I request a lot of random stuff from NetGalley,
because I have a book-hoarding problem. Most recently, I read a book
called Unoffendable by
a conservative evangelical type called Brant Hansen. The title
intrigued me, because when I requested the book I didn't know where
Hansen was coming from, and I was kind of hoping for a radical
argument for a new social justice coalition that transcends the worst
excesses of petty holier-than-thou progressive infighting. Obviously
that is not what I got, but I still tried to read with an open mind,
because there are certain overlaps between the things that offend a
conservative evangelical Christian like Hansen and the things that
offend a radleftist SJW Christian like me, even if it's almost always
for very different reasons.
This
is a hard week in America, a sad and scary week for my Black friends.
White supremacy is flaunting its ugly face even more brazenly than
usual, and Black grief and anger is rippling throughout the country.
Inevitably, white people who believe they speak from a lofty position
of reason and objectivity are telling Black Americans what to do with
their anger: suppress it, let it go, rise above it. Most
perniciously, these white people are co-opting the words of a Black
martyr and saint in service of their craven complicity with the white
supremacist status quo.
To
my fellow white people I say: How dare
we?
How dare we commit this twisted sin of white supremacist apologetics?
When we steal Martin Luther King Jr.'s words to demand that Black
emotion and Black action be directed toward the maintenance of this
racist society, we murder him – and Michael Brown, and Trayvon
Martin, and Tamir Rice, and Jesus Christ – all over again.
Brant
Hansen does it too. He not only quotes MLK in support of his
anger-quashing agenda, but he also makes an example of his Black
friend's story of convincing an actively racist white guy that Black
people are human. This is the kind of narrative white people love:
focus on the overtly racist individual, and elide the existence of
the profound systemic racism on which this country is founded and
through which it continues to operate.
The
thing is, Hansen's book actually has a pretty good message for a
specific audience. It's shot through with theological assumptions I
do not share – Christian exclusivism, penal substitutionary
atonement as the entirety of soteriology, a patriarchal He-God, an
emphasis on heterosexual nuclear families and fetal personhood, that
baffling evangelical tendency to assert that conservative Christian
values are somehow countercultural – which make it clear that the
book is written within and for a white conservative evangelical
context. Hansen would have done much better to be upfront and
explicit about this. With such a disclaimer, this could be a helpful
text for conservative white cishet Christians: one of their own
telling them they need to quit getting so angry and offended about
stuff is definitely something they need to hear.
Without
the disclaimer, though, and with the MLK-quoting white-supremacist
sanctimony, it comes off as yet another instance of white
evangelicals trying to universalize their contextually-circumscribed
circumstances: yet another instance of white people telling Black
people what to do and how to feel. Black men are constantly subjected
to the dehumanizing narrative of the angry Black monster-man whom a
white cop or a neighborhood vigilante can murder with impunity
because any “reasonable” person would see him as a threat. They
have absolutely zero need for condescending whites to tell them what
to do with their anger.
Hansen
calls for Christians to stop perpetuating the idea that humans can
have righteous or justified anger. He says that anger is never a
force for good. But the thing about marginalized people is – and I
have felt this as a trans person, as a queer person, as a person with
depression, and I can only imagine how it feels as a Black person –
sometimes our anger is the only thing keeping us alive.
Sometimes (too often), my white-hot rage at a society that doesn't
want me to exist, that doesn't see my life as having worth, is all
that empowers me to say, I won't let them win.
I
don't have answers, I don't have solutions, I don't have a call to
action. All I have is this little flame, a grief and anger too deep
for words, and the assurance that God, too, lost a child to
state-sanctioned violence, and she knows how it feels.
