As a white antiracist Catholic social ethicist trained in theology, I approach my work as mediating “between a cultural matrix and the significance and role of religion in that matrix.”¹⁾Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology, Second edition (Minneapolis: Seabury Press, [1972], 1979), xi. In other words, theology is not the “crown of sciences” and does not transcend culture. Rather, I view theology as an ongoing process of critical reflection upon faith subject to collaborative creativity, constantly seeking to understand reality as it is, not as any person or culture may like it to be.

In the context of US empire, I think it is critical for people from dominant social locations to be explicit about their commitment to antidomination. For me, that means I must be continually (un)learning how I am complicit in multiple forms of oppression that Patricia Hill Collins names the “matrix of domination.”²⁾Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (HarperCollins, 1990), 221–238.

Contrary to popular custom, I claim neither innocence nor achievement. I hope this conversation contributes to a larger, shared struggle to become more deeply human and live in a way where all people and creatures may fully thrive.

I write from my beloved home of New Orleans, where intimate connections between colonialism, white supremacy, and othering are manifest in every dimension of social, political, economic, and environmental life.

Recall that the original plan of the colonial city New Orleans was designed as the center of a white-owned plantation society. As a seaport city that is largely below sea level, with flooding a regular occurrence, it should be no surprise that slave-owning whites occupied the highest, and therefore safest, points of the city. At the same time, slaves lived in the backswamp of plantations, frequently the lowest, and therefore most dangerous, points in the city. The current pattern of segregation in the city has not veered far from the basic structure of the built environment three hundred years later.

A comparative study of maps of plantations compared to modern neighborhoods today illuminates the enduring legacy of a slave-owning society and its relationship both to the river and the built environment. As Robert Bullard and Beverly Wright observe, “poor blacks lived in the backswamps on the inland margin of the natural levee, where drainage was bad, foundation material precarious, streets atrociously unmaintained, mosqui­toes endemic, and flooding a recurrent hazard. It is along this margin that a continuous belt of black population developed.”³⁾Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright, “Race, Place, and the Environment in Post-Katrina New Orleans,” Race, Place and Environmental Justice After Hurricane Katrina (Boulder: Westview Press, 2009), 21. The Crescent City has never overcome the legacy of vastly different outcomes for whites and people of color.

This gaping wound of racism is exacerbated by the industrial-age economics of fossil fuels that heavily favor the most powerful oil interests in Louisiana. These same interests hamper urgent efforts to address coastal land loss. We tend not to be aware, much less understand, how the history of a white settler nation destroyed the First peoples and way of life that might offer wisdom about how to recover the very coast Louisianans hold so dear.

I suggest broadening the view of “other­­ing” through three interrelated points. First, I draw upon James Baldwin’s invitation to do “our first works over . . . reexamine everything. Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself: but know whence you came.”⁴⁾James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1985), xix. Doing our first works over is a struggle to understand how our past endures in the present.

While powell and Menendian offer concrete historical examples to bolster social scientific insights, I believe that shared examination into othering needs to link particular histories with praxis, both to understand enduring dynamics of oppression and to envision and enact sustainable communities of resistance, belonging, and inclusion.

This turn to a history of othering, I believe, must also include an analysis of freedom’s ambivalence. We need to uncover how freedom functions in relationship to US empire, slavery, colonialism (internal and external), and democracy. The freedom to be “other” has never been free; freedom is only realized to the extent that social and political institutions, laws, and policies facilitate equity, justice, and now sustainability for the one and only planet that supports life.

Second, the forces and processes of othering tend to be profoundly anthropocentric. Too often we miss the profound interconnectedness between the stars, the earth, and the human body. Being human is intimately bound to all forms of life.

Third, what are the conditions of the possibility of enacting communities of resistance, belonging, and inclusion? How, in this century fraught with violence and transformation, will we embody and practice sustainable communities of belonging and inclusion?

In the spirit of Cecilia Paredes’s beautiful artwork featured alongside the essay, I hope my suggestions illuminate layers of complexity, texture, depth, and color to the intersectional tapestry so beautifully woven by john a. powell and Stephen Menendian.

The Presence of Our Past

In their opening line, “The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem ‘othering,’” powell and Menendian echo the hallowed prophecy of W. E. B Du Bois: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.” powell and Menendian, of course, extend the analysis by broadening Du Bois’s unveiling of whiteness and black double-consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk to elucidate how multiple forms of othering drive “territorial disputes, sectarian violence, military conflict, the spread of disease, hunger and food insecurity, and even climate change.”

powell and Menendian illuminate a comprehensive view of the divergent forms of othering that plague the world today. By highlighting climate change, I sensed the analysis might take up Du Bois’s description of whiteness in “The Souls of White Folk.” There, Du Bois describes whiteness as “ownership of the earth forever and ever. Amen.”⁵⁾W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, with introduction by David Levering Lewis (New York: Washington Square Press, [1920], 2004), 22. White supremacy intricately connects domination both of people and the earth.

