Brian Bantum has succeeded in doing what few scholars are able to do. He has written a book that is accessible to a broad audience but does not compromise its critical and theological rigor. Not only this: he has also produced a book in praise of story—the story of the author, the story of race in America, and the Christian story—and he employs story to persuade. This embrace of story, and this ability to communicate accessibly, opens the book to multiple interlocutors, pushing them to think more critically about race and faith. The Death of Race provides a framework for evangelicals to engage with racial issues and a way for racial justice advocates to engage with evangelicals. It also speaks compellingly to White “liberal” Protestants, Black Christians of all denominational stripes, and post-liberal theologians. Bantum gently introduces each of these audiences to the best theorizing and theologizing about race, offering tools to engage with some of today’s most pressing questions by employing these tools in stories about himself and those around him with evocative language and images. In part, this approach—of telling stories—works because Bantum, the main character, is so relatable yet also distinct. He encounters the complexity and paradoxes of the American racial landscape and owns his perplexity and discomfort—indeed, perplexity and discomfort eventually lead to the catharsis that embrace of the Christian story will provide for him.

The Death of Race is motivated, but not overdetermined, by concerns of the present and the local. Bantum is clear that the increased public visibility of racial injustice compels him to write, but he does not remain tethered to either violent Black deaths or the “Black Lives Matter” movement that has developed in response. Instead, The Death of Race is fundamentally about living and loving and believing—about growing in life, love, and faith. Through negotiating the complexities of a world marked by race, Bantum directs our attention to a world beyond race, made possible by the embrace of the Christian story, one that tells of a peaceful world, a world beyond Black death, and beyond all death. This strategy is promising because addressing the present in its own terms, given the strength of anti-Blackness, given the strength of the powers that be, is futile. It is necessary to find an alternative set of concepts and images, joined together by alternative stories, in order for genuine social transformation to be effected and for social justice to be achieved. These stories are necessarily speculative and tentative; if they are not, they would be derivative of the wisdom of the world. The criterion by which they should be evaluated, thus, must be in their capacity to inspire imagination and to orient listeners away from the interests of the powers that be—in theological terms, to orient them toward the divine.

At the center of the stories Bantum tells is the body. In a sense, The Death of Race is a direct response to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, an attempt to out-narrate Coates’s pessimistic story by embracing it and also supplementing it with a joyful, redemptive Christian story.Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015). Both Bantum and Coates see the Black body in the United States captured by a racial logic that operates in the domains of ideas, institutions, histories, perceptions, daily interactions, and, with particularly brutal force, police and prisons. Coates would certainly agree when Bantum writes of the American racial regime: “This fallen way of seeing and naming the world obscures our bodies, makes us more blind to who we are and who others are” (87). Here Bantum is already hinting at his counter-narrative: there is a truth to the body, to who we essentially are. It is a truth made visible in Christianity, specifically, in the centrality of the body in Christianity. Jesus Christ is divinity embodied, and worshiping him means embracing the image of the divine in the human. This means that allowing some other, worldly regime to determine the body’s meaning runs directly counter to Christianity; a prime imperative of Christians is to discern and reject the world’s attempts to inscribe the body in its stories. In other words, attacking idolatry—as Bantum elegantly puts it, purging the human tendency to confuse “our own machinations as holy and divine” (53)—means not only suspicion of those people and powers that would set themselves up as transcendent but also the suspicion of all ascriptions of what we are in favor of an embrace of who we are, participants in a divine drama.

This framework strikes me as very generative. The challenge is to articulate such a framework in a way that does not anchor it in the network of concepts, images, and institutions that sustain the status quo, including the present racial regime. Obviously, there is no possibility for telling stories unrelated to that regime, given its pervasiveness and power. The best one can hope is to use words and images—and institutions—in a way that encourages thinking otherwise. These are strategic questions, or questions of rhetoric. (I would argue that they also ought to be theological questions as well, when theology is approached with sufficient humility, when speaking about God is understood as a question of choosing better words rather than right words.)

In this context, I wonder about the possibilities and limitations of the two pillars of Bantum’s project, the concepts of bodies and stories. There are hints at a certain architectonic instability in choosing these two worldly terms as pillars right away: the connotation of bodies is essentially material while the connotation of stories is essentially immaterial. For example, we might wonder whether, when stories attempt to organize bodies, those bodies push back. We might wonder whether friction between stories and bodies is a feature of the world, never overcome in the world, not even by an embrace of the Christian story. We might wonder whether stories norm bodies, or whether bodies norm stories. And we might wonder how taking as foundational bodies and stories—abstractions both—helps and hinders the concrete, gritty practices of organizing for racial justice.

