Being a white male in a permanently racist society

As a white male from a middle-upper class upbringing, my daily existence is permeated by the privilege of simply being without being forced to reflect on my race or class position. My family and most of my white friends feel themselves to be living in a post-Civil Rights society in which we’ve all finally learned and agreed upon the truth that all people are created equal. Therefore, our story goes, we’re beyond the days where race matters: to even discuss race is to revert, inappropriately, to an earlier age. It is as such that the fundamental premise undergirding Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well, spoken into the world from which I come, is utterly incomprehensible and thereby disruptive: “racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society” (Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well, ix).

There are multiple white people in my life—also male, also middle-upper class—who, when confronted with the idea of racism’s continued existence, and especially through conversations on affirmative action, become deeply offended and reactionary: I am not a racist; slavery happened a long time ago—I didn’t do it; reverse racism is just as bad, they say. Thus, from such a perspective, to suggest that racism is not only permanent but is embedded within the very formation and essence of the U.S. (10, 155) is as backwards a position as they come. But on the “permanence of racism,” Bell, it seems to me, is right.

The reason many white people find arguments like Bell’s incomprehensible is that “racism,” for such people, tends to connote segregated water fountains and lunch counters and schools. In the absence (at least in explicit forms) of such segregation, it seems to many folks, racism is a thing of the past. Racism = segregation, “the n-word,” hoses and dogs, the KKK. But the point that critical race theory thinkers like Bell illustrate is that racism is fundamentally adaptive, that when it is widely rejected in one form, it takes new shape, goes “underground,” as it were, and manifests itself in new ways. Today, racism exists less through the clear dividing line between white men shouting slurs at black men, women, and children quietly walking through the world, and more through institutional violence upheld through racisms so deeply entrenched in our systems and consciousness that they are hardly even discernible to a white person unless trained to see it.

But for Bell’s claim, which he illustrates compellingly through his stories, that racism is permanent in American society, he nevertheless insists that claiming as much is not merely defeatist. On the contrary, to name racism’s permanence, to name the fact that black people cannot achieve full equality in the U.S., is, in itself, he suggests, “an act of ultimate defiance” (12). As his character Geneva says after the fifth rule in “The Rules of Racial Standing,” which dictates that prophecy and truth-telling are not, in themselves, enough—nevertheless: “SPEAK UP, IKE, AN ’SPRESS YO’SE’F!” (125-126). This corresponds to the notion of “both, and” that Bell utilizes in the book’s conclusion—that all civil rights-based legislative and equality-minded actions are ultimately futile, and yet “something must be done” (199). Ultimately, Bell suggests that racism is so deeply embedded in a white supremacist society such as ours that the only way racial injustice will come to an end is if that end corresponds to the interests of whites (107). In the meantime, black people must seek survival and dignity, as Malcolm X often said, by any means necessary.

Bell’s book has caused me to reflect even more deeply on what I, as a white male eager to struggle for racial justice, can and should do. I found Erika, the character in Bell’s story “Divining a Racial Realism Theory” (89-108) profoundly interesting. Coming from a “colorblind” consciousness in my earlier years, I have only more recently come to see the value of more so-called “militant” approaches to the realities of racism. For most of my life, the answers to racism were addressed and solved in the Civil Rights movement. I am still committed to the legacy of Dr. King, but I also see the ways in which the Civil Rights movement did not go far enough, or perhaps the ways in which its aim was slightly off in the presupposition that the U.S., deep down, has room for black people in its self-identity. I remain compelled by the tactics of the movement, but today I am more convinced by the notion that the white supremacy of the U.S., as a nation, is constituted in part by a necessary exclusion or displacement or “othering” of blackness.

So what is a white male to do? Grab a gun and head to the woods in preparation of ways to fight on behalf of black people when white supremacists attempt to take over? Not so much my style. I’m not sure I’m entirely convinced, either, that civil rights-type legislation is entirely futile. Sometimes reform can help pave the way for abolition by making it imaginable. In my own scholarship, I hope to help further articulate the ways in which racism works in social systems and structures, and how it does so theologically, and the ways in which those structures act upon human life. But that scholarship will mean nothing if I do not, in my own spheres, speak as a white male and as someone who is, by default, an inheritor and bearer of both racism and privilege, against racism, critically and constructively, meaning that I must speak to people like my relatives and friends who believe racism is a thing of the past, in ways they can hear. White people must give up racism, but it’s also more than an individual or community problem: structures that exist as a result of racism must be reformed to the point of abolition, particularly the U.S. prison system and structures that perpetuate poverty.