We will not understand ourselves in dominant white American culture until we contend with our enduring role in the legacy of slavery and colonialism. To say this work will be difficult is an understatement because it means contending with the pain and terror that historically colonized and enslaved peoples have endured since the “founding” of the Americas. As my coauthors and I argue in our book addressing US hyper-incarceration, we will not address this reality responsibly until we understand how the US systems of criminal justice and incarceration carry the past in the present.⁶⁾Alex Mikulich, Laurie Cassidy, and Margaret Pfeil, The Scandal of White Complicity in US Hyper-Incarceration: A Nonviolent Spirituality of White Resistance (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). This necessarily entails examining whiteness and white supremacy.

White supremacy involves much more than the KKK. A fuller analysis of white supremacy must include the historical legacy of colonialism and commodification that endures in at least four dimensions of culture and society. These include how white supremacy 1) functions as an historical mode of white racial class formation and economic ascendancy, 2) constitutes a symbolic hierarchical order of white superiority that feeds upon antiblackness, 3) serves as a primary socialization process of individual and group white racial identity formation, and 4) organizes a segregated society through a dynamic interplay between both position—the social geography, location, and power of whiteness—and practice—the ways whites are socialized to perceive and act within the world.”⁷⁾I draw upon the following resources to develop these four dimensions of white supremacy: M. Shawn Copeland, “Anti-Blackness and White Supremacy in the Making of American Catholicism,” American Catholic Studies 127, No. 3 (Fall 2016); Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 305–306; Bryan N. Massingale, Racial Justice and the Catholic Church (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2010); and Alex Mikulich, “Where Y’at Race, Whiteness, and Economic Justice? A Map of White Complicity in Economic Oppression of People of Color,” in Mark Allman, ed., The Almighty and the Dollar: Reflections on Economic Justice for All (Winona: Anselm Academic, 2012), 189– 213.

In his groundbreaking work examining the history of African American religions, Sylvester A. Johnson begins by describing how his study is intimately tied with “the architecture of empire—by which I mean the political order of governing through the colonial relation of power.”⁸⁾Sylvester A. Johnson, African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 2. Colonialism employs every form of military, political, economic, and psychological method to subordinate and dehumanize others.

In explicit terms of othering, Johnson calls colonialism “the essential matrix of racialization. It is what makes race.” More precisely, race is constructed in a politics or what Johnson calls a “biopolitics.” Drawing upon Michel Foucault, Johnson argues that racism is a state politics achieved through “internal colonialism” by creating “exclusive forms of political community.” ⁹⁾Ibid.

A contemporary case in point is the fact that the United States harbors three hundred reservations within the boundaries of the contiguous United States. As Johnson explains, outside of indigenous studies, studies of empire that account for First peoples and their histories tend to be the exception rather than the rule. Internal colonialism is a key theoretical framework that has been “richly informed by colonized people themselves.” ¹⁰⁾Ibid., 3.

In February 2017, water protectors were forced out of the Standing Rock Sacred Stone Camp. According to Robert Brave Heart Sr., this is yet another “example of the many countless acts of genocide, racism, and injustices that indigenous peoples of this continent have endured for five hundred years. Despite that, we are still here and will continue to fight for our freedom, rights, and dignity!”¹¹⁾Kevin Clarke, “Jesuits call Dakota Pipeline Work ‘Morally Unacceptable,’” America (February 23, 2017), available online at http://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2017/02/23/jesuits-call-dakota-pipeline-work-morally-unacceptable?utm_source=Full+List+with+Groups&utm_campaign=a9a336c09b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_02_16&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0fe8ed70be-a9a336c09b-57380021.

Internal colonialism shapes the current US anti-immigrant climate. Might not an internal colonial mind-set contribute to the pervasive assumption that all US Americans “are immigrants”? Too often both histories of immigration and slavery are forgotten. It is a white settler colonial state that led to the evictions, forced migrations, and genocide of First peoples. This amnesia corrupts our capacity to be human and extend compassionate welcome to others.

Du Bois’s critique of whiteness rightfully relates the dynamic of white supremacy to a nexus of domination structured within US empire, slavery, and colonialism. Du Bois noticed how whites conflated their racial identity and sense of self with the divine, and so he responded to white supremacy “with a counter cosmic vision” that considered “religion at the core of the social and cultural construction of whiteness.”¹²⁾Edward J. Blum, W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 15. Christendom itself was an imperial formation that constituted the so-called age of discovery and, despite the Roman Catholic Church’s theological opposition to slavery, helped to facilitate colonial rule of peoples in Africa and the Americas.

