I remember reading passages from Jewish author Anne Frank’s diary in middle school. It eventually became one of the critical texts that changed my life, opened my eyes to the racial ordering of the world, and revealed how Jewish flesh was abjectly positioned as the imperial “threat” against which the racial order was established (i.e., the Nazi genocide of Jews in the Holocaust, and even before that, the medieval oppression of Jews under Christendom). The story always begins with Christian supersessionism, abandoning the notion of Jesus’ Jewishness, and positioning Jewish identity as the enemy of (Christian) society.1
This past Monday, June 12, was the 94th anniversary of Anne Frank’s birthday. After years of hiding from Nazi oppressors, she tragically perished due to exhaustion, lack of food, and contagious diseases on February 1945. Anne was 16 years old when she died. Too young. Too, too young.
This racial order is to blame for such a tragedy… and the many other tragedies that have ravaged our modern world, from slavery to the Holocaust, anti-Asian hate, and anti-Black police brutality.
The task now is to interrogate the Marcionite lines that have been drawn between the Jewish and the Christian, understanding that Jesus was and is and will always be Jewish, and challenge the segregationist social order that continues to enact anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism today... and every other form of racial oppression that persists. And, crucially, the task is also to learn how to share the same space, habitation, and land, with those different from us, with strangers, and learn what it might mean to commune with one another in an improvisational sociality that communifies without erasing particularities and/or diversities.
To close, I’d like to quote one of my favorite lines from Anne Frank’s diary, which beautifully reminds us of the importance of going “outside,” which I might interpret as going “outside” of the racial order that oppresses by making us “afraid, lonely, or unhappy.” It is to dream of what could be radically otherwise, something that is “outside” the hold of the racial order2, where the lines between God, the human, and the more-than-human are blurred, brought together, and joined in an entangled (inter)mixing:
The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be.
I pray we remember Anne Frank’s wisdom today. Though her diary was written almost a century ago, her prophetic witness resounds crucially for our time today. It is a reminder that the im/possibility of the “outside,” of life beyond imperialist oppression, is at hand.
Indeed, the task now is to dream of it, to imagine it, and thus strive for it.
For more on Christian supersessionism and the origins of race, read Willie Jennings’ The Christian Imagination and J. Kameron Carter’s Race: A Theological Account.
This is reminiscent of what race theorists J. Kameron Carter and Sarah Jane Cervenak are theorizing as the “Black Outdoors,” or an alternative sociality and mode of living that is fugitive, that continually escapes, defies, and transgresses the rules of racial order(ing). The “outdoors” is an imaginative venture that destabilizes the rubble of empire, something that is radically “outside” the racial order, while the racial order seeks to enclose it and police it. This is a radical “outside” or “outdoors” that chooses to live otherwise, and, thus, to be fugitive. For Anne Frank, this was her hope. She dreamt of the “outside,” and she calls us to dream of it too.