Episode 264 - Andrew Krinks

[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to that makes Total sense, a podcast dedicated to exploring God's generosity and justice. I'm Alexis Busetti, a Christian aiming to ask good questions and encouraging you to do the same. Every one of us is wired by God to live out generosity and justice. But the how sometimes eludes us that makes total sense is a way for us to get together, posture ourselves as learners, and challenge one another to practice generosity and justice in a tangible way every day. Okay, Andrew, I'm going to like, I feel like I need to take a deep breath, center myself, you know, do all of the spiritual disciplines right now because we're starting a little later than we wanted because of my technical difficulties. But we're here, and you've been so patient. So thank you so much for coming on today, for being patient and for coming back. [00:01:05] Speaker B: Glad to be here. Thanks for having me back. [00:01:07] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm really excited. My guest is Andrew Krinks. He was here before. I've interviewed his wife as well, and I'll put the links to those episodes in the show notes. But today we're going to talk about Andrew, your this is a big book. This is your most recent book. This is a big book. And I, and I will say for folks, I'm thinking right now about my husband, Seth, who loves history and context and theology, and he wants to know all of the things. I'm like, this is, I'm recommending this book to him. I have a few other people in my direct circle that I'm like, this is going to be right up your alley. And so I have been spending some time with your book, and I'm really, really appreciative, it's called, and I almost want to wait because I feel like this is kind of where we're going to go. I mean, your title and your subtitle break down into really what the book is about, as you tell us in the intro, but it's called white property, black trespass, racial capitalism, and the religious function of mass criminalization. This is a lot. But first, before we get into the book, I know a little bit about your social location, your context, your social context, and also your scholarly context and your theological context. But could you give us just like a brief rundown of that so that when people are hearing you as an author, they're hearing where you live, where you come from, these kinds of things that have interested you in your scholarship and theology and that might help us as we're know track a little bit better as we're having this conversation. [00:02:56] Speaker B: Sure. Yeah. So I was born and raised in New Jersey, outside of Philadelphia, semi rural, semi suburban suburb of Philadelphia. Was raised in Protestant Church of Christ tradition, which is fairly conservative tradition in which I received a great deal of love. But also, as I narrate in the preface to the book, I inherited a helping of fear as well. Fear of hell, fear of danger in the world, etcetera. And what's raised in that tradition came to some moments of existential crisis related to events taking place in the world around 2001 to three, when the US was responding seemingly to 911 and gearing up to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. I had a crisis provoked by friends at school who were atheists and agnostics stating moral opposition to the war. Meanwhile, my church family was proclaiming its holiness from pulpit and Piu Alec. And that led to questions that led me to leave home to go to college in Tennessee, where I was blessed to receive the hospitality of people who were willing to hear my questions, my consternation, my uncertainty about how my faith was showing up in the world around me and how I was not feeling so much alignment with aspects of it, particularly its kind of warmongering aspects. And so that began kind of phase two of my life of faith, from the one I inherited to the one that I found and kind of co created with others in community, which is a faith for me, very much expressed through seeking to embody God's justice. And I hospitality and accompaniment with people who are marginalized and oppressed. And, yeah, knowing God through the doing of justice as some liberation theologians interpret the hebrew prophets. So, yeah, that's a bit about my faith trajectory. I am a white guy from a middle, upper class background. Upper middle class, I should say background. And in the last 20 years, though, as I lived in Nashville, Tennessee, have kind of come to consciousness around the racial component of my upbringing and the class component of my upbringing and the gender component of who I am as well. And kind of doing the important work of reckoning with what I have inherited in my body and in my lineage, and kind of doing the work of being accountable and walking with others who are learning and unlearning and relearning and doing all of that work. So that's a bit about my context. I teach, educate, I organize, I write, I parent, I do lots of stuff. [00:06:25] Speaker A: Thanks, Andrew. We're going to jump right into the content here of the book, but I just want to say I think this conversation will be new for a lot of folks. And so I just kind of want to put not a disclaimer out. But maybe an invitation for people to, like, just pretend for a second that we could drop the paradigm of incarceration in the United States. Like, pretend for a second that that isn't what kind of justice, in quotes, might look like. Drop the policing paradigm for a second. And that's. That's going to be really hard because especially since 2020, in the wake of George Floyd's murder, you know, with defund, the police being shouted and things like that, this is obviously become a very polarizing issue. But I would say even in the. Everything that we have thought, no matter what we thought about those things, it's hard. But, like, let's just, like, open up our imaginations a little bit to this. To this conversation. I found that, as I have been involved in conversations like this one for years now, um, that that's just one of the first things that we have to do. I think if we, um. If we come in and say, like, what can we keep or what can we, you know, we're. We're going to be kind of messed up a little bit. An example. They're tearing the house across, like, next door to us, down almost. And. But that's the key, is almost. So some of the neighbors were looking at this, and you can literally stand on the sidewalk and see straight through to the backyard. Like, there's studs, but there's almost no bricks even on the outside of this house anymore. And so several have said, why did they not just tear it down completely, like, to the foundation, you know? And we don't know because we're not the contractor, the architect on that. But I think of that, like, and what's left looks real shabby at this point because of the work that they've done. And so I think that that's almost a picture that I get here of. Let's. Let's not try and keep the studs here, at least for this conversation. Let's just imagine something different. Is that. Is that fair at all going into this, Andrew? [00:09:07] Speaker B: Yes, I it is fair. And I want to, you know, echo what you're saying, that the invitation that I'm posing is not an easy one in that it involves kind of a wholesale rethinking of a whole lot of stuff that we kind of take for granted as normal and natural. And so, you know, what we're referring to specifically here, prisons and police, as institutions that most of us, I think, in the us context, take for granted as institutions that have kind of always been there and probably always will be there. You know, it's kind of the assumption for a lot of people. I can remember going on a tour at eastern state Penitentiary in Philadelphia, which is a really interesting site, part museum, part venue for strange Halloween related events, but nonetheless, the museum portion is really interesting. And the tour guide, I went on a little guided tour with