"I see you as a white guy, like me"

The Power of Story and the Violence of the White Imagination

Photo by ÉMILE SÉGUIN on Unsplash

About the author: Dr. Ashish Varma is an Indian American theologian based in Chicago, IL. His dissertation work explored theological grounding for virtue ethics. In recent years, his research has sat at the intersection of theological engagement with race and ecology, writing and speaking on both. Additionally, he edited and contributed to A Praying People, a collection of essays on prayer (Wipf & Stock, 2023).

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“I see you as a white guy, like me.”

To some, these words will read as affirmation: whoever said it, liked me! Others are likely triggered. Perhaps a few people will read no further, sensing a potentially uncomfortable conversation ahead. Regardless of your reaction—and I certainly had one (see below)—such words powerfully inscribed me into a story. Just as significantly, the story is a theological one, deeply rooted in the practice of faith. After all, faith and story belong intimately together (more on this below, too).

On two separate occasions, colleagues directed these precise words toward me: “I see you as a white guy, like me.” For them, their affirmation of whiteness was an affirmation of their trust in me along several, intersecting issues: they saw me as a conservative, like them, and thus, they saw me as a faithful Christian; because of this, my scholarly credentials were acceptable. I was allowed to teach alongside them.

Later, the whiteness that colleagues bestowed on me was revoked, precisely because I dared to question the story of whiteness. When they realized that my scholarship lay precisely at the intersection of theology and race, my status changed. But to make sense of the density of their initial affirmation of me, we need to shed light on the power of story to inscribe us into constructs of meaning. Then we will be able to see into what kind of story these words sought to inscribe me and why that matters for our encounter with Jesus.

Stories are everywhere. We know some of them: television has begun to eclipse movies culturally in the U.S. precisely because TV studios began to understand that story arcs keep audiences more effectively engaged than disconnected episodes do. The movie industry followed suit by making franchises out of every piece of intellectual property, from the Wizarding World to Westeros. In his insightful book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, Jonathan Gottschall compellingly demonstrates what we should have already known: Story is natural to who we are. Children thrive on storytelling. My own children do not seem to know how to eat meals without inscribing themselves into a story at the dinner table. Adults also do this, whether through dreams at night, daydreams throughout the day, or looking for meaning in every event (“my best friend is not calling back; something calamitous must have happened!”). Cultures have long envisioned themselves as the heirs to a grand (often divine) story, whether in India with the Mahabharata, in Rome with Romulus and Remus, or in England with King Arthur. In the U.S. we tell fanciful, feel-good stories (for some) about the Pilgrims and George Washington in order to establish the U.S. as a certain kind of nation and (some of) its people as the bringers of global peaceful civilization.

In each of these stories, identity is forged. For my colleagues, “I see you as a white guy just like me” was a welcoming embrace that was simultaneously disciplining, for the story declares social boundaries. When colleagues realized that my words, actions, teaching, and research transgressed their exclusionary story of quasi-belonging, I was excommunicated. Suddenly, because of story, I became not-white, which made me a villain in their tale. 

To shed light on the story in which, for a time, I was called “white,” I first need to explain my uneasy entrance into the story. Born to Hindu immigrants to North America, I first encountered Jesus in a small Christian school in the Midwest. That the school was “fundamentalist” and “conservative” did not register to me at the time. What I knew existentially, even though I did not have the words to describe it, was that their world worked differently than mine. They told me drinking was evil. For as long as I can remember, my father enjoyed a cold, dark beer, and in recent years, bourbon on the rocks. These “conservatives” told me that gambling was evil and even shared stories in which they almost succumbed to card playing. The primary game that I played with my father was an Indian variation of rummy. On occasion, we would switch things up and play poker. The “conservatives” who introduced me to Jesus also taught me the “evils” of music built on the 2–4 beat and the related dangers of dancing. We Punjabis are known for our lively music and dancing (bhangra!). I have to confess that to this day, while I know the basic difference between the 1–3 and 2–4 rhythms, I have no comprehension of the supposed metaphysical-theological problem that exists here. Regardless, my early Christian education taught me that my homelife was “liberal” without ever uttering a word about India or Indian people. It was clear that “conservative” was good and “liberal” was bad.

