Christ Divided: Antiblackness as Corporate Vice

by Katie Walker Grimes

Overview

Bringing the wisdom of generations of black Catholics into conversation with contemporary scholarly accounts of racism, Christ Divided diagnoses "antiblackness supremacy" as a corporate vice that inhabits the body of Christ. Antiblackness supremacy operates as a unique form of oppression: it arises from the enduring association of blackness with slave status and plays a foundational role in processes of racialization and racial hierarchy in the United States. In fact, since non-black people often amass power at the expense of black people, much of "white supremacy" is more accurately described as "antiblackness supremacy."

In addition to introducing a new framework of racial analysis, this book proposes a new approach to virtue ethics. Anti-blackness supremacy inhabits not just the biased mind and the individual body, it also resides in the corporate body of the church. But due to the porosity of Christ‘s body, the church cannot reform itself from within. Antiblackness supremacy has twisted even baptism and the Eucharist in its image. In response, the theory of corporate virtue outlined here contemplates the conditions under which the church‘s corporately vicious and necessarily porous body can be made to "do the right thing."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781506438535
Publisher:	Augsburg Fortress, Publishers
Publication date:	11/01/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	344
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Katie Walker Grimes is assistant professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University. She is the author of Fugitive Saints: Catholicism and the Politics of Slavery (Fortress Press, 2017). She has published articles on the relation of white supremacy and the Catholic Church in Political Theology and Horizons and has articles in the Journal of Religious Ethics. She is a regular contributing author to the blog Women in Theology.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Preface ix

Introduction xiii

Part I Defining White Supremacy and Antiblackness Supremacy

1 Antiblackness and World History 11

2 The Nearly Global Afterlife of Black Slavery 41

3 The Spatial Afterlife of Slavery in the Contemporary United States 53

Part II Diagnosing the Corporate Habits of Antiblackness Supremacy

4 Inverting Virtue 89

5 The Catholic Corporate Habits of Antiblackness in the Era of Chattel Slavery 105

6 Racial Segregation as a Corporate Habit of Antiblackness Supremacy in the Body of Christ 123

7 Nonwhiteness Will Not Save Us: The Persistence of Antiblackness in the "Brown" Twenty-First Century 147

8 Toward a Theory of Corporate Virtue and Vice 177

Part III Antiblackness Supremacy and the Sacraments of Initiation

9 Baptism and the Eucharist as Habits of Antiblackness Supremacy 189

10 Corporate Vices, Ecclesial Consequences: Poking Holes in the Ecclesiology of "Battened-Down Hatches" 205

Part IV Re-habituating the Corporate Body of Christ

11 Real Food for Real Bodies: From Sacramental Optimism to Sacramental Realism 223

12 Dismantling Antiblackness Supremacy 237

Bibliography 265

Index 299