Racism and the Modern Self

Racism and the Modern Self July 20, 2015

In his A Future for Africa, Emmanuel Katongole offers this brief analysis of the roots of racism. He argues that it is a specifically modern phenomenon, and that it is entrenched in “the story of the modern self, particularly the constant anxiety at the heart of the modern project.” Moderns reject any story that we have not chosen, and thus must justify their existence, and of our knowledge, values, and worth. We pretend to be “autonomous and our own self-makers,” playing out a story of self-interest. We can’t relax and rest on our tradition, or ease into an assigned role. We made ourselves, and we have to prove our selves to be worthy projects. Thus, “self-justification becomes both tenacious and ever-suspect” (221).

The anxiety induced by the tenuousness of our claims to knowledge and value “gives rise to practices in which the meeting with the other is policed by theories of race, history,or culture – all of which are meant to assure the modern self’s place at the center of history, as the climax of civilization, or as the most advanced.” The result is “a history of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery,” and “endless thrust of the desire for control and conquest of the modern self, a self haunted by the need to justify its own existence and place in history.” Racism isn’t the only manifestation of modern desperation, but it is one.

This is the reason, Katongole argues, why efforts at racial reconciliation so often fail. The “may unwittingly reproduce the same politics of anxiety.” “Tolerance” is problematic because “it produces a problematic form of inclusion by which power and privilege are extended but not questioned. In this way, white privilege may be extended to black folks without, however, questioning the underlying politics and accounts of the self and of human flourishing that are responsible for giving rise to the problem of racism in the first place.” What is needed is a different story, one, Katongole argues, that is expressed in and flows out of Christian worship (221).

To which one might add: This may be taken as evidence against the notion the doctrine of justification no longer make sense to moderns. It may not make sense if we work it out in terms of sin, divine judgment, God’s law, heaven and hell. But on Katongole’s analysis, the modern self craves nothing so much as justification. And the abiding sin of moderns is what Barth said is the abiding sin of virtually everyone – the insistence on self-justification over against the justification of God.


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