I believe that this Something Else is rooted in the radical act of repenting from the American Dream, the corporate-sponsored conventional wisdom that comes at the awful expense of this agonizing statistic: the US and Canada comprise about 5% of the world's population - and consume over 30% of the world's resources. I am calling the North American context The 5/30 Window, a play on what my white Evangelical pastors referred to as "The 10/40 Window," the African, Asian and Middle Eastern regions of "unreached" people who live between ten and forty degrees north latitude. I am flipping the script and saying that the souls of dark-skinned Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims who live on the other side of the world do not need to get saved. We do.
By "we" I mean those of us in the 5/30 Window who have a semblance of privilege and are more progressive than our fundamentalist and fascist friends and family members. We do everything that we are supposed to do to make life matter - college, career, marriage, maybe kids, march at the Pride parade, make donations to important causes and keep up with social justice issues - but are left feeling exhausted, lonely, unfulfilled, stressed, depressed, anxious, addicted and/or insecure. We are weighed down by a soul dissonance. Because all our supposed-tos pile up and perpetuate an oppressive system. My spouse Lindsay, who is a licensed marriage and family therapist, says that if we remain in a codependent relationship with a counterfeit system like the American Dream, then the counterfeit will inevitably come out sideways.
When Jesus beckoned his disciples to repent, he was borrowing language from the battlefield. In the first century Roman empire, the soldier who repented was a traitor. He switched sides. He spoke treason. I believe that for people with a semblance of privilege (like me) living in the 5/30 Window, repentance is a call to break rank with the aspirational goals of achievement and upward mobility. Because our success and social respectability are "earned" in a system addicted to the antithesis of love: supremacy. By this, I mean that it has a built-in pecking order, a kind of caste code that says that certain people are more deserving than others. This stubborn supremacy still reigns in systems dedicated to diversity, equity and inclusion.
Repentance slowly erodes our obliviousness. When we switch sides, we see how the Dream excludes, exploits and extracts from the 10/40 Window and those Dr. King called "the other America:" the poor, the essential workers, Black and Native folks and other people of color. Jesus prescribed repentance because he knew the spiritual secret. If we do not openly oppose supremacy around every corner, then supremacy becomes a part of who we are wrapping itself around our souls like the arms of an octopus (as Anne Braden once wrote). If we do not break rank, we drown in denial, dysfunction and/or drink.
The American Dream is a nightmare and those of us playing by its rules in the 5/30 Window are paying the price spiritually and emotionally. Because our lives are embedded in an interrelated structure of reality. The soul is not locked inside autonomous individuals. It is a web of Being that binds everyone to everything else. We are caught in what Dr. King called "the inescapable network of mutuality." Whatever affects anyone directly, affects everyone else indirectly. The excluding, exploiting and extracting of disproportionately dark-skinned bodies is inextricably connected to the excluding, exploiting and extracting of the souls of white folks and middle-class people.
Repentance is not fueled so much by what we are against, but who we are for. We can live for Something Else, a Power of love that compels people of faith and conscience to promote an alternative spiritual paradigm. It's not about aspiring for greatness, but conspiring with the critical mass of people - disproportionately dark-skinned - who are being excluded, exploited and extracted. The word "conspire" literally means "to breathe with" (by the way, "aspire" means to breathe on, which brings up a whole cringeworthy history of diseases that white settlers have passed along to Native people, from 1492 to our present-day pandemic). So in a nut shell, repentance is breaking rank with supremacy and breathing with Something Else.
But here's where it gets really interesting. In a stubbornly anti-Black and settler colonial society like America, Something Else cannot possibly be colorless or colorblind. James Cone (writing three years before George Floyd and I were born) forcefully suggested that Something Else is Black - and that the salvation of white Americans depends solely on joining the oppressed, becoming one with them and participating in the goal of collective liberation. Cone outright rejected the idea that white people were supposed to lend a hand to unfortunate poor Black folks. He called these philanthropic and political acts “sin offerings,” used by white folks to assure themselves that they are good people.
Cone went even further. He said that white people must become Black like God. Because Blackness is synonymous with salvation. Cone broke out the bible and compared it to the Philippian jailer’s question to Paul and Silas in the book of Acts, “What must I do to be saved?” The jailer's question implied that if he worked hard enough, or knew all the right things, he, too, could get saved. Paul and Silas told him that his salvation depended upon simply believing in Something Else. Cone wrote that Blackness is that gift from God. Believing entailed receiving the gift - and then reorienting one’s entire existence on the basis of the gift.
Blackness is what the Wholly Otherness of God looks like. It’s the polar opposite of whiteness - not the skin color, but the spiritual condition connected to playing by the rules in an anti-Black, settler colonial system. To heal and recover from the American Dream, white folks and middle-class people must become Something Else. This is obviously controversial - and uncomfortable and inconvenient. But I believe that Cone was basically spot on. Very few white folks in American history have tried it - but the ones we know from history are tremendously compelling figures (for starters, look up John Brown, Laura Ann Haviland, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Clarence Jordan and Braden - whose life was referred to as a "racial conversion narrative").