Beyond these general, conceptual worries, the choice of bodies and stories as cornerstones for The Death of Race raises a set of concerns based on the current cultural connotations of these concepts. While engaging with the intricacies of incarnational theology is well above my pay grade (and I have no doubt that Bantum is pointing to something right—and an important corrective—in emphasizing Christianity as a story about the body), I do worry that there may be ways this emphasis fits too comfortably with contemporary American, secular culture. Here I do not mean only exercise and dieting—though these are symptomatic—but also a more general emphasis on the autonomous individual, disconnected from community and history, with their essential normativity. A generation or two ago, this was an abstract, rational individual, with discrete desires, making discrete choices in line with his interests. The individual, as imagined in today’s culture, remains denuded of normativity, but the light has softened. Mind and body are integrated, along with reason and emotion, leisure and work, and necessities (of food, love, shelter) and pleasure. American individualism has incorporated its critics into itself, aided by the complementary forces of neoliberalism that colonize social life and culture. Nevertheless, for most of us, at the end of the day there remains the individual mind-body, alone, driving to work, to the store, to the mall, choosing her lifestyle, looking for new experiences, searching for a “value system” that fits—fully invested in the false consciousness that it is she alone, not her communities and histories, that sets the horizon of normative possibilities for her life. This, of course, is ideology—advancing the interests of elites, sold to the masses, packaged along with middle class aspirations, but always leaving some remainder. That remainder, that resistance to ideology, is most visible in the most marginal, where the pull of community and history is inescapable. My worry, then, is about centering the elite language of bodies rather than languages from the margins, where the marginalized obviously recognize the import of bodies but express that import in ways that do not automatically translate into an idiom that makes sense from the perspective of those who uphold the status quo.

Stories, of course, have always been part of the world, but the thematization of story as common currency also strikes me as very much a product of the past half century of American life—a technique to manage the unity of American identity in the face of proliferating diversity. Multiculturalism (as ideology, rather than fact) embraces the plurality of stories, each arising from specific histories and communities, and each enriching our common life. The role of teachers, politicians, and business leaders is to tell stories that motivate but that also increase our investment in that common story—that common, American identity. Certainly, some stories are harmful, enabling violence (weapons of mass destruction, Manifest Destiny), while others open new possibilities for living together (Rosa Parks, Stonewall). Telling stories that have been excluded becomes an imperative of justice—stories about disability, gender, immigration, and race. These stories are constrained by various culturally-specific genre conventions, but they are also, more importantly, constrained by the necessity that each story accept, at an ontological level, the plurality of stories, its place as one of many interlinking stories. As Bantum rightly points out, stories that sustain patriarchy, heteronormativity, and white supremacy are deeply linked (I would add—crucially—capitalism, a word that is absent from his book). But these are stories that are crumbling—even while the practices and institutions they praise remain robust. They are weakened because they do not fit into the contemporary economy of stories that requires a commitment to plurality. This prompts the question: how could Christianity, packaged as story, thrive in such a story-economy?

Here I wonder again about strategy or rhetoric—or theology. Does challenging injustices through multiplying stories—or through advancing the Christian story—allow for the depth of critique that is necessary to combat entrenched evils, specifically, the evils associated with racial injustice in the United States today? On the one hand, racial justice activists have recently pointed to the specificity of anti-Black racism and the way it is not just one of many “-isms” but a constituent ingredient in the metaphysics of the West. Whether or not one buys such a grand theory, it does seem like increased attention to the distinctiveness of Blackness, rather than just race—one among many stories, itself consisting of many stories—would be useful, given the specifics of the world—and of the nation—in which we live. On the other hand, racial justice activists have also pointed to the way that race ought to be understood in the context of racial capitalism, with specific economic forces in specific places and at specific times shaping the way the concept of race and its practices manifest themselves. The focus on story would seem to pull away from these material conditions, discouraging the sort of analysis that attends to economic forces shaping the world and also to the contradictions that result from those economic forces, contradictions that can be exploited to advance social justice.

The Death of Race unfolds as love unfolds: Bantum learns about himself, race, and God as his romance with his partner deepens. Love brings insight, and participation in love deepens participation in the divine. There is something peculiar about this love story, however. It seems to involve neither desire nor especial pleasure. There is intimacy, and there is “joy in the mundane again and again” (32), but the most we hear of desire is the disavowed “male desire to be free without limitation” (66). I suspect this has to do with the limitations of taking bodies and stories as foundational. Story plots bodies, putting some here, some there, costuming them this way or that, offering scripts to follow. The love story is such a script—again, a quintessentially American one. I wonder what would happen if The Death of Race set aside the American love story in favor of the Augustinian love story, the story of the human as a bundle of disordered loves with a deep desire for those loves to be rightly ordered, for participation in the divine, but also with deeply human resistance to such right ordering. Racialization systematically disorders desires, of an individual and a community, with the two inextricably linked. Naming this disorder helps to account for the fundamental dissatisfaction that we feel, even when our worldly desires are apparently sated. Where Bantum’s vision of bodies plotted by God’s story rather than by racial stories conjures the post-racial—which is a questionable and still decidedly worldly utopia—the tragic struggle to order desires in the City of Man offers a helpful reminder that the City of God is qualitatively different, and that maintaining this difference is absolutely essential for racial justice activism—and for theology.

