In this book, Rima Vesely-Flad provides a deep and comprehensive account of one facet of US-American antiblackness: the social construction of blackness as a “social pollutant,” which endangers “the moral foundations of [our] white, Christian, democratic, and capitalist nation” from within (3). Vesely-Flad believes that we “cannot hope to comprehensively understand the emergence and perpetuation of disproportionately black imprisonment in contemporary U.S. society” unless we grasp “the salience of [this] symbolic construct.” In highlighting the role that this symbolic construct has played in establishing and upholding antiblackness, Vesely-Flad helps us understand how antiblackness has taken on a life of its own.
She marks the start of antiblackness earlier than other scholars do. For her, racialized notions of leadership and servitude date back to the thirteenth century and persist still to this day. According to Vesely-Flad, antiblackness fueled “nineteenth-century nation building” campaigns by portraying “dark-skinned people as intellectually and morally degraded, and thus in need of authority figures who could assert control” (31). It similarly helps to explain the rise of “southern penal systems and northern penitentiaries” in that same century (69). Despite other significant differences, both southern and northern forms of discipline and punishment “relied on religious interpretations of black immorality to buttress their advocating for restraining black people” and “sought to exploit labor under a system of violent subjugation that relied upon the lash” and therefore harkened back to slavery (69).
Vesely-Flad focuses on the postabolition context in such detail because she believes it laid the symbolic foundations that underpin our current regime of racialized crime and punishment. In excavating the late nineteenth-century symbolism of antiblackness, we can recognize how little has changed and how greatly Africanized slavery still structures life today. The association between blackness and criminality has become self-perpetuating: black people endure incarceration at dramatically higher rates than other groups because they are perceived as criminals; they are perceived as criminals because they are incarcerated at dramatically higher rates than other groups (83).
But Vesely-Flad does not simply chronicle what has been done to black people; she also documents what they have been doing for themselves. In the final three chapters, which discuss the way the Black Lives Matter movement has protested this association between blackness and pollution (153) and provide an overview of “new theological constructions of blackness,” Vesely-Flad makes her most important contribution to the field (175). While in previous chapters she creatively synthesizes and sheds new light on the research conducted by other scholars, here Vesely-Flad breaks new ground. Her theological analysis of contemporary black protest movements is fresh and original. Her writing is energetic. This cutting-edge account of the way “activists have flipped the dominant narrative of blackness and violence … [by] illuminating that policing forces, not black people, are shockingly violent” would resonate with and offer a much-needed challenge to undergraduate students and perhaps even advanced high-school students (201). This concluding section could also serve as a springboard for parish-based discussions about racial justice.
This book hits only one false note. Unfortunately, like many other Christian scholars, Vesely-Flad occasionally makes Christianity look good by making Judaism look bad. Placing Jesus in opposition to his own Jewish religion, Vesely-Flad argues that Jesus “challenged boundaries of pollution in Jewish society,” which upheld “purity [as its] premier structuring value” (xvii). This is, at best, a highly uncharitable reading of first-century Judaism, which was theologically and politically diverse. And, within the structure of Vesely-Flad's otherwise airtight argument, this claim implicitly positions white supremacy in general and antiblackness in particular as “Jewish.” Vesely-Flad ultimately recirculates an old anti-Jewish Christian trope that portrays Christianity as a religion of freedom only by depicting “the law,” that is, Judaism, as a religion of oppression and slavery. Here, she also anachronistically treats first-century Judaism and Christianity as two distinct religions. We now know that the split between Judaism and what would come to be known as Christianity did not occur until several decades after Jesus’ death. Despite this unfortunate, but very common, misstep, Vesley-Flad's tightly argued and richly original work should be read widely.