I found myself inside a story.

Now, some from especially conservative backgrounds might think that I am about to unleash a “liberal” counter-offensive upon them. Shields are up, and weapons are drawn. My criticism of “conservative” while teaching at a “conservative” school in the Midwest certainly raised this posture. Colleagues told students to stay away from me because I was “liberal.” Sometimes they used their synonyms: “Varma is postmodern!” or, my personal favorite, “Varma is a heretic!”

They were at war with me, and I did not even know until shrapnel began flying. When I was first encouraged to apply to this school, I initially resisted because I was well-acquainted with those sharp, war-like reactions to anything considered “liberal” (read: “anything that we do not like”). Eventually, I applied because several long conversations convinced me that no one really cared anymore about “conservative vs. liberal” wars. It turns out that this was a poor reading of the social story. And my status in the story of “whiteness” is central to our re-evaluation of the theological character of this social story.

Anyone who has ever seen me would have a hard time honestly admitting that they saw me as a “white guy.” I certainly do not look the part, and at every stop of my life, people have reminded me. As a grade-schooler, I remember trying to make sense of my own skin color in contrast to my predominantly European-descended classmates. From their positions of racial invisibility, teachers and friends danced around the subject with me. They liked me—they really did—so the best way to avoid the awkwardness was to—well—avoid the questions.

Yet the uninitiated who had not yet learned the dance would ask, “So, where are you from?” followed by, “Oh, I mean, where are you really from?” In other words, the idea of the U.S. invoked a certain skin color, and my skin color betrayed my natural belonging. Sure, I was born in Minnesota, but I did not really belong.

Frankly, the examples—even the highlights—are too many to list, so I will share only a couple. In junior high, my principal regularly asked me when I would return home. He made it clear that “home” was India. These encounters with the principal were always uncomfortable. It did not matter to him that I was the top student in all of my classes—in fact, my academic prowess seemed to bother him. It did not matter that I was infatuated by the great, American-born sport of basketball and that I gushed non-stop over Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. My clothing matched his, my English grammar was second to none, and my preference, at the time, was for pizza and other staples of an American-fare diet. Nothing could hide my darker pigmentation, which became the basis for my true home: India. The U.S. was for “white” people.

Later in life, as a married man and a father of three, I dropped my wife and kids at the door of our church before I continued to find parking. I had been at that church for 13 years, where I was a fixture in the Greek Sunday school class and a coach and referee in their annual basketball league for kids. After parking, I entered the church building, was greeted with a smile, and then was followed around the building by one of the security personnel—the same person who smiled at me. It was only when he saw me with my light-skinned wife and the lightest-skinned of our children that he stopped following me. He passed me, walked several paces, then raised his walkie-talkie to his mouth to call off the hunt. When I reported the incident to my pastor, he set up a meeting with the head of security—a meeting that the pastor skipped. The head of security insisted that he didn’t see color. What had happened was merely run-of-the-mill caution. A week later, he made an effort to talk to my wife and then to me, clearly trying to make amends. Then he saw the only other Indian family in the church, looked from me to them, and said, “I do not want to keep you from your family.” Just one week prior, he had insisted that he did not even see “color,” yet here he was connecting me to another family on the basis of color. He betrayed his own colorblind rhetoric. That is to say, again, that despite the efforts of people over the years to convince themselves that they did not notice my brown skin, their actions and words regularly betrayed their claims.

My point in sharing these incidents is to question the silly statement, “I see you as a white guy like me.” Those colleagues did not really see me as a person of low pigment. They were inscribing me into a story—a story that they probably did not know they embodied.