The current religious and political climate of the United States lends itself to both triumphant and disturbing stories. One particularly disturbing story comes out of Portland, Oregon, where, after yelling racial and religious epithets at two Muslim-appearing women on the MAX train, a man stabbed and killed two men who were trying to intervene. News outlets also reported that the man had attended a conservative free speech rally a month prior, where he also shouted racial epithets. While media outlets have not specifically reported whether or not this man was a Christian, I am still left wondering if parts of his extreme ideology have any roots in the stories that evangelical Christianity continues to tell today.

At a time in which 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for the current president (Trump), who has run a campaign infused with flawed racist views, misogynistic taunts, and fearful rhetoric, I believe that Bantum’s book comes at a time when many of us must reevaluate the stories that we tell. As I formulate my response to Bantum’s work, The Death of Race: Building a New Christianity in a Racial World, I will focus on three aspects of the book: story, bodies, and identity.

I think that what Bantum does best in his book is to weave stories into his argumentation for the death of race. While in no way arguing for a “post-racial” ideal in the United States, he rightfully calls for the demise of race as “the structure of death, the dehumanizing and de-creating word a people [successfully] sought to speak over the world” (16). Recognizing that race “is a story bound to the death of certain bodies,” Bantum uses his stories around race to argue for a different way of living and hoping within the world (16).

Bantum’s delineation of story is important here. He states that race is “a” story. It is not “the” story. And one of the many ways that Bantum pushes his readers not to think about race as “the” story is the way that he interweaves stories of his partnership with his wife, Gail, into his book. As a “sucker” for a good love story, I love the personal nature of the stories that Bantum tells about his partnership with Gail. When Bantum married Gail, he saw that their story was not just a story of White and Black. Theirs is a mix of Black-White-Brown-Korean that demands an untangling and deciphering of that story for the task of living. Bantum reminds us that there are levels of complexity within story. The ability to recognize complexity is what I often hear from my Asian students: in the United States conversations often center on Black/White and Christian/Muslim dichotomies while missing the complexities of everything in between; we have a habit of telling one story as “the” story.

Thinking through the complexity of story, Bantum turns to biblical stories in order to flesh out his thesis, the first being the creation story in the book of Genesis. Reading the creation story through the lens that he had inherited, Bantum recognized that this story could not explain the women that he knew and loved, such as Gail and his mother (22–23). The “simple” creation story that he thought he knew was that God created men and women for different roles: men lead, women follow; men are rational, women are emotional, etc. This simple creation story named what was “natural” but still could not explain what Bantum saw every day: enslavement, patriarchy, etc. (23). When he began to resist and complexify that “simple” reading of the story, Bantum states, “I did not see a story of marriage. I did not see a story that simply explained why I should not have sex before marriage or why women were somehow to blame for the evil in our world” (25–26). Rather, what he saw was that the creation story is a story that claims that we were created to be with God and with others (26).

Part of the beauty of Bantum’s resistant reading is that it helps me frame my own pedagogical approach as a womanist biblical scholar teaching biblical hermeneutics in a predominantly White institution. Many of my current students come from evangelical contexts where they have been taught models of purity codes from texts such as Genesis and the book of Ruth. Bantum responds to such ideologically-laden readings of these texts and argues for alternate readings. Instead of thinking about the creation story as showing God’s intention for humanity within the confines of sexual relationships only, Bantum expands the creation story of Genesis to offer an ideal of being with God and being with others. Building capacity for resistant, complex readings is of utmost importance for Bantum and, I would argue, for our continued conversation and work in the public sphere and within theological education.

In chapter 2 of his book, Bantum argues that “bodies matter.” Specifically, bodily difference has often justified both dehumanization and death in society. Pondering difference as a gift, instead, Bantum argues that our bodies’ power lies in limitations. These thoughts lead Bantum to ask how the stories of our bodies can aid in understanding the incarnation of Jesus (40). More specifically, since Bantum recognizes that our “senses help us to know and understand so much,” then bodily differences can serve as an opportunity to “understand God, the world, others, and ourselves more deeply” (40). While Bantum’s logic is sound, the problem with implementing such logic is that only certain bodies have accumulated the power to tell the story of the incarnation. Cis-gendered, White, male, heterosexual, propertied men have been the arbiters of thought regarding incarnation for such a long time that it may be difficult to wrest the stories of bodies from such entrenched, ideological prisms.

