How Christianity Forgot Its Grammar, Part 2 — Contrapunctus II: The Instruments of Flesh and Exclusion
Jazz, Shame, and Being With — Essay #11
The faith that crossed the Atlantic arrived already missing its immune system.
In the previous contrapunctus, I traced the vacuum — how the theological imagination mutated under colonial encounter, severing identity from covenant and filling the space with performance. Jennings showed us the displacements. Carter showed us the replacement doctrine. Locke and Kant gave it philosophical architecture.
But a vacuum is an absence. What I want to show you now is the presence — the specific instruments that wrote dominative identity into American bodies across two centuries of flesh-and-blood commerce. Not the ideas. The practices.
And I need to tell you what happens to me when I sit with this material. Because the temptation — my temptation, the one I know best — is to turn it into a lecture. To manage the horror by analyzing it. To put Baptist’s accounts and Cone’s theology into careful paragraphs and move on, having understood without being disturbed. That’s Data — my hyper-competent controller — doing what he does: mastering the material so I don’t have to feel it.
I’m going to try not to do that here. Not because my feelings matter more than the historical record, but because this essay argues that formation happens in the body. If I write about bodily formation while dissociating from my own body, I’m performing the very thing I’m critiquing.
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I said a profane sacrament is a practice that performs the formational work a sacrament performs. Let me be more precise.
The church’s sacraments rehearse the true story — that being is gift, that we are made for communion, that there is enough. Profane sacraments are practices outside the liturgy that do the same kind of formational work, and they can rehearse either story. A barn raising, a shared meal, a neighborhood that teaches children they belong — these are profane sacraments that form people toward the true story. But the ones I’m tracking in this essay rehearse what Wells calls the false story: that scarcity is the nature of things, that other people are threats rather than companions, and that what cannot be seized cannot be trusted.
And I need to press the analogy harder than that. Sacraments don’t merely symbolize. They accomplish. The bread and wine don’t just represent communion — they form us into people capable of receiving it. The unholy profane sacraments work the same way in reverse. They don’t merely represent the false story. They write it into the nervous system at a depth no counter-argument can reach. They have their own terrible efficacy.
The unholy profane sacraments don’t merely represent the false story. They write it into the nervous system at a depth no counter-argument can reach. They have their own terrible efficacy.
Tran names the theological structure precisely: the privatio of gift — the desperate extraction of what can only be received.1
I’ve organized what follows around Jonathan Levy’s economic periodization — four ages of American capitalism, each generating its own characteristic profane sacraments. The instruments change. The grammar persists.2
The Age of Commerce (1620–1860): The Instruments of Flesh
The first profane sacraments were performed on bodies.
The Auction Block
In 1830, in the Attakapas region of Louisiana, a free man of color named Duplantier stood before a notary and signed a mortgage. He was buying the freedom of Helena and her daughter Marieta — his wife and child. The instrument of their liberation was a loan from his neighbor Massi, secured against property. Love, formalized as debt.3
To secure the loan, Duplantier pledged five other human beings as collateral — Clara, Pedro, Francisco, Mary, and Mary’s children. What promised a brighter future for Helena and Marieta increased the risks of displacement for Clara and the other five.
The only instrument available for love was the same instrument that enslaved.
A man named Bob cut his own throat rather than submit to a new owner. A man named Bunch had insured Bob’s life. For three years after Bob’s death, Bunch pursued the claim — $456 plus interest, compounding while Bob’s body decomposed.4
Samuel Davis executed his own enslaved person for stealing a gingerbread cake. Under the law governing enslavement, the state compensated enslavers for executed “property” at an assessed value — and in this case, the assessed value exceeded what Davis could have gotten at market. He profited from the killing. Murder, engineered as sound financial planning.5
The profane sacrament didn’t merely reflect a pre-existing hierarchy. It produced one. How you use a person tells you what kind of person they are, and the kind of person they are justifies your use of them.6 Duplantier’s mortgage didn’t just express the market value of Clara and Pedro and Francisco. The act of pledging them as collateral produced their status as pledgeable — and that status then justified the next mortgage, the next pledge, the next leveraging of a human life. The auction block didn’t price people because they were property. It made them property by pricing them. And on it goes.
Where baptism says you are beloved, the Auction Block said you are worth what someone will pay. Where baptism marks an identity that death cannot destroy, the Auction Block marked a commodity status that death could not end. Bob had been dead for three years. The interest kept compounding.
