Items of Interest: Second Week of Lent

Fragile, Handle With Care: On White Classicists
by Mathura Umachandran (Eidolon). «Classicists are very well placed (I wrote “uniquely” at first, but I don’t want to displace exceptionalism only to re-inscribe it elsewhere) to critique the political realities of racial injustice. That is, classicists are at a fruitful vantage point to expose how the foundational privileges of whiteness have been used to justify imperial systems of control, racial hierarchies and oppressive aesthetic regimes. And yet, the assumption of the cultural superiority of the Greco Roman past as the fountainhead of white Europe is an attitude that is so much a commonplace in our discipline that it hardly goes remarked upon.»

Moral church, amoral society
by Robin Lovin (The Christian Century). «The situation of the Confessing Church, however, is not quite our situation. Bonhoeffer was trying to sustain his church in a place where the state and the political party sought to determine all of the legitimate social options. The 20th century has offered numerous examples of that sort of state, and in many of them, “taking up space” has required real courage and brought real persecution on those who attempted it. It is less clear what it means to take up space that is morally empty.»

Beyond the Wages of Whiteness: Du Bois on the Irrationality of Antiblack Racism
by Ella Myers (Social Science Research Council). «Ella Myers provides an account of W. E. B. Du Bois’s nuanced analysis of the sense of entitlement among whites in the United States. Drawing from Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction and other writings, Myers draws attention to both the concept of a compensatory “wage” that elevates the social status of lower class whites in ways that bind them to white capital, but also to the irrational aspects of antiblack racism. Myers’s essay complements the earlier “Reading Racial Conflict” essay by J. Phillip Thompson on Black Reconstruction, and also makes a direct connection to debates on the role of the white working class in Trump’s electoral victory.»

75 Percent of Republicans Say White Americans Are Discriminated Against
by Peter Wade (Rolling Stone) This surge of white identity politics, not some abstract 'both sides' polarization, is at the root of the current conflict.

White Nationalism’s Deep American Roots
by Adam Serwer (The Atlantic). «King’s recent question, posed in a New York Times interview, may be appalling: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” But it is apt. “That language” has an American past in need of excavation. Without such an effort, we may fail to appreciate the tenacity of the dogma it expresses, and the difficulty of eradicating it. The president’s rhetoric about “shithole countries” and “invasion” by immigrants invites dismissal as crude talk, but behind it lie ideas whose power should not be underestimated.»

Privilege Masked as Orthodoxy: What the Slander of Cardinal Ticona Reveals
by Jerry Ryan (Commonweal). «But what we are witnessing in many traditionalist groups of the kind that have targeted Ticona is on a different level altogether. Here Catholic identity is being defined as adherence to a rigid and unforgiving moral code and to a formalistic liturgical rite. This is combined with a total disregard and even disdain for social justice and the teachings of Vatican II. The image of a triumphant and glorious church is part of our creed and the object of our hope, but it is not our present reality, and to pretend otherwise is a dangerous form of self-deception. The Kingdom of Christ is not of this world; we are not yet a cortege of white-robed innocents following the Lamb wherever He goes. We are members of a pilgrim church, a community of broken people seeking mercy—and a communion of saints only to the degree that this mercy is received. Beneath all the triumphalism of the traditionalists can be heard the blasphemous prayer of the Pharisee: “I give you thanks, O Lord, that I am not like the rest of men.»