The Christian Imagination by Willie James Jennings

A different story of race needs to be told, one that helps people grasp the depth and power of racial perception. Many theorists and historians are trying to tell the story of race beginning, of the origins of a concept of race. Some believe race conceptuality has its determinative origins in the Enlightenment and in modernity. For my part, I join the chorus of voices that spy out racial formation before the Enlightenment, before common notions of modernity's beginnings, and in the earliest moments of modern colonialism. Yet I want to draw attention not simply to a medieval beginning of racial vision but also to a theological beginning. There is more here in this beginning and in my position than an alternative beginning of the race story. The story of race is also the story of place.

Geography matters for race as well as for identity, vision, and the hope of how one might live life. It is this deep connection between place and identity that will be difficult for many to grasp because people have been formed in a world in which such connections are only imagined, only fictions enabled solely by volition and market desire, the parents of private property. We cannot go back to a different world, the world where animals, landscape, and people together form an identity, collective and individual. But the first task of this text was to try to illumine the power of the racial imagination as exactly a power that draws its life from copying a centered existence between animals, landscape, and peoples. That power found expression through theological voice that gave shape to racial anthropology and nurtured its power to stand in for landscape in its facilitating characteristics.