Correcting Our Vision

I was around ten years old when it became abundantly apparent that I needed glasses. Up until then, I had stumbled my way through elementary school, squinting at the whiteboard and making out the vague shapes my teacher had written. One day, though, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t read what was written. I remember my fifth grade teacher asking me the answer to a question on the board, but I simply couldn’t read it. After that fateful day, my parents took me to the optician. Anyone who has glasses knows the performative rigmarole of an eye test: the doctor places different lenses over your eyes, testing your sight in all sorts of different configurations until she gets to the one that is just right. This process usually entails a series of questions: is the image clearer with lens number 1, or lens number 2? [A shuffle of lenses]. How about now? 1, or 2? [Another shuffle]. What about now? At the end of the rigmarole, you come out with what I think is probably one of the best inventions humans have come up with. When I first put on my glasses, I couldn’t believe it. This was how the rest of the world saw things? This was what I was missing out on? I was in awe. Everything was so clear. I could read the signs on storefronts and see all the way across the room. I could see faces in the street. It was like I had a new lease on life.

Photo by Bud Helisson on Unsplash

Oftentimes, we do not realize our vision is distorted until we are given a corrective lens. We do not realize that our way of seeing the world is coated with interpretive frameworks that shape our relationships, actions and society. And not always for the better. You might be wondering what vision has to do with a blog about faith and justice, but as I’ve dug further into theological studies and journeyed as an intern with BFJN, I’ve realized that vision is everything. When I’m not listening to podcasts or drinking as many iced lattes as I can get away with in the sun, I spend my days reading and studying the intersection of decolonial thought and Christian theology. What I’m trying to tease out in my study is how visions of society, humanity and bodies which called themselves Christian got so twisted and distorted that people came to mount theological arguments in favor of enslavement, colonialism and violence against Black and indigenous peoples. I am trying to understand how and why constructions of race and racialized violence were in many cases reliant upon theological ways of thinking. I think the exposure and the correction of that distorted vision is key. It’s easy to shy away from exposing our blurry vision - maybe we feel like these histories happened so long ago that we couldn’t possibly do anything about them, or even if we wanted to repair them, no one would be able to agree on how. But what such excuses neglect is the way historically distorted visions still determine our current moment, defining the things that we accept as “normal.”

I’ll give you one example. One reason why colonial agents from the 15th century onwards justified their violence against indigenous people was because they “saw” those bodies of color not as humans like themselves, endowed with the dignity and image of God, but as “brute” matter, material flesh: flesh that was inert and didn’t have any creative or “civilizational” capacity. Colonial agents saw themselves as fully formed and those they colonized as barbarians at the “early stages” of society. I could give you many examples of this kind of language cropping up in history: Amitav Ghosh tells us about Dutch colonizers who took over the Bandanese islands near Indonesia in his book The Nutmeg’s Curse, and I was recently reading about Belgian colonial rulers in the Congo who banned traditional arts among the people there, forming theories of their subjects as lesser than them. Much has been written on how American settler colonists exerted cruel violence and enacted a reign of terror on Native American communities. The list goes on. These are fundamentally distortions of vision - ways of “seeing” people wrongly that infect our ways of thinking. Willie James Jennings, a theologian who studies histories of colonialism, tells us that the Western Christian mind is plagued by a “diseased social imagination.” The way it relates to land, bodies, and material is infected. For many Christians in the West, such a statement is shocking. But underneath that layer of shock, I believe that the hearer can recognize its truth. And I say this not as criticism for criticism’s sake, but precisely because I love those who follow Jesus so much that I believe the Spirit calls us to a new way of seeing the very bodies he has created.

So: what does this have to do with our contemporary moment? Everything. It’s often said that colonial ways of thinking do not just disappear. They persist. What is required is active efforts at decoloniality that are disrupting where our visions have been distorted by knowledge that dehumanizes and racializes other bodies in order to create hierarchies. Where theological repair steps in is to perhaps tell us that our faith, as we wrestle with it and the questions of the world, offers resources - the right lenses - to correct our vision. I don’t have quite enough space in this blog post to outline all the ways in which this might happen, but I can give you one example of a colonial way of thinking that still persists, and which we are called to correct our vision around, digging into the theological resources of our faith. 

One way colonial ways of thinking still filter into our modern day is the distorted vision that tells us that segregated communities are just “how things are” and there is nothing much we can do about it. Jennings talks about this in a Q&A session here and in much of his other work. We expose first the colonial ways of thinking that led to deliberate segregationist policies placing Black and brown people in underfunded, underresourced and separate communities from white people, and we expose through interdisciplinary methods the knowledge production that allowed such policies to not only pass but be seen as "normal" or “desirable.” Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law is a premier book on this topic. But the exposition doesn’t end there. Decoloniality recognizes that segregation hasn’t left us. We are not under Jim Crow but legacies do not leave us that easily. In what ways are our current housing construction policies, zoning laws, and real estate development configurations perpetuating a racially segregated and dehumanizing way of thinking? In what ways are we accepting homelessness, lack of affordable housing and rent burdens as “normal”? How are ideas of “blackness” still intertwined with assumptions about guilt and criminality? Why can we not imagine a new way to live? Fundamentally: in what ways are we looking at particular bodies, and by our actions, deeming them people who are simply “matter,” who don’t really matter?

These are hard questions, and I open this conversation to leave us in the throes of questioning, bringing to mind the same issues that decolonial and postcolonial theorists have been grappling with for years. I write this because as a Christian I believe we have a duty to step into that dream God is dreaming of a just world, and to step into that dream also means to step into the messy, distorted ways of thinking that have opposed justice. Maybe, just maybe, might we then begin to ask what lenses we need to see a little bit clearer.