What if the terms of religion are, actually, the terms of race, and that the terms of race are, in fact, the terms of religion? What if “whiteness” is, in fact, what Hortense Spillers called a “god-term”? Drawing on my book-in-progress, I explore whiteness as an article of (Western) civilizational faith. Indeed, I explore it as political theology, a form of imperial governance through the patrimonial bureaucratic state, on the one hand, buttressed by an imaginary of the transcendental god(s), on the other, for rule over the earth. In filling this out, I draw a bit on Herman Melville (on the “power of blackness” and “the whiteness of the whale” in Moby Dick as a story of US imperial expansion and the crisis of slavery) and Walter Benjamin (on mythic violence and the barbarism of history) to take up W. E. B. Du Bois’s provocation regarding "the religion of whiteness [that is now] crashing upon the shores of our times.” What I aim to bring into view is whiteness as a materialist practice of deification, of messianic “God-Manhood," and, further, to reveal it, in its simultaneous distinction from but relatedness to the people hailed to be “white,” as a socio-psychosis, to adapt Toni Morrison slightly. In short, I consider whiteness as a religio-psychosis, indeed, as that political theology that’s at the heart of the present.
J. Kameron Carter is a professor of African American Studies, Comparative Literature, and Religious Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Under the rubric of “political theology,” Professor Carter examines questions of race and ecology (or where the social and the environmental are inseparable) through religion, literature, and philosophy. He is the author of Race: A Theological Account (Oxford University Press, 2008), editor of Religion and the Futures of Blackness (2013), editor of The Matter of Black Religion (2021), and author of The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song (Duke University Press, 2023). The book he is finalizing and from which this colloquium paper draws is Whiteness: A Political Theology (Yale University Press, forthcoming).
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