It is unfortunately part of the legacy of racism itself that white people will believe it more if it comes from a white person, but perhaps that is a privilege I can deploy on behalf of racial justice, speaking and writing, as a white person, in ways that illuminate the fact that yes, racism does indeed still thrive, and here is where, how, and why. As Bell’s character Erika put it, “America’s race problem is a white problem” (94).

Episteme #8

Crucifixions among us

Reading James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree is a profoundly moving exercise in learning to see anew: to see in the cursed ropes and trees from which thousands of black men, women, and children were tortured, hung, and killed, the wood of the tree upon which Jesus of Nazareth was tortured, hung, and killed two thousand years ago. For Cone, discerning a parallel between these two “symbols of death” is more than a mere intellectual exercise. Rather, as Cone writes, “The cross and the lynching tree interpret each other,” meaning that Jesus’s crucifixion was truly a “first-century lynching” and that lynchings of black men, women, and children in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States were—truly—contemporary crucifixions (James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, 161). The God of Jesus of Nazareth, Cone helps us to see, is the God of solidarity with the lynched, the tortured, the executed—the God who was­—and is—lynched on a tree. Thus, for Cone, learning to hold together the cross and the lynching tree—to see one in the other—is the key to being authentically Christian in a country that still carries the weight of the racial injustice upon which it was built: “Until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify Christ with a ‘recrucified’ black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy” (xv).

Images of black fathers, mothers, daughters, and sons hanging from ropes above masses of white people make my stomach hurt. The gravity that pulls her, that pulls him, earthward seems almost to pull me earthward whenever I see it. And the baffling grins on the faces of the white women and men gathered there—what the f---? It is too much for the mind to comprehend. And yet, it is so near in time and space. The second epigraph on page one of Cone's text describes a lynching that took place in Fayette County, Tennessee, which I drive along the edge of at least once a year when I go to my sister’s house outside Memphis. It’s a beautiful area: the road winds through expansive fields with enormous properties dotted with plantation-style houses hemmed in along the road by white-picket fences. The trees near the road I drive along are thick and strong, towering. It has never crossed my mind driving that road that these are the parts where black folks got killed at the end of ropes hanging from trees like these for being black, for loving themselves, for daring to be in a white world.

But Cone calls me to see the lynching tree and the cross not just in West Tennessee, or even in and around Nashville, where plenty of lynchings also took place. Cone calls us to train our eyes to see other places where people are crucified today. For instance, I have seen and stood beside the bench at 2nd and James Robertson where a homeless man was crucified by a gun, the campsite where a man was crucified by the warmth of his own fire that literally swallowed him whole, the stoops and overpasses and alleyways where women and men are crucified by a system that criminalizes them for their poverty. Even more closely to home, more recently, my stomach has been made uneasy by the crucifixions that will likely soon take place nine miles west of downtown Nashville, at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. Two weeks ago, I embraced Nickolus at a prayer gathering inside Unit 2, Tennessee’s death row. A few days later, the state set April 2014 as the end of his life—unless he can find alternatives before then. Others, however, are out of options. Like my friend Donnie, one of the most courageous and deeply faithful men I have ever met. His spirit guides him in confidence outside the walls of that place—even if that should happen through the little room with the gurney. But all I can do is think: The state of Tennessee wants to kill Donnie? And Nickolus?

After we learn to see anew that “the lynching tree reveals the true religious meaning of the cross for American Christians today” (161), that the cross and the lynching tree are also the execution chamber, the streets, the places where people are dehumanized and condemned to die, what do we do? In the words of Latin American liberation theologian Jon Sobrino, who Cone quotes, we must find ways to “take the crucified down from the cross” (quoted on 161).

How, then, can we take down from the cross Nickolus and Donnie and Billy Ray and Abu and the seven others who already or will soon have execution dates? At the prayer gathering on Unit 2 two weeks ago, my friend Kurt, also facing down an eventual death sentence, squeezed my hand ‘til it turned purple as he prayed in a booming voice for God to stop the death machine. From where will the answer to that prayer come?

Our societies do, indeed, still crucify and lynch human beings—legally and extra-legally. The first step is to learn to see it in our own communities, as James Cone compels us. The next step is to take our sisters and brothers down off the cross. But the power of death is so strong that it sometimes seems impossible. And yet, Cone suggests, God transforms death into new life. My question is, can pentobarbital—the drug used to euthanize dogs that the state plans to begin using to kill human beings—be transformed into hope and new life, as Cone suggests? If so, I do not yet know how.