another family of folks, and the tour guide asked a really interesting question that actually influenced the beginning words of my introduction, which is, he came up to us and said, before we start, let me ask you, why do we have prisons? And it's kind of one of those questions that most people don't even think about. Cause it's just so naturalized and ingrained. And one of the people there responded, there's a lot of bad people out there. As if, like, why are you even asking? We know why we have these. There's a lot of bad people out there. And, you know, it turns out. And part of what I do try to do in the book is to that presumption that so many of us are familiar with, that there's just a lot of bad people out there, and we need someone to catch them and somewhere to put them to kind of keep the rest of us safe. And maybe you could add in things about accountability or whatnot. It turns out that that story is one that's essentially been fabricated over time, and that does not actually reflect the origins and the ongoing function of the institutions. And that is, as you're saying in our time, where a lot of people are asking questions about these institutions, there is at the same time this kind of pendulum swing backwards or backlash response that's like, why are all you people complaining about the police in prisons? Like, people are still hurting and killing people? Right? So what do you suggest? You know, that kind of response, kind of dismissive response. And so part of the work that I try to do is to say that, you know, if you want to go with the analogy that you were presenting of a house, you know, being mostly torn down and looking pretty rough, and why not just kind of start again? And, you know, I think that the assumption is that prisons and police exist again because people inevitably do wrong. You could say in the theological key, people are sinners. And then also in a theological key, you could say, as the tradition has, many theologians in the tradition have said, that God gives the sword, so to speak, to the state to keep order and to defend the godly from the wicked. And that, to some extent, is what the state continues to do today. But when, as I've looked over the last decade plus into this more and as I've built relationship with criminalized people and incarcerated people today, I come to understand that these institutions are not quite doing what we assume they're doing in terms of making safety and executing some sense of justice, divine or otherwise. And one of my favorite lines that I quote in the introduction, or I kind of paraphrase in the introduction, comes from Danielle Sarrid, who's a restorative justice practitioner out in New York and an author. But I paraphrase her by saying, if prisons and police created safety, then the United States would be the safest nation in all of human history by far, because we incarcerate and police more than any nation in all of human history by far. And are we the safest in all of human history by far? Far from it. Far from it. Something's not coming together here. If these institutions are designed to make safety, then something's nothing working. And so that leads you to think, well, maybe they aren't, in fact, made for that. And so what the history shows, in short, is that the logic behind their creation is this need to maintain a sense of order. They come about at the same time that the economy called capitalism, comes about, and also at the same time that the notion of white supremacy comes about. And it's no accident, I argue, that they come about at the same time. And so the order implied when all the many social commentators and architects and legislators over the last 500 years or so spoke about the need to maintain order and creating institutions that could help us do it. The order they're talking about is hierarchical order, where people know their place now, where some people have and some people have less or have nothing, where some people are in control and some people follow orders. And for a lot of that period, there's this kind of fusion with a christian rationale that that's what God wills and that's how God designs the world for some people to be in charge and some people to follow and obey. And so prisons and police essentially come about, first of all, to deal with the problem of dispossessed people, in other words, poor people, people who had been kicked off land by landowners, who are gathering more properties for themselves and closing off common lands, where people made a livelihood for themselves and people who are then forced into situations where they're supposed to labor for a wage. And if they don't, if they're able bodied but don't, they can be picked up by these bodies, these forces that are essentially the predecessors of police and then taken to the predecessors of prisons that are essentially filled with poor folks early on in the english context, and then over in America, the same thing. And then after the end of child slavery, its shifts from being predominantly just poor folks to especially black folks and other dispossessed folks and indigenous people as well. I can wind down this long kind of narration, but the point is, yeah, that I'm inviting us to understand that the institutions that we take for granted as reflections of the way things always have been and always will be have a point of origin. They have not always been with us. And I also, part of my faith says that there will also be a time after them as well. And I can say more about that as we go. But, yeah, the invitation is a significant one. It's to expand our thinking, question what we've assumed just to be the norm and natural and even a reflection of divine will, and to ask some bigger questions. [00:17:11] Speaker A: Yeah, thank you. I'm glad that you brought up, especially the racial component and the component, the economic, a capitalism propertied component. I would say this and then ask a question that reflects my context and what I found to be really significant in the book. And I have quoted this a hundred times on the podcast. I really hope that I didn't mishear him now that I've said this a million times, but I've never gone back and checked. But Mark Charles, I heard him say he was speaking of, one of the example he gave was, we want to know, why do women make $0.70 on the dollar, whatever it was at the time, to men in the United States? And his answer was, well, because the Constitution is working. Because the Constitution was written by white land owning Mendez for white land owning men. And so anything else that happens subsequent of this, if we look back at the Constitution, we shouldn't be shocked or surprised in our context as Americans when we see things like this, injustices like this, because our context is that the founding documents were written by white landowning men, for white landowning men. And so that lives rent free in my head. And in the context of our conversation today, I might not just paraphrase that, but I might make that analogous and say, why are more black and brown people locked up and arrested and locked up in the United States today? We shouldn't be surprised by that because the system is working. The penal system is working. The police system, the prison system, the carceral system, as you say in the book, is, it's working. So we shouldn't be surprised that we have more black and brown and four people locked up in the United States today. Arrested and locked up disproportionately, maddeningly so. The system is working now that, it's not that I don't want to talk about that. I do want to talk about that, like, quite a bit. But I would say that and those parts of the book, it wasn't all brand new news for me just because of the things that I have been fortunate. It's been put in front of me. So I've been reading. It's my interest. We talked about death penalty stuff the last time that you were here. This is something I was arguing with my pastor about at 15. This is a long time for me. But as a