Robin DiAngelo describes and critiques the defensive responses we (that is White people) deploy when encountering, and especially when challenged on, the issues of race and racism.3 She makes the point that while these defenses are often unconscious and reflexive, they are not innocent, but rather, weaponized. They work to derail honest conversations on racism, and thereby obliterate even the possibility of confronting and dismantling the structure of White supremacy.
DiAngelo is an atheist, but if we were to translate her ideas into a theological framework, we might say that White fragility represents sin’s effort to remain unexamined. In the face of such dissembling fragility, DiAngelo’s prescription is simple: “toughen up.” Her central argument is:
Stopping our racist patterns must be more important than working to convince others that we don’t have them. We do have them, and people of color already know we have them; our efforts to prove otherwise are not convincing. An honest accounting of these patterns is no small task given the power of white fragility and white solidarity, but it is necessary.4
And it is necessary. White fragility shouts like hell to drown out Black voices. We must learn to muzzle it, if we ever hope to listen for Black lives.
When Christians encounter a new moral claim, it’s almost reflexive to ask ourselves: “What would Jesus say about this?” Often, this question leaves us sorting through complicated and conflicting testimony. But there are those blessed, startling moments when Christ’s witness is so clear as to silence all debate.
As we consider DiAngelo’s claims regarding White fragility, the story of Jesus’s encounter with the Syrophoenecian woman offers just such a testimony.
[Jesus] set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But she answered him, “[Lord], even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone. (Mark 7:24–30)
For many Christians, myself included, this is one of the most cringeworthy passages of the Bible. There are multitudes of verses of scripture that we weaponized to support discrimination, disenfranchisement, even genocide. But this may be the only time we hear such words come explicitly from the mouth of Christ. Hearing what sounds like racism from a man we proclaim as Messiah should give us pause.
Before proceeding, let me offer two disclaimers. First, historically, it’s not quite accurate to label Jesus’s rebuke as “racist.” Both racism and race are recent inventions, scarcely more than five hundred years old. As Du Bois famously noted:
The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing—a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction.5
Racism—that is, the project of sorting humanity into a small number of groups based on an arbitrarily chosen set of physical attributes, with the purpose of establishing and enforcing a universal hierarchy among them—is a decidedly new idea. But ethnocism—that is, the project of arguing for and enforcing various hierarchies of human ancestry—is certainly ancient. And it can fairly be described as a kind of antecedent to racism.
This distinction is more than simply academic. One of racism’s fundamental lies is that race is both eternal and natural. In fact, it is neither. When we uncritically and anachronistically read racism and race back into scripture, we contribute to the lie of race’s inevitability and immortality. And if we attribute divine characteristics to human constructions, we are rightly called idolaters.
That said, while Jesus’s comment to the Syrophoenician woman is not racist, it is decidedly enthnocist. Mark is content to imply this fact (though it takes very little inference to catch his meaning). Matthew’s account of the story is more explicit. Before rebuking her, Jesus declares “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 15:26). Jesus asserts a clear hierarchy: Israelites are privileged over Gentiles; and on this basis, the woman’s daughter should be left to suffer. Though the statement is not racist, per se, its effects are similar.
His words also fit the popular short-hand definition of racism: prejudice + power. Jesus is prejudiced against the Syrophoenecian woman; and he holds in his hand the power to free her daughter, or not, as he chooses. So if Jesus’s rebuke is not technically racist, in the historical sense, we can still reasonably understand it as a fore-type of racism. Having delivered this disclaimer, for the sake of convenience, and to communicate the urgency of this passage, I hope you will forgive me if I call Jesus’s behavior “racist” going forward.
The second disclaimer is this: given that my stated purpose is to consider the story of the Syrophoenecian woman in light of DiAngelo’s “White fragility,” and given that I’ve identified Jesus’s rebuke as a fore-type of racism, a reader might infer that I am attributing something like Whiteness to Jesus.
To be clear, Jesus is neither historically nor theologically White. Ethnically, he did not belong to any of the diverse groups that have been assimilated into Whiteness. Sociologically, he was a working-class Israelite living under Roman occupation, from a town of ill-repute: he did not have the social capital of Whiteness. Theologically, Jesus’s clear orientation is toward the margins, thus Whiteness cannot be his subject. As James Cone famously noted: “He is Black, because he was a Jew.”6 Whiteness has no part in him.
That said, we must also acknowledge that at various points in his ministry, Jesus wields significantly greater social power than those who surround him: as an able-bodied man, as an Israelite within Israelite lands, as a respected and educated teacher, as a renowned healer, and as an adult. Though he is not White, the way he conducts himself in these moments can be instructive for those of us who participate constantly in the social power of Whiteness.
Disclaimers aside, what can DiAngelo teach us about Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman? And how will it help us listen for Black lives? DiAngelo identifies a number of defenses that White people deploy when confronting the issue of racism. Among them is White solidarity, which is the unspoken agreement among Whites to protect White advantage and not cause another White person to feel racial discomfort by confronting them when they say or do something racist.7
At the first sign of racial trouble, we circle the wagons to defend other White people from charges of racist conduct, or even from confrontations with simple facts regarding the racist institutions of our society. As regards Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman, it seems that we transfer this same impulse onto Christ.
If you make a search of sermons and biblical commentaries on the story of the Syrophoenician woman, you will notice very quickly how White scholars and pastors seem intent on circling their wagons around Jesus. Though he is not White, perhaps we recognize in his power and in his prejudice the same racist dynamics that surround us. Or, perhaps, we imagine him to be White. Either way, we feel compelled to defend him from the charge of racism before it is even stated. What does this look like in practice?
DiAngelo notes that one of the most prevalent defensive