Recognizing the power dynamics regarding the stories of bodies takes me back to how I began my review of Bantum’s work. The Portland stabbings show that in our current political climate, we are not understanding “God, the world, others, and ourselves more deeply” (40). It seems that Brexit and our recent, 2016 election in the United States have shown that cis-gendered, White, male, heterosexual, propertied men as arbiters of power would rather hold to a story of the body that does not recognize difference as an opportunity to bring about “love, faith, and hope” (40). Bantum’s book implores Christians to engage difference in meaningful ways.

Now that Bantum has pondered bodies and difference for the incarnation, he links together the stories of race, contemporary bodies, and the racialized body of Jesus. As I ponder the 81 percent White evangelical vote noted in my introduction, I believe that Bantum argues for a corrective to the Christian story’s lack of accountability for the racialized body of Jesus. However, Bantum does not stop at the body of Jesus since he links his argumentation to the racialized bodies of contemporary Jesus followers as well. In his chapter entitled “Jesus Walks,” Bantum highlights the story of Jesus’ particularity as a Jewish man in Roman imperial society as a way to show how a culture “interprets a particular set of bodily markers” (101). More specifically, contemporary readers of Jesus must now recognize that we are all connected to one another without erasing one another’s differences. For Bantum, Jesus’ incarnation takes up difference and declares that our histories are irrevocably tied up with one another. Can we live with that? In today’s world, I do not know if we can. While that last sentence is difficult to write, I would love to read from Bantum if (and how) Christians in the society of the United States can live with being irrevocably tied up with one another. Bantum writes that following the body of Jesus makes “our confession,” become “a type of activism—naming the various ways white supremacy shapes our lives” (149). He continues that through “naming we begin to live a new story” (149). I am trying to be hopeful that we can live a new story, but I am not sure exactly how or if we can.

Bantum closes his work with a letter written to one of his sons. In the epilogue, he ponders the “nebulous space” of the “inter,” the “in-between,” the “not quite,” and “racial ambiguity” (174). Bantum’s son was finding that “innocent” questions of identity have more attached to them than he realized (174), and he welcomes his son to this realm of the “neither/nor” (174). These words and questions of identity are especially trying for our children. I also have a son who has struggled with what it means to be a Black man raising children in the Southern United States, knowing that often police have not been prosecuted in many unjustified shootings of innocent Black and Brown bodies. As Christians, how do we navigate our various identities that are steeped in gender, race, class, nationality, and sexuality? How do we navigate the realm of the “neither/nor”?

Additionally, Bantum hits the proverbial nail on the head when he writes about the Jewish people’s identity as an identity of presence (82). In Jewish tradition, Jewish bodies move toward God as they live into covenant with God (82). Likewise, Christian identity is about finding yourself encountered by a God who knit you together with others and now speaks to you through broken, imperfect people. Bantum, however, articulates that his White Southern Baptist church, although steeped in apparent piety, would not speak to the duality of his identity as a Black and Christian man (84). Because of this, Bantum argues that a transparent Jesus cannot save. To clarify, since Christian identity is about the realities and everyday struggles that occur in embodied limbs, thoughts, and desires, Jesus must be embedded and embodied in those struggles (83). As a result, any idea of a Jesus who saves means that Jesus must walk in his authentic, historically-situated, embodied Jewish identity (83). This reasoning leads to the conclusion that any Christianity that does not account for race and embodied existence in general is not an authentic Christianity at all.

Bantum’s language around identity took me to the work of Eboni Marshall Turman. In Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation: Black Bodies, the Black Church and the Council of Chalcedon, Turman embraces the duality of identity for Black women by arguing that the church’s understanding of Jesus not only informs its identity but also propels the active articulation of that identity into the world.1 Thinking through Chalcedon, Turman argues for a meaning of “coming together” wherein the two distinct natures of Jesus coexisting in difference paves the way for Black women to occupy sacred space within difference. Turman predicates God’s ethical identity upon a womanist ethic of incarnation, in which the bodies of Black women possess the brokenness of their bodies while also rejecting the oppression and subjugation with the “coming-togetherness” of God’s activity within their bodies. In my reading, Bantum takes up difference in a manner similar to Turman. As Bantum reckoned with his identity, his mother’s identity, and even Gail’s identity as a Korean woman, he often used the language of “confession” as the act of making known and walking in Blackness, Whiteness, or Korean identity. Thinking through Turman’s ethic of incarnation and Bantum’s definitions of confession, I am left with an uneasy feeling that some womanists who read Bantum’s work may push back against the notion of confession because, historically, Black women have resided on the lowest rung within the society of the United States. For example, Bantum idealizes Mary as a confessor because she expresses the “wonder of God’s redemption through her particular body” (128). While I appreciate Bantum’s view of confession as a way of resisting patriarchy through Mary’s body, the fact remains that Mary’s body was used in a surrogate manner that speaks to a hermeneutic of sacrifice. Womanists such as Joanne Marie Terrell and Delores Williams have written against the sacrificial uses of Black women’s bodies.2 Moreover, what does confession look like to those who have generally been arbiters of power and who espouse an ideal of masculine authority over women’s bodies?

