Lost in Translation

J. Kameron Carter argues that the creation of the modern racial imagination intimately depends upon theology; scholars must consider both the theological foundations of racial thinking as well as early modern blacks' engagement with Christian theology in their efforts to counter a racially stratified social order. Carter distinguishes his understanding from Cornel West's history of racial thinking and the subsequent foreclosure of black equality. Where West holds that the shift in the seat of authority from the church to science, the Cartesian transformation in philosophy, and the revival of classical aesthetics all came together to set the stage for the modern racial drama, Carter argues that West brackets nondiscursive influences on the racial imaginary like theology and therefore theology's influence on racialized conceptions of the true, the good, and the beautiful. The story of race is incomplete without an examination of how Christianity became the paradigmatic modern religion.

In Carter's account, the "pseudotheological" idea of race emerged as theologians severed Christianity from its Jewish covenantal roots in order to make it the moral property of the white race. Jewish flesh became racial flesh, associated with an Oriental world to which Occidental Civilization is opposed. Whiteness came to function "as a substitute for the doctrine of creation" (5). Immanuel Kant proves key in how Christianity became white. Carter argues that in "Of the Different Human Races" Kant puts forward the idea that "in the beginning" were whites, that white civilization was the rational civilization, and Christianity the supreme, rational religion. Kant ignored Christianity's Jewish roots and while he identified Jesus Christ as the moral ideal, he conveniently severed him from the Oriental past in claiming him for Occidental civilization. This is an incorrect understanding of Christianity's purpose, of the working of God in human history. "Jesus is not," Carter says, "the religio-moral exemplar of white accomplishment and of the supremacy and advance of Western civilization. He is the Jew who draws those who are not Israel into YHWH's promises with Israel" (315).

Carter presents the theological counternarrative that New World blacks presented as they interpreted the meaning of their own lives in terms of their relationship to the divine and Jesus Christ's divine work in the world, meanings they used to critique their place in the racially stratified social order. For Carter, their engagement with Christian theology opens up a world where black freedom is possible. Early modern Afro-Christians—Briton Hammon, Frederick Douglass and (most clearly) Jarena Lee—held that Jesus was not Kant's ersatz white master but instead the savior who brings all that is outside to the inside. Carter holds that the theologians in pre-modern times (those writing in the time before "race") knew what blacks would later claim as those on the dark side of modernity: Christianity is for all. Early black narrative wrestled with racial hierarchy on theological terrain, presenting interpretations of the gospel that correctly grasped the covenantal, non-racial understanding of God working in human history. To live a life in the image of Christ, or as Carter puts it, "to enter into Abraham-Christ is to enter into Israel's covenantal story and to leave behind essentialist identities of tyranny" (358); that is, to leave behind social relations where some (blacks) obey and some (whites) are to be obeyed.

The book is not for the novice. It proceeds via discussions of a laundry list of scholars and is filled with sentences that can only be described as Byzantine. The patient reader is rewarded, however, particularly by the book's final section, which presents a theological reading of the narratives of Hammon, Douglass, and Lee. To me, Carter's account of the Easter story symbolism in Douglass's narrative was enlightening. As someone who has been more interested in the political side of the narrative—Douglass's coming to voice and his attempted conspiracy with his fellows, for example—Carter's theological reading gave a richer thematic account of the text. This chapter...