theologian, what was very striking for me, and you talked about the origins like the predecessors of police and the predecessors of prisons in the social systems. But what was fascinating for me was the religious connection, the theological connection. And even as I'm reading, I'm like, oh, like, these quotes aren't unfamiliar to me, you know, all this, but I had not made the connections that you make with these, the theological connections here. This religious function, as the subtitle says, of mass criminalization. You talk about Augustine, Anselm, and Calvin together, this trio. You mentioned them a lot in the book. You know, quotes from W. E. B. Du Bois and Baldwin all over this book that point to the theological origins and the sustaining of not just origins, but how we use the theology to maintain a the systems. Even today, that was very striking for me. So I guess, let me put a question here, Andrew, although I know you can just rip off of that. You went to Vanderbilt. You were raised in a christian context. You already said that. Talk about why is that religious component or theological component important? Maybe we might even say, like, why do church people need to be involved in this conversation? [00:22:01] Speaker B: Yes, thank you for this question. Really a cluster of questions altogether. [00:22:08] Speaker A: Take it wherever you want. Really. I'm just kind of, like, still processing from having read this, going, wait a minute. [00:22:16] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Well, to me, one thing that I want to say first is that one of the most liberating things I've learned in my theological study over the last, you know, 15 more years has been that when we're talking about Christianity, we're really talking about Christianity is plural. You know, there are traditions within traditions within traditions, and it's far from a monolithic whole. And so that gives me a little bit of freedom to navigate the fact that this tradition that I come from and that I still claim is one that is so deeply wrapped up in so many terrible things throughout history and how it's also a thing that I find liberating and life giving and meaning making, and that those things can be true at the same time. That's partly because, well, for one thing, it's a human, you know, it's a human endeavor in pursuit of a divine reality, but nevertheless limited by finitude and the like. And so we're doing the best we can, in other words, and the best we can for a lot of people has looked pretty. Pretty awful. So what am I saying? One thing you can look at that's one of the more commonly understood things is the fact that in the context of chattel slavery in the United States, that's an institution that is at every turn legitimated in and through theological and biblical reasoning by white property owners who are christian in one sentence or another. You even have this complicated fact that in the formation of racial identities, as we have them today, before they were called white, they were called european peoples were called christian. In the context of colonial Virginia, you have clear documentation of the shifting of language and legislative documents from all christian people, meaning Europeans to white. So whiteness emerges out of a sense of european christianness. And so there's all this reckoning that I feel we have to do. So what? Why should church folks today be interested in this? Well, if we want to embody and practice our faith in a way that brings about as much good, as much healing and justice and hospitality and generosity and mutuality as possible, then we have to do some of the difficult work of reckoning with how our tradition has given shape to and given life to a lot of violent history. And so I am trying to do the work in inviting us to do that reckoning with the chapter of that larger history of a kind of the formation of white supremacy, the formation of institutions like private property. And that is one I recognize, that most people are going to be like, wait a second, I have a house. I own a house. You know, a lot of people do, and I do. What's wrong with private property? Why is this, you know, manifestation of something counter to God in some sense? And I, you know, I can spend more time with that if you'd like. But in short, the answer is that in order to embody our faith in his and. And as life giving away as possible, we have to reckon with the death dealing ways our faith has been deployed throughout history. And so maybe I could narrate briefly some of the, you know, the theological dimensions of these. Of these so called public safety institutions, of how they come about. And, you know, like I say, we can't, in the book, we can't really understand them if we understand, if we try to understand them in isolation from these histories of white supremacy and the emergence of capitalism and things like that. There's a question that I take from the streets over the last ten to 20 years, which is when demonstrators will often shout to a line of police protecting some corporate entity or whatnot. When people shout, who do you serve? Who do you protect? It's this kind of rhetorical question that people chant together in the streets, and it kind of implies its own answer. You know, we see who you're protecting and who you're serving here, and it's not all of us. It's somebody else. It's the people with a lot of money and a lot of property and a lot of power. And that's no accident because that's where the institutions quite simply come from. So it's not a matter of, well, that cop is racist and that judge is racist and that lawmakers, classist and patriarchal, et cetera. And that's why you have so many people in prison. Yes, there are plenty of police and wardens and lawmakers and judges and prosecutors and all down the line who harbor racial, classist, sexist bias, and that informs their actions. But before there's even an opportunity to hold personal bias, we have to reckon with the fact that these institutions literally come about in and through, like white supremacist thinking, thinking that's essentially classist in nature, meaning that it's okay for there to be poor people who don't have as much as the rest of us. And that that's kind of a natural way of arranging society. And these institutions come about to deal with the outcomes of those presumptions. So the reason that you have so many black and brown people and poor people in prison today is because the prisons and police were created to manage the outcomes of systems that take things away from some people and give them to others. So that's a kind of a broad brush check way of saying it. But, you know, there's a lot to say in my book gets into it in the intro, especially, you know, if we had a system that was really concerned with the crimes of all people, then it would look a lot different, because there's a lot of people with a lot of resources and privilege who are doing a lot of bad stuff, who aren't ever spending a moment behind bars. And so it's really not so much about what we've assumed it's been about. But let me get back to the theological piece. So part of what I do is to track how these theological ideas help us understand the ways that these institutions function. And I go to the areas in Christianity thought over the centuries, millennia, thinking around sin and salvation as places to get some important insight, to understand why we have what we have today. And what I do that, like you say, by engaging with these three thinkers, primarily across more than a thousand years of Christian theologizing, that's Augustine of ancient Christianity and some of the medieval periods, and Calvin of the Protestant Reformation, beginning of the modern era. And there are plenty of differences between those three figures and nuances between them, but there's a great deal of continuity. And so what I'm tracking is a trajectory within christian thinking. I don't argue that this is the core of christian thinking necessarily, but it's