The Whipping Machine
In the 1930s, in Alabama, an elderly woman named Adeline Hodges could not watch clerks weigh her groceries.
She was in her eighties. She’d been free for seven decades. But when the clerk lifted a bag of flour onto the scale, something happened in her body that no amount of freedom could reach. She turned away, or she left the store, or she sent someone else — because she remembered that each day the enslaved were given a certain number of pounds to pick, and when weighing-up time came and you didn’t have the number set aside, you could be sure you were going to be whipped.7
I need to sit with that. I need you to sit with it. Because what happened to Adeline Hodges is the single most important thing I can show you about how profane sacraments actually work. A practice repeated daily for years had inscribed itself so deeply into her nervous system that a grocery scale could trigger the full cascade of terror seventy years later. The weighing ritual didn’t just hurt her body. It became part of her body.
Here’s how the system worked. Every evening, as the sun dropped, the enslaved carried their cotton baskets to the gin shed and waited. One by one, the drivers hung each basket on a steelyard balance. The overseer recorded each number in chalk beside the picker’s name on a slate. If you fell short of your quota, you were beaten — not randomly, but proportionally. So many pounds short meant so many lashes. The violence wasn’t chaos. It was measurement.8
And once you met your quota consistently, the overseer erased his chalk and wrote a higher number. The old target disappeared. There was no stable endpoint. The system ratcheted upward, perpetually, extracting the enslaved person’s own adaptive creativity — every trick of the fingers, every efficiency of motion — and weaponizing those discoveries against the discoverer by demanding more.
Baptist calls this the “whipping-machine.” Not because any single device did the whipping — though one Louisiana enslaver apparently possessed a literal contraption — but because the entire system functioned as a technology. Between 1800 and 1860, cotton-picking productivity increased by roughly 400 percent. Not through mechanical innovation. Through calibrated torture.9
When I first read Baptist’s account of the whipping machine, the locale he named stopped me cold. Bayou Bœuf, Louisiana. The planters whose records he was analyzing — the ones who kept ledgers tracking the relationship between whipping and picking, who calibrated torture as a technology for productivity gains — were farming in the parish where my family planted. These weren’t abstractions. These were my people. The whipping machine wasn’t a historical artifact I was studying. It was the family business.
But here’s the thing I almost missed, and it’s what matters most for what I’m tracing in this series: the whipping-machine didn’t only form Adeline Hodges. It formed everyone in its liturgical field.
Think about the overseer standing at the steelyard with his chalk and slate. Every evening, the same ritual. Hang the basket. Read the number. Write it down. Compare it to the quota. Determine the punishment. Day after day, season after season, the practice is teaching his body that this is what evening looks like. That the relationship between a person and a number on a slate is the relationship that matters. That administering calibrated violence based on a mathematical shortfall is simply what the evening requires. The whipping-machine is forming him into a person for whom the hierarchy of human value has become as invisible and as given as the steelyard’s operation. He doesn’t experience himself as monstrous. He experiences himself as competent.10
And the planter who reads the slate over breakfast — who never touches the whip but studies the numbers, notices which hands are falling behind, makes notations in a ledger? The practice is teaching him that these numbers are these people. The profane sacrament is creating in him what I’ve been calling dominative identity: a self that knows its own worth by standing atop a hierarchy that sorts human beings into quantities. He doesn’t need to be cruel. He needs to be numerate. The cruelty is built into the counting.
And the neighbor — the small farmer, the merchant in town, the minister who rides out on Sunday — who hears the system operating, who sees its products at market, who benefits from the cotton economy it sustains? The profane sacrament is training his nervous system to separate what his body registers from what his mind permits him to know. He hears the screams and learns not to hear them. He sees the marks and learns not to see them. This trained dissociation outlasts the institution that produced it. It becomes heritable — not genetically, but formationally, through the institutions and habits and social arrangements that carry the sacrament’s grammar forward long after the specific practice has ended.
The whipping-machine is the supersessionist standard in action — not in the abstract four-step pattern I described in Essay 10, but in its embodied, practiced, daily form. The purity test is productivity. The “universal” standard is the quota. The targeted group always fails because the quota ratchets upward whenever it’s met. And the “failure” justifies the violence that extracts more labor that generates more wealth that confirms the hierarchy that makes the whole system feel like the natural order of things.
The whipping-machine is the supersessionist standard in action. The purity test is productivity. The “universal” standard is the quota. The targeted group always fails because the quota ratchets upward whenever it’s met.
