A review of Katie Walker Grimes: Christ Divided: Antiblackness as Corporate Vice (November 1, 2017: Fortress Press) 344 pages.
What if slavery never really ended? In Christ Divided, Katie Grimes argues that its logic still governs us We’re familiar with the term “the afterlife of slavery.” Grimes sheds light on the afterlife through the concept of “antiblackness.” Beneath America’s progress lies a persistent antiblackness supremacy—a collective habit so ingrained that white society enacts it unconsciously, even in its churches and sanctuaries.
A Unique Contribution to Racial Justice
I like to believe I’ve traveled a long road in search of fair and peaceful relationships with people different from myself. In many ways, our country has been on a similar journey. Before the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, in September 2017, I might have assumed that our racial attitudes had reached a kind of uneasy standstill—that, for now, there were no new steps to take.
I didn’t expect a theologian and academic to push me further along this path. Yet halfway through Katie Grimes’ 2017 Christ Divided, I realized I was encountering ideas about race that I had never considered. I began to wonder if I was holding a watershed statement on racial justice.
Grimes’ work impresses on several fronts. Her perspective is fresh and bold. She unsettles old habits of talking about race, draws on moral anthropology in ways I’ve not seen applied to racial justice, and speaks with a confidence that allows her to challenge respected figures like Protestant ethicist Stanley Hauerwas and Catholic race-relations expert Cardinal Francis George. She is equally unsparing with familiar concepts like “colorblindness” and even “white supremacy,” dismissing them as too bland to expose the deeper forces at work.
The Persistence of Racism
Her central contribution is to name a persistent, largely unacknowledged evil: a hostility directed specifically at people of African descent, woven deep into what she calls the “White Way of Life.” While “white supremacy” describes a hierarchy placing whites above all other races, Grimes argues that this framing obscures something crucial: the way white societies have uniquely and relentlessly marked African-descent people as perpetual victims. To name this, she introduces the term “antiblackness supremacy.”
Christ Divided demonstrates how this force operates across history, in America, and even within the church. Grimes shows how white-dominant culture has reserved an exceptional disadvantage for people of African descent—a pattern that repeats itself endlessly, even when we deny responsibility for it.
Reading her work, I found myself thinking of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. Alexander documents racial bias in the justice system and the mass incarceration of African American men. Wilkerson traces the continuing hardships of African Americans who fled the South, showing how emancipation failed to free them from slavery’s lingering grip. But Grimes attempts something yet more transformative: she isn’t trying to confirm what I already believe about race—she’s trying to change it.
Her claim is unsettling: slavery didn’t end. It evolved. It lives on, not merely through laws and systems but in the very habits of white society—including my own. Borrowing from scholar Saidiya Hartman, Grimes invokes the “afterlife of slavery”—the idea that slavery’s harms and benefits persist long after emancipation. Enslavement devastated Black families, alienated workers from their labor, confined Black bodies to segregated spaces, and normalized violence. At the same time, it conferred enduring privileges on white society: dominance, material wealth, social respectability, and a sense of innate superiority. These patterns didn’t vanish with emancipation; they became habits so ingrained that we carry them forward unconsciously, without intention or reflection.
A History of Antiblackness
Grimes traces this dynamic back through centuries of Western history, beginning with the 15th-century slave trade. As European powers encountered new peoples and lands, societies worked out racial hierarchies—and Africans consistently landed at the bottom. One striking example comes from 16th-century Spain. At the time, Spanish Catholics clashed with Muslims and Jews in struggles over religious purity, culminating in the Inquisition. Yet even Black Catholics—who shared the dominant faith—were mocked and assaulted in public processions. Unlike Jews and Muslims, whose religious differences were legible within Spanish society and who could sometimes reintegrate, Blacks were treated as inherently alien and unredeemable. Within the prevailing logic, Black equaled slave, slave equaled criminal, and criminal equaled nonbeliever.
Grimes shows that this pattern has replayed itself in countless forms. In the American context, we can observe how immigrant groups—German, Irish, Asian, Hispanic—have historically faced suspicion and hardship upon arrival, often settling in ethnic enclaves. Over time, though, many assimilate and gain social acceptance. Black Americans, by contrast, remain disproportionately incarcerated, impoverished, and socially marginalized. Grimes attributes this not to Black “deficiencies” but to a persistent antiblackness—a collective, unconscious habit that continually pushes Black people downward, generation after generation.
To explain how these habits endure, Grimes draws on Thomas Aquinas’ insights into virtues and vices as acquired dispositions. Actions repeated often enough eventually become automatic, bypassing conscious thought—like driving home on autopilot. In much the same way, white society has developed a kind of muscle memory that perpetuates antiblackness. It manifests in our cities, our schools, our churches, our institutions, even our language. It feels natural, even inevitable, but it carries us down the same well-worn paths.
Antiblackness in the Church
The second half of Christ Divided turns to the American Roman Catholic Church, revealing how deeply antiblackness has penetrated its history and structures. Rather than interrupting the cycle, the church has often embodied it—through clergy who profited from slaveholding, segregated parishes, whites-only schools, and enduring patterns of exclusion.
And yet, Grimes sees possibility here. She imagines congregations becoming sites of transformation. One provocative idea she proposes is replacing the traditional “cultic” Mass with communal meals held in prisons. Parishioners and incarcerated people would sit at the same table, breaking bread together, embodying Jesus’ own practice of dining across boundaries. Even the logistics—transporting suburban parishioners downtown—would take on sacramental meaning, turning inconvenience into an act of solidarity.
Christ Divided arrives at a pivotal moment in America’s racial reckoning. From Charlottesville to police shootings of unarmed Black Americans, from debates over Civil War memory to the resurgence of white nationalism, our national conversation about race grows ever more urgent.
Katie Grimes has given me a new lens and left me with an unsettling question: Am I complicit in an enmity toward Africa’s children—an enmity I neither acknowledge nor fully understand, yet one that persists today as insidiously as it did in the 15th century?