a. It's a central kind of trajectory of thought within the traditions, reflection on what does salvation mean and what is sin. So the continuities that I identify are that sin is defined in terms of, ultimately, a kind of a refusal to be in one's place in relation to God. Meaning properly subject and obedient to a God who is figured in terms of a kind of a sovereign or a lord, or kind of by reference to earthly power. You know, these notions of lord and sovereign and king, I mean, that's all. That's all human frames of reference for understanding who God is. And so if sin is a matter of refusing to be properly subject to God, and mind you, this is subject to a life giving and loving God for Christian, for this christian tradition, where you're subject, because God gives you everything you need and you don't need to find it for yourself. And in fact, trying to get it for yourself is the explanation of the first sin, of Adam and Eve, of the pride that leads one to try to have knowledge as big as God's knowledge of all things, of good and evil. And so Augustus has these lines, interestingly, though, that are telling to me, where he is trying to explain and characterize the sin that is embodied in what he calls pride. And he does so in some places by referring to layers who try to run away and prisoners who try to escape their captivity. And he even has these notions of the clanking of my chain was so loud that it deafened me to the voice of your voice calling to me. These images of the state of sin is a state of captivity, self made captivity, mind you. You put yourself in those chains, essentially, by refusing to be subject to the God who gives you everything you need Anselm and Calvin will use similar images of not giving to God what God has owed. The honor that God has owed is how Anselm will talk about it. And doing so puts you in debt, essentially, or a state of condemnation. And I grew up singing lots of songs about debt and owing and purification and all these kinds of things. And these are the images that. That these thinkers use to make sense of what God is doing in salvation and what humans are doing when they're in sin. And so if sin is a matter of the refusal or the inability to be properly subject in your place, humans are humans, and God is God, and you can't try to be God. And that's part of what sin is, is trying to be God, trying to claim as much power as God for yourself, if that sin and the answer to sin and salvation is a restoration of proper, a relation based on proper subjection, where a life giving and loving God is in charge and humans are not. And so part of my argument is that that line of thinking gets transposed and fed into these institutions that emerge alongside the church in the form of penal institutions and policing institutions and in conversation. Oftentimes you have theologians and legislators and lawmakers kind of working together throughout the late medieval, early modern era. And so what you get are institutions that work by a similar rationale, that those who sin are those, or in a kind of secular register, those who are criminal are those who have stepped out of place in the proper order of things, the proper hierarchy in a divine sense, but also in a governmental and secular sense of not everyone can be in charge. There's one person who's in charge, or a few people who are in charge, who make the rules and the rest of us should follow. And that's what makes everything orderly and go as planned. But when someone claims a little bit more for themselves in the sense of pride, by stealing something, for instance, then that shows that you're not respecting the order of things in a divine and in a human sense, in a political sense. And then you need to be made to be subject again. And so if prison is anything, it's a subjection in the form of captivity, of returning to one's proper place in a hierarchical social order that, by most accounts, early on, is an order that reflects what God wants the world to look like. So that's the kind of long winded narration that I think still plays out and helps us explain why subjection and captivity are understood to be salvific in some sense. That's the thing that was hard for me to understand is like, why is it that putting someone in an actual human cage is understood to be in some way, like, doing right by everyone and by God and by the person who did it and by the person who got hurt? And I think we can only really can't understand that unless we understand that there's this rationale that threads its way through the christian tradition that says that in some sense, subjection and captivity to another power is what saves us from ourselves in some way. And, you know, this is not so. In other words, like you were saying earlier, by doing this and by being essentially dehumanizing, you know, the institution of prison is actually doing what it was intended to do. We have these. Some people have a narrative of incarceration has gone off track. We got to get back to the penitentiary when there was this sense of kind of restoring the soul and getting people back on track in a kind of gentle way. But the truth is, from the very beginning, first of all, it was always poor folks that we got to reckon with. Why was it always poor folks that were understood to be distant from God more than the rest of us? And also understand that entry into prison was deliberately dehumanizing, not just accidentally dehumanizing. And there was a sense that by being dehumanizing in that way, you're facilitating a process that involves the soul and that involves a kind of salvation that is both social, political, and religious and spiritual in some sense at one and the same time. And that it's not an accident that people lose their name and get a number and lose their clothes and wear the same uniform and all that. Like, there's this dying component that other authors have talked about and that I cite in the book, that's very intentional. And even in the present, though, you know, one of the stories that I tell that I think explains a lot about how this line of thinking still animates our present systems that we have in place prisons and police. And that is this example, terrible example from my own state of Tennessee of this sheriff's deputy, who first of all, has a bunch of lawsuits against him already for sexual misconduct and harassment on in uniform. But there's this particular episode with this woman who he pulls over and accuses her of having some marijuana in the car. She reports that he gropes her during the search, acts extremely inappropriately, and also says he feels God's spirit upon him while he's searching her. Cardinal says, you know what? You don't have to go to jail if you can let me take you down to the lake and baptize you. He's like, uh, okay. I mean, you know. You know, you're under their discretion and their power. You can't really say no. He's coercing her into baptism, essentially. Takes her down to a river. It's cold. He asks her to disrobe. She just. She says no. He takes off most of his clothes, asks her at a certain point before that all happens, are you saved? Also calls her, if I can say a piece of shit and does all of this in the same set of conversation and is abusing her physically while baptizing her. So, yes, that doesn't happen with every police officer. We know that that's not super normal, the extremes of that story. But I think it's the rationale taken to an extreme conclusion that's there throughout, which is you treat people like crap. And that that is part of the work of saving them and of saving the larger social order that is rid of their immoral presence is the presumption by containing them behind razor wire, you don't have to deal with them anymore. But they're also getting saved in the process by being. By relearning subjection, because they clearly they're out here sinning and committing crime because they've lost their way. They don't know how to follow authority anymore. And so you got to teach them. Teach