Another question I have stems from Bantum’s work and its relationship to the church’s re-imagination of Christianity. Since I believe Bantum and I both serve as academics and people of faith, how does Bantum imagine his work engaging both the arenas of the academy and the church? I imagine that “academic” folks will argue that Bantum’s work is too subjective.

My last question for Bantum relates to sexuality. In his work, Bantum alludes to differences in sexuality. Knowing that many of our LGBTQI allies are married, raising children, and have expressed fear that the current presidential administration may decrease certain rights and freedoms affecting their communities, how does Bantum see his work interacting with those communities? How might Bantum’s work be beneficial to LGBTQI Christians?

Notwithstanding the above questions and critiques, Bantum’s work is timely. I am excited (and slightly more hopeful) about how the church and the academy can engage such a work to bring about effective change and transformation in a context here in the United States in which it appears as though some want to turn back the clock by fifty years.

I begin my interaction with Professor Bantum’s book with tremendous gratitude for the personal narratives he tells within its pages that are very helpful to illuminate his argument. There is a great risk in doing that, especially in light of the book’s title. One of the potential problems is voyeurism; the abiding joy that onlookers gain from viewing the distress of others. Yet, Bantum avoids the problem of voyeurism by holding the reader accountable for what is being viewed within the pages, paying close attention to the way that Whiteness is a regulating and problematic force that we all must endeavor to address.

Near the end of Bantum’s book, he makes a claim: “Race is an idolatrous tool, a pseudo god invoked to re-create the world in its own image. Race is not a description, but a way of being—its henchman is whiteness and its chariot is the church” (151). This claim sits in the book’s penultimate chapter, and it encapsulates much of the argument that he advances. Race is not merely a way of describing benign, human difference; it is a nefarious device, a false god, and a way of being. Those metaphors for race coalesce within its pages to support two key theological symbols that are appropriated as response—namely death and rebuilding, or rebirth. These symbols help to demonstrate that in all of its complexity, the problem of race cannot be understood by Christians apart from the accompanying role of theology. Moreover, the same can be said about a healthy response to the problem; in all of its difficulty, an appropriate Christian response to the problem is also theological, redeployed as our co-participant in the divine response to the forces of death within the complex—and lethal—subterfuge of race.

Race is a destructive tool (nefarious device) and a way of being. In society, this narrative is a biopolitical organizing mechanism appropriated to arrange communities around the concept of an ideal human being—a White, heterosexual, masculine, self-possessed, sovereign subject. Our humanity is measured by aesthetic proximity to this ideal. Race is an ideological mechanism that arranges the world that we understand ourselves to inhabit in a precognitive way. We live and move and have our being in this racialized world, as characters within a story that we know by heart. We inhabit this story even as we sit here, reading and listening. We are protagonists—and antagonists; there are no neutral characters. Race identifies our character. What you know about your capacity for intelligence, for beauty, morality, potential to be a criminal—or a president—is all handed to you in the script you are given at birth, before your capacity to earn merit or to consent. Race is the aesthetic mark—written in our flesh—of our role in a particular, scripted way of being in the world that is given to us at birth.

This corporeal story is constantly being told through multiple outlets. It speaks on our behalf before we utter a word. From the moment I enter the classroom to meet new students, the story is talking, before I even open my mouth. When I enter a department store, the story is talking. When I walk through predominately White spaces, the story speaks. I am not the protagonist in this story, and that is not by my choice. As Bantum describes, who I am is intimately tied to the way my body is seen by others. He tells us that this story is woven into us, thread-by-thread, commercial-by-commercial, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, and sermon-by-sermon. The racialized gaze is connected to the narrative in a way that focuses our vision by lenses set behind our eyes, filtering what we believe we are seeing and think we know about others through the prism of race. It demands that we respond to the claims that it makes on our bodies.

Race is a false god. Bantum argues that race is more determinative for our lives than being a Christian. As he states, “Race shapes who marries who, where we live and cannot live, who is more likely to be seen as guilty or innocent, who shapes our prospects for education or for health. . . . It is a Christian story that has not accounted for the body of Jesus, or the bodies of those who believe” (10, 11). Here, I want to add something to Bantum’s argument. We may indeed understand the narrative of race as a heretical accounting for the body of Jesus, as devotion to a fetishized being who masquerades as the central figure of Christian devotion. Bantum gestures toward this façade as a White impersonation of the divine, speaking over the creative Word of God, de-creating, and disfiguring what God has made. This act of speaking over and disfiguring is historically the work of humanity re-creating the world from its own imagination, as an idealized being who subsequently functions as a kind of deity.

