Book Recommendation: Stand Your Ground by Kelly Brown Douglas

Watching newscasts and the presidential campaign, it should be fairly obvious that race relations in the U.S. are strained. It is often unapparent (mostly to white people) why this is the case. White privilege allows for a type of blindness to racism in our structures, institutions, ideologies, dominant narratives, and national mythologizing. Kelly Brown Douglas deconstructs history and storytelling to uncover how America’s “grand narrative of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism” has led to what she calls a “stand-your-ground culture”: one in which black lives as valued less than white lives-- in which an adult white man is acquitted of predatorily killing an unarmed black youth. She argues that narrative, “science,” religion, and civic culture have been used to promote a society built upon the inequality of races (and subjugation of some) as a just and justified endeavor based on natural law and structured to reinforce white superiority and Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism (KBD, 50).


Douglas traces how this exceptionalism is so rooted in national foundations that it is often indistinguishable. As a member of a primarily white Christian congregation, given the Church’s role in founding this country and promoting its myths, we, as Christians (and perhaps especially as Congregationalist/UCC Christians) must ask ourselves how we our churches contribute to racial divides and oppressive forces, especially since it is often unclear and invisible to white people. The theologies used to promote hierarchy and division are often still present in our churches. Douglas elucidates how narratives of science, religion, civic culture, and whiteness are conflated in ways that make them often indistinguishable. As a white person working in a white church, it is imperative that I work to untangle the racism woven into the ways we tell our stories as Christians, Americans, and white people if I hope to cultivate an anti-racist church culture and promote a more harmonious national future.


Douglas lays out how structures of church, society, and government have aligned to protect white superiority. Her analysis shows how racism continues to permeate all aspects of culture and is highly adaptable (KBD, 76). Just as enlightenment ideals concerning “natural law” theologically justified subjugation of peoples for earlier Americans, how do our views today justify the ways that we discriminate? Do our words about unity justify assimilationist attitudes that ask minorities to take on prescribed behaviors that mimic whiteness (or heteronormativity, gender roles, etc.)? Do we march in Pride but shy away from Black Lives Matter protests? Are our music selections indicative of Euro-normativity (or are they appropriative)? Do we resist dealing with instances of racism in the Bible-- and in the world-- because it is uncomfortable? These questions are a small fraction of those we must ask ourselves in church work if we are serious about anti-racist theologies in church and untangling our churches from the progression of institutionalized racism in this country.


As the history of this country and Stand Your Ground show us, changing particular racist structures in this country is incomplete work-- neither emancipation nor desegregation were able to “fix” racism. Our structures, ideologies, and people are saturated and tangled together within the Anglo-Saxon exceptionalist. Our work is to engage in critical love for our institutions, but also to generate new ways of telling stories that can replace harmful narratives which perpetuate oppressive frameworks. Just as Jesus reinterpreted his community’s stories for their given moment, we must find life-giving ways of re-framing our narratives so they can encourage the dismantling of hierarchy.