LAUSR

This article conceptualizes racism and privilege as habitual orientations located at the bodily level, not merely at the level of intention and consciousness. Engaging contemporary critical race thinkers, the analysis explores how William James’s psychological-pragmatic perspective on habit opens up fresh insight into the nature and function of racist habits. The author looks specifically at the value of James’s metaphors of “habits as scars” and “habits as grooved pathways” for conceptualizing racism embedded as bodily habit and habitual orientation. He also applies Bourdieu’s notion of habitus to Christian churches in the United States in order to examine the church as a habituating locus of power and to account for the role of social structures in the formation and reproduction of racist habits. Given the difficulty, even implausibility, of completely erasing racist habits, he considers how James’s view of habit change translates into practical theological approaches for confronting Whiteness and developing more racially just pedagogies and practices that gradually orient the body in new habitual ways of being.