Is this how to be an anti-racist?

Every system gets the results its structure is designed to produce. Some pastors learn this lesson explicitly in pastoral care courses, and others learn it on the ground in congregational ministry. It wasn’t until I heard my most blatantly racist parishioner describe his difficulties paying the bills and his frustrations over being at the mercy of the Veterans Health Administration for health care that I even thought to ask the question, What purpose does racism serve?

In this necessary and challenging book, Jonathan Tran employs a relational ethnography to critique what he deems the reigning orthodoxy on anti-racism and to provide a contrary framework for destabilizing the status quo that Whiteness protects. He documents the histories of two communities, Redeemer Community Church in San Francisco and the Mississippi Delta Chinese, to show how anti-Asian racism in America belies the simplicity of the Black/White binary. By moving from the now normative framework of “identitarian anti-racism” to one of “political economy,” Tran attempts a counterintuitive analysis that, he argues, can lead to imaginative alternatives when it comes to our practices and our politics, especially for Christians.

Tran’s thesis is as simple as it is contrary. He asserts that orthodox anti-racism’s intense focus on racialized identity is a “serious impediment to the work of democratic life on the one hand and political liberation on the other.” Alternatively, he foregrounds the political economy (or what scripture calls the principalities and powers), which originally created the concept of race and racial categories as a means to justify domination and exploitation. In widening the frame of the discussion to better understand the historic purpose racism serves, Tran is returning to the kind of argument mounted long ago by Black thinkers such as W. E. B. Du Bois.