Baptist describes how the pressure forced enslaved people to develop what he calls a “sleight of hands” — Patsey working both sides of her row, both hands picking independently, moving in an unconscious rhythm born of dissociation rather than pleasure. Her artistry was extracted under threat of death. Baptist calls this the extraction of “left-handed power,” borrowing from theologian Robert Farrar Capon — the enslaved person’s own creativity weaponized against them.11
And the sacrament’s reach extended beyond the cotton field. On Virginia wheat plantations where the McCormick reaper was being developed alongside enslaved labor, Rood found the same grammar operating at the level of chronic, pervasive threat. The overseer’s journal revealed that the withholding of violence was exceptional enough to note in the record — which means the threat hovered constantly.
Rood’s language is precise: the invisible hand of the implied lash pushed the workers onward, as essential to the harvest as the tallow greasing the wheels of the machine. Adam Smith’s great metaphor for the market’s benevolent self-regulation — repurposed for the ambient terror that made the market’s cotton supply possible. The invisible hand was a whip. And the whip didn’t have to land. Its possibility was the formation.12
The Coffle
A coffle was a chain — literally. Enslaved people shackled together at the neck or wrists, marched overland in lines from the Upper South to the cotton frontier. The word comes from the Arabic qāfila, a caravan. Americans borrowed the term and industrialized the practice, moving roughly a million people by force between 1790 and 1860.13
But the chains were only the most visible form. By the 1830s, much of the domestic enslavement trade had moved to coastal shipping — and this is where the Coffle did its most insidious work. Not on the enslaved, who already knew what the system was. On everyone else.
Somewhere in the waters between Savannah and New Orleans, a woman gave birth aboard the brig Lapwing. The customs inspector recorded the event: one infant slave. No name for the child. No names for the parents.14
In the hold of the Unicorn, twenty-four-year-old Thomas, twenty-six-year-old Jane, and Jane’s six-year-old daughter Anne were packed alongside violins, mirrors, wine, tea, hats, and coffee mills. All listed in the same manifest. They had been forced to acknowledge themselves as slaves for life before being loaded alongside the consumer goods.15
These vessels also carried first-class passengers on their decks and United States mail in their cargo bays.16 The passenger who dined above while enslaved people were held below. The postal clerk who sorted mail aboard a floating prison. The harbor master who logged the ship’s arrival. None of them needed to wield a whip or sign a mortgage. They just needed to eat dinner, sort the mail, log the manifest — and not let what they knew reach what they felt.
The Coffle’s formation was this: it taught a population to practice, at neurobiological depth, the art of knowing and not-knowing simultaneously. Seeing suffering and filing it under normal. Feeling the pull of empathic connection and overriding it with the categories their world required.
I’d rather suppress that part of our story than deal with it. That impulse — the flinch, the desire to look away — is itself evidence of how deep the formation goes. The grammar that says don’t look at that, it was a long time ago, you had nothing to do with it — that grammar is the coffle’s bystander formation still doing its work in me, four generations later.
The Ledger
In 1859, a planter named Clinch sat down with pen and paper and assigned a monetary value to every enslaved person he held. Katy: negative one hundred dollars. Old Betty: negative fifty dollars. Phillip: negative fifty dollars.17
Not worthless. Worse than worthless. Persons whose existence registered as net financial loss, calculated according to the best accounting practices of the day. Rosenthal has shown that enslavers were pioneers of what we now call scientific management — developing depreciation schedules, productivity tracking, and human-capital valuation techniques that northern industries would later adopt for equipment and inventory.18
To shipping merchants, Schermerhorn writes, slavery smelled not of perspiration and humiliation but of ink and paper.19 The ink displaced the sweat. The paper replaced the skin. The body disappeared behind the document.
An eight-year-old boy named Jacques was mortgaged three times in four years. Not beaten, in this particular record — leveraged. His future pledged before he could understand what a mortgage was. Enslavers, Martin writes, “worked their slaves financially as well as physically.”20
When a planter recorded the birth of a child — listing weight, sex, estimated future value — the ledger was performing a baptism in reverse. In baptism, a community receives a child, names them beloved, and promises to form them in the true story — that being is gift, that they belong before they produce. The ledger performs the counter-liturgy with equal precision: it receives a child, names them property, and begins the formation in the false story — that being is commodity, that they belong only insofar as they produce.
The Ledger is the profane sacrament of the professional-managerial class. I am its creature.
