Abstract
Willie James Jennings’ After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging is an ambitious meditative essay that uses personal reflections, poetic verse, principled appeals, and informed analysis to propose a reorientation of theological education towards a redeeming desire [eros] for belonging. After Whiteness advances two central claims: a) plantation pedagogies and dogged reproduction of white self-sufficient masculinity exacerbate theological education’s current crises and instability; b) reimaging formation through prisms of belonging will better situate theological education for the myriad diversities on its horizons. Whiteness, for Jennings, is neither a simple ethno-racial identity nor a generic description of skin complexion. Following his argument in The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (2010), Jennings employs whiteness as framework and discursive practice; whiteness orients individuals towards ways of knowing and learning that reproduce self-sufficient masculinity and understand their telos and self-sufficiency in terms of possession, control, and mastery. Jennings remedies these legacies by imagining belonging within the language and framework of a theologically informed image of Jesus and the crowd. Through brief allusions to Mark 5:24b and Luke 5:1, the crowd becomes metaphor and lens for revealing Western education’s misapprehensions and reorienting them towards belonging.
Divided into a prologue ‘Secrets’ (pp. 1-22) and five chapters, Jennings presents his primary argument within ‘Secrets’. Here, readers first encounter the uneven yet deeply affective, staccato-styled transitions that characterize the work’s constant movement between poetic verse, vignette, contextual assessment, and proposed correction. Possibly the most elusive part of ‘Secrets’ is Jennings’ characterization of theological education as consisting of five elements that subsequently outline the body of the work: ‘Fragments’ (pp. 23-46); ‘Designs’ (pp. 47-76); ‘Buildings’ (pp. 77-104); ‘Motions’ (pp. 105-134); ‘Eros’ (pp. 135-156). Each chapter presents vignettes and poetic verse upon which Jennings uses his experiences as student, faculty, administrator, and consultant to reveal the corrosive effects of Western education in its current guise. Each element functions like a discursive space where Jennings assesses vital components and processes that varyingly construe theological education as an ecology, economy, institution, or ideal. In ‘Fragments’, ‘Designs’, and ‘Buildings’, he employs vignettes to address building blocks, design objectives, and institutional cultures of Western education. These chapters extend Jennings’ understanding of white self-sufficient masculinity and plantation pedagogies as reproductive expressions of individualism, colonialism, and slavery. ‘Motions’ highlights the inner workings and cellular activities that characterize an institution’s fragments, designs, and buildings. Utilizing crowd as metaphor, ‘Eros’ corrects overly sexualized understandings of the erotic and imagines a deep redeeming desire that serves as the unifying ethos for his pedagogy of belonging.
After Whiteness draws insights from diverse fields and models an intersectional sensibility that appreciates the complexity of one’s subject positions. Some adherents to critical race theory may find After Whiteness naïve while many academics ensconced within the guild will decry it as hyperbolic pessimism. Nevertheless, readers must remember that After Whiteness is a vision for theological education; its subject is neither whiteness nor the theorization of racism.
Jennings’ vision is critical and hopeful, navigating a narrow ideological path. Ultimately, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging achieves its goal of stimulating vital conversations and offers a valuable thought-provoking contribution to current dialogues on the state and future of theological education.