I intend to continue responding to Cone’s call to see crucifixion in my own communities, including that of men, women, and children who endure poverty and the burden of criminality, as well as those incarcerated and those sentenced to death. I have never stood in the place of such persons, as Cone has with those who have faced the threat of the lynching tree. But I do know many at risk of crucifixion by name, by face, by the warmth of their touch. I believe more and more—especially after finally reading The Cross and the Lynching Tree—that it is for the liberation of such women and men that theology and ethics must carry out its work.

May it be so. And may the death machines be dismantled.

[Note: The background artwork on this blog, depicting a person in solitary confinement, was created by Derrick Quintero, who is also facing a death sentence at Riverbend here in Nashville.]

Episteme #7

A woman? A minister?

As a white male raised in a “Christian” home, I grew up, as most white males raised in such homes, going to a mostly white church—a “Church of Christ,” in the Stone-Campbell, Restoration movement (Disciples of Christ and the Christian Church have the same roots). Unlike most Churches of Christ in the south and across the country, while its leadership is almost entirely white men, the church I grew up attending in the northeast consists of a number of African American families as well. Race was hardly ever a part of our consciousness in such a way that it was articulated or discussed; rather, we all “got along” quite well, and black families in the church, from my point of view, seemed just as much a part of the congregation as white families.

However, sex and gender, as well as sexuality, were very much on my church’s radar, and therefore also on mine as a young person growing up in it. In her book Plenty Good Room, Marcia Riggs describes a number of scenarios allegedly common in the African American church in which women struggle to attain roles of leadership, are manipulated into subservient and/or sexual roles by male pastors, or are the object of misogynistic expressions of desire. As such, Riggs names “the African American church as a site of sexual-gender oppression in which male power (as clergy exercising patriarchal privilege) operates consciously and unconsciously to create sexism and heterosexism” (Riggs, Plenty Good Room, 29). Riggs writes, further, that African American women and men “labor” “under” a “racist-sexist-capitalist oppression” that prescribes or forces certain stereotypes that become accepted roles into which women and men are pressured to fit, and that, under such pressures, “the sexual-gender relations of African American women and men are mostly reactive rather than creative responses” to their oppression (54). In light of these realities, Riggs posits a renewed “moral vision” for the African American church (95), a “moral education whereby women and men acquire virtues and values associated with a sexual-gender morality” that is constituted by just, relational, balanced power dynamics, as opposed to manipulative, controlling, power-over practices of relating across sex-gender lines (100, 105).

I cannot speak to any experience in the African American church as I grew up in a mostly white church that also included a number of African American families. However, insofar as (as Riggs argues) the sexual-gender injustice of African American churches finds its origins, in part, in white, patriarchal, sexist, capitalist forms of power, then it is possible to speak with some experience, as a white male, to the realities Riggs describes and analyzes in Plenty Good Room.

In the Churches of Christ, women are largely resigned (but for a few “progressive” churches pushing the boundaries in recent years) to a kind of second-class status. In more traditional congregations, women are not allowed to speak at all in church services (aside from singing with the rest of the church, a cappella)—no praying, no reading scripture, and certainly no preaching. The stated source of these restrictions is commonly the Apostle Paul’s prohibitions against women’s participation in various aspects of gathered worship, as well as those of his household codes that position men in authority over women in family life.

I can remember a conversation I overhead as a young boy in which my mother and some of her female friends from church were conversing with a woman new to the church, who was struggling with some of the restrictions place upon women’s participation and leadership in worship. I can remember one of the women, in a well-intended effort to persuade their new friend of the good sense of our church’s guidelines, saying something to the effect of, “I’m glad I don’t have to be a leader in the church—it’s easier to stay out of the way!”

Like some (though not all) of the women described in Riggs’s text, some of the women in the church in which I was raised—wonderful, loving, nurturing, hard-working women, and most certainly “leaders” at least among other women in the church—came to be content with the prohibition against their speaking or leading in church—which is, in Riggs’s terms, an unjust relationship of power—and even came to favor such prohibitions as making for an easier existence.

