[11] Supporting Actors.
On Wednesday, my nephew Milo had his first day of kindergarten in Oregon. It was the same day that a 14-year-old white boy named Colt shot up a high school in Georgia.
I will never forget where I was twenty-five years ago when those two white boys murdered fifteen students at Columbine High School in Colorado. I was teaching American Government and Economics in one of the old portable classrooms in the senior parking lot at Capistrano Valley High School in Southern California. A spiritual darkness hung over our campus.
The morning after the massacre, I invited student-leaders from our Fellowship of Christian Athletes club to come into my classroom and pray for the victims’ families, for the survivors and for an end to the violence. I believed then that only Christ could save individuals from doing dumb, destructive and violent things. I believed that pretty much the only thing we could do was pray that God would change people’s hearts.
Over the past quarter of a century, as more and more white men have committed mass murder, my convictions have significantly changed. I still believe in Jesus and prayer, but I do not believe that nebulous, universalized notions of sin and Satan make someone shoot up a school.
I believe in rigorous social analysis that gets to the root of our issues.
I believe that specific supremacist ideologies like racism, anti-Blackness, misogyny and Zionism influence institutions and individuals much more than most people understand.
I believe that white men are usually the ones committing the violence because they have been scripted into these supremacy stories as the main characters by their families, schools, social networks, churches, media outlets and businesses for generations.
I also believe that, being a white man, I bear the responsibility, day in and day out, of committing to the work of getting free from supremacy and in freeing society from supremacy too.
In the wake of Columbine, I was confined by an evangelical theology that condemned “works righteousness.” Our pastors taught us to hand the wheel over to Jesus and just let him do all the driving. Because sin and Satan were way too powerful. Our only task was to trust and obey. Because there’s no other way. Evangelical Christianity trained us to spiritually bypass all the confusing, complex, complicated and scary stuff that life threw at us.
As I’ve studied the Gospels for the past twenty-five years, it has become glaringly obvious that Jesus was not down with spiritual bypassing. He confronted the supremacy stories head on and he empowered his disciples to become Something Else in the process. One of the ways he modeled this was by cutting against the grain of the accepted norms and expectations of his culture’s masculinity. He cried. He tended the collective. He changed course when the Canaanite woman corrected him. He would rather die than dominate others.
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I do not believe that it is a coincidence that white men are disproportionately the stalkers, the predators and the perpetrators of mass shootings and other epidemics of violence like domestic abuse, sexual assault and genocide. Because in this world, white men have been scripted for generations to be the main characters who always take matters into their own hands.
Theologian Willie Jennings diagnoses this disease as white self-sufficient masculinity. He traces it back to the Southern plantation which trained white men to move on mastery, possession and control. Jennings lays this all out in a book called After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging.
He writes:
White self-sufficient masculinity is not first a person or a people; it is a way of organizing life with ideas and forming a persona that distorts identity and strangles the possibilities of dense life together. In this regard, my use of the term “whiteness” does not refer to people of European descent but to a way of being in the world and seeing the world that forms cognitive and affective structures able to seduce people into its habitation and its meaning making.
This pedagogy of the plantation is perpetuated by what Jennings calls an “institutional unconscious.” Our institutions are playing it out and they aren’t even aware of it. White self-sufficient masculinity was invented in the American colonies. The whole continent was colonized by it! Now, the school system, the job site, the sports world, the police-and-military, the non-profit industrial complex and, yes, faith communities take on this business-like approach that puts one person on the pedestal in charge and the rest of the people become tools for production and profit.
For generations, white men have been taught that they are the masters of their own destinies and that they can become whatever they want to become, if they just put their minds and bodies to the task. America was set up for white male supremacy. But things are shifting now. The pedagogy of the plantation is still in place. But more and more white men are no longer in control. Women, queer folk and people of color are replacing many white men at the top of the plantation pyramid. However, instead of critiquing the basis of the destructive and dehumanizing system itself - and working for an alternative - white men are raging against critical race theory, DEI and wokeness. They are also resorting to violence, disproportionately targeting people who are not white and not male - and their children.
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Two years ago, the day after an 18-year-old white boy livestreamed his mass murder spree in the only supermarket of a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, I was hosting a monthly men’s group on zoom. We were not fixing each other. We were feeling with each other. We were sharing early memories of when our tears and tenderness were not honored by adults in our lives. We all grew up with messages directed at us to be tough, stay strong, push through, get over it and max out our potential.
