After Whiteness

In at least two ways, theological education is an unfinished endeavor. It is unfolding, not yet complete, present still—at least for now. More fundamentally, it is incomplete by nature, partial, piebald, fragmentary. In After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging, Willie James Jennings stresses these unfinished qualities to argue that the end of theological education is communion, the joining of dissimilar, even incongruous, fragments. Christian theology’s work is to bind various fragments—of faith, of colonial eradication, of commodification—into something akin to a coherent whole, and theological education should similarly make the unification of fragments its mandate. Teaching students how to dexterously form communities from disparate individuals, cultures, and histories is its once and future task. 

Jennings announces the text as a disclosure of the tacit norms and cultures governing the theological academy. By dint of his own professional and personal history, Jennings is a well-informed guide for the perplexed, although the oscillation between discomfiting disclosures of what transpires among theological educators, administrators, and students, on the one hand, and Jennings’s hopeful visions of what might yet be, on the other, requires him to speak in at least two voices, to be now Virgil, now Beatrice. These multiple voices are echoed in the formal multiplicity of the text, which weaves together poetry, prose, dialogue, and confessional writing.  

Through these various voices and forms, Jennings suggests that Western educational institutions have distorted their self-appointed task of forming individuals. This distortion occurs in two modes: whiteness and reactionary rejections of individuals racialized as white. “Whiteness” tersely indexes a specific vision of an educated subject, the ideal graduate of a divinity school and the model after which faculty often fashion themselves: a white, self-sufficient, masculinist figure who masters, possesses, and controls knowledge. Unlike demographic, racial meanings of “white”, whiteness for Jennings denotes self-sufficient mastery and indicates historically contingent and culturally parochial, albeit highly vaunted, modes of organizing life, articulating ideas, forming persons, and foreclosing porous, open, interdependent relations that enable communion. At the same time, those who reject human relationships in an attempt to reject whiteness, and the traditions and cultures allied with it, further prevent the promise of communion that latently animates theology. A fuller discussion of how and why outright rejections of whiteness are appealing would have been useful historically and conceptually, but Jennings nonetheless aims to restore this promise, which theological education is especially equipped to fulfill: “Theological education is supposed to open up sites where we enter the struggle to rethink our people,” thereby enabling the recognition that “we belong to each other, we belong together” (10, emphasis in original).  

The first chapter, “Fragments,” proposes that education organized around the study of traditions provides an illusion of coherence to our objects of study, whereas fragmentation more accurately describes those objects. The scholarly task is not the rehearsal of given traditions, but the work of interpreting and uniting fragments.  

In the second chapter, “Designs,” Jennings proposes that the scholar’s resources of attention, affection, and resistance can be shaped toward various outcomes. Colonial designs have drawn these energies into constrained conceptions of erudition and rigorous scholarship. However, they might be repurposed by educational designs that cultivate attention to one another and generate intellectual community rather than isolation. 

“Buildings,” the third chapter, is the crux of After Whiteness and argues that Western education—and particularly theological education—is indebted to a slave legacy that remains deeply embedded in educational institutions, curricula, and imaginations. If Jennings is correct that “[s]lavery taught us how to build” (83) social orders and their leaders, institutions and their administrators, then it seems likely, given the magnitude of the task, that “theological educators have never reckoned sufficiently with the racial character of institutional life in the West” (84). This chapter’s formidably honed visual and spatial analyses recall Jennings’s earlier work in The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale University Press, 2011) and point beyond textual study toward the visuality of theological imaginaries, thereby subtly suggesting the kinds of theoretical and methodological shifts needed “to touch the deep colonial consciousness that flows like subterranean waters beneath” institutionalized education (100). 

Whereas what is built is visible, the fourth chapter, “Motions,” describes in atmospheric terms the invisible yet ever-present ways that students’ capacities for assimilation, inwardness, and revolution are tutored in the academy. While the atmosphere of education conspires to form students into masters and men, it might yet be commandeered to form emancipators, those more aligned with a divine mission to overturn the world rather than uncritically lead it. 

“Eros,” the concluding chapter, asks how to think about collective existence without recourse to the familiar, colonially inflected categories of race, religion, and nation. Jennings nominates erotic capacities, bodily ecstasies, and divine longings. 

A brief coda, “For Further Thought: Beyond the End,” evokes the patently Christian framework of After Whiteness. Whether and how the futures of theological education to which Jennings points will be Christian seems a worthwhile line of inquiry for those of us inside its buildings and motions. Which versions of Christianity can be retained or redeemed after whiteness? Whose Christianity? Decolonial intellectual traditions hover just outside the frame of the book. In what ways is a decolonized theological academy still Christian? For Jennings, it would be more properly Christian, but other possibilities remain.  

If theological education is unfinished in many ways, then perhaps the question of Christianity’s endurance elicits the various meanings of “after”: does “after whiteness” name a state of belonging achieved upon the end of whiteness, a communion available following a Fanonian ending of the world as we know it? Or does it humbly indicate the kind of belonging that remains possible in the wake of whiteness, after its historical advent, even if its conclusion is uncertain? The differences between the titular “after” and the epigraphic “beyond” are paramount: whereas “after whiteness” remains profoundly beholden to the insuperable histories of coloniality and enslavement that mark the temporal career of theological education, “beyond the end” is insuperably Christian, eschatological, otherworldly, eternal—it focalizes hope, although the status of history is less decided and decisive, less deterministic. In this way, After Whiteness is apologetic, confessional, and devotional. It is committed to the idea of faithful, Christian confessional origins and ends of theological study; it is certain of a remainder beyond the end.  

Denson Staples is a PhD candidate in religion at Harvard University. 

Denson Staples

Date Of Review:

April 4, 2023