The Morality of White Supremacy

I am one of those unusual people who does not like the story of Nat Turner. When I share this with people from my community, there is often some frustration with my perspective. I struggle with the fact that he took the lives of even little children, and that he did it so violently. When I share this struggle with people, they remind me of the violence he witnessed and endured. This is true. Logically, it seems justifiable that he would bring that same vengeance against those who were violent toward him and his community. I would not struggle with his story so much if he had led a rebellion that fought against other fighters. But to go from home to home, killing children along with slave masters and their wives, my conscience struggles to celebrate him.

I am not the only one who does not like the story of Nat Turner, but our reasons are somewhat different. Mine comes from my soft heart toward children and my convictions about taking human life. For many White people, historically, the discomfort with Nat Turner has been rooted in the fear he brought to their community. He broke some sort of code, or “fourth wall.” He shattered the illusion of the obedient, contented enslaved person who accepted his place. His story has often been told as the story of a violent man, even a terrorist in America. His rebellion intrudes upon romanticized images of the antebellum South: the ball gowns, elegant porches, and beautiful mansions, etc. because it forces us to confront what was happening underneath all of that beauty.

Nat Turner was highly intelligent, well-read, and deeply knowledgeable about the Bible. His reading of Scripture helped inspire his rebellion. He was a brilliant man who had appeared to serve his master faithfully, giving his master the illusion that he was a faithful and obedient servant. And then he rebelled. His rebellion birthed a lingering fear: that we cannot be tamed. And perhaps that is because it is not in our nature, as human beings, to be tamed. History has shown again and again that people eventually resist being denied their freedom. But Turner’s rebellion also fed another fear among White Americans: that Black people could not be trusted, no matter how mannerly, educated, faithful, or obedient we appeared to be. After his rebellion, there were laws passed prohibiting slaves to know how to read. I am always amazed at how people will talk about how awful he was but are so gracious when talking about the violence of the enslaver. Historically, White supremists usually see the moral flaws of those they oppress, but fail to see their own.

Harriet Jacobs was one of the first enslaved people to write her own autobiography. Before she published it herself, she reached out to Harriet Beecher Stowe to see if she would help her publish it. Harriet Beecher Stowe refused to, it could have been that the content of Harriet Jacob’s story was sexually explicit and contrasted the “saintness” of Tom’s humble Christian obedience. Harriet Jacobs made a choice that she knew the respectable Christian society of her time would consider immoral. After years of sexual harassment from her enslaver, she deliberately entered into a relationship with another man and had children with him. She did not want her enslaver to own her body. She did not want him to decide when, how, or by whom her body would be used. And she refused to allow him to become the father of her children. So, within a world in which almost every choice had been taken from her, Jacobs found one place where she could still exercise some power: she chose for herself.

Later, she hid for nearly seven years in a tiny garret above her grandmother’s home, where she could sometimes see her children through a small opening, before eventually escaping slavery for good. Jacobs knew that people would judge the choices she made. She even appealed directly to the women reading her story, asking them to understand that an enslaved woman could not be judged by the same moral standards as a free woman who possessed control over her own body and circumstances.

This is where the morality of slavery becomes complicated. Harriet Beecher Stowe used Uncle Tom’s Cabin to help awaken the conscience of the North and build sympathy for the abolitionist cause. Yet even many White people who opposed slavery struggled to comprehend the depths of desperation that led enslaved people to make choices that violated conventional ideas of morality. They could condemn slavery while still judging the enslaved by moral standards created for people who possessed freedoms the enslaved did not have.

But the question is, how do we determine what is moral or immoral within an immoral society? At the time, the enslavement, abuse, exploitation, and even murder of other human beings were woven into the very fabric of the society in which they lived. How do we judge the morality of people whose choices are being made within a system that has stripped them of their freedom, dignity, and control over their own bodies? How do we apply conventional standards of morality to people who are simply trying to survive?

It reminds me of the ministers who wrote the OP-ED against MLK, claiming that his protests and sit-ins were disrespecting the authority God has sent. In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. expressed his deep disappointment with White moderates and White Christian leaders who were so focused on criticizing the methods of the Civil Rights Movement while failing to speak with the same urgency against the systems of oppression that made those methods necessary in the first place.

I have met Christian school leaders who refuse to honor MLK Day because of what they see as King’s disrespect for the law. Yet some of these same people honor Thomas Jefferson, a man who enslaved other human beings and had a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved girl who was still a teenager when that relationship began and who did not possess legal ownership of her own freedom. Someone recently told me that when additional recordings and records concerning MLK are released, the world will finally see how imperfect he really was. But we already know how imperfect many of the Founding Fathers were. We know about slavery. We know about the human beings they owned. We know about the contradictions between the liberty they proclaimed and the freedom they denied to others. And yet none of this has stopped many Americans from praising them as great and noble men.

Why, then, does the discovery of moral failure threaten to erase the legacy of one man while the documented moral failures of another are treated as unfortunate imperfections that do not diminish his greatness? This is part of what I mean by the morality of White supremacy. The immorality of owning, exploiting, abusing, and oppressing other human beings can become strangely invisible within a worldview shaped by White supremacy, while the moral failures of those who resist that oppression are examined under a microscope.

Not too long ago, I was watching a video about a Christian school curriculum where the person presenting the curriculum explained why they did not teach about Frederick Douglass: he was too radical. Yet in some of these same spaces, students are taught about Robert E. Lee, who, according to testimony from people he enslaved, could be a brutal slaveholder. But Lee was a devout Christian, so apparently that makes things different. Insert sarcasm. This is the contradiction that troubles me. The response to the violence of slavery is often portrayed as immoral, while slavery itself is explained away as simply “part of the culture of the time.”