This is the profane sacrament I find most difficult to name in myself. The Whipping Machine is visceral — I recoil, and the recoil feels like moral seriousness. The Auction Block’s entanglement of love and exploitation is tragic in ways I can narrate. But the Ledger — the capacity to convert persons into data points, to manage human suffering through categories and metrics, to smell the ink and not the perspiration — that formation lives in every spreadsheet I’ve ever used to evaluate a program’s “impact,” every institutional calculation that translates persons into numbers. The Ledger is the profane sacrament of the professional-managerial class. I am its creature.
The Age of Capital (1860–1920): The Instruments of Exclusion
The most pernicious feature of the profane sacraments is that they create their own aftermarket. Each Age’s violence produces the inequalities that the next Age exploits — and the exploitation requires no explicit racism, only the opportunity that prior racism manufactured.21
The cotton-to-gold pipeline didn’t stop flowing when the auction blocks went dark. The Anglo-American banking houses — the Rothschilds, the Barings, the Browns — had built their financial instruments through the commodity trade that enslavement produced. When that trade ended, they pivoted to railroads, gold, government bonds. The firms changed clients. They didn’t change grammar.22 And the nation that had generated its profane sacraments through commerce would now generate them through spectacle, law, and exclusion — all at once, targeting multiple populations simultaneously.
The Equal Justice Initiative has documented 4,084 racial terror lynchings in twelve Southern states between 1877 and 1950. These were not spontaneous outbursts. They were announced in advance through newspapers and radio. Crowds of up to 20,000 attended.
In Livermore, Kentucky, in 1911, a man named Will Potter was taken to the local opera house. Admission was charged by seating section — orchestra seats entitled the holder to empty their gun into the victim; gallery seats limited you to a single shot.23 The theatrical staging made the liturgical structure undeniable. This was not punishment. It was worship — a profane Eucharist where the sacrificial body was consumed by a congregation that knew its roles and paid for its seats.
And the liturgy had its own form of anamnesis — “do this in remembrance.” Postcards. Photographs of lynched bodies, printed and mailed through the United States Postal Service, with handwritten domestic notes on the back. “This is the barbecue we had last night.”
The same administrative infrastructure that once moved human property along coastwise shipping routes now distributed the memory of their destruction. Bits of clothing and body parts were kept as relics. The postcard said: remember what we are capable of. Remember what happens to those who breach the walls.24
Consider what happened in Bartow, Florida, in the summer of 1901. A young Black man named Fred Rochelle was accused of a crime. The town’s leading citizens — not a nameless mob, but men with positions and property — chained him to a tree, stacked bone-dry wood around the base, poured gasoline on the pile, and set it ablaze. Eight minutes later he was dead. The newspaper reported that by midnight, “the town was as peaceful as ever.”25
A five-year-old boy named Ossian Sweet may have watched from the bushes near the bridge. Whether he saw the burning itself or only the aftermath, the event seared itself into his nervous system so deeply that decades later he would recount it with terrifying specificity — the smell of kerosene, the screams, the crowd picking through charred remains for souvenirs. The image of the conflagration, the heart-pounding fear of it, wrote itself into his body the way the weighing ritual wrote itself into Adeline Hodges’s. His parents, unable to keep him safe in a town where such things could happen on a Tuesday and be “peaceful” by midnight, eventually sent him north. He was thirteen.26
The profane sacrament performing its formation on two populations simultaneously. On the Black community: families shuttering windows, barring doors, learning that no amount of respectability could protect them — the practice writing terror into their nervous systems as a permanent condition of American life. On the white community: the leading citizens who did the killing, went home, and slept soundly. The bystanders who watched and learned, as the coffle’s witnesses had learned, the art of knowing and not-knowing. But the lynching taught something the coffle hadn’t: not just dissociation but righteousness. The experience of another person’s destruction as defense of sacred order. As something God required.
I have to sit with what this means. A community that gathers to watch a man be tortured and burned, that brings children, that takes photographs, that sends postcards, that reports the town “peaceful” by midnight — that community is being formed at the deepest level of the nervous system. The practice is writing something into their bodies: the experience of another person’s destruction as festive, communal, liturgical. That is formation so deep it reorganizes what the body registers as normal. Meanwhile, a five-year-old boy is hiding in the dark with the smell of kerosene in his nostrils, and his body is learning a different lesson: nowhere is safe.
That’s the evidence. Here’s the theology.