that to them again. So I'll pause here and, you know, just to kind of put a cap on it and tie the bow. It's this idea that this presumption that these institutions are doing right by people, both people who have committed harm and those who have been harmed, and society itself, when we subject them to captivity, that's inherently dehumanizing, that that is somehow doing God's work. And I think that we have to reckon with the fact that we're given this enormous amount of metaphors and ways of reasoning throughout christian theology that says that subjection is where we meet God in some sense. And so I don't think that that theology throughout the tradition has to result in prisons and police, but it has. And so we have to reckon with that. And also, as I invite us to in the book, think about how we could use this tradition to imagine otherwise. [00:41:13] Speaker A: So I'm really glad you brought up that story. I had it in my notes. I was shocked as I was reading it. And I want to. I want to maybe go a little bit further, because I had some things that were crossing my mind as you were talking and as you brought up that story. So one is, I think, that I read. So, like, the racialized component. This is a white male police officer and a black woman, I think, who. [00:41:39] Speaker B: Was actually a white woman. [00:41:42] Speaker A: Okay, so white woman gendered, though, still, there's, you know, and so there was that. The other thing about whore, I think that you wrote in the book that his defense. Because. Because obviously the things he did were wrong, right? They were against the law. They were wrong, they were sinful, you know, use whatever words we've talked about. And that he was provided with, like, something like a million dollars in legal help. Right. From the government, I think, in this case. And so I'm thinking there's no way this woman would have had access to a million dollars worth of legal funding had she been in the situation where she needed it. So that was one thing that was crossing my mind. But one of the phrases that you use in the book is the. The patriarchal and possessive nature of whiteness. And that is tied into this as well. Also that when we go back to being, you know, being locked up, the dehumanization of that for stealing, for property crimes, you talk about how, like. And it led me to ask, you know, more questions about, like, who is the victim in this case? Well, the state is the victim. Like, gosh, you know, like, can we talk about that? Like, it's like, you know, we have our, you know, we. Nothing ever happened. But several years ago, our home was broken into, and we had things that were stolen. And so we called the police, you know, and they came out and all that stuff, and nothing happened. They. No arrests were ever made. They never, you know, never caught anybody or, you know, anything like that. But even just thinking about something like that, like, the system is set up now not for any sort of, like, any sort of situation where the person who was stolen from and the person who stole would actually, you know, have any contact or there would be, you know, I'm thinking you. You have a young kid. I'm thinking of Daniel Tiger, you know, saying I'm sorry is the first step. Now, how can I help? Like, locking this person up doesn't actually help, you know, my situation, you know, at all. But. But I'm not the victim in that. The state is the victim in that. So I think there's part of it this maybe I shouldn't mention. My husband can edit it out if he wants to, and you can say, no, let's not go there. And I don't want to necessarily go there, but one thing that I couldn't help crossing my mind, especially when you talked about the police officer, and you've talked a lot about the power, the hierarchy, and. And who is the system designed to protect and serve. You know, you talked about the businesses, um, in the church context. You know, let's talk about abusive pastors right now for just about 2 seconds. Uh, because I'm thinking, and I wasn't thinking this when I was reading the book, but just in our conversation right now, I'm like, there's all of these stories. It's almost like you can say, okay, I've seen that movie before. Because what happens is a pastor ends up, um, abusing a congregant. Um, you know, usually a woman. It's often a white male pastor or a white male congregant, white male youth pastor, or something like this. They abuse a woman or a girl, which is, like, things that are, like, clearly criminal, like, actually written in the laws that are criminal. But in many times, and we. It's kind of like I said, we've seen this movie before. You. If you've read one article, you've readdezenhen ten or 100, where the person in authority, in other words, a person with power, religious power, in that setting, will say, we were handling this ourselves. There was no reason to get the authorities involved in this kind of situation. But it made me think, kind of in an analogous way, maybe in a parallel way, how the power, the hierarchy, the patriarchy, the possession, even these men often are their property. They have power. They've written books, you know, whatever the kind of thing. And they are creating systems inside their religious contexts that protect and serve the white, propertied men, and where they wouldn't be subject to the same policing and penal systems that they, you know, that maybe a poor person of color or something would be for a property crime. So I think, like, I'm like, hmm, I don't know, maybe there's a. Maybe there's a connection there, too, something that's. That's going on with that. But. But mostly I'm thinking about these systems, the protecting and serving in the context of power. And I really like that phrasing to go back to kind of the beginning of my little rant here, the phrasing that you use of whiteness being patriarchal and possessive, also whiteness obviously being connected to the religious part that you already brought up, but that patriarchal and possessive, that hierarchical structure. So, again, no real question there. I love when scholars come on people who teach like you. I'm like, okay, I'm just going to throw something out and you just, like, just improvise. Just riff here for a minute. Cause I know that you can, but I don't know, like, maybe talk to me about some of those thoughts. Yeah, we don't have to go there with the pastors. It just. It came to my mind with the police. [00:47:37] Speaker B: Well, it fits. And where I think I wanna start with it is this move that I try to make, where I invite the reader to try to understand whiteness as this patriarchal and possessive phenomenon in terms of the aspiration to godlike power. Yes, and there's lots of sources for me on that. But the one that. The phrase that shows up all throughout the book as a kind of refrain comes from W. E. B. Du Bois, the black scholar, black radical scholar of the 20th century, um, predominantly, um, who was massively prolific and gives us so much to understand about, um, the history of the United States and reconstruction in particular, and the integral function at the so called color line, as he calls it, plays in. In us life, the racial line. And he has this essay where he's talking, trying to understand what whiteness is. And he's got this great. I quote it, a long quote. It's my longest quote in the book, because I just think it's so wonderful and so powerful and explained so much to me. But it ends with this line where, you know, someone's trying to explain to him this kind of imagined scenario of why. Why whiteness is so wonderful. And he and all of his fellows, black folks in the US and others around the world, are lesser. And there's lots of, like, religious language kind of peppered throughout, intentionally. And he finishes this paragraph that I quote, saying whenever I ask, why is like, what is whiteness? That it's so wonderful and so valued? And he says, I always hear one way or another, in, you know, some turn of phrase or another, that