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Racism Runs Through Enlightenment Philosophy
‘America’s Unholy Ghosts’ by Joel Edward Goza
Growing up as the white son of a Southern Baptist deacon in the suburbs of Houston, Joel Edward Goza attended white churches. When he moved to a neighborhood of immigrants, he came to understand street violence. He says one shooting “broke my peace with the status quo.”
He brought his questions about racism and poverty to his postgraduate divinity studies at Duke. With language that resounds for sermons, he wrote America’s Unholy Ghosts: The Racist Roots of Our Faith and Politics (Cascade Books, 2019).
What to do in a moment of cultural crisis? We need to have solidarity with the oppressed, he says, and reexamine our beliefs and behavior. Otherwise, we can’t admit the extent of oppression, still less grasp its meaning.
The ‘Prophetic’ Christian Tradition
Racists’ real motivation, Goza says, is to help elites stay rich and powerful. Ignorance and hate are generally byproducts of the elites’ racist myths. In England, Enlightenment philosophers claimed a “reasoned” approach to natural law to justify white people’s exploitation of Black people. This ideology replaced older forms of Christian dogma.
What Goza calls the “Prophetic” Christian tradition is one that prioritizes human relationships, not just private faith in God. Goza has lived that solidarity through his clergy role at a Black Baptist church in Houston.
His book, America’s Unholy Ghosts, is mostly academic. He addresses himself to white readers who want to “break the grip of the generational sin that is White Supremacy.” Christian readers may find something special that speaks to them, but the book is also valuable to non-Christian and secular readers like myself.
Three Enlightenment Philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Smith
Goza focuses on three Enlightenment philosophers: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Adam Smith. They were white men who studied at Oxford, though generations apart. Their words caused foundational harms.
I learned about Hobbes and Locke in high school and about Adam Smith in my introductory economics class in college. I went on to major in philosophy. I don’t remember learning much about Hobbes’s and Locke’s direct racism, nor about Smith’s moral indifference to racism.
Goza explains this and illuminates the larger context of racism in the United States.
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes, born 1588, was an elite white man who set himself up as a judge of reason. Whereas in earlier Christian tradition, according to Goza, “reason was profoundly relational and only as healthy as the relationships it produced,” white men of Hobbes’s era insisted on “racialized” and “weaponized” reasoning in pursuit of their own interests. They thought financial contracts mattered more than virtues, for example.
Hobbes portrayed human history as an unceasing power struggle amid the assumption of scarcity. He endorsed slavery. He believed that a large government, a “Leviathan,” was necessary to consolidate control. He stoked anxiety, recommended obedience, and discouraged hope.
John Locke
John Locke, born 1632, claimed that humans have no innate ideas yet do have innate racial character. He prompted his readers to doubt their own moral assumptions. He made racist proposals of obvious nonsense (such as that West Africans might be the children of baboons). To him, it was common sense that victims of racism deserved their lot in life. He saw no need to seek systematic causes of racial inequities.
His ideal form of government focused on protecting material property. He believed the elites should hoard their money and manage poor people — while enslaving them and supposedly tending to their welfare, not liberating them nor encouraging them to liberate themselves.
True Christianity, to him, was apolitical. It was a private, sentimental relationship with God.
Adam Smith
Adam Smith, born 1723, made a different sort of contribution in this area: he “ingrained a morality of hardheartedness into society,” as Goza sees it. Perhaps Smith’s philosophy didn’t cause inequality, but he assuaged guilty consciences.
Smith understood that Hobbes’s and Locke’s ideas served only the wealthy, that wages would never be fair and profits would never flow back to the workers, and that slavery was based on rape. But he didn’t offer a way out. He trusted too much that if each individual followed their self-interest, human problems would somehow resolve.
He thought economists could look at financial mechanisms without acknowledging human responsibility. He believed moral reasoning should be impartial rather than empathetic. He considered inaction to be a valid stance in the face of injustice; though someone might seek revenge, no one had responsibility to restore anything. He didn’t have a solution for what to do about conflicting interests, other than for each person to pursue their own.
Ultimately, his philosophy enabled racist attitudes.
The U.S. Is in ‘Cultural Chaos’
“America’s White Christianity was designed to perpetuate racial injustices,” Goza says. Despite the promise of the 1960s civil rights movement when activists got segregationist laws overturned, Americans have been in “cultural chaos” since the Vietnam War and have not progressed toward socioeconomic equality. Poverty persists, and many kinds of equality are theoretical.
One of the white ideologies that maintains Black poverty, Goza says, is the lie that poverty results from character failures. The so-called “rational” perspective claimed by white people involves “neither intimacy nor solidarity with Black folk.” Thus, as the nation mass-incarcerates African-American men, white Christian leaders allege that individual Black men are delinquent. They fail to ask how the police and justice systems decide to arrest those men. They don’t see how poverty is institutionally designed.
White people hide their racism even from themselves by performatively embracing President Nixon’s call for “colorblindness” or, more recently, the “All Lives Matter” refrain. White Christians claim to promote “family values.” Their version of religion has evidently “failed to provide depth perception,” without which it will not be possible to find answers and solve crises, Goza says.
Something I’d Add
Goza makes a convincing case that racism, even when it has been a silent undercurrent, has always been a main agenda.
One thing he doesn’t discuss: The Christian right-wing tried to maintain racially segregated private schools in the ’60s and ’70s, but when they decided they had lost on this issue and needed a new political cause, they drummed up anti-abortion and anti-gay crusades in the late ’70s and ’80s. The purpose was to agitate and recruit more white Christians to conservative organizations. White Christians’ furious bluster over sexuality has deflected attention from their underlying racism.
Goza explains that philosophers rationalized men’s control over others’ reproduction to uphold slaveowners’ interests. I’d add that these rationales surely motivate anti-abortion and anti-gay ideology. A major consequence of anti-abortion and anti-gay movements, as with racist movements, is to fracture social trust and solidarity.
To Do Nothing Contributes to Evil
In America’s Unholy Ghosts, Goza lays out an important problem of our philosophical heritage. He makes the moral case that white people have to change where we live, how we learn, and (if we are religious) with whom we worship.
Inaction, he says, is a form of evil.
That’s a challenge posed to all of us who aspire to achieve the good.