Bringing the wisdom of generations of black Catholics into conversation with contemporary scholarly accounts of racism, Christ Divided diagnoses "antiblackness supremacy" as a corporate vice that inhabits the body of Christ. To truly understand racial inequality, theologians must acknowledge the existence of "antiblackness supremacy" and recognize its uniquely foundational role in prevailing processes of racialization and racial hierarchy. In addition to introducing a new framework of racial analysis, this book proposes a new approach to virtue ethics. The theory of corporate virtue outlined here provides a framework through which to evaluate the habits of antiblackness supremacy and propose new ones-to be made to "do the right thing."

How should the Catholic church remember the sins of its saints? This question proves particularly urgent in the case of those saints who were canonized due to their relation to black slavery. Today, many of their racial virtues seem like racial vices. In this way, the church celebrates Peter Claver, a seventeenth-century Spanish missionary to Colombia, as "the saint of the slave trade," and extols Martin de Porres as the patron saint of mixed race people. But in truth, their sainthoods have upheld anti-blackness much more than they have undermined it. Habituated by anti-blackness, the church has struggled to perceive racial holiness accurately. In the ongoing cause to canonize Pierre Toussaint, a Haitian-born former slave, the church continues to enact these bad racial habits. This book proposes black fugitivity, as both a historical practice and an interpretive principle, to be a strategy by which the church can build new hagiographical habits. Rather than searching inside itself for racial heroes, the church should learn to celebrate those black fugitives who sought refuge outside of it.