Mixed Race Studies

[Brian] Bantum explains his understanding of race as “the structure of death, the dehumanizing and de-creating word a people sought to speak over the world, and violently succeeded. Race is what overshadows the world, conceiving our bodies and their differences as something to be perpetually overcome.” He later writes, “My body is not a race.”

La Reine-Marie Mosely, “Race and sovereignty, a story of the body,” National Catholic Reporter, May 3, 2017. https://www.ncronline.org/books/2017/08/race-and-sovereignty-story-body.

Race and sovereignty, a story of the body

National Catholic Reporter
2017-05-03

La Reine-Marie Mosely, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
Notre Dame of Maryland University, Baltimore, Maryland

Brian Bantum (Jessica Wood)

THE DEATH OF RACE: BUILDING A NEW CHRISTIANITY IN A RACIAL WORLD
By Brian Bantum
Published by Fortress Press, 182 pages, $16.99

In The Death of Race: Building a New Christianity in a Racial World, Brian Bantum explores the practical consequences of race in our world: Those who have inherited sovereignty have long organized the world according to the belief that whiteness is the paragon of existence, while black and brown bodies are deficient and suspect. It is this misconstrued and dangerous understanding of race that Bantum believes must die if followers of Jesus Christ want to live a meaningful embodied life in the spirit of their Savior.

Bantum is a biracial person who married a Korean-American woman. His life story is woven throughout the book as he explains the manner in which he came to racial consciousness.

It began with a choice. When the author was 6 years old, his mother was filling out a government document. Under the category of race, she asked her son to select the race that best captured his identity: white or black. Bantum selected “white” because of his love of his mother and the physical characteristics he shared with her. His brother, on the other hand, chose black because of the physical characteristics he shared with his father. Early in his life, Bantum began to realize the complexity of race in the U.S...

Read the entire review here.

The Death of Race: Building a New Christianity in a Racial World

Fortress Press
2016-11-01
182 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781506408880
Ebook ISBN: 9781506408897
5.50 x 8.50

Brian Bantum, Associate Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University, Seattle, Washington

Brian Bantum says that race is not merely an intellectual category or a biological fact. Much like the incarnation, it is a “word made flesh,” the confluence of various powers that allow some to organize and dominate the lives of others. In this way, racism is a deeply theological problem, one that is central to the Christian story and one that plays out daily in the United States and throughout the world.

In The Death of Race, Bantum argues that our attempts to heal racism will not succeed until we address what gives rise to racism in the first place: a fallen understanding of our bodies that sees difference as something to resist, defeat, or subdue. Therefore, he examines the question of race, but through the lens of our bodies and what our bodies mean in the midst of a complicated, racialized world, one that perpetually dehumanizes dark bodies, thereby rendering all of us less than God’s intention.

Table of Contents

• 1. Race Is a Story Written on My Body
• 2. Bodies Matter
• 3. Naked and Ashamed
• 4. This Is My Body, Born for You
• 5. Jesus Walks
• 6. Jesus Makes Us Free to Become Like Mary
• 7. Race Must Die
• 8. There Is Life in the Tomb
• Epilogue

“Fake Black?”

brian bantum: theology, culture, and life in-between
2015-06-12

Brian Bantum, Associate Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University, Seattle, Washington

Theorist Stuart Hall suggests identity is better understood as identification. That is, our identities are not fixed as essential realities whether gender, or race or nationality. We are always living into or out of the ideas and representations of what these things are.

Rachael Dolezal apparent presentation of herself as black shows this to an extent. She is living into a people with whom she has seemed to identify with. But this process requires point of departure and a point of entry. You identify from a particular place and a particular body, and this is part of the process of negotiating your identity.

To act as if you have no point of departure is to persist in a delusion and re-enact Americas fundamental racial sin – to pretend there was no history before you arrived, then co-opt the resources of the land for your benefit. Perhaps her life had deep resonances with aspects of the African American community. But to really understand that community, to understand their history also has to be an acknowledgement of what her white body signifies in that history. To even say that one is mixed must be to confess the complicated realities of mulatto identity and colorism in American racial history…

Read the entire article here.

