Hiding the White Numbers

Many theorists on race have pointed out that the white race is the one that need not speak its name; this certainly pertains in the case of theology, where we can now find black theology, womanist theology, Latina/o theology, Latin American theology, liberation theology, feminist theology, African theology, Asian theology, queer theology, Native American theology ... a plethora that points out the obvious: anything without a label or hyphen is by definition a white theology.

But not a consciously white theology; not theology written from a perspective informed by a critical understanding of what it means to be white. Rather, before the critiques and constructions of marginalized communities, most theology was written by white (presumably straight) men who regarded their perspective as either objective or universal.

The advent of people of color and feminists and eventually lgbt people noted the falseness of that objectivity and universality. (Of course, the white feminists immediately got it wrong, too, thinking there was a universal female perspective and failing to realize white feminists could not speak for women of color, but that women of color needed to speak the learnings and visions of their own experience.)

Perhaps not too surprisingly, the U.S. government continues to do its part to render whiteness invisible ... conveniently also making white privilege more difficult to discern. For instance, the Census Bureau's Quick Facts web page on the United States as a whole notes that of the total number of business firms documented in 2002 (22,974,655), Hispanic persons own 6.8 percent of those firms, African-Americans own 5.2 percent, Asian persons own 4.8 percent, and indigenous peoples own .1 percent (i.e., one-tenth of a percent).

Conspicuously absent is the statistic for white ownership of business firms, which – based on the figures for other ethnicities – I would estimate at around 83 percent (a figure that might be rounded down somewhat for the inclusion of some Hispanics who might designate themselves as being white). And these are predominantly male owners, across all racial/ethnic category: the percentage of woman-owned firms, unparsed by race or ethnicity, is 28.2 percent.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) also organizes its data in a way that renders whiteness invisible. Its Current Population Survey data on employment and income is tabulated for workforce totals and then presented in subsets for women, African Americans, Asian and Hispanic/Latino workers. Data for men and/or white people must be extrapolated. But even as one extrapolates from the data, one finds that the data is presented in such a way that it can only be used to estimate white workers or male workers, but not – for instance – white male workers.

There are changes afoot; many authors and bloggers and theologians and just plain folks are working to make whiteness more visible, in order to render it critique-able ... and ultimately, many of us hope, transformable.