One of the white guys on the screen said something that stoked vigorous nodding from the rest of us. “It really wasn’t what I was told,” he said, “It was what I wasn’t told.” In childhood and adolescence, we were forced to fill in the gaps of all those silences from our parents, pastors, teachers and coaches. We filled in those gaps with the scripts we were learning that said we were not good enough and would never really be loved unless we met a certain standard of “success.”
Those silences functioned as a slow trauma that seeded deep feelings of self-doubt and worthlessness. Those silences water the soil of the gun culture, the rape culture, the corporate culture, the cancel culture. In America, white men are made to be the main characters, the owners of the plantation. It’s not just the passionate white men with their man caves and their big trucks and their unregulated firearms—but also the passive white men who pride themselves on staying safe, stoic, nice and neutral, above the fray, hiding their feelings as they over-function to “provide for their families.”
What we are suffering in this late stage of racial capitalism is what happens when those who are incessantly socialized into being the main characters fail in their mastery mission, or do not receive the special recognition they have been scripted into believing they deserve, or feel like they are being replaced on their mission. Some men shoot up a crowd. Some commit suicide or succumb to addictive substances. A lot more double down on their legacy projects and manipulate those assigned to be their supporting actors—especially women and children and people of color—so they can somehow, some way, stay on top.
There is Something Else. But I have come to believe that the opposite of the pedagogy of the plantation is not the passivity of playing it safe by being nice and neutral. Instead, it is an equally emotionally expressive manhood that is animated by mutuality, presence, playfulness, awareness, appreciation, accountability, tenderness, transparency, compassion, conviction, vulnerability, open-heartedness, humility, honesty and intimacy.
The late great bell hooks started her classic on men, masculinity and love by drawing on the work of Barbara Deming. She wrote that the reason that men are so violent is that they know, deep down, that they are living a lie. They are in a rage rut because they are acting out the main character myth—and they do not know how to break the cycle. In fact, they are not even aware of an alternative.
White men are stuck with the same old story: the pedagogy of the plantation. Possess! Master! Control! However, deep down, we long for love and we are homesick for the truth - and the truth is that real love does not come from being the main character on a mission, but from belonging to a beloved community that roots identity and worth in the well-being of others and commits to building a world that works for everyone. Together.
I, too, know that I have been hoodwinked by American institutions into living a lie. I, too, long for love. This is one reason why I am still rooted in biblical faith, a spiritual tradition whose strength, according to Dr. Cornel West is its “unstoppable predilection for alternatives grounded in the present.”
When Jesus subverted greatness, he was specifically speaking to the men, not the marginalized. He summoned them to stop self-promoting and become “servants,” a Greek word that literally meant “those who kick up the dust.”
The alternative to the plantation is a greatness that gets dirty for the sake of everyone else’s dignity. Jesus also told the men they must be “slaves,” to become supporting actors by chaining themselves to the destiny of others.
Greatness is not about guns, grit and glory.
Greatness is about having the guts to grieve, in public, over what white self-sufficient masculinity has done to this world.
The mass shootings. The sexual trauma. The prison labor. The refugee crisis. The addiction epidemics. The homelessness. The climate catastrophe. The genocide in Gaza. The settler violence in the West Bank.
Greatness is about giving up the main character myth and conspiring with those society considers the very least.
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This week, another school shooting, another former student of mine took his own life, and another shipment of US weapons sent to kill innocent Palestinians. All connected to a spiritual crisis in white society that swivels on the dehumanizing, unconscious ideology of white self-sufficient masculinity.
I believe that we need to aggressively advocate for robust gun regulation and an immediate arms embargo on Israel, but I also believe we need to dig deeper and get to the spiritual root of our crises.
I believe that we need to gear our lives towards a completely different goal.
I believe that we need to start having “the talk” with our sons, grandsons and nephews.
I believe that we need to warn the white boys in our life that white self-sufficient masculinity is playing out just about everywhere and it is a lie.
I believe that we need to explain to our sons, grandsons and nephews - over and over again - how this main character myth malforms their souls, even as it destroys the lives and livelihoods of supporting actors all over the world.
I believe that we need to consistently offer our white boys and men Something Else, a way of measuring worth and success based on inherent belovedness and mutuality, not based on their ability to possess, master and control.
I believe that we need to follow the lead of Black feminists who reject pedestals and walking ten paces behind. Because to be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.
I believe that we need to address the silences with a compelling narrative much better known in Black and Indigenous communities who believe in a greater Power, a Love supreme groaning for a world protected and served by supporting actors who belong to, feel with and nurture the web of life.
I believe that we must do this, or else our society will shrivel - like a fig tree that refuses to bear fruit.