James Cone spent his life insisting that the cross and the lynching tree interpret each other. His thesis is a single devastating sentence: “Every time a white mob lynched a black person, they lynched Jesus. The lynching tree is the cross in America.”27 Cone saw spectacle — “public spectacle,” “ritual,” crowds performing a social drama. I see sacrament. Once you make that move — once you read the opera house and the postcards and the tiered admission through a liturgical lens — the profane Eucharist becomes impossible to unsee. But I need to be honest about the register shift. The liturgical reading is mine, not Cone’s. He gave the evidence and the theology. I’m extending both into sacramental grammar.
Cone grew up in Bearden, Arkansas, in a lynching state, watching for his father’s headlights every night.28 I grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in a cotton state, watching from the other side of the walls. We were formed by the same grammar — from opposite positions within it.
My father’s theological hero, Reinhold Niebuhr, possessed what Cone generously called a “profound theological imagination.” He never connected it to the lynching tree. What Cone diagnosed was a theology that offered reconciliation without demanding liberation, resurrection without confronting the cross — my compression of Cone’s argument, but the substance is his. The white church’s most serious theologian built an entire ethical framework without once reckoning with the ritual murder happening in his own country, in his own lifetime, blessed by congregations that sang the same hymns he sang.29
The lynchers went to church on Sunday. They worshipped the Jew crucified in Jerusalem. Cone saw the irony — and the irony is the formation. The Sunday worship that should have formed participants against Saturday’s violence instead coexisted with it, leaving the conscience undisturbed. That coexistence isn’t failure. It’s the trained dissociation I described in the Coffle, operating now at the level of an entire theological tradition. The perspective it produced was, in Cone’s word, “fraudulent” — not merely mistaken but actively constructed through the suppression of what the tradition’s own symbols demanded.30
The theological tradition that couldn’t see the lynching tree produced the divinity school I attended, the ethics I inherited, and the reflexes I couldn’t name until a man named Salin asked the right question.
That silence is itself a formation — and the church’s hands were not merely passive. In 1937, Moody Bible Institute in Chicago executed a restrictive racial covenant on its property. Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary did the same. So did the Board of Foreign Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church.31 The irony circuit ran through the church’s formational institutions themselves: the same tradition that worshipped the crucified Christ was signing legal instruments to exclude his darker-skinned image-bearers from their neighborhoods. The trained dissociation wasn’t just a failure of theology. It was an institutional practice.
How lonely sits the city that was full of people. The words are Jeremiah’s, but they could be written over any American town where the church signed the covenant on Monday and broke the bread on Sunday. Blessed are those who mourn — but first you have to see what there is to mourn, and the whole architecture of trained dissociation was designed to prevent exactly that.
The church wasn’t merely a passive recipient of malformation from the surrounding culture. In the lynching, the church was co-producer — providing the sacred canopy under which the destruction of Black bodies could be experienced as divine order maintained, signing the covenants that wrote exclusion into property law, training generation after generation in the art of worshipping a crucified God without recognizing crucifixion when it happened in their own town squares. That is the profane sacrament at its most devastating: when the institution that should have recognized the counter-liturgy for what it was instead consecrated it.
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But the grammar was never only Black and white.
In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred fifty-five percent of Mexico to the United States. Approximately 100,000 Mexican citizens woke up in a different country. The border had crossed them. A man named Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo — a wealthy California landowner, one of the most prominent Mexican citizens in the territory — watched as his property was systematically stripped through legal mechanisms the treaty had promised would protect him. Article VIII guaranteed citizenship. Article X protected land grants. The Senate struck Article X before ratification. The supersessionist standard in its treaty form: promise incorporation, make it formally universal, then ensure the targeted group fails by removing the protections that would have made the promise real. White on paper. Brown in practice.32
And the grammar didn’t need an Anglo-Protestant inventor. It was older than English and wider than Protestantism.
The grammar ran deeper than Anglo-Protestant invention. Spain had built its own Ledger centuries earlier. The casta system classified human beings through an elaborate taxonomy of racial mixture — Mestizo, Castizo, Mulatto, Morisco — each category determining social position, legal standing, economic possibility. Casta paintings hung in churches and government buildings, displaying the hierarchy as visual liturgy.
The English-speaking settlers who arrived after 1848 didn’t invent racial classification in the territory they seized. They imposed their own Ledger on top of one that was already operating — different vocabulary, same grammar of sorting human beings into those who matter and those who don’t.33
By the 1910s and 1920s, the convergence was complete. Peak lynching, KKK expansion into every major American city, and the simultaneous militarization of the southern border — all expressing the same grammar through different targets.