Just a few days ago, my wife, who was also raised in the Churches of Christ, was officially ordained as a minister through our house church (an official “church” with the IRS), which is ecumenical and affiliated with no single denomination. It was a beautiful, deeply moving ceremony held at the site of Nashville’s old Tent City, and was attended and led by many friends, mentors, family members, and former residents of Tent City, where my wife and others spent years working with and on behalf of people enduring homelessness under the shadows of the highway overpasses above. It was only in recent years that she was even able to conceive of the possibility that she might become a “minister”—the church tradition we grew up in never allowed such a thing to even be imaginable in the first place. And still today, there is only one Church of Christ congregation in the U.S. that I am aware of that has appointed a woman as an Associate Minister. A relative heard about my wife’s ordination, and, because s/he simply has no frame of reference for such a thing, having spent his/her life in the same tradition as we have, was somewhat baffled. A woman? A minister? How is that possible? I can’t blame someone for holding to the only belief on such matters they have ever known. But it’s remarkable how “natural” such prohibitions become when they are presented as God’s word, as the only possible way to do things.

While we do not currently worship in a Church of Christ, we do still have relationships with many people in the tradition, and a number of people in attendance at my wife’s ordination are members and even leaders in local churches of Christ. With my wife’s ordination, and with a blog post she wrote that was, in turn, passed along to many people in the churches of Christ, I believe she has enacted, in some small way, the beginnings of a process of what Riggs calls “resocialization”—an “ongoing” process and set of practices that reorient religious institutions toward sex and gender justice through more equitable and mutual power dynamics (111). I, for one, am grateful and exceedingly proud to have the opportunity to be, as a male, the spouse of a female minister—or, as I like to say, “the Reverend’s husband.” I do not know what difference it will make, but I pray that my wife’s witness will serve to further the “moral education” and “resocialization” of a tradition stuck in forms of “sexual-gender oppression” that are embedded in its very “ecclesial practices” (29). My wife’s ordination, in itself, obviously does not accomplish full gender justice in the church, but it is, I believe, a profound, embodied gesture in the right direction, and I hope it will serve to exert pressure, or at least the pressure of conscience, in those places where women are still not allowed, because of patriarchal, racist, and capitalist norms, to exercise the gifts God has given them.

I would like to further study the dynamics of patriarchy, racism, and capitalism for the ways in which they factor in the prohibitions against women’s leadership. Patriarchy’s influences are obvious, but racism and capitalism are less obvious, and yet I would be interested to reflect on the ways they, too, are at work in prohibitions against women—even white women. I would also like to consider the experiences of black women in the churches of Christ, both white and black churches of Christ (there are both in the U.S., though a larger percentage of congregations in the tradition are white).

Episteme #6

Acceptance and the Refusal to Accept

James Baldwin

Du Bois understood that to be black is in America is to be “a problem” (Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1). But Baldwin understood that to be black in America is to never “really be considered a part of [America]” to begin with (James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 78). “[S]carred by the conditions of [a] life” in which, from an early age, one tries “desperately to find a place to stand,” a life in which mere survival is a kind of miracle, Baldwin understood the reality of being black in America as the reality of being pushed out, unwelcomed, placeless from day one in the only place one knows (73). It is alienation, exclusion, demonization—as if such orientations were inscribed in the very being of the land of the free and the home of the brave.

For Baldwin, calling home a place from which one is perpetually and violently excluded can only result in a kind of sickness, a “chronic disease,” a “dread” that leads to a “rage” one must either live with or surrender to (96). The result of such rage is often a hatred that is oriented at once towards those who exclude and also a hate towards oneself—a multifaceted hatred that is ultimately destructive, but which nevertheless cannot be totally escaped (114). Thus, Baldwin writes, “It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition.” On the one hand, “acceptance…of life as it is,” the acknowledgement that “injustices is a commonplace.” And yet, on the other, the fact that “one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength” (114-115). In the context of a world characterized most dramatically by a fundamental cognitive dissonance—the state of having to stand where there is no “place to stand”—Baldwin posits, with a sense of both firmness and exasperation, that one must intermittently accept and at once absolutely refuse to accept the way things are. In such a tension, Baldwin might say, is survival, perhaps dignity, and, at the very least, a path forward.