This act of de-creation is a disfiguring effort at re-creation. Genesis chapter 1 tells a story of creation that can help illustrate a historical drama that I am describing as re-creation. When the Spirit of God is hovering over the darkness, God’s speech reigns in the unformed, unregulated chaos, shaping the world in the divine act of creation. Through six days, God speaks the words that form all that exists. On the sixth day God creates human beings in God’s image and hands creation over to them. They become God’s proxy in creation, with access to God’s regulating power over chaos. This creation narrative informs the historical manner in which Anglo-European theologians and biblical interpreters have deployed whiteness to regulate darkness, organizing humanity according to the imagination of an idealized human—a White, sovereign, cisgendered man—the one scripted in the narrative as the only one with the image of God, endowed as God’s proxy on earth, with power and authority over dark bodies. His word is the word of a deified human, and, as Bantum describes it, his chariot is the church.

But there is more than one creation narrative. John chapter 1 also describes a creation narrative in which the Word, which existed in the beginning with God, by whom God created all things, became flesh and made his home among us. We have encountered him. The word of the White, sovereign, cisgendered proxy god-man meets the Word become flesh, and one of them must die. They both cannot survive the encounter. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer argued, the “word of man” says, “what” or “how are you,” meaning, “how do I describe your existence?” in the encounter with this Word made flesh. The question from the proxy god-man does not come from a desire to know, but to control with the word of his imagination. And in the encounter with the Word made flesh, the question is not able to generate a genuine response. It is the wrong question. The answer to this question can only make sense in a world where the proxy deity, the White, hetero-masculine sovereign, controls everything. That is a world where he remains perpetually ascendant, and people whose bodies do not represent the idealized White figure have their identities given to them from his distorting, malignant imagination. This is a violent malformation of real humanity. His insidious creativity tells the world about the ascendancy of Whiteness through the ever-present question, “what are you?” that configures racial others. The answer to “what are you?” provides a word he uses to regulate all others according to his imagination, and stabilize his ascendancy, by capturing all of humanity within his story of human difference. This move to capture and to regulate is an act of violence to enslave—and to kill—God’s Word. As Bantum describes, this “word of man” takes what is most unique, what is given by the creative, life-giving Word of God, and utterly destroys it, all the while believing that destruction is a mark of the likeness of God. But this Sicut Deus—this “likeness of God—is the result of death as people no longer in a life-giving relationship with God now oppose the life-giving Word of God. In the encounter with God’s Word, the White sovereign cannot abide this rival. Encountering the Word of God would necessitate the death of this de-creative word and would result in submission to the Word become flesh, who meets us in the daily social encounters we have with one another.

The de-creative word is idolatry. It is the gospel of the cor curvatus in se, the “heart turned in upon itself.” It captures those whom it meets in order to establish a world created in its own image. It is incapable of a genuinely ethical encounter with others or of loving others in any real sense, as it can only consume the other, loving the other for its sake, alone. As Bonhoeffer describes, the question that must be asked is not “what,” or “how,” but “who are you?” That question can only be asked in faith, by one who recognizes their limitation, that it is God whom we are addressing and that our total being is required in the encounter. This question does not seek to consume the other in an act of self-aggrandizement; it does not originate from the effort to sustain a human hierarchy. With this question, the Word of God remains ascendant as the one to whom we relate in humble reverence, and not as rival. This question recognizes the other as “thou”—as co-humanity in responsible social encounter and not as “it.” That is a genuine encounter with the “other,” and it is the death of the “word of man.” In that encounter, God’s Word speaks of a different reality. This reality is one of freedom for one another; of love for the sake of the other’s well-being, of a humanity regulated by the imagination of a creative and generous God, who chooses to create with no explanation. God gives no explanation, no regulating logic; God is simply free for us. God’s Word comes to us as loving and free. It is freedom for us, and gives us freedom for real encounters with one another. Thus, it is the death of race.

To close this brief essay, I want to clarify that race as it is described here is a biopolitical organizing scheme. It is a historical distortion that serves as a malignant ideology of difference that is socially constructed and not a biological reality. It is, however, a political reality. As such, I ask Dr. Bantum to address the way he might imagine the conversation about death and rebirth in the academy, where students are trained to adhere to it as a reality. How might we imagine our theological institutions, or our churches, undergoing the sort of death that he is describing here? Especially in the wake of the election, when many of us are undoubtedly complicit in educating people within a community that found it within the realm of their Christian responsibility to vote for a proxy god, or demagogue. Our history of making Europe the point of departure for knowledge of everything related to heaven and earth is the centering word that disfigures the rest of humanity. What would it mean for our theological institutions or our churches, to see the death of race or, perhaps, to die, themselves?

I commend Dr. Bantum for this work. This book speaks all of this complexity in a way that renders it accessible to educated laity and clergy. Thank you, Brian, for your work.