I do not think that repentance just happens. I do not believe that it is possible to just flip a repentance light switch. I think it is a life-long process that requires collective study, a commitment to practice and some sort of accountability (to kindreds, to the other America, to the earth, to the erotic and tender parts of ourselves). It simply cannot happen alone. I am convinced that this process, this training program, has the power to make us more humble, honest, open-hearted, tender, nurturing, courageous, compassionate, playful, present, centered and emotionally available. However, there is a catch. It will cost us everything
Below, I've linked some readings that have formed a canon of repentance for me. This list is neither pure, nor exhaustive. But it's a start. All this to say: I am interested in committing to collective study with other white folks and middle-class people who are repenting from the American Dream too. This list will also be a part of a curriculum, in 2024, for the 1st Annual John Brown Society, a gathering of white boys who are breaking rank from the American Dream. Details to come.
-The Other America, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (March 14, 1968)
MLK gave this speech three weeks before his assassination in the wake of the Kerner Commission Report, a congressional study that proclaimed that white society was deeply implicated in the conditions of the ghetto. King spoke in the high school gymnasium in Grosse Pointe, the suburb directly east of Detroit. White people interrupted his speech multiple times.
-Poor People's Campaign, National Fact Sheet 2023
The PPC publishes an annual statistics on poverty in America. These stats are absolutely abysmal - and I believe they affect us all at the soul level.
-Bruce Rogers-Vaughn, Soul Talk in a Neoliberal Age (a 5-Part Interview)
No one has studied how the economy affects our souls quite like Dr. Rogers-Vaughn, a long-time psychotherapist and professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School.
-Kentanji Brown Jackson's Dissent in the SC Case Overturning Affirmative Action (July 2023)
-The California Reparations Report (June 2023)
Cedric Robinson was the first to call the American economic system "racial capitalism." It is a system fueled by white racism from the very beginning. Nothing has changed this. Not the Civil War or the Civil Rights Movement or the uprising after the viral police murder of George Floyd. KBJ's masterful dissent lays out the way that this works intergenerationally. For further study, dig into the forty-chapter report from the California Reparations Taskforce. The City of Detroit just started their own 18-month taskforce and I am trying to attend as many of its monthly sessions as possible
-James Perkinson, The Apocalypse of Whiteness
-Imani Perry, Racism is Terrible: Blackness is Not
-Biko Gray, The Theodicy of the Unliving, or Why I Won't Teach My Black Lives Matter Class Anymore
So much was written in the wake of George Floyd's murder. These are three of the very best, in my opinion. Perkinson is a white boy in his seventies who moved to Detroit from suburban Cincy in his early twenties. Black people on the city's eastside saved his soul. Perry is Black, Gen-X and from the South. She is a professor at Princeton University, and her book South to America bowled me over last year. Gray is a professor at Syracuse and his essay here is deeply personal, reflecting on his experience teaching about Black life and death (to white students) in the classroom.
-adrienne maree brown, relinquishing the patriarchy
-Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic (The Erotic as Power)
-bell hooks, Killing Rage: Militant Resistance
-Bettina Love on Marc Lamont Hill's Pod
-By White Privilege I Mean the Ability to Stay Alive, an interview with Claudia Rankine
-The Combahee River Collective (1977)
Black women have endured the "double jeopardy" of being Black and female in a 5/30 Window that runs on racism and patriarchy. Lorde's essay on "the erotic" has been a monumental paradigm shift for me. Feelings - she writes elsewhere - are the fortresses and sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. Our salvation will not come from head knowledge. Men: please read the piece from brown on patriarchy first!
-James Baldwin, On Being White...and other lies
-Biko Gray, A Letter to (White) Liberalism
-Willie Jennings, Whiteness Rooted in Place
-Kiese Laymon, The Worst of White Folks
-Kiese Laymon, Black Churches Taught Us to Forgive
These essays - all written by Black men - are some of the most poignant and accessible pieces I've read about what "whiteness" is and does to us. Please start with the short piece by Baldwin who left the land of the living four decades ago.
This book, available online for free here, is a collection of letters written by George Jackson, a young Black man who was thrown into prison for petty theft in 1960. During the decade he was imprisoned, he spent seven-and-a-half years in solitary confinement. His diagnosis of the destructive American system is more important than ever. Jackson keeps the main thing the main thing - and the main thing is revolution. Which is just another word for repentance.
-The Geography of Sorrow, an interview with Francis Weller
Last but not least, this interview is so important to me because I believe that a spirituality of repentance must be rooted in grief, not guilt. Especially for white people who have guilt burned into the basal ganglia of our brains. Weller, a psychotherapist in Northern California, writes about "apprenticing to sorrow." This is vital. Because as the bible says, only deep grief can lead to repentance. When we see the suffering, the only appropriate response is sorrow. Which should lead us to switch sides - and get saved.
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