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Notes
1 Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Triptych (New York: Modern Library, 2015), 238. This line from Vieux-Chauvet was highlighted during a faculty book conversation on Vieux-Chauvet and postcolonialism by Nathan Jérémie-Brink, a faculty colleague of mine at New Brunswick Theological Seminary.
2 For history on Duvalier’s antagonism to the bourgeois, see Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (New York: Picador, 2012).
3 In this instance I hyphenate “post-colonial” in order to emphasize that I am not specifically referring to postcolonial theory and that this violence flows out of the aftermath of colonialism.
4 In engaging language of “cultural suicide,” I am aware of my loved ones who struggle at times with suicide or who have lost someone to suicide. If you or anyone you know is struggling with suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.
5 Vieux-Chauvet, Anger, 238. This is the second novella in the trilogy Love, Anger, Madness.
6 I again reference the economic, political, and military violence done to Haiti by Western powers in Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (New York: Picador, 2012).
7 I understand white culture as both a reflection of and a primary source of the extensive and persistent manifestations of direct and indirect violence done to persons who are not deemed white. Here I am also implicitly connecting colonialism and whiteness. This is intentional. The contemporary version of the white racial hierarchy emerged in the seventeenth-century context of the European colonial project, and issues of race and colonization are now deeply connected. See Rebeeca Anne Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2012).
8 These resources can be utilized to support my claims about five key characteristics of white culture: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012); Alvin Alvarez, Christopher Liang, and Helen Nelville, The Cost of Racism for People of Color: Contextualizing Experiences of Discrimination (Washington, DC: The American Psychological Association, 2016); Andrea Flynn, Dorian T. Warren, Felicia J. Wong, and Susan R. Holmberg, The Hidden Rules of Race: Barriers to an Inclusive Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2017); Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock (Boston: Beacon Press, 2019).
9 This is sometimes stated as “Western cultural suicide,” and other times it is referred to simply as “cultural suicide” with an implied connection to Western culture and whiteness.
10 I use suicide as a verb, suiciding, to indicate the insidious manner in which an outside party can force death on another person without being labelled as a murderer. Cultural suicide has always been a challenge for racial and cultural minorities in the US. W.E.B. DuBois in “Whither Now and Why,” a speech given at Johnson C. Smith University on March 31, 1960, spoke about the future of black integration into the U.S. in which black persons and communities could be respected without further sacrificing their unique history and culture. He specifically grappled with integration into the U.S. without committing “racial suicide,” which he describes as “this situation [voting rights for Black persons] is in sight and it brings, not as many assume, an end to the so-called negro problems but a beginning of even more difficult problems of race and culture. Because what we must now ask ourselves is when we become equal American citizens what will be our aims and ideals and what will we have to do with selecting these aims and ideals. Are we to assume that we will simply adopt the ideals of Americans and become what they are or want to be; and that we will have in this process no ideals of our own?” Ian Lopez defines dog whistles as “coded racial appeals that carefully manipulate hostility toward non-whites” and “western cultural suicide.” See Ian Lopez, Dog Whistle Politics (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015). Ian Schwartz, “Gingrich on Terrorism: How Often Donald Trump Is Right and How Often His Critics Are Just Stupid,” Real Clear Politics, November 2, 2017, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/11/02/gingrich_on_terrorism_how_often_donald_trump_is_right_and_how_often_his_critics_are_just_stupid.html.
11 See Ian Schwartz, “Gingrich on Terrorism.”
12 Christopher Mathias, “All the White Supremacists Running for Office in 2018,” Huffington Post, February 9, 2018, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/white-supremacists-running-for-office-2018_us_5a7da926e4b0c6726e1285c1. I identify him as a “sympathist” in that he has not self-described as a white nationalist.
13 This is accurate as of December 2018.
14 Euan McKirdy, “What President Trump Said About May, Brexit and ‘England,’” CNN Politics, July 13, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/13/politics/trump-sun-uk-interview-intl/index.html.
15 Many years before, former Colorado congressman, Tom Tancredo, who has been connected to white supremacist groups, stated that through illegal immigration, the U.S. is “committing cultural suicide … the barbarians at the gate will only need to give us a slight push, and the emaciated body of Western civilization will collapse in a heap.” See David Horowitz, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Washington, DC: Regnery Press, 2006), 13.
