Unlearning White Supremacy: A Spirituality for Racial Liberation

Overview

"Mikulich doesn’t just invite white people of faith to take responsibility for our role in anti-Black white supremacy; he insists the responsibility is ours, and he doesn’t spare himself, even as someone who has been doing anti-racist work in churches for decades.  r. In this book, he draws on years of practical personal experience to invite white readers of faith into hard truths, historical perspectives, powerful self-reflection and possible ways forward. This approach is an important addition to the genre, especially for white Merton scholars and white Catholics." -Cassidy S. Hall, The Merton Annual 36 (2023)

"For more than twenty years, Alex Mikulich has lived Christian discipleship in a  praxis of active, practical solidarity with African American children, women, and men in opposition to white racist supremacy. Drawing on his experience as a parent, lay minister, theologian, and scholar, and taking inspiration from Thomas Merton’s Seeds of Destruction, Mikulich interrogates disordered historical, social, cultural, and ecclesial contexts that promote and sustain white supremacy. Moreover, in this book, he invites White people of faith to take up concrete practices that counter white supremacy and encourages them to live out and out of a new consciousness and spirituality as members of the Body of Christ in active solidarity with all marginalized peoples."  --Shawn Copeland, Professor Emerita of Theology, Boston College

“In this timely and powerful book, Alex Mikulich calls his fellow white Christians to name and dismantle the idolatry of white supremacy that informs so much of our life, thinking, and action in American society and the church. Weaving together personal experiences with wisdom from Black Christian and secular sources, Mikulich is unflinching in his challenge that white people of faith have a responsibility to work for racial justice because, as his fellow white Catholic Thomas Merton presciently declared decades before, racism is a white problem. This book shows how the work of antiracism requires an investment of the whole self, which includes one’s spirituality and faith commitments. Unlearning White Supremacy offers resources and tools to support those white Christians seeking a holistic approach to decolonizing their imaginations and outlook, while deepening their commitment to the work of racial justice in the church and world.”— Daniel P. Horan, OFM, Professor of Philosophy, Religious Studies and Theology at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame and author of A White Catholic’s Guide to Racism and Privilege.

"Unlearning White Supremacy is what White Christians need right now to deepen our spiritual investment in addressing racism's violence. Mikulich places our fingers in the colonial wounds of white supremacy, and with searing analysis interrogates the white ecosystems and patterns of self-perceived innocence that remain. This richly textured gathering of lament and transformative practices is hard to put down and will be difficult to ignore." -Jeannine Hill Fletcher, author, The Sin of White Supremacy

Drawing on the writings of James Baldwin, W. E. B. DuBois, M. Shawn Copeland, and others, the author weaves together historical, theological, ethical, and sociological analysis to understand the origins and evolution of anti-Black white supremacy and to suggest ways in which white Christians in particular can work to overcome it in themselves and in their institutions.

Alex Mikulich, a Roman Catholic theologian and social ethicist, devotes his scholarship and activism to addressing white privilege and racism in the Catholic Church and in society. He is co-author of The Scandal of White Complicity in U.S. Hyper-Incarceration (2013), and he co-edited Interrupting White Privilege: Catholic Theologians Break the Silence (Orbis, 2007), which won the 2008 Theological Book of the Year award from the College Theology Society.