At the Santa Fe Bridge crossing between Juárez and El Paso, Mexican laborers were forced to strip naked, their hair cropped, their bodies sprayed with kerosene, vinegar, and Zyklon B — the same chemical compound that would later fill the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
The purity test was hygienic fitness. The universal framing was public health. The targeted failure was guaranteed: Mexican bodies classified as pathogenic vectors whose very presence contaminated American soil. Madison Grant and Harry Laughlin testified before Congress with eugenic charts proving which races were fit for citizenship. Congressman Claude Hudspeth argued that no barrier was too high. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 codified the whole grammar into federal law.34
And in the same decades, while lynching terrorized Black communities and border militarization targeted Mexican laborers, Congress maintained the Chinese Exclusion Act — a uniquely targeted system of statutory exclusion lasting sixty years, generating entirely new governmental apparatuses to control American borders.
The arguments were explicit: the Chinese were “irredeemably uncultured,” “naturally pagan,” “innately crooked.” The purity test — civilizational fitness for citizenship — was designed to be failed. Not because Chinese immigrants lacked civilization but because the test was ontological rather than civic: the Chinese were classified as constitutionally incapable of meeting the standard, the way limpieza de sangre had once classified Jewish converts as constitutionally incapable of real conversion.35
The Reconstruction-era Congress had actually debated dismantling the racial grammar entirely. Charles Sumner proposed a Civil Rights Proviso that would have removed race from the law. Lincoln’s own party defeated it. The distinction was stated plainly: the Negro was native-born and had a right to be here; the Chinese did not. When the Gong Lum case reached the Supreme Court in 1927, the justices unanimously ruled that the principle of racial separation extended to “the yellow races.”36
A nation that defines itself by who it keeps out is being formed by that practice as surely as the people it excludes. Belonging becomes a function of exclusion. Identity becomes a practice of refusal.
American race politics, Tran argues, constructs race through a white/Black binary that governs all it identifies. Because race is presumed to work for those classified as white and Black, it is presumed to work for everyone else too. If you didn’t fit the categories, you were routed through them.37
My brother-in-law Salin grew up in eastern Tennessee in the 1970s — one of the first Indian children in the region. He’s described the playground calculus to me: no one who looked like him, friends who didn’t know what category to put him in, the daily negotiation of which side of the binary to occupy. “You have the skin color of one and the hair texture of another,” people would say.
His father — a priest and professor who had crossed an ocean on a cargo ship — was coached by host families to dress in ways that would prevent him from being “mistaken” for Black. One summer in Michigan, darkened by the sun and needing a haircut, he walked into a barbershop and was told they were busy. No one was inside. The camp director who picked him up explained: they thought you were Black.38
That’s the binary processing in practice — not as political theory but as a child on a playground trying to figure out where he belongs, a scholar-priest refused a haircut because the sun made the wrong category visible.
My wife grew up in the same household, navigating the same calculus. When I imagine her as a girl — bright, brown-skinned, fierce — trying to locate herself in a world that could only see Black and white, my heart breaks in a way that no amount of Tran’s analysis can reach. The profane sacrament’s formation isn’t only what it does to the excluded. It’s what it does to every child who doesn’t fit the categories and has to perform the sorting on their own body, every day, on the playground.
This is what Tran means when he says race was always “so much political economic theater and its real-world consequences.” The categories were labor-management tools dressed in civilizational language. How you use a person tells you what kind of person they are, and the kind of person they are justifies your use of them.39 The feedback loop powered every profane sacrament I’ve described — and it operated across every target simultaneously.
But here I need to name what exclusion did to the excluders. Because the profane sacrament’s recursive logic — the pattern that every instrument forms both sides of the encounter — demands it.
A nation that defines itself by who it keeps out is being formed by that practice as surely as the people it excludes. The body politic that draws the line learns to experience its own identity as dependent on the line’s existence. Belonging becomes a function of exclusion. Identity becomes a practice of refusal. And the community that has learned to know itself by who it rejects will need to keep rejecting — because without the excluded, the excluders don’t know who they are.
Lynching, border militarization, Chinese Exclusion, the Johnson-Reed Act — different populations, different instruments, same grammar. The profane sacraments of legal exclusion taught the American body politic that belonging is racial, that race is visible, and that the nation’s identity depends on controlling who gets in. And in the teaching, the body politic was formed into a community that cannot stop sorting — because the sorting is how it knows itself.
