Freedom for "Our Sick White Brothers": A Kingian Theology of the Moral Injury in Whiteness

This paper argues that King's later theological work is imbued with a latent yet robust theology of "moral injury" that can inform theologies of social healing in the 21st century.  King distinctly and seamlessly linked the personal, the social, and the political in a radical praxis of liberation: he clearly characterizes the racist social sinning of peoples racialized as white--who are formed by an insidious ideology of white supremacy--as a kind of moral injury that must be addressed in order to realize Beloved Community.  King strikes a delicate theological balance of prioritizing the imminent liberation of Black peoples with diagnosing a cause of this oppression in the morally injured conscience of whites. So, for Black peoples to be fully liberated there must be a concomitant repentance, repair, and healing among those racialized as white, a claim with far-reaching implications for theology and ministry.