Do the Right Thing

I am reminded of the exasperations that have resounded from the lips and actions of other persons of color (both historical and fictitious, and even when fictitious, as real as can be), tired and filled with rage at having no place to stand, of being perpetually excluded and pressed down and brutalized, and finally exploding with a force like that which welled up in James Baldwin that led him to hurl the glass of water at the white waitress in the restaurant in Trenton (98-99). I think of the exasperation of Mookie, Buggin’ Out, Radio Raheem, and others who slowly endured the racism at Sal’s Pizza in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, a racism that eventually erupted into violence, and, at the hands of white police officers, death. I am also reminded of an episode of The Wire in which Bodie, a young man who pushed drugs on the streets of Baltimore, and who was possessed by a deep sense of morality and righteousness, exasperated by another death of another friend in a city where life is survival against the poverty and violence of power and the neighborhood it created, blew up and began kicking in the windows of a police car parked at the scene. As he kicked off the rearview mirror, voices can be heard in the background shouting, “Attica! Attica!” And thus, I am also reminded of the uprising at Attica Prison in Attica, NY, in 1971. Fed up with the austere, excessive, violent, and purely punitive conditions at the prison, inmates formed a coup and took over control of the prison, demanding that changes be made. After some successful negotiations with laywers, New York’s Governor Rockefeller sent in the National Guard, who proceeded to retake the prison and, in the process, kill ten prison guards and 29 inmates, with many others wounded.

Attica uprising, 1971

The gift of James Baldwin is his ability to articulate poetically the sickness and rage that wells up in a people who have no place to stand, and the ways in which life lived under such circumstances can only consist in both acceptance and absolute refusal to accept oppressive conditions. Survival and dignity, he might say, depend upon both, at different moments. Manifold characters in TV, film, and literature, as well as real-life women and men, embody the righteous rage that wells up, in between moment’s of survival-as-acceptance, when one is excluded on the basis of one’s race, class, gender, or orientation. The lesson for me, as a white male, is that I must continue to learn—and teach others—that moments of rage must be respected and seen within the trajectory of structural racism and the poverty and violence that are left in its wake. As Baldwin would instruct, however, such rage, when it takes the form of hatred, is ultimately destructive to all parties. But in order to move forward, such exasperation must be given space to express itself.

I would be interested in thinking further about the stereotypes of white gentility and black rage, both in their cultural constructions, and in their corresponding historical moments, and what, theologically and ethically, we might say about the difference between the two.

Episteme #5

Survival, Self-Fulfillment, and Privilege

To possess privilege of any kind—racial, gender, class, or otherwise—means, among other things, never really having to acknowledge the fact that one is privileged in the first place. To be marginalized, on the other hand, is to be so perpetually aware of one’s race, gender, class, etc.—in some circumstances as a matter of survival—that one’s identity markers perpetually inform one’s actions, gestures, words, expressions, and many other aspects of daily life, big and small. As Katie Cannon writes, black women have long been oppressed on multiple levels—as people of color, as women, and often as people enduring poverty. As such, Cannon argues that “Black women are the most vulnerable and the most exploited members of the American society” (Katie Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics, 4), which means that black women’s existence has historically been characterized primarily by struggle (6-7), as evidenced most particularly during slavery, but also continually into reconstruction, the post-war period, and into today. Out of such a context, Cannon argues, despite the weight of oppression, women of color have not merely suffered; rather, black women have “used their creativity to carve out ‘living space’ within the intricate web of multilayered oppression” (76). Cannon thereby argues that the moral agency of black women, in both historical figures and in the black female literary tradition exemplified in figures like Zora Neale Hurston, both represents and functions as a primary source for a constructive ethic that enables both survival and self-fulfillment in the midst of endured suffering (75-98).

Angela Davis interviewed in prison

What does it look like to “carve out ‘living space’” in situations of oppression? I am reminded of the women I have been blessed to interact with at the Tennessee Prison for Women, many of whom are women of color, who, through the classes they have taken for years now through Lipscomb University that will soon culminate in Associate’s Degrees, have carved out spaces for self-betterment and a more flourishing form of survival in an oppressive context—a survival that, itself, signals that they are more than the worst moment of their life. The women have also published multiple collected journals of their poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and artwork, and have even performed their work before live audiences at the prison. I am also reminded of multiple scenes in Angela Davis’s autobiography in which she describes the sense of familial solidarity and collectivity between her and the other women incarcerated in the same New York City jail after the FBI captured her. From the secret karate sessions with other inmates (Angela Davis, An Autobiography, 64), to the conversations on racism and imperialism shouted between cells (61-62), to the moment when protesters on the street outside her cell window shouted over and over again, “Free Angela!” until Angela, “concerned that an overabundance of such chants might set me apart from the rest of my sisters,” began shouting “one by one the names of all the sisters on the floor participating in the demonstration. ‘Free Vernell! Free Helen! Free Amy! Free Joann! Free Laura! Free Minnie!’” (65). I am also reminded of groups like INCITE! that organize and strategize—as women of color—against the multiple forms of violence they endure in their communities. For instance, aware that calling the police—the very people who criminalize them and their families on a regular basis—during violent situations with spouses or partners or friends or family is a non-option, members of INCITE! have developed alternative means of preventing violence and holding the perpetrators of violence accountable in public and provocative ways, without depending on the patriarchal and often white supremacist authorities that “police” their existence.

