism. I think it is, however, a powerfully structuring inversion: Whiteness-as-original sin stands gaunt and damned, casting its long pale shadow over the ennobled suffering of black bodies as far as the eye can see. Yancy isn’t precisely the author of this narrative, but at a minimum he is one of its seminal evangelizers.

1. And on: “You see, the complicity, the responsibility, the pain that I cause runs deep. And, get this. I refuse to seek shelter; I refuse to live a lie. So, every day of my life I fight against the dominant male narrative, choosing to see women as subjects, not objects. But even as I fight, there are moments of failure. Just because I fight against sexism does not give me clean hands, as it were, at the end of the day; I continue to falter, and I continue to oppress. And even though the ways in which I oppress women is unintentional, this does not free me of being responsible.”

2. Of the many passages in Between the World and Me that deploy the “black bodies” locution, I find this one, in which Coates is directly addressing his son, the most striking:

“Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this.

“…It had to be blood. It had to be nails driven through tongue and ears pruned away. ‘Some disobedience,’ wrote a Southern mistress. ‘Much idleness, sullenness, slovenliness….Used the rod.’ It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman ‘chear’d…with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday again.’ It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization. ‘The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,’ said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. ‘And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.’ And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.”

“You and I, my son, are that ‘below.’”