“Race operates as a verb before assuming significance as a noun” (53). Powell’s central thesis is that we have been “racing” society, and that the verb-operation of race can and will continue even if we never talk about the noun “race.” Post-racial, colorblind rhetoric does not work because it fails to undo the unconscious and systemic components of the white racial hierarchy. Race has been “raced” into our culture and only through direct and explicit engagement can a more just society be approached. In terms of policy reform, powell advocates for “targeted universalism” (24ff). Such an approach sets universal goal of enfranchisement for all peoples while recognizing the particularities of our situatedness. Unless whiteness as the governing power structure is intentionally dismantled, powell explains, inequitable social arrangements will continue reconstituting themselves.
What is needed today, and what has been sorely lacking in racial discourse up to this point, are robust examinations of whiteness. Unless we can draw out the many layers of its totalizing character, we will continually discover that as soon as we have dismantled one structural manifestation it has shape-shifted into a fresh evil. The best example powell provides is the distinction between North and South/pre- and post-Civil Rights forms of racism. The South’s Jim Crow apartheid system was the prime target (alongside universal suffrage) of civil right’s reform. This was not, however, the way whiteness had “raced” the North where segregation of metropolitan space through redlining, blockbusting and other tactics was the central tool. As Jim Crow was repealed, the Northern strategy slipped in on its heels (147ff). In the spirit of redirecting the social construction of race in America, Powell offers a slew of penetrating insights into the nature of whiteness: whiteness as anxiety and fear, as isolation, as a property interest, and even as “emptiness” because it is unconstitutable without a discriminatory relation to the non-white other. A beautiful moment of exposure comes through his use of a quote from James Baldwin, “As long as you think you’re white, there’s no hope for you” (150). Whiteness, as it functions in America, is not an ontological fact for anyone. Painful though it may initially be, there is hope for those who identify as “white” to discover that the implicit meanings under this term need not possess any descriptive power over us.
The reconstructive fight for powell lies at two levels: 1) rooting out our unconscious biases, and 2) transformations in our political economy. For him, this is fundamentally spiritual work for it involves both redemptive suffering and profound relational work that must be guided by love.
If there is a lack, it is that his book does not dig back far enough into the substrates of Western civilization to uncover the root causes of racism. For that, I recommend Willie James Jenning's brilliant text *The Christian Imagination.* But no book can do everything, and powell is excellent at what he does.
Powell named the most difficult aspect of anti-racist work for me as a white man in a more honest and accurate way than I have ever heard:
“Beyond these distortions, however, lies a more fundamental fear: self-annihilation. For in the context of this society’s unwillingness to come to terms with its racial organization, to ask people to give up whiteness is to ask them to give up their sense of self. We cannot expect people to expose themselves to ontological death or worse. Instead, we must provide space--institutional space, political space, social space, and conceptual space--for the emergence of new relationships and a new way of being that exists beyond isolation and separation” (xviii). Being able to name the pain whites experience--without comparing or equating it to pain of people of color--is a healthy and constructive step toward progress, something I needed fresh permission to own. Powell helped renew my soul, deepen my resolve, and clarify my mission.
Read his book and be empowered for love's public performance: justice.
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