White Supremacy Naperville Style
Context
On February 23rd, Gregory McMichael, Travis McMichael, and William Bryan hunted and lynched Ahmaud Arbery. On March 15th, police shot and killed Breonna Taylor while acting on an illegal no-knock warrant.
Throughout the rest of March and April, reports of COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on Black communities poured into homes and phones across the globe. So did reports about how structural racism intensified COVID-19’s impact on Indigenous communities and Latina/o communities; and reports about the rise of anti-Asian racism.
One report about the rise of anti-Asian racism emerged from Naperville, IL. The town’s City Council passed a resolution denouncing “all acts of racism, intolerance and unlawful discrimination and will not tolerate them of any kind” in response to a woman calling Asian residents that supported a ban on selling recreational marijuana in Naperville “roving carpetbaggers.” The women made the racist remark while reading from a prepared statement at a council meeting!
This background information frames what happened in Naperville over Memorial Day weekend. For less than twenty-four hours before police officers murdered George Floyd—keeping his corpse pinned to Minneapolis asphalt for two minutes after forcing the life from his body, his beautiful and wondrously made body—a black structure in the middle of Naperville’s Cantore Park read: “White Pride.”
Let me Preach
Before I continue, I ask you to examine the photos here.
What these images capture is deplorable—a blasphemous weaponizing of the liberating, unifying, white-supremacy-destroying cross of Christ. Whereas the Son of God came to bring peace—full, long-awaited shalom—this racist vandalism is an act of terror designed to maintain racial domination. Whereas Christ’s covenantal body was broken to redeem people from every racialized community, this racist vandalism draws upon the historic linking of Christ’s broken body to redemptive conceptions of whiteness and white nationalism. Indeed, we students of U.S. racial history recognize the racist symbolic importance of placing white spray paint championing white pride over something black. We’re not dumb; we’ve read Winthrop Jordan.
We students of U.S. racial history also aren’t surprised this happened. We know Naperville was a sundown town that removed some of its overtly racist policies because of an interest-convergence: white economic aspirations required cheap non-white labor. Those in civic power weren’t trying to make Naperville into an equitable multi-racialized community. They labored to forge a modern-day plantation on which middle and upper class whites reside in a metaphorical big house (of course, their actual houses are also enormous!), and poor whites and racialized minorities are the needed labor force living in lesser conditions on-site to make the plantation run. A cursory drive through Naperville reveals as much.
But a cursory drive or glance at economic and demographic data also shows that things haven’t gone exactly as planned. Naperville’s Asian population has the highest average salary by race or ethnicity. These non-whites, so the prepared paper delivered in April reasoned, are like Northern carpetbaggers ruining Naperville’s Southern-style plantation. And now they’re trying to dictate Naperville’s laws and order! So despite all the racialized injustices I mentioned at the outset, people in Naperville are championing white supremacy in council meetings and white pride in public parks. Can’t you hear the calls to sing Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” during live-streamed church services and prayer meetings?
As the globe mourns the above racial evils, I pray that we in and around Naperville mourn and resist the white supremacy pulsating throughout our neighborhood. The City Council’s resolution is not enough. We need antiracist preaching, teaching, policing, marching, lending, and buying. We need the people of God doing good, race-conscious, Christ-glorifying, neighbor-edifying works of justice and mercy. We who God has liberated by the covenantal blood of Christ must commit to confronting white supremacy in ourselves, our institutions, and our societal structures. If we don’t, there’ll be little room for wondering why folks in Naperville blaspheme the name of God.