whiteness is so wonderful, because whiteness is ownership of the earth forever and ever. Amen. And a lot of scholars who aren't religious, scholars who quote du bois, usually just witnesses ownership of the earth, period. But I think forever and ever, amen holds the most weight in that phrase, because, you know, where does that come from? That comes from the Lord's prayer right after you get done saying, for thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, so all things belong to goddesse forever and ever. Amen. And then whiteness is ownership of all things, forever and ever. Amen. That, to me, is a way of saying whiteness is an aspiration to God. Like power and transcendence in the world over people and planet. And what is God like power? It's a lot of different things. So I spend time in my second chapter kind of trying to narrate how whiteness and property possession kind of resemble some of the traditional attributes of God as narrated in christian theology over the centuries. So you have these attributes of, like, all powerful, all knowing, all present, invulnerable, essentially independent of all other relations, needs nothing from anyone to be who you are and fundamentally innocent in some sense. And so I kind of track how whiteness takes the shape of a kind of aspiration to God like power. And we can understand what whiteness is by understanding how a lot of western european traditions have understood who God is in patriarchal and powerful and utterly independent and transcendent terms. And it's not that I even am contesting those descriptions or characteristics of ways of characterizing goddess so much as I'm critiquing how they find material manifestation in the form of this thing called white supremacy. So if you want to go deeper in the weeds on that, go to chapter two in the book. But what I'm trying to explain there is that a lot of this can be understood. A lot of these injustices of white supremacy and the exploitations of capitalism and the dehumanization of incarceration and policing is that it can be explained by this aspiration to wielding a kind of power akin to gods. It can't be questioned. It's always in the right. It is always morally sound. It transcends finitude and mortality in some ways. There's this presumption of. Of the right to hold a kind of power that goes beyond what anyone can say about it. And so that explains a lot to me. And then I want to also bring one more thread in here to kind of tie it together. And that is this notion of the power of the state, and particularly the police power of the state as a kind of mortal God that the philosopher Thomas Hobbes introduces in the 15 hundreds, where there's this idea that there's disorder and there's chaos until a God figure comes in, imposes his will, and I say his intentionally, and that creates order and balance, and things are allowed to function. But without that, it's just anarchy, chaos, etcetera. So that's a way of explaining the value of the state in his political philosophy. But it's also inherently theological in that he's using images from the Bible to explain it and says that essentially the power of the enforcers of the state's law are like a kind of mortal God. They're not the full God, but the kind of like God. And so, you know, part of what I'm trying to illustrate in the course of the book is that these institutions of white supremacy and property possession, that's absolutely exclusive in nature, owing nothing to no one outside of the gate and prisons and police, that they are kind of doing and understand themselves to be doing a kind of godlike work in the world of maintaining order and of enjoying a kind of heavenly paradise like power of the orderly and the privileged. And that so often throughout history, the characterizations of those on the other side of that sacred belonging, those who are not white, those who are not property, those who are not normative in any way, those who have broken some law. It's always laced through with these moral tone, this moral kind of intonations that those on the outside of property are an immoral threat. Those on the outside of whiteness are a dangerous, animalistic, uncivilized threat. That's immoral in nature, and it's not an accident. Finally, that prison and the work of police describes in relation to heaven and hell so frequently throughout history, both by those making the rules and those impacted by the rules and the institutions. And so I think that where this finds expression, too, I narrate this in my last chapter, is this. I kind of traced the etymology which is right there in front of us, a lot of us. Don't think about it. The etymological, the root origins of words, the relationship between safety and salvation. That's something I hadn't even thought about a lot before I started this project. We use the word safety so much, public safety, keeping us safe, etcetera, and don't recognize how safety and salvation come from the same root in language. And so that's why I, in the last chapter, I borrow from Baldwin, writing to his friend Angela Davis, who now is a well known prison abolitionist and activist and scholar in 1970, where he's saying, you know, you would think our nation would be. Would be embarrassed, essentially, by the sight of chains on black flesh, as he puts it, you know, given our history of enslavement, et cetera. And this is the time at the beginning of mass incarceration, actually, when he's writing, and he says, they're not embarrassed. In fact, America measures its safety in chains and corpses. It's a striking line. If anyone can give a striking line, it's baldwin. And there's so much that you could take from that. And so I exchanged safety for salvation in the title of that chapter, measuring salvation in chains and corpses to show that there's this sense that it's. That the work of safety is the work of God is the kind of the popular presumption, even if it's not articulated as such all the time. But there's this kind of sacred aura around what police and prisons do that leaves them beyond questioning. So there's a sense of offendedness when people do question them. And even within police rhetoric, there's this notion of a thin blue line that is interlaced with images of good and evil, sacred, profane chaos and order. And in really frightening terms, too, it is a mythology, like, it constitutes a mythology mythology not just in the sense of a lie or an illusion, but in the sense of a guiding narrative of ultimacy that makes sense of the world for you. And the police are often framed as this thin blue line holding back the chaos and the evil from the good and the orderly. And so, yeah, this is my riffing response to say that what it comes down to is this aspiration to God like power and this presumption that those who are doing the work of protecting the moral, which doubles as the white in propertied a lot of the time, they are also doing a sacred, godlike work. You can even go, like many voices in policing have throughout the last 50 years, go to Romans 13 to say that God ordains all earthly authorities. When you obey them, you obey God. And, you know, there's even a scholar, a friend of mine who I cite in the book, points out that this, of the many translations of the Bible that have been done, one in the seventies or eighties, I think Romans 13, it rendered the authorities in that line. It used the word police. And so God institutes police, and those who obey the police obey God. And so I think that even if we don't hear it put in those terms all the time, I kind of feel like it's between the lines. It's the presumption that a lot of people hold and that keeps us from being able to ask hard questions about what those institutions actually do. Because there's this aura of unquestionability in a similar way to a pastor who has all of that power abusing someone. And there's this sacred aura around them that, you know, they're doing. They're representative of God in some sense, so you can't really question them or, you know, it