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This dissertation develops a liberationist practical theology of white emotioned resistance to critical anti-racist education. Its central argument is that white resistant discourse and emotional reactions in response to anti-racist pedagogy reflect the influence of social location on white people's psychological development, which forms comfortable intuitive attachments to the white hegemonic social milieu. These attachments constitute psychic incentives to preserve that milieu, which operate alongside conscious anti-racist commitments, resulting in disorientation and distress when the contradictions between those motivations are exposed in anti-racist classroom settings. This psychodynamic analysis serves as the basis for examining the theological implications of white resistance and, by extension, white social formation, which devalues mutual encounter across difference and constrains white people's ability to conceptualize shared culpability in generating oppressive social norms. This dissertation employs an interdisciplinary method that integrates theories of social practice, critical whiteness theory, and developmental psychology. The first chapter examines the relationship of habitual practices to structures of oppression, drawing upon Sally Haslanger’s theory of practice and Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of habitus. The second chapter reviews qualitative research conducted in the field of multicultural anti-racist education, which analyzes white resistant behaviors and discursive patterns in the classroom. The third chapter engages with critical whiteness scholars Barbara Applebaum, Jennifer Mueller, and Linda Martín-Alcoff, specifically as they theorize the nature of white resistance as a series of strategies to preserve moral identity and social power. The fourth chapter responds to these theories with a psychodynamic approach developed in conversation with Phillis Sheppard’s reformulation of Heinz Kohut’s self psychology. This analysis is followed in the fifth chapter by a theological interpretation of white resistance and the oppressive potential of social norms, drawing upon the work of Willie James Jennings, Katie Walker Grimes, and Mayra Rivera. The final chapter outlines pastoral and pedagogical concerns relevant to helping white people process the vulnerability inherent in having one’s sense of self implicated in structural oppression. Analyzing white resistance through a psychodynamic lens provides new directions for research within practical theology and critical whiteness studies on strategy and efficacy of anti-racist pedagogy.

Recent decades have seen an increased interest among predominantly white, middle-class evangelicals in church planting and organizing ministries in urban centers, often in racially diverse neighborhoods undergoing the process of gentrification. This thesis will analyze the phenomenon of white urban ministry through the lens of critical whiteness studies and psychoanalytic theory, drawing on Shannon Sullivan's notion of whiteness as unconscious habit characterized by ontological expansiveness. I propose that sincere efforts on the part of white urban ministry practitioners to form and nurture diverse communities rooted in place are impeded by habitual modes of relationship to place formed in predominantly white contexts, which reproduce, however unintentionally, patterns of white supremacy and displacement of people of color. The thesis begins with a survey of print and online sources including accounts by white urban ministry practitioners and critiques of their models. I then address the theological and affective motives and rationales for these models, and examine their relationship to wider social patterns of gentrification. Next I will analyze these patterns in light of the work of critical theorists on whiteness, focusing on the nature of white relationship to place shaped by centuries of colonialism. Developmental psychology will then be employed to account for white habit formation, drawing upon Kohut's account of the development of grandiosity. I conclude by calling for a paradigmatic shift toward de-centering whiteness, drawing upon theological and psychological resources to transform white relationship to place into one of respect and deference to diverse ways of being.