By carving out “living space,” many women of color in prison—whether imprisoned for revolutionary action or the worst moment/mistake of their life—and many women of color imprisoned in carceral-like communities of poverty, much like the sisters and mothers who endured slavery and other injustices before them, are more than just victims and they do more than just survive: they discern and demand and create for themselves ways of living with dignity even in the midst of suffering.

The lesson that Katie Cannon lays out thoroughly through the lives of both historical and literary figures, that women of color, under multiple layers of oppression, discern means of asserting their dignity and carving out “living space” in a multitude of ways, is an important lesson for white men and women to learn, for two reasons. First, well-meaning white people are vulnerable to the temptations of what’s been called a white-savior complex, which starts with an awareness of black suffering, and ends in some kind of attempt to bring rescue. Cannon’s thesis is important because it demonstrates that women of color are capable of bringing about their own survival and flourishing apart from white norms and ethics (Black Womanist Ethics, 4). Second, white people need to learn to become attentive to the lived experiences of survival and self-fulfillment of black women because white men in particular, and white women as well (though sexism against white women is quite clearly an enormous problem), need to learn what it means that certain people suffer multiple layers of oppression, in order to learn how they (white people) might be complicit in that oppression, even without intending to be.

I write these reflections not as an “expert” on these matters—as a white male, being an “expert” on these matters simply is not possible, and being an “expert” is really a white male category anyways, so it’s completely beside the point. But I do write this on my own journey seeking to learn about my own privilege through learning about the lived experiences of survival, resistance, and self-assertion embodied by black women and other people of color throughout history and today. I am grateful for Katie Cannon’s Black Womanist Ethics for the way it systematizes the ethics by which black women have carved out “living space” in a world that would otherwise erase them. I am confident it will prove a valuable resource in my own teaching in the years to come. Indeed, I would be interested to "take it to prison," both literally and theoretically, in search of how her text might illumine the lives of incarcerated women, and vice versa.

Episteme #4

How might a white male theologize liberatively?

Growing up in a conservative evangelical church, I can remember learning about Moses leading God’s people out of Egypt, where life was pretty hard. But the details of the skits the teenagers performed at Vacation Bible School are a little blurry today. As I recall, there were frogs and locusts and I think Moses was white, with a beard, and a staff. After a few rounds of “Pharaoh, let my people go,” they were on their way. So, it seems as if my indoctrination into liberation theology started at a young age—except that I most definitely did not learn it as such. It’s one thing to say, “God helped Moses lead the people out of Egypt where life was hard,” and quite another to say, “God liberates the oppressed from bondage.”

Beyond a basic awareness that Jesus was nice to people that no one else was nice to, and that we should love one another too—a powerful and important lesson at a young age, no doubt—my religious upbringing did not include the notion that God cares about the material, economic, social, or political conditions and distributions and relationships of human beings and society’s structures and institutions—that God desires and manifests, and desires for humans to struggle for, the freedom of people suffering under unjust circumstances. This, in part, is why, when I gained the perspective (largely from my non-Christian friends at school) in 2002 and 2003 that a militaristic response to the attacks of September 11 and its evolution into the Iraq War were wrong, and when I heard only the beating of war drums from Christian peers and people at my church, I fell into an existential crisis: I literally did not know it was possible to be a Christian and to oppose the war that seemed based on exploitation and which would almost certainly result in the deaths of all sorts of people. There was, for me, no precedent—no Liberator God, no Prince of Peace Jesus—by which to make sense of my anti-war convictions from a religious point of view. All I had been taught was that God was concerned that I not “sin” (individual bad choices or thoughts), and that if I get baptized and keep “following” Jesus, and help others to do the same, I would go to heaven when I die—the ultimate goal of my life on earth.

