The testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford in September 2018, and the subsequent confirmation of Judge Kavanaugh, brought forth a fresh round of division, suffering and truth-telling across our country. Many of us watched the Kavanagh hearings with horror, if we could bear to watch at all. We listened as Dr. Blasey Ford gave her heart wrenching testimony. We watched as Kavanagh blustered and sneered in response. And we watched as he was confirmed, against tremendous protest, as the newest justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Many were arrested in dissent; others, at a Trump rally, cheered “Lock Her Up!”
In a political poll two days later, a majority of Republicans said that they would have supported Kavanaugh even if he had been found guilty of sexual assault. So they might believe Dr. Blasey Ford, but they don’t care. Boys will be boys?
We might imagine that women, as a subgroup of voters, would be more sympathetic to the testimony of a female sexual assault survivor. But, recent polling also shows that less than half of white women voters in the United States believe Ford’s allegations (Sharpe-Levine 2018).
In response, Julia Sharp-Levine wrote a piece titled “Why so Many White Women Don’t Believe Christine Blasey Ford.” In her explanation, Sharpe-Levine uses the term “patriarchal bargain,” adopted from sociologist Lisa Wade. The patriarchal bargain, she explains, is “a decision to accept gender rules that disadvantage women in exchange for whatever power one can wrest from the system. It is an individual strategy designed to manipulate the system to one’s best advantage, but one that leaves the system itself intact.” This helps to explain why this same demographic (white women) helped elect Trump, who by his own recorded words is a sexual predator. It would seem, then, that at least half of all white women voters in the United States are “deeply beholden to the patriarchal bargain” (Sharpe-Levine 2018). They are willing to accept sexual abuse, sexism, and a host of other injustices against marginalized peoples, in order to remain close to the most powerful people: white men.
So the patriarchal bargain was on full display during the Kavanaugh hearings, as a majority of white women deny the experience of even “one of their own” and celebrate the continued solidification of white male privilege and power over all other people. Many progressive white women have been awakening to systemic injustice in a new way since Trump was elected. Now that “one of our own,” a model white woman, has been steamrolled by the establishment ~ now, perhaps, we begin to see how systems of privilege and injustice work. Now, perhaps, we are ready to fight for our own freedom, when we begin to see how the deck is still stacked against us.
But this sort of fight has been going on since our country was founded. The deck has always been stacked in favor of the few. Our European ancestors waged genocide against the indigenous peoples of this country, boosted by Anglo-Saxon mythology and theology. Our forebears stole Africans from their country and forced them to create white wealth, creating the idea of race to justify their actions and quoting scripture all the while. Our grandparents shouted at black children as they integrated schools, and refused to sell homes to people of color. Our parents were thrilled with the war on crime, which disproportionately targeted people of color, but made them feel safer. When the prison industry boomed, and racist policing was separating black parents from their children, our aunts and uncles shook their heads, complaining about the breakdown of the “black family.”
And all the while, people of color were organizing, relentlessly and successfully, for their own liberation. Their protests were always vilified, never convenient for whites, but the fight for civil rights continued and continues.
Americans have been fighting for their own freedom and liberty, within and against the repressive systems of their own country, since its founding. Systemic injustice is even more American than apple pie. But most of us only wake up to this reality when it happens to “one of our own.”
For some women of color, the public response to Blasey Ford's testimony was a painful reminder of the ways in which white women have championed their own freedom to the exclusion of other women. For example, when Anita Hill gave her testimony against Clarence Thomas, risking everything just like Blasey Ford, there was no national campaign standing behind her. Hill was caught in the crosshairs of both sexism and racism, roundly ridiculed, shamed and dismissed. Did white women stand up for her testimony, for her humanity? Or did we see her as an unfortunate “other,” stereotyping her as an over-sexualized black woman who probably wanted it anyway?
I offer all this not to court defensiveness, or its painful cousin shame. I write these words because I believe that the life of faith requires us to draw the circle of our love and care ever wider. We can take off our blinders and come alive to new knowledge about the ways in which we are all connected.
Our spiritual traditions have deep wisdom for those who are ready to join the holy tradition of moral dissent. I speak from my social location as a white, cisgender, bisexual, middle-class Christian woman. I speak because I believe that we, white Christian women, have more to do, and will deepen our relationship with self, God and community in the process. We must continue to rework white Christian theology to privilege prophetic dissent over pious ignorance.
