re-producing racism and Mary ’s talking back rap

By Michael Jagessar (Council for World Mission)

locating my reflection

For this issue of INSiGHT, I was asked to do a sort of year-end reflection as a mission secretary with responsibility for two CWM regions (Caribbean and Europe). My tasks also include facilitating (with a great team of colleagues) the cutting-edge, challenging, and relevant work of eDARE. What to write about? Should I (a greying privileged heterosexual male) focus on the many Breastfeeding God. Via https://www.redletterchristians.org/breastfeeding-god/ exciting things happening across the regions and in the life of the member churches in spite of the pandemic? Or would it be better to reflect on the ways our online life has created an array of exciting conversation openings, opportunities for newer voices, greater cross-regional and ecumenical engagement, and much more? Perhaps, the excitement and refreshing insights from the recent engagement and encounter of poets, artists and theologians through eDARE webinars would be just ideal? Or how about a focus on regional struggles and challenges of COVID 19, revealing the many intersecting and endemic inequities which CWM and its member churches continue to highlight, chant down, and take on?

portal – an apt metaphor

The Spirit, though, is full of surprises. She dragged me in the direction of the familiar in the advent and Christmas stories we have grown so accustomed to and prodded me to look again at the very familiar in the stories we reel out for a clue on an urgent theme. For both the Caribbean and Europe regions, looking back in 2021 and looking forward to 2022 and beyond, Arundhati Roy’s apt descriptor of the pandemic as a portal “as a gateway between one world and the next” continues to spin around me like a nervous parent awaiting the birth of their first child. I felt as if I was sucked up and thrown into, and floating in, like a new-born baby. In caustic and prophetic fashion Roy wrote: “We can choose to walk through it [portal], dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.” Churches and communities in both regions would do well to continue to heed Roy’s insight given current existential realities. So, with my feet now touching ground but still on an imaginative journey through that portal, my 2021 ‘unending’ reflections take me into the uncomfortable space of gender justice and racism as I strain to imagine a new world with a very familiar figure of the advent and Christmas story, Mary. Her story of womb, birthing, breastfeeding her infant, a dazed fiancé, her radical rap (named as Magnificat) is located in the midst of occupation, empire/state control (Augustus and his governor Quirinius), patriarchal control, headcounts, women represented as producers, and much more. A baby stirs or swims in her womb, later clinging to her breast, yet somehow, we have turned the blood, sweat and tears of her life, through artistic depictions, songs, liturgies and theologies into a layered story that has lost its edge. Over the centuries we have ended up with an ‘air-brushed Mary of L’Oréal’ without traces of toughness, resilience and that revolutionary spirit rapping against the empire’s occupation (political, economic, religious, and patriarchal to name a few)

One of my former teaching colleagues (Professor Nicola Slee) invited us years ago to imagine what it would have been like had Mary given birth to a girl child, contrary to the design of Holy Spirit. Readers may wish to contemplate this as we consider the increase of gender-based violence especially to young girls. Would a girl-child saviour have made a difference to the ways we treat the bodies of women within and across regions? I even wonder, in spite of what the gospel accounts and ecclesial traditions tell us, had the option been given to Mary to decide the terms of engagement, with her body as the carrier of the hope of her nation, what would her response have been [Luke 1:30]? I pose this latter question in the contexts of newer forms of political and popular racism, in nationalist discourses that are taking exclusionary intentional shape as a result of perceived demographic threats from migrants (and refugees), especially women. Here I am very grateful for, and wish to draw on, the very enlightening essay of Sophia Siddiqui: “Racing the nation: towards a theory of reproductive racism” (Race and Class, Oct-Dec, 2021 63/2, pp.3-20). Siddiqui writes:

“There is a pattern and consistency that situates women now at the nexus of both defining the nation and also maintaining it, while excluding those who do not conform. With multiple crises in neoliberalism – including the gradual destruction of the welfare state, forced displacement that leads to mass migrations, and in democracy itself – society is being restructured around exclusion. Exclusionary strategies demarcate the productive and unproductive, the valuable and non-valuable, those that bolster the nation and those that threaten it – and this has particular gendered and racial implications for those who are non-white, non-mainstream, non-citizen. And importantly, it implicates women not just in their role as workers, but, in their ideological and reproductive roles too.” [Siddiqui 2021:4]