In the first two ages, the instruments were visible. You could see the whip, the auction block, the chains, the noose, the exclusion notice posted at the port of entry. The violence was performed in public because the formation required witnesses.
And through it all, the ledger kept its quiet counter-liturgy going — that baptism in reverse, naming each person not as beloved but as commodity, as category, as problem to be managed. The instrument changed with each age. The grammar persisted: you are what you produce, and what you produce determines whether you belong.
What happens when the instruments become the neighborhood itself — the redlined map, the highway route, the zip code, the credential? When the formation no longer needs an audience because it’s been built into the architecture of ordinary life?
Notes
Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), ch. 4. Tran writes: “Domination and exploitation, when theologically cast, denote the privatio of the divine gift.” See also Samuel Wells, Incarnational Ministry: Being with the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017).
Jonathan Levy, Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States (New York: Random House, 2021). Levy organizes American economic history into four ages: the Age of Commerce, the Age of Capital, the Age of Control, and the Age of Chaos.
Bonnie Martin, “Slavery’s Invisible Engine: Mortgaging Human Property,” Journal of Southern History 76, no. 4 (2010): 817–866. Martin documents the Duplantier mortgage in the Attakapas region of Louisiana, showing how the financial instruments of enslavement entangled love and exploitation in the same legal apparatus.
Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017). Berry traces how the enslaved were valued, insured, and commodified from birth to beyond death — including the insurance claim on Bob’s life that continued compounding for three years after his suicide.
Berry, Price for Their Pound of Flesh. The Davis case illustrates how the legal apparatus of enslavement created perverse financial incentives: the state’s compensation for executed “property” could exceed market value.
Tran, Asian Americans, ch. 2. Tran’s core analytical engine: “how I use a thing tells me what kind of thing it is, and the kind of thing it is justifies my use of it.” The circularity is the point — the practice produces the category that justifies the practice.
Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014). Baptist draws on the WPA Federal Writers’ Project slave narratives for Adeline Hodges’s testimony. Hodges, interviewed in 1930s Alabama in her eighties, could not watch grocery clerks weigh food — because seventy years earlier the nightly weighing ritual of the cotton field had inscribed itself on her nervous system.
Baptist, “Toward a Political Economy of Slave Labor: Hands, Whipping-Machines, and Modern Power,” in Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 31–61. The weighing ritual — steelyard balance, chalk slate, proportional punishment — was the daily liturgy of the cotton frontier.
Baptist, Half, ch. “Backs.” The “whipping-machine” names the systematized apparatus of daily quotas enforced through calibrated torture. Between 1800 and 1860, cotton-picking productivity increased by roughly 400 percent — not through mechanical innovation but through the ratcheting extraction of enslaved people’s adaptive creativity.
Baptist, Half. The formation of the overseer, the planter, and the bystander is my extension of Baptist’s evidence into the sacramental framework developed in this series.
Baptist, Half, ch. “Backs.” Baptist describes Patsey’s “sleight of hands” and borrows the concept of “left-handed power” from theologian Robert Farrar Capon — the enslaved person’s own creativity weaponized against them through the ratcheting quota system.
Daniel Rood, “Plantation Technopolitics: A Steampunk History of Biopolitics and Biotechnology in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana and Virginia,” in Beckert and Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism, 107–129. Rood traces the “implied lash” on Virginia wheat plantations. See also Stephen W. Porges, The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation (New York: Norton, 2011), for the neuroscience of how ambient threat — neuroception — shapes the nervous system without requiring explicit violence.
Calvin Schermerhorn, “Slave Trading in a Republic of Credit,” in Beckert and Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism, 208–215. The coffle moved roughly a million people by force between 1790 and 1860.
Schermerhorn, “Slave Trading,” 210. The Lapwing birth record.
Schermerhorn, “Slave Trading,” 211–212. The Unicorn manifest listing Thomas, Jane, and Anne alongside consumer goods.
Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, “Introduction,” in Slavery’s Capitalism, 7–8. The coastwise shipping infrastructure served commerce, mail delivery, and passenger travel simultaneously.
Caitlin Rosenthal, “Slavery’s Scientific Management,” in Beckert and Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism, 62–86. Rosenthal documents the Clinch slave list, including the negative valuations assigned to aging enslaved people.
Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). Enslavers pioneered depreciation schedules, productivity tracking, and human-capital valuation techniques later adopted by northern industry.
Schermerhorn, “Slave Trading,” 208. “To shipping merchants, slavery smelled not of perspiration and humiliation but of ink and paper.”
Martin, “Slavery’s Invisible Engine.” Martin documents the case of eight-year-old Jacques, mortgaged three times in four years: enslavers “worked their slaves financially as well as physically.”
Tran, Asian Americans, ch. 3. Tran’s concept of the “aftermarket” — each Age’s violence produces the inequalities that the next Age exploits, requiring no explicit racism, only the opportunity that prior racism manufactured.
Kathryn Boodry, “August Belmont and the World the Slaves Made,” in Beckert and Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism, 163–178. Boodry traces the genealogical bridge from the cotton-to-gold pipeline to the postbellum financial infrastructure.
Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, 3rd ed. (Montgomery, AL: Equal Justice Initiative, 2017). The EJI documents 4,084 racial terror lynchings in twelve Southern states between 1877 and 1950. The Will Potter case in Livermore, Kentucky (1911) — with tiered admission to an opera house execution — is documented in the report.
James Allen et al., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 2000). Postcards of lynched bodies were printed and mailed through the United States Postal Service with handwritten domestic notes.
Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (New York: Henry Holt, 2004). Boyle documents the 1901 Bartow, Florida lynching of Fred Rochelle and the newspaper’s report that the town was “peaceful” by midnight.
Boyle, Arc of Justice. Ossian Sweet would later become the defendant in the landmark 1925 Detroit trial defended by Clarence Darrow. The lynching seared itself into his memory with sensory specificity decades later — the profane sacrament’s formation still operating in his nervous system.
James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), xiv and throughout. The liturgical reading of lynching as profane Eucharist is my extension of Cone’s evidence and theology into sacramental grammar.
Cone, Cross and the Lynching Tree, ch. 1. Cone grew up in Bearden, Arkansas, watching for his father’s headlights every night.
Cone, Cross and the Lynching Tree, ch. 2. Cone’s account of Niebuhr’s “profound theological imagination” and his failure to connect it to the lynching tree. My compression: a theology offering reconciliation without liberation, resurrection without confronting the cross.
Cone, Cross and the Lynching Tree, ch. 2. Cone describes the perspective produced by this trained dissociation as “fraudulent” — not merely mistaken but actively constructed through the suppression of what the tradition’s own symbols demanded.
Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017), ch. 3. Rothstein documents restrictive racial covenants executed by Moody Bible Institute, Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the Board of Foreign Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and its aftermath. Article VIII guaranteed citizenship to former Mexican nationals; Article X, which protected land grants, was struck by the Senate before ratification. Vallejo’s dispossession is documented in histories of Mexican American land loss in California.
The casta system classified human beings through an elaborate taxonomy of racial mixture — Mestizo, Castizo, Mulatto, Morisco — each category determining social position and legal standing. Casta paintings displayed the hierarchy as visual liturgy in churches and government buildings.
At the Santa Fe Bridge crossing between Juárez and El Paso, Mexican laborers were forced to strip, their bodies sprayed with kerosene, vinegar, and Zyklon B. See David Dorado Romo, Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juárez, 1893–1923 (El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 2005). Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (1916), and Harry Laughlin’s congressional testimony provided the eugenic framework codified in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924.
Tran, Asian Americans, ch. 1. The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) was a uniquely targeted system of statutory exclusion lasting sixty years. Tran traces the racialization of the Chinese as “irredeemably uncultured,” “naturally pagan,” “innately crooked” — an ontological rather than civic classification.
Tran, Asian Americans, ch. 1. Charles Sumner’s Civil Rights Proviso, defeated by Lincoln’s own party. Gong Lum v. Rice (1927): the Supreme Court unanimously extended racial separation to “the yellow races.”
Tran, Asian Americans, ch. 2. American race politics constructs race through a white/Black binary that governs all it identifies. Those who don’t fit the categories are routed through them.
Craig Geevarghese-Uffman and Salin Geevarghese, “01: Finding Hope In The Face of Racism with Salin Geevarghese,” Common Life Politics podcast, originally broadcast 2021, republished September 21, 2024.
Tran, Asian Americans, ch. 2. “So much political economic theater and its real-world consequences.” The feedback loop — how you use a person tells you what kind of person they are, and the kind of person they are justifies your use of them — powered every profane sacrament across every target simultaneously.