It’s all too easy to go on believing God doesn’t care about the material conditions of human beings if you’ve never heard otherwise, and especially if you’re white, upper-middle-class, and live in the suburbs. This is why, according to James Cone, people who are white, who have never seen poverty, who have never suffered under unjust social, economic, or political arrangements, cannot speak the word of truth that God liberates the oppressed: it is not their experience, so they cannot ascertain the God of the Exodus, the God of Jesus, who brings freedom to the captives and liberation to the oppressed. As Cone writes, “Theologians of the Christian Church have not interpreted Christian ethics as an act for the liberation of the oppressed because their views of divine revelation were defined by philosophy and other cultural values rather than by the biblical theme of God as the Liberator of the oppressed” (James Cone, God of the Oppressed, 183). For Cone, the stories I learned as a child—of the people of Israel being freed from bondage, of Jesus helping strangers and healing wounds—are the stuff of liberation. But because of my social context—which determined, in large part, my interpretation of scripture and reality—I could not know the Liberator God, the God who gives the gift of salvation in the form of liberation from oppression (130).

My theological perspective and orientation is somewhat different today. I grew up a Christian, but I have been “converted” again and again in recent years through my interactions with people enduring poverty and incarceration here in Nashville. When I stepped down from my position as editor of The Contributor street newspaper this summer after five years with the organization in order to begin my doctoral work, one of our vendors, a wise and weathered woman named Bobbie told me, “When you go and study your religion, remember these people.” I took—and take—Bobbie’s words to me as a charge. I have not experienced poverty myself, but after my experiences engaging with people who have, I cannot “do” theology without them in mind. I cannot theologize uninformed by the lived experiences of the oppressed people I now know by name. As James Cone instructs, the truth of God’s salvific liberation, which is both concrete and cosmic, cannot be proclaimed by theologians who have not experienced or been exposed to the suffering of marginalized people—and to not speak that liberating truth is, for Cone, to miss the point of Christian theology altogether (75).

A question that remains for me is the apparent truth of Cone’s indictment of dominant white theologies’ inability to proclaim the truth of God’s liberation-salvation, which is evidenced in my own upbringing, and to what extent this fact must remain true. In other words, Cone is right about dominant white theology’s inability to speak liberatively to and for oppressed peoples, and his entire project of forging a black liberation theology informed by black experiences of oppression is justified in light of that fact; but can it only be that way? Unfortunately, for anything to change, people who are white and upper-middle-class who cannot comprehend the notion of a Liberator God likely will not encounter that God until they encounter people enduring oppression in its various forms today. And such encounters can hardly be forced. What would it mean for a white male such as myself to practice a form of liberation theology? I carry this question with me as someone who seeks and tries to theologize liberatively and who also recognizes—or tries to—my multiple forms of privilege. And if I were to find such theologizing possible, who would my audience be—and who would listen? Such are the further questions I continue to carry with me after my reading of Cone’s God of the Oppressed.

I had the opportunity to spend a window of time with Professor Cone in his office at Union last year, and I spoke with him again after he spoke at Vanderbilt in April of this year. Hearing him speak again on his lifelong theological project, I told him that I take his theological work and witness as a charge to my own beginnings as a theologian—that I never let my theologizing become separate from the lives of oppressed peoples. With what I received as charges from both Dr. Cone and my friend Bobbie, I feel I have no choice but to follow through. The question is, as a white male, what sort of liberative theology might I practice? And how, methodologically, might it be different from that of black and Latin American liberation theologies?

Episteme #3

Personhood, Community, and the Ethics of the Obama Administration

One of the most important myths by which the United States of America understands itself is the myth of the “self-made” man or woman. As a moment in the evolution of an idea that emerged during the time of the Enlightenment—that personhood is constituted in the solipsism of the individual thinking self—America abides by the myth of self-making in part because America itself was constructed by white, male Enlightenment minds that understood the (white, male) “individual” as the primary unit of human life. Deployed politically and economically, the philosophical primacy of the individual enabled the construction of the mythological individual who pulls himself up by his own bootstraps and, allegedly without support from others, achieves his own prosperity and liberty.

In The Spirituality of African Peoples, Peter Paris argues that the millions of women and men forcibly removed from their African homeland and shipped across the Atlantic to what would become the U.S. brought with them a quite different understanding of what a human being is in relation to other human beings than that of their captors. “All African peoples agree that the tribal or ethnic community is the paramount social reality apart from which humanity cannot exist,” Paris writes. “Similarly, all agree that the community is a sacred phenomenon created by the supreme God, protected by the divinities, and governed by the ancestral spirits. The full participation in the community is a fundamental requirement of all humans. It comprises the nature of religious devotion” (51). Thus, Paris goes on to write, “Africans have no conception of person apart from the community” (111).