Stories are replete around demonising the ‘other’ across Europe and elsewhere, with the ‘other’ taking a variety of forms from Black and Indigenous peoples, to the poor working class, to migrant women, to the disabled, to LGBTQ communities, to Muslims and many others. Siddiqui’s analysis flags us the resurgence of an intentional demographic attack on ‘reproductive capacities’ on especially migrant women and LGBTQ communities which she names as ‘reproductive racism’. While Siddiqui’s focus is Europe, her insights are relevant for contexts shaped by our current model of neoliberal capitalism, especially where the so-called authentic established population is on the decline. So, for instance, in some European countries ‘native’ women’s reproductive capacities are being incentivized for nationalist ends (what is termed the birth-rate agenda) and the protection of the ‘purity’ of the nation and the threat of its shrinking authentic population. Meanwhile, on the other hand minority migrant women’s rights to have children and family are being curtailed while their labour is exploited to care for the children, young, sick, and elderly of these nations. In these nations, where migrant women become surrogate carers and parents, these women are also slapped with restrictions around their choice of/for a similar family life. While their services are critical for the traditional capitalist model of the family, they are also perceived as a threat to the purity of the nation. What Siddiqui highlights for all of us is how our current capitalist model feeds on the unending production of good and services (growing ad infinitum) and cannot be separated from the reproduction of bodies. Thus, the ongoing exploitation of women bodies for a largely male-patriarchal nationalist vision of society with women’s role being that of the ‘womb of the nation’ (to replenish the purity of a restrictive view of the nation), with eugenics overtones and misogynist notions of the role of women.[5]

CWM’s collaborative work in the areas of racial, gender and economic justice has revealed and underscored how the neoliberal capitalist model feeds on the continuous production of goods and services, growth ad infinitum.

Siddiqui’s contention is that this should not be separated from the reproduction of people and the links to the politics of bodies, gender, class and racism. The implications of what Siddiqui names as ‘reproductive racism’ are enormous. This form of racism linked to our current economic model “controls, restricts and exploits reproductive capacities” as the bodies of women are used “as conduits for the production of national identity, while propelling conspiracy theories of a demographic takeover – with violent consequences for those constructed as a threat”. So, the system and its immigration laws prey upon migrant women to ensure the capitalist leviathan is fed with ‘cheap, precarious, and hyper-exploitable’ [12] labour, while restricting the ability of these women to delight in their family lives. A similar case can be made for poor working class white women and Black British and Minority Ethnic women.] Sophia Siddiqui is correct in observing that reproductive racism has implications “for all women, racialised communities and anyone who does not fit into the heteronormative mould of the nuclear family, including trans and queer people”.[15] Gender justice must demonstrate a solidarity that recognises that race, economics/capitalism and gender justice are indivisible in contending with the ‘shitstems’. In other words: “Any feminism that does not address racism and capitalism cannot bring about systemic change, and likewise an anti-racism that excludes issues around gender and reproduction will be limited in scope. Once we recognise this, we can build towards an anti-racist feminism, which holds the potential to disrupt and transform the current social order.” [Siddiqui 2021: 16]

back to the child-mother: legacies and Mary’s Magnificat Rap

Legacies are not that which happened in some historical past or has to do only with past events. We carry them into the present, as Arundhati Roy hints. They can be releasing or they can perpetuate continuing restrictive behaviour and enslavement. So, current tendencies towards an ‘air-brushed Mary of L’Oréal’ may not necessarily be some coincidence. Nor is the fact that the image of a nursing child at its mother’s breast as a symbol of salvation (love, care, life, release, freedom) being taken over by the macho symbol of cross and crucifixion without consequences. Liturgically, ecclesial communities may be nearer to the Divine with having more ‘nursing stations’ than ‘stations of the cross’. I wonder what those early Church male theologians such as Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, Anselm and Bernard of Clairvaux had in mind picturing sustenance of the faithful as coming from God’s breasts? With so much violence of all sorts around us, can the image of a nursing mother chanting down and raging against ‘the mighty’ speak more powerfully of God’s radical and revolutionary love? Yes, this very young peasant girl, herself knocked up by empire, patriarchy and religion is chanting not about some mere past and some far-removed future vision. Perhaps her rap or chant is an invitation to journey through current endemic portals to inhabit the present of God’s work of disrupting, overthrowing and transforming the current capitalist, racist and patriarchal social order which continue to knock up, knock around and knock out while we pontificate. Among the lines of John Lennon’s Imagine is “you may say I’m a dreamer” which the singer goes on to qualify, “but I’m not the only one”. I find this, like Jesus’ Hill-Top Sermon, as a call to consider what we are often not even allow to consider. And I am not alone nor are you. My invitation (beyond the two CWM regions I accompany) is a call for us together to do something more than just talk (blah-blah-blah) about gender, sexual, economic, racial, disability and climate justice. As Jamaicans say: ‘time come’. What witness will we bear to and in the name of Mary and her child?