A black prisoner’s conversion testimony uncritically reaffirmed white supremacist tropes about needing discipline

Evidence

Although I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, in retrospect, I realize that Gooch’s easy acceptance hinged on the fact that his testimony reinforced a complex choreography of white supremacy. The powerfully built black man wore his prison-issued clothes and performed under the watchful eye of an armed white prison guard who would escort him back to prison after the service. His personal narrative evoked stereotypes of black inner-city ghettos and dangerous black male bodies that needed to be subdued and disciplined by white authorities before surrendering and submitting to a Jesus introduced to him by a white European woman. And the central point of Gooch’s testimony subtly evoked a common trope of Old South white ideology: the happy slave who finds his true purpose in the service of a white master, where he is better off than before his enslavement. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, 154

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘choreography of white supremacy’ is a vivid framing for an essay on how well-intentioned integration moments in religious spaces can structurally reproduce the very hierarchy they claim to overcome.