The first colleague to openly welcome me into his “white” fraternity would later quietly join the movement to push me out. He didn’t know that I knew. Why did he want me to leave? Because I dared to join and contribute to the scholarly conversation on theology and race. It would have been okay to decry those “politically-motivated reverse racists” who say Western Christianity belongs to a story characterized by racial formation and violence. But I did not, so I was reinscribed into the story as a “liberal,” which simply means that I belonged to the other side of the Western story:

“Conservatives and liberals are at war, so if you are not with us, then you are with them.”

That is, I belonged to his story, but he had my affiliation wrong. The story of race hid quietly inside the story of conservatives and liberals. Later, that same colleague would revoke my “white” card. He told me that he admired my advocacy for “those people,” by which he meant black people. Despite my attempts to explain why this was no mere advocacy from outside the story but rather deeply personal, the colleague had no interest in nuance. One was either with him as a “white” guy or an advocate for the “liberal” agenda. To be black or to advocate for black people was a mode of undermining the “conservative” movement. To be for the “conservative” movement was an affirmation of one’s whiteness. To reject his “conservative” ideals was to advocate for “those people.” In other words, I was not black or white, but I was inscribed in that story somewhere between the two. Initially, he made me a probationary white person, but eventually, he came to his senses and cast me away. Stories are powerful.

For Christians, understanding the real significance and disciplining force of stories should be vital work for several reasons.

First, we all belong to them in some capacity, whether or not the narratives are visible to us. Astute marketers know that they exist, and they use subtle cultural stories to shape our expectations. Social media algorithms team with marketing in order to play to these “stories,” delivering us content that befits our self-perception. There is a reason that companies spend so much on advertising. Politicians also know this reality as they actively shape constituents into certain values to bend the votes of whole communities one way or the other, regardless of concern for logical consistency among the views. Our identities, desires, and values are forged within social stories. 

Second, we are people who belong to theological stories. Jesus comes to us at the cross-section of stories, such as the biblical stories of Genesis-to-Revelation, Jews-and-Gentiles, and Creation-Fall-Redemption-Consummation, as well as cultural stories, such as Premodern-Modern-Postmodern, Civilization-Barbarian, and Western-Colonialism-turned-Globalism. The vast majority of our images of Jesus reflect the proportions of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, the skin tone and hair of the Germanic ideal, and the conceptual normativity of Western philosophy. We are hard-pressed to imagine a Jesus who is not naturally a product of Western stories.

Third, Christian confession inevitably exists in all places at the intersection of these stories. Some entanglements might be easier for some people to discern and unravel. Others more easily elude us. Nevertheless, as people born and shaped in places, the encounter of varying cultural and social stories with the story of Jesus is inevitable. At the worst of the entanglement, real violence happens—for example, see the history and present of Christian racial religiosity. At best, the entanglement enables real opportunity—for example the wondrous capacity of enslaved black Christians to find the hope of exodus from racial bondage in the biblical story of Israel fulfilled in the Jesus who came out of Egypt after the death of Herod (Mt. 2:13–21).

Fourth, stories discipline our imaginations’ ability to evaluate healthy and unhealthy theologies. For example, Christians rightly proclaim divine providence, but arguably, Western Christians especially struggle to articulate a doctrine of divine providence that is free from the violent presumptions of social control and manifest destiny. I hope to evaluate just this issue of story and providence in my next post. Stay tuned!

For now, though, perhaps the best place to start is to be awakened to our stories—social and personal. How do they shape one’s being in the world? How do they affect our ability to hear the experiences of other people from other social locations in our stories or from other stories? How do they condition our ability to hear the story of Jesus as a story that comes from outside of our stories?

I offered the story of race and its conditioning of “conservative” and “liberal,” but perhaps we could have told the stories of gender, dis/ability, neurodiversity, and ecology, among others. All of these stories intersect, and the more astute our recognition of these stories and our being shaped by them, the more powerful the capacity of the story of Jesus to bring healing and hope within them.

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