<epigraph>But what if the composer wrote a song with enough structure to hold together and enough flexibility to be played in countless ways, again and again and again? What if our freedom was tied to being notes that found new resonances as they found new partners and new communities and new rhythms? What if race is just an ancient song that refuses to make sense of the beautiful depth and profundity of each dark dot that marks a score, a mystery that allows a body to slide and sound in new ways?

—Brian Bantum, The Death of Race, 168–69</epigraph>

In the book The Death of Race, by Brian Bantum, I hear a song in which memorializing tunes creatively intersect our innermost impulses for flourishing expressions of interconnectivity. Like the groans in many tongues of Pentecost, his is a Song that interweaves the burial of the “colonial idolatry” that illusorily projects our split from dark bodies with the threads of the resurrecting horizons of a new era of freedom to think “race” differently. The lyrics of this song aim at the experiences of freedom for love: to become bone and flesh of another (as Bantum describes becoming one with his Korean-American wife, Gail Song), to give birth to a life that can emerge out of the most entombing of existences, and to celebrate our bodied pluralities and differences. So, while the title would suggest to the reader an encounter with a philosophy of death typical of modernity, on the contrary, its verses embody a theology of natality, of creation, of beginnings. In The Death of Race, memory, mourning, and lament encounter the resurrected Jesus, and the Middle Passage transfigures into the womb of Mary. Just as the Spirit hovered over the primordial chaos for the Word-Sophia to become flesh through her, our song becomes our embodiment of a God-Creatrix blessing, a Magnificat.

As a response to the genocide that Race is fueling, Bantum’s Song explores how we can consciously and habitually be reborn into the fullness of our humanity. Time and again, we humans can become a song that renounces the tendencies toward egotistic self-enclosures and that welcomes interrelatedness. Through redemptive processes of memory and anticipation, as with groans of many tongues, we join the harmonies of differences within the spectrum of the many ethnic-othered, with a view for enacting social transformation.

But what would it mean to become a harmony of differences when one feels compelled to choose between black and white categories? As with Bantum, many of us continue to confront a history of raced bodies embodying a narrative that progressively suffers the death of innocence within a world of sharp binaries—male/female, black/white, Latinx/American. Might there be a way out of the black and white binary? Even as I read a liberating text such as this one, as a Latinx, when I see my image in the mirror, I have difficulty recognizing myself solely in relation to these two categories.

Nonetheless, I embrace the impulse to choose to darken my ancestral line. This is not so that I can transcend all categories by belonging to some extraterrestrial race, but, rather, so that I continue to participate in redemptive processes. Darkening sharpens my awareness to the manner in which the messiness of my human story is painfully and yet wonderfully entangled with blackness. On this, there is no disregard for the beauty of the details of the cosmos and of God that each human comes to embody. Rather with each act of remembrance (or meaningful entanglement with the many others), I am being an icon of the Word who tabernacles with us. In this manner, I agree with Bantum. I progressively become a song of redemption in the shape of freedom to enact my love toward another in darkening myself.

A darkened song is born from past and present wounds that bid our colonized selves to enter the resurrection waters of the Jesus-event. For Bantum, as bodies face the deadening abyss of race, these can be at the precipice of the pools of the resurrection, which overcomes race’s death-principle, if not also our death-drive—the cancer that de-creates us into inhumanity. Tunes of lament awaken us to the possibility of a turn in history should we consciously choose to participate in redemption as a people “spoken into being from nothing” (82). This “nothing” can mean, as Karen Baker-Fletcher explains, “out of nothing” and also “out of the deep,” in the sense that God is present as Word and Spirit in our creative processes, and particularly, as we face the nothingness of exclusion and scarcity.1 Bantum summons humanity to perform aesthetically this storytelling as a way to limit modern notions of race that illusorily appear as impossible to obliterate. Because the term “end” can metaphorically point to the human horizons as much as to the limits of being human, the phrase “the end of race” can also mean the goal for becoming human in a manner that anticipates the limitless. In other words, ending race means the conscious, willing, and bodied participation in processes that end the constrictive manner in which society has signified and devalued dark bodies.

Perhaps not too unlike the “Redemption Song” of Bob Marley, our ancestors humming in us the cries of the Middle Passage remind us that hope remains mixed with mourning. In singing according to the lyrics of Marley’s “songs of freedom,” we lament, “Minutes after they took I / From the bottomless pit”; and can immediately hear the “I” exclaim, “But my hand was made strong / By the hand of the Almighty.” In such laments, we are plunged into the horizon of divine deliverance—deliverance that leads to human freedom and triumph over the effects of robbery, trade, human trafficking, market economy—the “bottomless pit” that voraciously seeks to claim souls and minds. For Bantum, the abyss of the Middle Passage marked on bodies the beginning of a world that also birthed the limits of the globe as merchant ships transported the “moans and cries of dark bodies” (15). Reflecting on W. E. B. DuBois’s work, Bantum writes about awakening to a historical blackness that was submerging him underwater. When feeling as if drowning under the weight of the ocean pressing upon his chest, someone swimming alongside him had to show him “how to find the pockets of air, the spaces in this confined space, where so many” before him had survived, resisted, and found “lament mingled with hope” (85). Redemption includes mourning, yet as with Jesus’ resurrection experience at the tomb, death loses its submerging weight when black bodies that matter are spoken into being out of the nothingness of a bottomless pit or an abyss.

