Introduction
T
he theme for this particular issue of Insights is “Interpreting Whiteness.” This topic is, at least to me, a new angle in the ongoing conversations about race that have occupied the last sixty or so years. Maybe its newness itself is the biggest source of embarrassment for white people like me. In other seasons of my life, I have assumed that embracing the complexity of America’s racial history has begun with the considerable task of understanding people of color and their particular narratives—“Interpreting Blackness,” for example. My starting question has thus essentially been, “What’s it like to be of African or Hispanic or Asian descent in this country?” Answer that question, I’ve often thought, and we’re off to the races understanding how to get at the complexities of race. But if you want to encounter the inadequacy and naiveté of such an approach, preaching professor Carolyn Browning Helsel’s lead essay will hook you in the first paragraph. “To focus on whiteness,” she corrects, “is to put the onus on people who identify as white to address racism, rather than relegating work on race and racism to those who suffer discrimination in a white-dominant society.” From that paragraph on through, prepare to experience a redemptive series of reversals as this issue unwinds a lifetime of assumptions held by white people like me. Helsel’s testimony of her growing up as a white Texan, and her observations about it now, is frank and brave … and ultimately transformational. Dr. Xochitl Alviso, a Latina scholar on the faculty of California State University in Northridge, encourages us to take on the complexities of race and racism in our various contexts, to the end that we do the often difficult work of “seeing,” and thus experiencing the “deep and beautiful work” of God in a bigger way. The Reverend Mihee Kim-Kort, a Presbyterian minister, shares an AsianAmerican perspective on the problem of whiteness. Recounting several experiences of being told, “You don’t belong here,” she nonetheless calls upon her Christian faith to draw this hopeful conclusion: “Maybe the real story is not that everyone belongs here, but that no one truly belongs here.” Why? Because of the One to whom we belong—“whose presence,” she asserts, “can make a world of difference when we recognize the human and divine, the Incarnate One, in each other throughout all the starts and stops of our days.” The Reverend Patrick Johnson, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Asheville, North Carolina, offers similar testimony that, in his own words, “helps clear the fog of economic status that often clouds discussions of whiteness.” He pulls this huge, fraught conversation through the waters of baptism until we reach, in Willie Jennings’s words, “a reality unrealized within the identities and potential relationships between different peoples who have been convinced of the power of Jesus’s life.” All of these pieces are worth our deep attention. Moreover, the Pastors’ Panel features the contributions of three thoughtful Texas pastors: Rob Mueller, David Coello, and Janice Bryant (both a Seminary trustee and an alumna). Read on!
Theodore J. Wardlaw President, Austin Seminary 2