was a mistake and they can handle it internally, or there's all these other ways of rendering it but it's the same thing with, you know, if. If police and prisons are doing God's work in the world, then it's no wonder that police who kill people are always found innocent, because they're just doing their job. And their job is. Is God's work. It's the Lord's work, as a lot of police will say. And so, you know, I narrate a story about a neighbor being arrested and the cop kind of talking to me and all of them like, I'm just doing my job here. Someone called us on you, and you were in the wrong. So just doing my job. Don't blame me. And in a similar way, anybody who's abusing their power, if their power is understood to be derived from God in some way, then they can only ever be doing their job, even when they're hurting people. And so that's what we have to start to break down if we're going to get to a better way of doing things than just presuming that anybody who has power has it because it's natural or divinely ordained in some way. [01:00:13] Speaker A: I have a response. Just a second. I might need to. Never mind. I was going to say, we might need to pause for a second while I go nudge my mastiff, who's snoring on the floor behind me. I didn't know if that could be heard. So, anyway, we're fine. I think she's calmed now. Um, I'm. You brought up two of the things that I wanted to mention. I wanted to just give some, like, quick bullet points of, like, we didn't get to touch on these things, but grab a copy of the book and read this, that these things interest you. And then I want, really want you. I would love for you to wrap up just by talking about abolition. You mentioned Angela Davis, and I think that she was one of the ones that you quoted in the conclusion. And even to go back to this analogy of the house next door to us, it's like, people think that I'm going to butcher this, probably, but people, when we talk about abolition, think about tearing it all down. But what if we could think about it as a more creative process? So I want for you to. I would love for you to go there, but a couple of bullet points that were on my notes that we didn't get to just to kind of whet people's appetites to grab a copy and go more in depth with your book, but also with the sources. This is a really well researched book, obviously, with tons of notes. For people who might, you know, find themselves wanting to follow a certain thread. But in the story. So I would say that the living translation is one of the ones that I thought of. So I'm like, if you. You know, Billy Graham has a couple of mentions in the book, as does that translation. Also the phrasing of law and order. So, you know, those things that we're hearing thrown around quite a bit right now. The thing that was interesting for me in the story that you just mentioned with the neighbor being arrested is just the idea of, like, deputization of white people, especially white men. You know, how you became kind of a. Another authority in that position, even though you weren't, and said that, said as much, but just how you were viewed that way by the. By the arresting officer and also by the person whose property he thought had been, you know, trespassed. Again, property crimes. Anyway, we. Let's see. I'm looking around here. Oh, salvation is safety. We talked about that. Broken windows, policing. We didn't get to go there. But that's a huge part of, um, things that we see in practice right now. Um, I put redemption in quotes, uh, after reconstruction. Even that language you talked about, the etymology. All of those things are really interesting. So I'm like, sorry, we won't get to. Sorry, everyone. We won't get the chance. But I'm mentioning that to say, like. Like I said, there were lots of things in this book that. That were somewhat familiar to me, but there were so many connections that you bring up that I just had not really made before. And so I'm going to be processing for a while. I'm appreciative of you, Andrew, to come and, like, let me do that some with you on the fly. Process some of that on the fly. But now I would love to invite you to, as you. As we bring this conversation to a close, to talk about this concept of abolition. We asked people at the beginning, like, hey, let's switch our paradigm or turn some of these things off. And so maybe just some of the things that you and other scholars who have come before you and concurrent with you are, how are some people reimagining this system that we've just spent this hour talking about? [01:03:51] Speaker B: Yeah, well, thanks. And thanks, Steve, for having me on. What I'm learning as I talk about this book is that it's one thing to write it and another to talk about it. There truly are so many threads that I try to do the delicate balance of pulling together. And when you try to pull a lot of threads together, you can find yourself kind of knotted up a little bit at times. So, yeah, I appreciate you taking us where we went and appreciate you naming the places we didn't get to go and hope people will engage, because there's a lot more to explore. But, yeah. So this concept of abolition. So, abolition, the long lineage of abolition, you want to think from one of its earliest points, would be the abolition of chattel slavery. And, you know, a lot of people have done the work of narrating how our current carceral and police systems are these kind of afterlives or residual kind of manifestations of those earlier systems of chattel enslavement. And so I don't need to rehash all of that here. But, you know, the early abolitionists in the 19th, 18th, and 19th centuries are people who were wanting the abolition of the slave trade and of chattel slavery. And Du Bois, who we talked about earlier, has this great notion that Angela Davis actually picks up and runs with, which is this notion of abolition democracy, which, in the context of reconstruction, there was this desire on the part of formerly enslaved people and those accompanying them and advocating with them to not just remove an institution, but to build up new institutions of democracy, of people having what they need to thrive and make decisions that determine the direction of their own lives, etcetera. And so the present day abolitionist movement, which arguably, like 1970s, then again in the nineties, and then again the last couple of years, have really had their moments of emergence and growth. And especially after George Floyd, this notion of abolition entered the public consciousness in a new way for the first time at a scale. The people like Angela Davis, who've been working on it for 50, 60 years, dead in the last couple years. I never imagined that this many people would know about abolition, about the vision and politics of abolition. And so. Yeah, what is it? It's. It clearly, there's this sense, just in the word alone, of a tearing down, a taking away, a negation of some kind, you know? But Davis, as well as Ruth Wilson Gilmore and other prison abolitionists and others, will talk about, you know, if you hear an abolition, nothing but just, like, tear down all the prisons today and let everyone out today and get rid of all the police today, and just a destructive act, a tearing down, a taking away, a burning up. And if you don't hear an abolition, something that's more creative, then you're not really hearing what people mean when they say it. Because for abolitionists today, and I count myself among them, abolition is not just about getting rid of systems that do harm and that do harm in the name of safety and justice, namely prisons and police. It is that. But if we understand those institutions as manifestations of these larger social arrangements and orders, then we understand that if we got to make a world on the other side of those things, then we also have to change everything. And so that's why Ruthie Gilmore will say, you know, abolition means one thing, which is change everything. So it's not just get rid of a couple