In the face of the horrific killing of George Floyd – an African American man at the hands of a white police officer – public protests exploded across the United States. In this historically significant wave of America's racial reckoning, many raise important yet often-unspoken questions. How are Black bodies perceived? Why are Black bodies seen as inherently threatening? How does the image of whiteness come to communicate what is civilised, virtuous and pure, while the image of blackness communicates uncivilised, barbaric and perverse? In Disordered: The Holy Icons and Racial Myths, Jessica Wai-Fong Wong aptly tackles these timely questions by exploring how and why these racialised images, myths and stories of whiteness and blackness are so ‘deeply embedded within Western ways of imagining the world’ (p. 3). This ‘modern western social imaginary’ not only shapes our imagination, but also informs ‘how we come to see ourselves, others, and the world around us’ (p. ix). From the Middle Ages, the Christian church has also played a vital role in forming and sustaining western modernity's oppressive racial hierarchy. Particularly, the early Gentile church leaders distorted the doctrine of God's election, ‘making it into a fundamentally white, European, and later, American condition’ (p. 4). Because whiteness transmutes itself into God's holy people, Wong argues that ‘Whiteness [has] become the idealized form of Christian discipleship’ (p. viii).
Chapter 1 explains how this western social imaginary has constantly privileged and presented white masculinity as ‘the ideal manifestations of human existence’ and ‘the proper telos of humanity’ (p. 15). In this modern context, as the antithesis of white masculinity, non-white and non-male individuals embody ‘the disorder of their marginal social location, polluting society with their chaotic nature’ (p. 16). The Black population, specifically, was perceived as ‘the enemy of values … absolute evil’, according to Frantz Fanon (p. 17). Wong pertinently identifies the role of Christianity in reinforcing this modern western imagination's understanding of racial hierarchy. The Christian religion has long been used as a tool to create certain theological assumptions indicating a profound association between whiteness and God's holy order. Chapters 2 and 3 demonstrate how this racial logic of the modern world influenced the medieval conception of Jesus as a white European male. Wang contends that Christ's ‘European-like body suggests something important about perfect complexion and its related spiritual order’ (p. 35). Because this holy image of Jesus Christ with a white, European-like appearance represents the sacred order, members of God's kingdom then must embody whiteness that is iconic. In contrast, the darkness of blackness is seen as ‘a disordered condonation’ rooted in spiritual corruption and indicates ‘a fundamental ontological incompatibility’ with white Christian beliefs, values and society (p. 50). Even in the present day, the black body continues to be anti-iconic.
In chapter 4, Wong analyses how, in the time of European colonial expansion, the Christian colonisers perceived themselves as ‘divinely ordered’ and ‘sanctified’ people who are responsible to ‘mediate Jesus and his holy order to the colonized’ (p. 55). In this manner of misleading God's divine order, while whiteness becomes ‘an ontological condition of ultimate spiritual significance’, the ontological state of blackness ‘threatens to disrupt the proper orchestration of God's divine oikonomia’ (p. 62). Chapter 5 reveals how in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this white European vision of racial order formed and influenced the racial optic of North America, where black, brown and Asian bodies continue to be alienated, subjugated and criminalised. Finally, in chapter 6, Wong concludes by offering a new theological vision of ‘seeing and being in the world’ (p. 129). Because the western modern racial optic is ‘a blindness born of idolatry’ (p. 129), Wong challenges us see that the holy order is at the heart of Jesus’ identity. Jesus himself is the holy order of God. He invites and teaches ‘a counter-cultural way of seeing and, in turn, a distinct manner of being in relationship with others’ that is God's true oikonomia (p. 110).
Wong's book is a delightful contribution to the emerging conversation on the intersection of religion and race in North America. Not only for scholars, teachers and students of theological education, but also for ordained and lay church leaders, Wong's deeply theological account of western Europe and North America's long history and practice of racial discrimination make it a must-read, especially for white readers. While this book can certainly speak to a larger audience, Wong's Disordered is a compelling introductory book on theology of race for white Christian readers who might be in the process of making sense of the Christian religion's worship of ‘white Jesus’ and its role in sustaining the modern racial optic. As such, this book will engage and speak differently to different groups of readers. What would it mean for white bodies to follow Jesus’ new way of ‘seeing and being’ in this racist society? What then would it mean for black, brown, Asian and indigenous bodies to follow Jesus in this racist society? These are two different questions that must be asked and considered critically as all Christians are called to participate in God's divine oikonomia in order to heal today's broken world.