16 David Hanson, “Western Cultural Suicide,” National Review, May 29, 2013, https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/05/western-cultural-suicide-victor-davis-hanson/.
17 Hanson.
18 Hanson. I link Hanson’s article with the use of pressure-cooker bombs during the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15, 2013. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were Muslim immigrants from the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan. See “Prosecutors: Boston bombing suspect scrawled motive of attack inside boat” The Guardian, March 2, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/02/boston-bombing-pretrial-hearing-suspect-boat-evidence.
19 Hanson.
20 Schwartz, “Gingrich on Terrorism.”
21 The irony that bombing, an act of terrorism, is rendered in connection to a racialized other in the U.S. is not lost on me. White terrorism is disregarded here.
22 Hanson, “Western Cultural Suicide.”
23 Hanson primarily references European immigrants with the lone exception of “Mexicans” who have assimilated.
24 Hanson.
25 Gregory A. Smith and Jessica Martínez, “How the faithful voted: A preliminary 2016 analysis,” Pew Research Center, November 9, 2016, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/how-the-faithful-voted-a-preliminary-2016-analysis/.
26 Smith and Martinez.
27 Mainline white Protestants reportedly support Trump six percentage points above the average. See Alex Vandermaas-Peeler, Daniel Cox, Maxine Najle, Molly Fisch-Friedman, Rob Griffin, and Robert P. Jones, “Partisanship Trumps Gender: Sexual Harassment, Woman Candidates, Access to Contraception, and Key Issues in 2018 Midterms,” Public Religion Research Institute, October 3, 2018, https://www.prri.org/research/abortion-reproductive-health-midterms-trump-kavanaugh/.
28 Candace Smith, “Meet the Pastors Who Support Donald Trump,” 6ABC (WPVI Philadelphia), April 14, 2016, https://6abc.com/news/meet-the-pastors-who-support-donald-trump/1292149/.
29 Tara Burton, “Trump-allied pastor tells worshipers “America is a Christian Nation,” Vox, June 25, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/6/25/17502170/pastor-robert-jeffress-america-christian-nation-trump-dallas-baptist.
30 See Andrew Wymer, “Knee-Deep Preaching: A Homiletical Engagement of White Bullshit,” Practical Matters, July 20, 2018, http://practicalmattersjournal.org/2018/07/20/knee-deep-preaching/.
31 I am not alone in making such an expansive claim about the Euro-American church’s commitments to whiteness. Among authors who have made similar claims, see James Cone, “Sanctification, Liberation, and Black Worship,” Theology Today 35, no. 2 (1978): 149; George Garrelts, “Black Power and Black Liturgy,” The Journal of Religious Thought, 39, no. 1 (1982): 34–45; Scott Haldeman, Toward Liturgies that Reconcile: Race and Ritual among African-American and European-American Protestants (Philadelphia: Routledge, 2007); and Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2019);
32 Paul Scott Wilson, “Christ and Culture: A Belated Assessment of H.R. Niebuhr for Preaching,” The Homiletic 41, no. 2 (2016).
33 Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1975).
34 Wilson, “Christ and Culture,” 5.
35 Wilson, “Christ and Culture.”
36 Wilson, “Christ and Culture.”
37 James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll: Orbis Press, 2013).
38 Leonora Tubbs Tisdale, Preaching as Local Theology and Folk Art (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1997).
39 Eunjoo Mary Kim, Preaching in an Age of Globalization (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010).
40 Kim, 108.
41 Andrew Wymer, “Punching Nazis?: Preaching as Anti-Fascist Resistance,” International Journal of Homiletics 3 (2018).
42 Stephen D. Brookfield, “Overcoming impostorship, cultural suicide, and lost innocence: Implications for teaching critical thinking in the community college,” New Directions for Community Colleges (14 June 2005), https://doi.org/10.1002/cc.195.
43 Brookfield, “Overcoming impostorship.”
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Andrew Wymer
Andrew Wymer is assistant professor of liturgical studies at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, Illinois.