Christ Divided: Antiblackness as Corporate Vice

by Katie Walker Grimes

Bringing the wisdom of generations of black Catholics into conversation with contemporary scholarly accounts of racism, Christ Divided diagnoses "antiblackness supremacy" as a corporate vice that inhabits the body of Christ. Antiblackness supremacy operates as a unique form of it arises from the enduring association of blackness with slave status and plays a foundational role in processes of racialization and racial hierarchy in the United States. In fact, since non-black people often amass power at the expense of black people, much of "white supremacy" is more accurately described as "antiblackness supremacy." In addition to introducing a new framework of racial analysis, this book proposes a new approach to virtue ethics. Anti-blackness supremacy inhabits not just the biased mind and the individual body, it also resides in the corporate body of the church. But due to the porosity of Christ‘s body, the church cannot reform itself from within. Antiblackness supremacy has twisted even baptism and the Eucharist in its image. In response, the theory of corporate virtue outlined here contemplates the conditions under which the church‘s corporately vicious and necessarily porous body can be made to "do the right thing."

Genres: Theology

339 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 1, 2017

Reviews

[William Lindsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's not often I feel like cheering when I read a smart, dense theological work like Katie Grimes' "Christ Divided." I did so repeatedly as I read this book. I like how

1. Katie turns so many taken-for-granted theological problematics upside down, as she tells us that it's not about white supremacy, but about antiblackness supremacy; that the questions we need to be asking are not about the lack of virtue of black people living in the afterlife of slavery, but about the way antiblackness vice inhabits the bodies of white people; that we need, with feminist theologians in general, to stop abstracting and start talking about the body, about real embodied human beings and the effect of abstract ideas on their real embodied selves and lives.

2. She brilliantly demonstrates that the body of Christ is, as was Jesus' body, porous, and, "More than just a cause of his death, Jesus' feminized porosity made his ministry possible" (p. 219). This theological perspective allows her to turn the traditional notion of the cultic Eucharist — that the body of Christ's Eucharistic gatherings in which the body of Christ is offered in the form of bread to the faithful is about feeding souls — on its head, as she insists that what's of central importance to the Eucharist is that it's a meal. It's a meal. For bodies that are living embodied lives in an embodied world to which the boundaries of the body of Christ are porous…. So that sacraments like Baptism and Eucharist do not magically remove the porosity of the body of Christ and the antiblackness supremacy that white worshipers import into the church from the world itself, by carrying this vice in their bodies — so that the church and its sacraments are not the magical, mystical solution presented to us by sacramental optimists, which negates the sinful effects of the secular, but:

"The church exists most fundamentally not as a city or society, but as a body. As such, it will always be susceptible to the habituating power of the world it inhabits" (p. 219).

And there's also this:

"Christianity bears at least as much responsibility for Africanizing slavery and sustaining its afterlife as any secular power….Antiblackness supremacy does not simply operate through social structures; it inhabits white bodies as a vice. As long as white and other nonblack people continue to cling to these habits, they will attempt to twist any social, political, or ecclesial order into the shape of slavery's afterlife" (p. 211).

With these citations, I'm pointing to the final section of the book, which deals with the ecclesial consquences of corporate vice and with questions of sacramental theology. This part of the book is, quite simply, wonderful, and I hope that Katie will write more about these matters. Here's one of the sections of the book that made me stand up and cheer, which I hope, in particular, Katie will develop further in future books and articles:

"Due to the way it treated Jesus like a slave in general and subjected him to sexual violence in particular, crucifixion therefore also emasculated Jesus. Just as slavery rendered male slaves symbolically feminine by making them uniquely vulnerable to sexual abuse, so the sexually violent character of crucifixion placed Jesus's naked body in a feminine position. Rather than penetrating women and male subordinates as true men ought, Jesus was the penetrated one. In this way, the condemned typically were crucified naked to heighten the humiliating contradiction between the spectacle of their unpenetrating penises and their violently penetrated bodies" (p. 217).

We can hardly talk credibly or coherently about the body of Christ — the church, its Eucharistic meal — without talking about these issues, can we? If we don't want to continue pretending that the mythical body of Christ is somehow the mystical body of Christ, that is to say (p. xvii, citing Arthur Falls)….

This is powerful theological reflection. It gives me a bit of hope, as an aging, long-since-discarded gay Catholic theologian in a long-term partnered relationship, who has been denied a role in "official" Catholic theological conversations and who has therefore found much Catholic theology produced in the last several decades totally alienating, that some younger theologians may begin breaking the stultifying mold that has proven so toxic to others of us who have walked ahead of them.