These memories of navigating through the Atlantic waters, in which darkened bodies have been racialized, suffuse our songs with lament because they arise out of the depths of our unconscious longing for life. The melancholic groans express an inexplicable impulse to spiral down into the depths of what has been denied and turned opaque—such as the “I” over which Bob Marley laments—in order to enliven potentialities to be more fully human. As with Afro-Caribbean Edouard Glissant, when going deeper into the dark unconscious, we traverse the oceanic waters. In its depths, we resist and struggle against the onslaught of sameness. There we also twist linear histories and entangle them with our ancestors in our search for meaningful forms of human interrelatedness. The bottomless abyss of our unconscious, as if passing once more through the Atlantic, recombines multiple zones of contact, entangling us with the many cultures and identities. This would be our creolization,2 the manner in which the unconscious “seeds of an invisible presence” become the submarine sediment for the emergence of cross-cultural relationship.3 Hence its potentiality can be described as the ancestral breathlessness of the maroon desperately pressing against the membranes of our bowels in order to birth novel social frameworks and dynamics that free us also from an enslaving past.

Theologically speaking, lament also can turn into gratitude and praise, as the depths of the Middle Passage are continuously being overflown by the natal waters of the divine creativity, which, as Bantum notes, like the resurrection, can metamorphose our most entombing realities into a womb (124). For our innermost being together with the rest of creation gestates in the likes of Mary as the theotokos—the “God bearer”—when the Spirit embraces us. Bantum puts it thus: “God dives into our wombs and enters the world through our most inward parts” (105). With the “Word pressing into our flesh” (125), we enact new beginnings, which take shape through bodily matter. In particular, by affirming fleshly differences, we celebrate what makes “love, faith, and hope possible” (40). We come to be a song of praise when we demonstrate an understanding of our entangled freedom for mutually beneficial forms of flourishing. To be a worship, meaning, to bodily live redemption, is to recognize that one cannot thrive without another.

Might Mary, as an icon of what all our bodies could be, serve to challenge the race and gender—along with the human/nonhuman—divides? Bantum is keen on taking this direction in order to further disrupt “white solipsism” (137). When we embody Jesus in a similar manner to the creative event of the womb of Mary, our response with regard to “Whiteness” includes that which we in Latinx communities refer to as denouncing what we proudly call la raza. As with Gloria Anzaldúa, la raza,4 or “the race,” is a term that denotes the shortcomings emblematic of the marginalizations of our own ethnic groups, behavioral patterns and conduct like male “bodily” privilege that often remain unchallenged in Latino culture. Similarly, it calls for a critique of the category of “the race” in the sense of the “human race” when it favors dominance over interconnectedness with regard to the nonhuman or the world of matter. By enacting our interdependence between male and female and with creation, or an entangled “I,” we enflesh the divine wisdom, the Jesus-Sophia intrinsic to the whole, so that the whole can be a song of liberation from bondage.

This then is how our bodies can sing anew the euangelion, as in Mary’s Magnificat, groaning in many tongues and timbres with the lament and the hope of praise. For in drawing near each other, including the strangely unfamiliar, we become songs of redemption that embody the plenitude of thanksgiving—freedom for all. Bantum aptly describes this gospel ensemble, avowing, “To sing a new song requires a radical commitment to making sure that all are free to sing along with you. The choir needs difference, it needs all the parts; the story needs all the tellers to be truthful, to be whole. To be a Christ follower in this moment is to fight the death of race so that the life of God might be felt for all” (171). This would mean for God to be born for us in daily life, for God to become body through us, for us to be called blessed, and for us to be a blessing unto God and ourselves. For in enacting bodily resurrection, we lament and mourn the de-creating effects of race upon humanity yet announce that a third day’s freedom is proximate. It is possible, for in plunging into the depths of our “colonial idolatry,” the “bottomless pit” of the Middle Passage, the abysses of our dark unconscious can bear witness to our bodily entanglements with the “lowly” in state (weighed down by the “mighty”) yet favored by God (Luke 1:46–55). The choice to consciously be a song that bears the Word, like Mary’s Magnificat, can mean the daily death of race, for bodies to freely slide down the score and create a new melody whose notes vibrate according to “new resonances,” “new partners,” “new communities,” and “new rhythms.” By living accordingly, the limit of the human race can be its horizon; an abyss that can become a womb.