Abstract
Jonathan Tran's latest book is one of the most significant treatments of racism and Christian theology to appear in recent years. Tran, who teaches theology and ethics at Baylor University, reshapes conversations on racism and theology by engaging Asian American Christianity through textured case studies that resist Black/White binaries. Tran argues against antiracism he calls “identitarian” in favor of antiracism situated within analyses of political economy, namely racial capitalism. Identitarian antiracism is based in rigid “racial kinds and identities” that end up reinscribing racism despite trying to solve it. It is unable to address racist structures embedded within economies, laws, and politics. Tran contrasts identarian antiracism with analysis based in racial capitalism, which sees racism emerging out of the economic exploitations of capitalist political economies. In this view, not only are we racialized but we are commodified, such that the two become entwined.
Two extended case studies ground the book's analysis. First, Tran shows the workings of racial capitalism through the example of Chinese Americans who settled in the Mississippi Delta after Reconstruction. Unable to participate in many aspects of the American economy because of racism, they built a business model of opening stores in food deserts of Black neighborhoods. An identitarian framework would narrate this story by claiming Delta Chinese were “becoming White” as their economic opportunities increased, but Tran disagrees. This simplistic analysis makes racial identity the primary factor for Delta Chinese when the situation proved more complex. An analysis based in racial capitalism shows that Chinese Americans worked in the aftermarkets of American slavery, exploiting Black neighbors even as they faced discrimination of their own. This first case study shows the power, persuasiveness, and thoroughness of explanations based in racial capitalism.
The second case study of Redeemer Community Church grounds Tran's more constructive argument. Founded in a neighborhood of the Bay Area that had suffered awful environmental and economic harm, Redeemer Community Church now enacts a different kind of economy, one opposed to aftermarket racial capitalism. Redeemer works in community development to repair local economies amid past exploitation, in part by redistributing profits from a software company founded by its members. It started a private school that works against educational opportunity hoarding by redistributing such opportunity. Redeemer is a small, limited example, but for Tran it shows how Christians can participate in the divine economy. In this economy, humans are connected with one another and creation through God's love, with reparative works of justice and mercy being part and parcel of economic life.
Tran's focus on political economy and his subsequent resistance to a Black/White binary carry immense consequences for Christian theology. Theological discourses too often treat race as a remote abstraction—theologians love our abstractions, after all!—without sufficient attention to how racism has been inscribed into our material conditions. Even when theological discourses give attention to material conditions, they often focus on racism within laws, within colonized imaginations, within church institutions, and so forth, without focusing on earlier labor systems that produced the racial classifications, first in Europe then globally. Furthermore, Tran's case study method offers a welcome model of studying racism through concrete history rather than remote analysis. Tran's ability to balance neighborhood-level investigation with more wide-ranging considerations is exceptional, leading to astute explanations of complicated phenomena.
If accenting racial capitalism is the book's greatest strength, Tran's nearly exclusive focus on it also limits his analysis. Racial capitalism seems to tell most of the story of racism in this book, yet I think there must be more. It seems to me that our racist sins prove so pernicious that they require fuller excavating than materialist analyses of political economy can provide on their own. Racism has infected our reason, for example, such that focusing on race's discursive aspects proves vital to understanding and overcoming our situation. Works like Achille Mbembe's Critique of Black Reason or Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze's On Reason show how racism has become embedded in thought itself. Even if political economy should have priority in our analyses of racism—and I think it should—that does not mean neglecting other aspects like racism's cultural or ontological functioning simply because we have addressed racial capitalism. Tran briefly responds to this concern when he rebuts Afropessimism, but his rebuttal relates more to pessimism and intellectual history than to this wider worry that diagnosing racisms requires more than materialist analyses alone. In short, I wanted to know more about the spirit of racial capitalism, not just its material qualities.
Given all that this book achieves, that quibble is a minor one. Tran displays remarkable methodological rigor, deep care for those he is researching, and nuanced analysis that draws on existing literature without being beholden to it. It is exemplary theological ethics.