We can begin at our theological beginning, with Adam and Eve. Rebecca Parker, in “Soul Work,” writes about the theological basis of the white Christian identity. Mainstream Christian theology, she points out, paints Adam and Eve (before the Fall) as innocent, obedient and pure. They were compliant, dependent on God, even ignorant, with no self-consciousness; and their innocence and ignorance was sanctified by scripture and subsequently by the church (Parker, 172, 176). Let me say that again: the pre-Fall ignorance of Adam and Eve was sanctified as a holy state. This becomes clear when Eve messes everything up… by seeking knowledge! Because “to gain knowledge was to defy God” (Parker, 177)!
Parker argues that white people have adopted a “piety of innocence,” in which we strive to ensure our goodness by being, like Adam and Eve, “all good, ‘all-white,’ and blameless” (178). When we are reminded, for example, of our complicity in racism, white people often become “highly reactionary” … for, Parker writes, my “sense of goodness has been constructed on the suppression and exile of my capacity to do harm” (178). But on a deeper level, part of us knows that “we have achieved our goodness at a violent price. We have a guilty conscience... we are fearful of this deeper violence being exposed. We feel helpless in the presence of our own violence” (Parker 178).
What results is a highly fragile white consciousness, ever fearful of losing ignorance and accepting blame for the suffering of others. This sort of fragility is only compatible with a Christianity that is highly spiritualized, de-politicized, divorced from the suffering of the vulnerable and focused only on prosperity and comfort. In our quest to retain our purity and ignorance, we deny and avoid any knowledge of systemic suffering. Any suggestion that we might be complicit in systems of injustice feels shattering and shaming, and so we block it out through denial and indifference.
But there is another way, one that reclaims the true heart of Christianity: a radical Jesus who embodied truth-telling and accepted the reality of suffering, and argued for a new social order that centers the most vulnerable among us.
Let’s go back to Eve, for a minute. She reached out for wisdom, and grew into consciousness. Yes, this new knowledge was also painful. It meant that she was responsible for her own life and her own body, that she would know the reality of suffering which pervades human life. But Eve was no longer ignorant and dependent; she became an active agent in her own life. With wisdom came power. And in eating the apple, Eve aligned herself with Lady Wisdom, who Scripture tells us was there with God before the world was even created. Here is Lady Wisdom, speaking in the eighth chapter of Proverbs:
“Take my instruction instead of silver,
and knowledge rather than choice gold;
for wisdom is better than jewels,
and all that you may desire cannot compare with her.
I love those who love me,
and those who seek me diligently find me….
My fruit is better than gold, even fine gold,
and my yield than choice silver.
I walk in the way of righteousness,
along the paths of justice,
endowing with wealth those who love me,
and filling their treasuries.”
Wisdom is better than jewels, says Lady Wisdom. Knowledge is worth the work, and maybe even the suffering it takes to unlearn ignorance. Rebecca Parker calls us to craft a new theology in order to recover from the wounds of whiteness. In the process each person might become a full “inhabitant of one’s own life and one’s own society” (179). Parker writes that this new theology “assists in an internal healing of the fragmented self…and that sanctions a remedial education into the actual history and present realities of one’s country. Theology must direct us, like Eve, to taste the fruit of knowledge and gladly bear the cost of moving beyond the confines of the garden” (179). This new theology might give us the spiritual sustenance we need to truly hear the stories of others, in all their specificity, and join in an intersectional movement for freedom and dignity.
In stepping into the reality of the human condition, and the full range of suffering experienced by those around us, we must lose our fragile consciousness. We must claim greater agency, compassion, and connectedness. It begins with each of us, educating ourselves by listening to others and taking off our blinders. In this way might we re-integrate our own souls, shedding denial and false ignorance and reclaiming our full humanity and potential. In following Lady Wisdom, we might also follow the Jesus who championed the most vulnerable and called for nothing less than liberation.
References
Parker, Rebecca, 2003. “Not Somewhere Else, But Here: The Struggle for Racial Justice as a Struggle to Inhabit My Country.” In Walk in the Ways of Wisdom: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza; Soul Work: Anti-Racist Theologies in Dialogue, edited by Marjorie Bowens Wheatley and Nancy Palmer Jones. Skinner House Books: Boston.