The history of the religious and political sources of othering within Atlantic empires leads to another critical point that is too often elided in discussions of othering. Antiblackness did not arise out of nowhere. As the African American Catholic womanist theologian M. Shawn Copeland writes, “the racialization of flesh has shaped Christianity, and thus Roman Catholicism, almost from its origins: women, Jews, people of color (especially indigenous and black peoples) have undergone metaphysical violence.”¹³⁾M. Shawn Copeland, “Anti-Blackness and White Supremacy in the Making of American Catholicism,” American Catholic Studies 127, No. 3, (Fall 2016): 7. By metaphysical violence, Copeland means “the attempt to master the real by force” through the racialization and commodification of human flesh.

Othering of the Earth

Theologian Willie James Jennings traces intimate historical connections between Christian colonialism, abuse of indigenous peoples, and alienation from the land. The intimate ties between identity and specific geographical locations nurtured by peoples throughout the world were disrupted and dislodged by European colonists. When European colonists stepped upon lands they assumed they “discovered,” they were ignorant of the fact that they were seen as stepping on both the skin of the world and the skin of First peoples.

Jennings notes the painful irony of how North Americans now seek out First peoples to reconnect with the earth. He quotes Vine Deloria Jr.: “Americans wanted to feel a natural affinity with the continent, and it was Indians who could teach them such aboriginal closeness. Yet, in order to control the landscape, they had to destroy the original inhabitants.”¹⁴⁾Ibid., 41

The Christians who claimed to “discover” new lands ignorantly and arrogantly walked on the skin of others, entering “a frontier of strangeness. Already fearful and angled toward isolationist practices, they enacted a spatial vertigo, renaming places, peoples, and animals and reconfiguring life.”¹⁵⁾Ibid., 42 Far from relating to the land as intimate kin, Europeans viewed lands and resources as undeveloped commodities to be tamed and conquered for the ends of empire.

In our current context of global environmental crises and how these crises contribute to migrations and conflict, I suggest that othering must also include the human history of domination over the earth and the resulting alienation between human and nonhuman life.

In his call for a transformation from anthropocentric ethic to an ecologically-centered ethic in his letter addressing the global environment, Pope Francis describes “tyrannical anthropocentrism” as the “irresponsible domination of human beings over other creatures.”¹⁶⁾Pope Francis, Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home, (The Vatican, 2015), available online at http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html, paragraphs nos. 68, 115–119. Roman Catholic papal and episcopal documents enumerate each paragraph as a way to cite specific quotations.

The pope’s approach provides a way to interrelate the many and diverse ecological, social-economic, and cultural-spiritual crises that afflict the world. I suggest his approach also provides a way to ground a way of living inclusion and belonging that is sustainable for the planet.

Embracing Ecological Intimacy

While I wholly agree with powell and Menendian about the need for a turn to belonging and inclusiveness, that crying need begs the question of how to get there from the troubled, contested, and confused place the world is today. We live in a time of epochal transformations. I don’t believe current social, economic, or political paradigms are sufficient or sustainable.

How will we together cocreate the conditions of the possibility of authentic and integrated living that sustains life for all so that all may thrive in freedom and justice? Although people of faith and people of no faith at all may not be aware of it, interestingly, both secularists and people of faith (like Pope Francis) are advancing an “integral ecological ethic.” Put in brief theological terms, an integral ecology recognizes that, ultimately, there is one earth, one life, and one love through which all may thrive. We are inextricably intertwined in ecological intimacy.

Both secularists and people of faith invite a shift from an egocentric and anthropocentric worldview to an ecocentric social, political, economic, and moral imagination. We live in a time of impasse, a profound limit situation, when established and traditional ways of living fail both human and nonhuman life. In US culture, as Du Bois understood so clearly, we cling to possession and control as the only way of living.

Paradoxically, as Carmelite contemplate Sister Constance FitzGerald explains, impasse itself may provide the condition of the possibility of transformation if we fully appropriate the experience of impasse with a fullness of consciousness and consent and “if the limitations of one’s own humanity and human condition are squarely faced and the sorrow of finitude allowed to invade the human spirit with real, existential powerlessness.”¹⁷⁾Constance FitzGerald, “Impasse and Dark Night,” in Joanne Wolski Conn, ed., Women’s Spirituality: Resources for Christian Development (Paulist Press, 1986), 410–450. We need to admit that we are made from dust of the earth and from the ground of that humility recognize our dependence upon the earth and all forms of life. Such humility, in turn, invites profound listening to cries for justice coming from both the earth and oppressed peoples everywhere. If we listen together, perhaps we might notice how we might cocreate an emerging, sustainable future.

If “there is a way where there is no way” to draw upon African American spiritual wisdom, I believe that communities of resistance will need to be formed that reinterpret and reapply ancient spiritual practices of contemplation in new ways deeply sensitive both to the woundedness of the earth and all people. Then, perhaps, there may be real hope for a turn to the ecological intimacy that interconnects and invites authentic inclusiveness and belonging.

I thank Andrew Grant-Thomas for the invitation to write this response. I am honored and humbled to enter conversation with john a. powell and Stephen Menendian, whose scholarship and leadership inspire me and many others to envision and practice belonging and inclusion every day.