institutions. It's change how everything works. It's an arranged society so that people have what they need to thrive and be well and therefore be safe, you know, because the lack of safety comes from people not having what they need to, and they don't have what they need, not because they're not working as hard, but because we have a system that's set up for some people to get a lot and a lot of people to work really hard for very little, if anything. And it's easy to have nothing, and it's easy to, you know, find yourself completely, you know, stranded on an island without any support, any means for subsistence, and you die an early death like that. It doesn't have to be this way. It truly doesn't. That's one of the things that I take from abolition is that I. This what others would call a naivete, that, like, this insistence that it does not have to be this way. Like, people's needs can be met. We can deal with people hurting each other in ways that get to the bottom of why it happened, and it actually create a sense of repair and accountability with our current system. You know, if you think about it just logistically, police come almost every time after something bad has already happened. You can't show up and undo that bad thing from happening. Prisons come into the mix often, like, months, if not years later, after something bad has happened. And the answer to that bad thing happening put him in a cage for a while. And, like, there's this presumption that the work of police in prisons is in is that it essentially honors the well being of people who have gotten hurt by crime or by violence in some way. But it just could not be further from the truth. I mean, you look at the way the system is arranged. Like you said, you actually, it prohibits act, like, actively and vigilantly prohibits the possibility of contact that might include repair between peoples who've been harmed, like, by law prohibits that kind of relationship from taking place such that, you know, I've been to these parole hearings over the years by friends on the inside or friends on the inside who are being considered for getting out early. And in a lot of those hearings, the family of those impacted will come and basically plead with the state to say, this happened 30 years ago, but please don't let them get out now. This is all I had. And what a, like, paltry, embarrassing offering the state gives to people that all they have for, like, recompense or well being is. Is that somebody who did it or involved, was involved with it has to sit in the cage for the rest of their life. Like, that's not a repair of any kind. And you don't even have to be compassionate or feel compassion for the person who did it to see that that is not serving the well being of the people who are getting hurt. And, you know, there's evidence to suggest, very real evidence that when people have a choice between where there were, there are municipalities that offer other pathways other than the sentencing, traditional penal process and have more restorative accountability process, you would think. And even for violent crimes, not just like property theft, but for very violent, life altering crimes, people who are impacted will the majority of them, when they have the option, choose the restorative path because it gives them more, too. Like it allows foreclosure, it allows for the person who did it to them to hear how they hurt somebody. It allows all these other things that the current systems that we have actively prohibit from happening. And so abolition is about a world where not so many people are hurting each other in the first place because our needs are met, and we're not having to find alternate ways of surviving. And we're not resorting to violence because our needs aren't being met. And research shows that violence happens because people's needs aren't being met. That's one of the main drivers of violence. And it also means, when harm inevitably still does happen, that you respond to it in a way that cares enough about it that you go to the source. Why did this happen in the first place? What are the life circumstances that the social circumstances that led to this harm? How do we prevent it from happening again? How do we create, repair where possible and essentially make things right? What we have now doesn't do that. But people right now, today, as we speak, are practicing those alternatives. That's abolition, and that's the process of building our capacities and institutions for another way of navigating harm and of distributing goods and resources to people. And so that's why Ruth Gilmore and others will say, and I agree, that people who are creating housing for all or healthcare for all or transportation for all, or access to childcare for all. They're doing abolitionist work, too, because they're creating the conditions for less harm to take place. And, you know, there's this accusation, I'll conclude with this, that abolitionists are naive and they want chaos on our streets, and they just want to get rid of the police because they're a bogeyman, etcetera. But abolitionists have argued, and I couldn't agree more, that abolitionists want more safety than we currently have, not less. We actually think that what we have now does not promote safety and well being for all and that we want more of that for everybody, not just a few of us. And to me, that is a deeply religious and spiritual desire in that. You know, I think the seeds of abolition already existed within Christianity and a lot of other traditions insofar as there's this sense that God wills that all people have what they need in body and mind to thrive on earth, because it's life is a gift, and life on earth is a gift, and you should be able to live in abundance here and now, not just when you die. And it also, you know, christian tradition offers us resources for navigating conflict and harm and all these things. And so, to me, there's great resonance between abolition and my understanding of the christian tradition as I inhabit it. And for me, the work of pursuing that world where people have their needs met and where we respond to harm and violence in ways that actually prevent it from happening again and restore and repair as much as possible, that is a spiritual work for me and for a lot of other people as well, because it looks a whole lot. That vision of a possible world looks a whole lot like the vision of a world as envisaged in scripture and in the texts of our tradition. So I want to invite churches to wrestle with this more and church people to wrestle with this more, because it's not just about tearing down these institutions that people have come to understand as good. It's about, like, we can actually do a lot better for people. And that's just what God envisions throughout scripture and in our lives. That's my invitation. [01:15:20] Speaker A: Thank you so much, Andrew. My feelings wouldn't be hurt if you wrote a book on abolition, because there's just, like. I feel like we could do a part two on that. There's so much more to say and learn about that, but I appreciate you offering that right now. And like I mentioned, that's the conclusion of your book. It's so well researched that people can come and read what you have to say, but also follow that thread for folks who have been engaging in that work and in that imagination for decades. So thank you so much for coming on. The book again by NYU Press is called white black trespass, racial capitalism and the religious function of mass criminalization by Andrew Krinks. And I'll have the link for where people can buy that in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on. [01:16:13] Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me. [01:16:16] Speaker A: The links for all the resources mentioned in today's episode can be found in the show notes. Music and podcast production by Seth Busetti. Be sure to give us a review on iTunes and subscribe at your favorite podcast listening app. You can also visit [email protected].