Rethinking Reconciled Relationships
Relationship doesn't distract from material injustice; it makes dealing with it unavoidable.
In the final chapter of Rediscipling the White Church, "Practicing Uncommon Friendships," I explain why a relational reconciliation paradigm is a hindrance to racial justice.
If [white people] are concerned at all about race, we have tended to think about the problem of racial injustice and segregation as one of relational separation, of different racial and ethnic groups being distanced from one another such that the unity of the church is compromised. From this perspective, the obvious solution is to bridge the separation and bring formerly divided people together. Multiethnic and multiracial churches are the evidence of success in this version of racial reconciliation.
This model of reconciliation prioritizes the comfort of white people over the well-being of people of color. By elevating reconciled relationships, white people are not asked to grapple with the nature and impact of our own whiteness. We don't have to think about the way race, as a way of identifying and categorizing people, was intentionally constructed over time as a means to benefit some while exploiting others. Neither do we have to acknowledge the material realities of racial injustice and segregation. If cross-racial relationships are the goal, then as long as I can point to a couple of friends of color, I don't have to notice how race makes the lived realities of those same friends far more difficult than my own.
What I advocate for in that book is an approach which prioritizes "racial justice over relational togetherness" and which accounts "for the particularities of whiteness." As common sense as such an approach will sound to some, for many white people - and white Christians especially - the choice to not begin with relationships cuts against some of our deeply held instincts. As Emerson and Smith identify in Divided By Faith, these include individualism, relationalism, and anti-structuralism. De-prioritizing individual relationships has been one of the themes I return to regularly, especially when talking with white Christians who want to participate in the work and ministry of racial justice. You can imagine my surprise, then, when a justice leader I deeply respect talked with me and a friends about the importance of relationships when it comes to reconciliation and justice. Here's what happened.
A few weeks ago I had the chance to travel to a beautiful piece of land outside of Portland, OR. The Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice is the vision of Edith and Randy Woodley. Equal parts farm and educational space, Eloheh provides its guests with the opportunity to experience an Indigenous worldview and imagine what life outside of our dominant Western assumptions might be like. Along with a few other racial justice practitioners, I spent a long weekend learning from a group of Indigenous elders on the Eloheh land.
One afternoon a friend and I sat around the fire pit talking with one of our hosts. We asked about his vision for racial justice and reconciliation. What would it look like from his vantage point? We'd noticed that he and others of the elders had used relational language throughout our visit so we weren't completely surprised when he talked about the importance of reconciled relationships. In fact, this was such a major theme in his vision for justice that we asked him to clarify what he meant. We mentioned that it many of our circles, relationships, while not totally discounted, are far from the priority; moving the needle on systemic injustice by addressing the material causes underlying societal racism is the focus.
In response to our questions and confusion, our conversation partner began talking about humanity's relationship with Creation. For him, any vision of justice which doesn't include our reconciliation with the earth is bound to fail, the result of a dualistic worldview which separates entities which were meant to exist in harmony: spirit and flesh, thought and emotion, and, relevant to our conversation, people and the earth. When our Indigenous friend talked about the essential nature of relationships for justice, he was including the earth as one of those relationships in need of reconciliation.
As best I can tell, an Indigenous vision of justice (at least the vision shared by this elder) is fundamentally relational because it assumes that we are each meant to be rightly related to Creation. It assumes that pursuing genuinely reconciled relationships with our neighbors requires that we are also ourselves being reconciled with Creation.
This view does not envision two autonomous individuals forming the sort of cross-racial friendship that has been fetishized in white spaces. Rather, it calls each person or group of people to move toward each other as they move toward harmony with Creation. This move will necessarily involve addressing the structural and material injustices which have degraded the earth and its human and non-human creatures. Relationship imagined like this doesn't distract from material injustice; it makes dealing with it unavoidable.