Brian Bantum on Redeeming Mulatto

Homebrewed Christianity
2014-08-17

Bo Sanders

Brian Bantum teaches theology at Seattle Pacific University out in the mighty Northwest. This spring when he and Callid were both at the Christian Leadership Forum of FTE they sat down to talk about Brian’s book Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity. Because they are in a hotel lobby there a bit of background noise, but it is such a terrific interview that you’ll want to listen all the way through anyway If you want to followup on this conversation another great resource is this video of Brian giving a talk called “The Church Cannot be About Multiculturalism” at Quest Church‘s annual day conference on Faith & Race. Bantum is on twitter as well…

Listen to the interview here.

“A Future Unwritten”: Blackness between the Religious Invocations of Heidi Durrow and Zadie Smith

South Atlantic Quarterly
Volume 112, Number 4 (2013)
pages 657-674
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-2345225

Brian Bantum, Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

Race and religion were two aspects of the Western colonial project. Novelists Heidi Durrow and Zadie Smith reflect two related but distinct articulations of how to understand this relationship from within the black diaspora and in particular the legacies of “mixed-race” children of the diaspora. This essay argues that each literary exploration of race and place demonstrates the inherent complications of two strategies of negotiating racial and religious identity in contemporary society. While Durrow seeks to extricate her character from both race and religion, seeing religion as simply a cultural marker, Smith wraps her main character inextricably to the historicity of race and religion. Through these interlocutors, this essay examines how black religion might imagine its future in relationship to the particularities of its diaspora(s) and confessions of faith.

Read or purchase the article here.

We Should all Be Terrified

brianbantum: theology, culture, teaching and life in-between
2013-07-14

Brian Bantum, Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

Today, do not speak to me of peace. Do not speak to me of reconciliation or “turn the other cheek.” Today we must confess. We must confess to what our nation was and is continuing to be. We must open our eyes to the way the cancer of race in America not only persists but has mutated, calibrated itself to the supposed inoculations of “multiculturalism” and “post-racialism.”

This morning we need to face a terrifying fact. George Zimmerman is a product of the “multicultural.” A mixed-race man, the son of a Latina mother and a white father, a man who identifies himself as Hispanic, killed a black boy who he identified as dangerous and followed as a suspect. The “not guilty” verdict in this case means quite simply that the [white] jury in this case deemed his actions “reasonable.” Race permeated this case, but in new ways that we cannot lose sight of.

To lose sight of Zimmerman’s racial self-identification is to lose sight of how race has worked in this country, how whiteness was never about biology. Whiteness has always been about a presumption of innocence, a power to judge, the freedom to exist and to be who you declare yourself to be…

Read the entire article here.

Race on the Menu: Cheerios, Paula Deen, with Some Supreme Court for Dessert

brianbantum: theology, culture, teaching and life in-between
2012-06-26

Brian Bantum, Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

It’s been a bad month. For some reason incidents and issues of race seems to appear like death, in groups of three. They clump together, overwhelming those whom they hurt and they come too quickly for others to process…

…But I am becoming less convinced that we will be able to have rational conversations about the facts of the cases, about how race functions in our society, what the consequences for our ignorance are for people of color. We cannot have these conversations because I am not sure we have really grappled with the reality of our condition as American citizens. We do not see ourselves as we really are. While some imagine themselves as the white wife and others as the black husband, what we fail to understand is that we are all the mixed race child. Regardless of our race we are children of this interracial union called America. We are the progeny of a tragic, dark, difficult history that we bear in our skin, even while we exhibit many wonderful possibilities.

But we will never move forward until we can admit who we are…

Read the entire article here.

Is There a “New Black Theology?” Yes and No.

brianbantum: theology, culture, teaching and life in-between
2012-11-28

Brian Bantum, Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

Last week I had the distinct privilege of sitting on a panel with Willie James Jennings, J. Kameron Carter, and Edward Philip Antonio with Joanne Terrell responding. The panel was convened by the Black Theology Group at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meetings in Chicago, IL [Illinois] from November 16-20.

