Emergent Village
Earlier this week, students from the Muslim Students Association, the Black Student Movement, Radical Asians, The Real Silent Sam Coalition, and other student groups from the University of North Carolina gathered in protest outside of Saunders Hall as part of an ongoing dialogue to change this building’s name. Saunders Hall is the home of the Religion and Geography departments at UNC. The building honors William L. Saunders (1835-1891), a UNC graduate, university trustee, former Confederate Army Colonel, and — chief organizer of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina. He is not the only confederate ghost that haunts these hallowed grounds. “Silent Sam,” a monument to the confederate dead, guards McCorkle Place, the oldest state university quad in the United States. I firmly support the efforts of these students to expunge these spirits from our racist past and to connect their passive retention on campus unambiguously with a racist present.
This dialogue reminds us once again that we face a dilemma with the material culture of our world — the symbols, markers, and monuments that link past to present. Certainly those whom I know in the Geography department, a rich discipline that looks carefully and critically at the hegemonic as well as liberative uses of space, place, and mapping in our society, do not want to be associated with a space that marks the contribution of the KKK to the narrative of a great university like UNC. Or, do they? One could also make a strong anti-racist argument for leaving these types of names on buildings and monuments in place. Some of my colleagues of color have made precisely this same argument. Allowing these specters to remain visible reminds us constantly of a racist narrative that many would much rather forget.
The odd stance to retain shameful legacies strikes a blow against the unseen quality of systemic racism. I imagine that many of the readers of this blog well know that invisibility is the racist game du jour. In a devastatingly brief summary of Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s excellent book, Racial Formation in the United States (2015), overt racial domination stretching historically through the Jim Crow era crashed squarely into the social uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s. A new Jim Crow has risen in the debris that cleverly supports White racial hegemony by claiming that racism has disappeared. Three common strategies of invisible racism are the use of code words that assert racism without directly naming race (like “community schooling” rather “resegregation”), claims of reverse racism (that absolve dominant class members from complicity in racism while also promoting their entitlements), and waving the American flag of national unity in a supposedly post-racial society (that effectively makes naming race anachronistic and unpatriotic).
These invisibility strategies are far from abstractions. Try this game: watch brief interviews of elected officials and see if you can spot all of the aforementioned strategies in a single sound byte. I was successful at this game just last week.
The invisibility of race is one aspect of “disappearing” non-dominant, non-majority bodies (female bodies, queer bodies, non-White bodies, prophetic and critical bodies that see the politic of our world with different eyes). William Cavanaugh in Torture and Eucharist (1998) recalled the brutality of the Pinochet regime in Chile (1974-1990) that very effectively tortured and disappeared the bodies of political opponents and subaltern voices — at first with the compliance of a national church that claimed the souls of the population while outsourcing bodies to the domain of the government. Eventually the church rediscovered its embodied theology and powerfully joined other activists to re-member and make visible again lost bodies often by simply assembling in front of the unmarked and non-descript torture chambers that pockmarked the nation.
This inverted practice of seeing histories that claim to no longer exist and seeing marginalized bodies is a critical lesson for contemporary activism and progressive Christianity. Speaking to Christians directly, we tend to disappear bodies in the sophistry of theologies that are so saturated with post-Enlightenment individualism and framed by the contours of the American dream that although these theologies ecstatically shout “Jesus!” at the top of tearful lungs, they are hardly even theologies in the literal sense of that word. Instead they become color-blind, gender-blind, queer-blind, class-blind, body-blind expositions of American exceptionalism rather than studies of the Creator of all bodies.
So, I fully understand and applaud the impassioned efforts to exorcise Colonel Saunders from a beautiful old building in Chapel Hill. But may his legacy and the world it has produced remain in clear view. May we clearly see all bodies, marveling in their wonder, and recoil in the travesty of our hubris. For those whose bodies have been deemed an unspoken norm, may a vision of complicity overwhelm the ‘invisibility games’ we so often play.
An aside and a testimonial: Last week, I had the remarkable, personal experience of disappearing and reappearing as a body in less than an hour. I joined the NAACP’s Moral Movement “Preach-In” in NC’s legislative assembly as an ethnographer and pastor. As I marched into the central rotunda with Rabbis, Imans, and Christian clergy, all colorfully garbed in the regalia of their profession, the eyes of many legislators and their staffers were constantly averted. I had literally disappeared in a colorful cohort of shouting preachers and melodious hymn singers. In contrast to my peers, the professional regalia that mark me as a pastor in an emergent church and a doctoral candidate are corduroys, boots, and a sweater. So dressed and having quickly delivered my portion of policy letters to the offices of legislators, I sat alone in a gathering of benches, just another 50-something White guy sitting quietly with his iPad. In a scene worthy of the resurrection of Lazarus, I miraculously reappeared, visible and even welcomed. Government personnel chatting amiably, a few apologetic about the “disturbance”, gathered warmly around me with some even engaging me in their conversations. I was lost but now I was found.
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