“Either a Killer or a Suicide”: White Culture, Anti-Cultural Preaching, and Cultural Suicide

Andrew Wymer

The issue of Liturgy dealing with “Preaching and Culture,” guest-edited by Gennifer Benjamin Brooks, looks at how culture influences preaching. What follows is an extensive excerpt from Andrew Wymer’s essay concerned with how preaching must be shaped in order to deny the violence of white cultural privilege. –– Melinda Quivik

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In Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Triptych, she portrays a fictional account of the complexity, rawness, and brutality of life in mid-twentieth century Haiti resulting from the past occupation of military forces of the United States. Her second novella, Anger, tells the fictional story of a bourgeois family whose lands are forcefully taken from them during Francois Duvalier’s attacks against the bourgeis.

In response to this threat to their social status and economic privilege, the family uses the daughter as a sexual commodity to buy the family’s continued social and economic privilege. As the story unfolds, Chauvet unflinchingly examines the brutal ways in which post-colonial violence, particularly as it is manifested in anger, is internalized or externalized in various ways by members of the family. The son, who desires to protect and avenge his sister, is overcome with both anger and shame. He does not know whether to kill his sister’s rapist or to kill himself. He muses, “Will I kill him [the powerful man who raped his sister]? Could I? Or just kill myself, that would certainly be easier. You’re born either a killer or a suicide.”

The ripples of violence caused by the colonial machinations of whiteness are encapsulated in Vieux-Chauvet’s line. None of the persons in the story or the author are white, yet I interpret the domestic violence of Haiti described in this book as deeply connected to the longstanding direct and indirect violence done to Haiti by European powers and the U.S.

In this essay I grapple both with the cultural posture of critically white homiletical identity and practice—which I will name as anti-cultural to the degree that it is anti-racist—and with the cultural costs that result from preaching a message of racial justice—which I will name as cultural suicide to the degree that it betrays white cultural allegiances and speaks to the potential for liberation from an evil culture. While I infer a definition of “critically white” as anti-racist, further explanation may be helpful. I utilize “critically” in this term to invoke connections to critical theory and more particularly critical race theory, in which racial constructs and racial systems are examined from the vantage point of—or with attention to—the experiences of persons with non-dominant racial identities.

I utilize “critically white” to identify a person who: (1) is seen in society as white or racially dominant; (2) experiences all of the resulting privileges of racial dominance, but (3) is simultaneously conscious of their racially dominant location and actively working to disrupt the violent systems of whiteness from which they benefit. The post-colonial violence of Vieux-Chauvet’s killer/suicide predicament is crucial to this study, because any engagement with culture in the U.S.—though I will specifically critique white culture—must account for the brutal past and present racialized violence committed by the dominant culture of whiteness in the U.S.

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The full article and the entire issue of Liturgy 35, no. 3 is available by personal subscription and through many libraries.

Andrew Wymer is assistant professor of liturgical studies at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, Illinois.

Andrew Wymer, “Either a Killer or a Suicide”: White Culture, anti-Cultural Preaching, and Cultural Suicide,” Liturgy 35, no. 3 (2020): 45-53.