The title of the panel was “Towards a New Black Theology?: Going Back in Order to Move Forward!” and centered upon the work of Jennings (The Christian Imagination), Carter (Race: A Theological Account), and myself (Redeeming Mulatto) and how we intersect with and diverge from Black Theology. As a panel we did not directly address the nomenclature “New Black Theology” which is not a terribly apt term for the work that we do, but it would also be a mistake to suggest that we are not indebted to Black Theological reflection either. The question of the name is less important than our hope that people might begin to enter into the problems and possibilities that animate our theological work. In the presentations we each, in our own way, sought to highlight both our connections to traditions and sensibilities of Black Christian thought as well as highlight how we are imagining a way forward…

…What follows is the text of my presentation, “Theology From and To: What is Mulatto Theology?”…

…What “mulatto” in a mulattic theological framework suggests is not the valorization of the mixed race body, nor the marginalization of the mixed race body. Rather, “mulatto” gestures towards the situatedness of bodies in a racial world where a person and a people occupy multiple spaces at once. The life of discipleship is navigating these various realities, discovering patterns of unfaithfulness as well as the continual possibilities that stand before us. “Mulatto” theology suggests that we stand in a space that is both transgressive and transgressed, that we cannot separate ourselves from the realities of our tragic beginnings, but that these realities do not exonerate us or protect us from perpetuating old terrors in new ways. We are children of mothers and fathers with complicated and tragic stories, but we cannot excise ourselves from them. A mulattic theology seeks to exist between these realities and discern patterns of faithfulness in their midst. Out of this reality a mulatto theology does not work to establish a cultural space or retrieve a tradition…

Read the entire article here.

Passing as Black? Some Initial Thoughts…

brianbantum: theology, culture, teaching and life in-between
2010-12-17

Brian Bantum, Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

Thomas Chatterton Williams has written an intriguing article highlighting recent trends of multiracial children “passing as black.” If I let myself go I will write a short book on this before I finish, so I will refrain and simply offer a few thoughts and questions and invite your comments and thoughts as well.

Mongrel and biracial are not the same thing…. First, I think Williams is concerned that blackness is often construed so narrowly it creates a necessity to “pass.” He wants to point to biracial as more naturally a category within black existence and thus free biracial people to live into being black while also expanding what it means to be black.

I am deeply sympathetic to this project, but I wonder if it doesn’t collapse racial modalities of an earlier American era with our contemporary reality. That is, the biracial child of slavery was a child of rape or illicit love, but in either case their birth could be monetarily quantified. They were still a slave…

…The reason for this brief historical context is to highlight an important difference in the experience of biracial people today. Many of us remain with our parents or live in households where racial difference exists together. While Williams wants to expand the tent of blackness, I worry this expansion simplifies a reality that can only be repeatedly and necessarily complicated. That is, part of the tension felt by biracial people today is the remaining structure of racial certainty that presses upon us. And yet,  radically near or domestic realities render such formulations of certainty, and their cultural practices, unstable at best.

To simply say everyone is black is to ignore the important tensions that exist inside of households and yet are so often resisted or separated in a biracial person’s daily life. This is very different from a genealogical claim that “we all have mixture.” Of course, there are no “pure” people, but that is hardly evident from the structural and cultural realities of our daily life (as Williams himself suggests in his important book Losing My Cool.)…

…First, while the idea of passing as black is a fascinating trend, mixed marriages of black and (anything) remain the lowest of all mixed marriages in the United States and marriages of black women to anyone else remain the lowest of all mixed marriages. There is something going on here. While many who pass as black are definitely embracing something of themselves and seeking to live into a difference that is both perceived and real, there remain real problems of representation, standards of beauty and desire that we need to account for.

Second, I can’t help but think there is an element of class here that is going without analysis. Who are those who have the freedom to choose? What are the economic and social realities that permit mixed marriages in the first place? How will the re-segregation of schools shift this trend in twenty years? Could this phenomenon be one of the first (and last) fruit of school desegregation? Obviously, Williams does not have the space to address such questions, but these are things that are rattling around nonetheless…

Read the entire article here.