We see something similar when we talk about Jim Crow. Images of Malcolm X or Huey P. Newton holding guns are presented as evidence that they were radical and violent, while far less attention is sometimes given to the violence that made armed self-defense appealing in the first place. Black communities were living under the threat of lynching, racial terror, police brutality, and other forms of violence. Whether we agree with the methods of Malcolm X or the Black Panthers is a legitimate moral question. But we cannot evaluate their response to violence while removing the violence that produced that response from the story.

America has often told its history in a way that makes the response to enslavement and oppression the moral problem, while treating the enslavement and oppression themselves as unfortunate features of American culture. And when I think about how quickly the moral failures of Black people responding to racism and White supremacy can become the entire story, I see echoes of this pattern in the present controversy surrounding Jason Arday.

I see it all over social media, particularly among some of my Christian, conservative, and MAGA friends: “He lied. He was dishonest. He lied his way into Cambridge.” But the investigation into all of the allegations against him was not even finished. Serious questions had been raised about his scholarship and some of his claims, and those questions deserved to be investigated. Arday himself acknowledged making mistakes while denying that he was the dishonest person his critics portrayed him to be. But there was another part of his story too: the extraordinary scrutiny and racist abuse he said he experienced as a Black academic.

I have experienced that. I know this experience deeply. It has been so hard for me that after Arday passed away, my husband asked me, “Babe, I have seen you go through some pretty dark times in academia. Have you ever wanted to take your life?” I could see the concern on his face. He has had a front-row seat as I have battled through being one of a small percentage of Black women with a PhD who work in academia. It is very difficult, but I assured him, “This is not my identity. I will just get another job or go back to teaching kindergarten.” (lol) Because he and our kids and JESUS are my whole world. That is all that matters to me.

Yet I understand Arday’s pain. When I was working on my PhD and professors did not want me to research the history of classical education in Black communities, someone told me to just research what they wanted me to research so I could get my degree. But I had just visited the Frederick Douglass House. I had seen his library and the statue of Cicero in his foyer, and I could not get that out of my mind! I chose to sacrifice my career for the truth I felt God was revealing to me. At the time, it looked like my career was over because I made that choice.

And perhaps this is another part of the morality of White supremacy: doing what you are expected to do in order to be accepted. Your goodness is measured, in part, by your willingness to comply. But when your identity is not connected to doing whatever White supremacy requires of you, or to whether the people within those systems accept you, but instead is connected to doing what you feel God is calling you to do, then you make different choices. You also make choices that are true and genuine to who you are, so you do not have to live with the fear of being discovered as a fraud. You do not have to create a version of yourself that will be accepted because your identity and sense of worth are not dependent on their acceptance in the first place.

The constant fight to prove that you belong in academia, has the potential to break you. I have been there. The night my husband and I came home from my PhD graduation, we got down on our knees together and wept and thanked God. My husband looked at me and said, “Babe, you did it. Thank God you made it.” And he literally cried. That is how hard it is.

Arday was married with children, and even that was not enough for him to see that he was greater than what Cambridge or academia thought about him. What if that pressure contributed to some of his choices? What if the pressure to prove that he belonged made him careless? What if it contributed to dishonesty? None of those possibilities would make dishonesty right. Integrity matters, especially in academia. But when do we talk about the racism and pressure he endured? When do we examine the environment surrounding the moral failure? Or do we ignore all of that and focus exclusively on the response to racism?

And this makes me wonder: In their eyes, is the moral failure really that Jason Arday lied, or is it that he broke some sort of unspoken code by making it onto the faculty of Cambridge? If lying is truly the issue, then the same scrutiny we give Arday should also be applied to other leaders and people in positions of power who have lied to get what they want. Why are we not just as vocal about their dishonesty? Why are we not as vocal about extramarital affairs and other moral failings that we see among people in positions of power? If integrity is really what we are concerned about, then shouldn’t we apply that standard to everyone?

That is the pattern I keep coming back to. The morality of White supremacy has historically demanded that those living under its authority remain obedient to it. When enslaved people ran away, they were breaking the law. When Nat Turner rebelled, he became the monster. When Frederick Douglass became too outspoken, he became “radical.” When Black people armed themselves against racial violence, they became the threat. The resistance becomes the moral crisis. The FBI is called. Phones are tapped. Smear campaigns begin. All the while, the system that made the resistance necessary is left unchallenged and unchanged.

The focus becomes the person who tried to break free by any means necessary, while the system that created this rogueness is left intact. We scrutinize the morality of the response while failing to scrutinize the morality of the system that provoked it. At its most extreme, White supremacist ideology even gave this hierarchy divine authority. White domination was portrayed as part of God’s ordained order, and resistance to that order could therefore be interpreted as rebellion not simply against society, but against God Himself. It is sort of like the way the story of westward expansion has been told in some children’s books. Native people seeking to protect their own land are portrayed as savage enemies standing in the way of progress, while Manifest Destiny is presented as part of God’s plan. The people resisting the taking of their land become the moral problem, rather than the people taking it.

The same mythology has shaped the way some people tell the story of Western civilization. Greece and Rome are celebrated for conquering vast territories and creating a civilization whose influence eventually reached around the world. Their expansion becomes greatness. Their power becomes civilization. Their conquest becomes part of the heroic story of the West. But when the people living underneath systems of domination resist, their resistance becomes barbaric, radical, violent, or immoral. And that is the contradiction I want us to confront: Why are we so often better at recognizing the immorality of resistance than the immorality that made resistance necessary? This is a question we have been wrestling with for centuries as we continue trying to do the work of changing a country rooted in the morality of White supremacy so that it becomes a country whose morality is grounded in something more equitable and humane than the systems of domination that shaped it and, in many ways, continue to influence how it operates today.