Capitalism is the root cause of anti-blackness and false reconciliation efforts

Reconciliation is profoundly uncritical in its inability to see that the constant in white supremacy is Christianity and Christian religious formation as unity in Christ that transcends earthly identities and thus holds the logic of the world together. This universal and totalizing logic of reconciliation is precisely the problem. For it is not able to imagine a world that would actually value blackness as blackness, only a world that is able to transform blackness into a lesser whiteness, to transform unreason into reason. Similarly, it is not able to hold a concept of whiteness as a violent and violating unity. It can only think whiteness as a repetition of forgetfulness, or the unthinking itself, that whiteness always performs (present currently in the “post-racial”). It can only think whiteness as a present failure that is not really a failure. A failure that will be made right in the future. For example, John Piper’s recent chat with Douglas Wilson [with brilliant twitter commentary by Sarah, here] had Piper applauding Thabiti Anyabwile because he bent over backwards to try and “understand” Doug Wilson’s racist treatise defending slavery. In the framework of unity and reconciliation, this is the mode in which blackness can be valued—in how much it defers to and submits to whiteness as the organizing logic around which we must confront race. A secular example of this could also be noted around Mandela’s death and the utility Mandela’s writings about peace and reconciliation quickly found themselves divorced from his radicalism and one-time support for armed resistance in order to shore up neoliberal ideals regarding democracy, global capitalism’s expansion, and hope in capitalism as the harbinger of democracy. In each instance, It is the same position blackness must hold—a thing to be reformed and transformed until it can speak in the language that recognizes whiteness as the savior and the structure of the world’s reason. Because it is not able to recognize itself as a reproduction of the violence of white supremacy and anti-blackness, reconciliation discourse and frameworks encourages the emotional abuse of people of color for the benefit of white supremacy and for the benefit of white people as the primary people who must be borne with in order for the world to really change. It encourages the redemption of a white supremacist world through a reconciliation that extends the white supremacist world in a nicer more inclusive form. Reconciliation sets itself up as the only solution to the problem it creates, as the only remedy to the violence it produces.