Amid the “Altar Call”: Sacrifice, Minoritized Beings, and the “Collective Good” by Thelathia “Nikki” Young

Within a given social, political, and/or religious context, the practice of identifying minorities and minority groups is essentially the same as creating minoritized subjects and subjectivity. Such practices of organizing human existence into distinctive categories produces fundamentally unequal and certainly hierarchically arranged relations that in turn produce differently valued human populations and individuals. The product of these relations reaches far beyond in group v. out group, haves and have-nots, righteous and wretched; rather, it designates subjectivity, humanity, and personhood.  Thus, the question that we ought to consider, as global citizens concerned with right relations built on systems of justice and peace for everyone… or as theologians concerned with socially-just politics in a racist time, is about the degree to which classification and categorization render some of us invaluable and others of us simply without value.

If we are using majority/minority frameworks in our determination of what is good for all—the “collective good”—and since such frameworks are constructed with the same logics that lead to settler colonialism, slavery, mass incarceration, poverty, hunger, and genocide, then we must interrogate the construction and use of collectivity. This examination is especially key for those of us embedded in theological discourse that lifts up martyrdom and sacrifice as the supreme outcomes of incarnation. If, for example, Jesus represents the importance of sacrifice for the good of all humanity while also representing the outsider, the poor, and the oppressed, then we might ask ourselves what epistemic and affective frameworks underwrite the notion of good. And further, whose bodies and lives are always already the compensation or currency for such a good?

We find ourselves in a spatial and temporal reality of moral depravity, which I specifically connect with capitalism and neoliberal values. The problem is not just economic, legal, political or even social. We are facing a spiritual issue, an issue of moral desire, capacity, and orientation. The cost of the moral framework under which we are currently operating is violence and death. There is a ritual of sacrifice being performed over and over again, and it is happening in, through, and on black bodies, queer bodies, trans bodies, disabled bodies, undocumented and imprisoned bodies and more…. These bodies – literally and figuratively blackened – are the soterial surrogates in the ongoing collective ritual of blood sacrifices for the salvation of white racial purity and white supremacy–aka the collective good. A good in which blacks, queers, trans folks, disabled people, and other marginalized groups are denied subjectivity, humanity, and personhood.

I have talked about this before, using Reinhold Neibuhr even, to illustrate the link between American liberalism, white supremacy, and black soterial surrogacy. I basically argued that from inception, through its constitution and execution, the American moral project exploited black bodies and sacrificed black lives in order to create and sustain a narrowly defined “collective good.” In the process of exploitation, black bodies were sacrificed – becoming soterial surrogates – for the sake of maintaining the whole (or in more familiar language) by means of serving and protecting. The painful thing that we have to face as people who have carved moral values out of liberal political and theological traditions is the fact that these ideals are poisoned by their roots in white supremacy.

The construction of race and particularly the construction of whiteness as a norm and means of understanding subjective difference is fundamentally a moral enterprise… and in such an enterprise, whiteness is a moral good. Through Emilie Townes’ concept of the fantastic hegemonic imagination, the moral good of white supremacy gets coded as American liberal democracy and understood as “liberty and justice for all.” The U.S. American context has been invested in the protection of the moral norm of white supremacy from the start of its imperial project. In fact, protecting the moral norm of white supremacy has always been the goal of American economic and political systems. The potential loss of white supremacy (and the political stability it represents) is anchored by the instability of white racial purity. Once people started talking about race as a result of genetics and as a measure of human capabilities, the construction of the abnormal – read blackness, womanness, gender queerness, transness, disability, queer sexual expression – justified the creation of hierarchically related bodies and lives. And the thing is: a hierarchical subjective structure that positions whiteness, cis-hetness, and able-bodied straightness at the top of a shared social order generates fear about the demise of the “collective good.”  The protection of white racial purity, and its progenitors then, is situated within an ethical framework of panic, which subsequently justifies the politicization of social constructions of race.

The subjective possibility of American liberty is linked to white supremacy as a political ideology. My claim that American liberalism is white supremacy points to an undeniable connection between white supremacy and the notions of freedom and free will that drive an American and “first world” sense of prerogative. As long as liberty is attached to subjective moral worth, we cannot deny that freedom is a limited commodity, not an ontological reality.

This exclusionary moral framework maintains itself by sacrificing not the few for the many, but many for a very small few. We are witnessing this right now, actually, with the current administration’s attempt to erase transgender people from the socio-political scene. Donald Trump’s government is working to narrow the already narrow definition of gender. Never mind how the Health Department is doing this unconscionable work by simultaneously conflating sex and gender and then separating them with biology and choice. It is important to remember that these are the same people leading the fight in the current opioid crisis but who condemned black mothers for poor moral choices and called them “crackheads” during the war on drugs. They are the same ones who, last year, established a shelter for “unaccompanied alien children” at customs and border control in Tornillo, Texas but who deny that this shelter is in any way connected to the separation of children from families that creates the very category of “unaccompanied alien children.”

And to be clear, in the wake of the gender and sexuality conversations that have emerged during Trump’s presidency, people have asked him about his promise to protect LGBT people. In one context he said, “You know what I’m doing? I’m protecting everybody.” And there it is. “Everybody”—the collective good, the “public”—is actually a limited number of beneficiaries of the white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchal system. Donald Trump knows it, and so do we. Even though the U.S. Health Department’s actual motto is “Improving the health, safety, and well-being of America”, it is our job to think about who is counted in America as American (and what that designation has to do with human rights more broadly). “America” becomes a metaphor for those same beneficiaries of the system described above, but more importantly, it stands for those who are counted as a subject, a human, a person.

Thelathia “Nikki” Young is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Religion at Bucknell University.  Her research focuses on the intersection of ethics, family, race, gender, and sexuality, and she is specifically interested in the impact of queerness on moral reasoning. Her first monograph, Black Queer Ethics, Family, and Philosophical Imagination, was published in 2016 by Palgrave Macmillan, and her second book, written with Eric Barreto and Jake Myers, is called In Tongues of Mortals and Angels: A De-Constructive Theology of God-Talk in Acts and Corinthians, Fortress, 2018.