As I summarized Jake Meador in my previous post, "'Whiteness,' ... entails a profound loss of geographical place-ness ("estrangement from nature") and community, and their replacement with an autonomous imposition of the will of individuals over land and other peoples." And if, quoting from Chapter 4 of "What Are Christians For?" (The Unmaking of the Body: Considering the Sexual Revolution),
The history that follows the advent of [W]hiteness is largely a history of expanding [W]hiteness into new domains and affording new peoples the same access to self-designation that was enjoyed by the Spanish conquistadores and their national leaders during the conquest of the Americas.
The right way of understanding the sexual revolution is [thus] not as the triumph of human freedom over the controlling and inhuman moralizing of Christianity. Instead, it was a further step in securing the rights of each person to self-designate over and against the Christian vision--a Christian vision which, at its best, provided a safe context for sexual relationships while also providing an account of human flourishing that did not require any sexual experience at all. ("What Are Christians For?" at 73)
it follows that identifying as a person of the opposite sex is an epitome of Whiteness. And adding the panoply of pharmacological and surgical techniques to such self-identification is Whiteness on Whiteness (W2).
What doesn't occur to many today--liberal or progressive or even Critical--is that the autonomous "I" (white or black; male or female; cis or trans) that chafes at a hint of limits becomes the puppet, not the master. As C.S. Lewis observed already in 1943,
It is the magician's bargain: give up our souls, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given souls. [If we] chose to treat ourselves as raw material, raw material we will be. ... Man's conquest of himself means simply the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material. ("The Abolition of Man" at 72, 75)
Of course, C.S. Lewis was a Very White Man. So let's consider J. Kameron Carter whose masterful elaboration on the writings of Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335 - c. 395) contain the following lengthy analysis:
Since only God is Lord and master, and therefor everything is subject to God, there can be within the created order no such distinction between human beings as master and slave... Human nature is not bound by ownership...
You condemn man to slavery, when his nature is free and is self-determining [eleuthera ... kai autexousios], and you legislate in competition with God, overturning his law for the human species. The one made on the specific terms that he should be the owner of the earth, and appointed to government by the Creator--him you bring under the yoke of slavery, as though defying and fighting against the divine decree. ([Gregory of Nyssa] Homilies on Ecclesiastes at 73)
Gregory's use of the terms eleutheros (free) and autexousios (self-determining) to describe the condition of human nature is critical here. In an essay on Gregory's fourth homily on Ecclesiastes, Maria Mercedès Bergadá has argued that eleutheros covers freedom in the civil and political arena as opposed external constraints in these spheres, while autexousios refers to that freedom by which the self is not held in internal constraint or bondage to itself, to its own desires. In employing these terms, Gregory points to human nature's freedom from tyranny on all levels, both external and internal tyranny. ("Race: A Theological Account" ("Race") at 237) (Emphasis added.)
Or, as Carter writes some pages later,
Love, therefore, is a theological virtue; indeed, the supreme one. When human being do not live in accordance with love, Maximus says, tyranny is introduced and sets in motion a history of oppression tied to power, and expresses phil-autia, or self-love... In such a schema, philautia functions as a substitute for a doctrine of creation inasmuch as the self-constituting "I" creates a reality ... ("Race" at 345)
While Carter doesn't apply Whiteness to transgenderism, his conclusion that "whiteness functions in modernity as a substitute for the doctrine of creation in its quest to create a reality into all else must enter" ("Race" at 352) suggests as much.
Freedom without love ends in slavery or oppression, or both. In other words, the Good precedes the Right.
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