Paris’s purpose in his book is to demonstrate the ways in which this emphasis upon community as the fundamental unit of human life finds its source in traditional African spirituality and culture, and to illuminate the continuity between mainland African moral frameworks and those of Africans in the diaspora, primarily in America—and to show how such moral frameworks, grounded in the indispensability of community evidenced in the rich history of cultural practices of Africans in both Africa and the diaspora, are powerful means of communal self-actualization and survival under the institution of slavery and other forms of oppression.

If, as Paris suggests, the fundamental communal ethos of African spirituality lives on in the diaspora even today, where might we look for it? For my own part, as a white male, as much as I might counter, in my academic exercises, the legacy of Cartesianism, if I am honest with myself, I find it much easier to concern myself with myself alone. Community, relationship, and mutuality are painfully difficult. But even such a notion—that community is hard—presupposes that I can even be (ontologically, socially, etc.) apart from others. Such is the indispensable challenge of African spirituality in a world so thoroughly entrenched in philosophical frameworks that privilege the individual over against the community.

Interestingly enough, the President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, the nation’s first African-American president, provides a fascinating case study of a person who, on the one hand, pays homage to African and African-American legacies of communality, and who, on the other, at times, forgoes the African moral legacy in exchange for another.

In his remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast in 2012, President Obama spoke movingly of how notions of community and responsibility guide him when he stated that his belief in the importance of opportunity for all people “comes from my faith in the idea that I am my brother’s keeper and I am my sister’s keeper; that as a country, we rise and fall together. I’m not an island. I’m not alone in my success. I succeed because others succeed with me” (“Remarks by the President at the National Prayer Breakfast,” February 2, 2012). Similarly, in his address on the night of his reelection on November 7, 2012, the President spoke of what, for him, makes America exceptional:

What makes America exceptional are the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on Earth—the belief that our destiny is shared; that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another, and to future generations; that the freedom which so many Americans have fought for and died for comes with responsibilities as well as rights, and among those are love and charity and duty and patriotism. That’s what makes America great (“Remarks by the President on Election Night,” November 7, 2012).

In the notion of a people who “rise and fall together”; in the notion that he is “not an island”; in the notion of “bonds that hold together,” of shared destiny, of “certain obligations to one another,” President Obama resonates with the best of African moral philosophy, which holds that persons are only persons insofar as they live in and through a community of people. It would seem, then, that the communality of African spirituality absolutely informs Obama’s presidency, as can be seen in efforts to provide wider access to healthcare, and in his attention to people struggling economically. However, I would also suggest that the President, in practice, has been largely unable to extend the concept of community beyond the borders of the U.S., as is evidenced in years of drone strikes killing alleged militants and civilians (including women and children) in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere, as well as in his current plans to invade Syria. Even domestically, it would seem in policy and practice that the notion of interconnectedness with others stops at the walls of prisons, on the other side of the tracks where poor people continue to struggle, while people and entities (the wealthy, high-earning corporations, Wall Street) already well off continue to thrive.

During his re-election ceremony, President Obama attempted to symbolically place himself, as a black man in the White House, in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., by placing his hand on Dr. King’s Bible when swearing the oath of the presidency. In response, Cornel West, during a panel discussion on C-SPAN, proclaimed with the righteous anger and vigor he so often summons that, when he heard Obama would place his hand on King’s Bible, he found himself angry: “So the righteous indignation of a Martin Luther King, Jr., becomes a moment in political calculation, and that makes my blood boil. Why? Because Martin Luther King, Jr., he died on the three crimes against humanity he was wrestling with: Jim Crow…carpet bombing in Vietnam…poverty of all colors…” He goes on:

But when he put it [on] Martin’s Bible, I said, ‘This is personal for me,’ because this is the tradition that I come out of. This is the tradition that’s connected to my grandmother’s prayers and my grandfather’s sermons and my mother’s tears and my father’s smiles, and it’s over against all of those in power who refuse to follow decent policies. So I say to myself, Brother Martin Luther King, Jr., what would you say about the new Jim Crow? What would you say about the prison-industrial complex? … Then, what do you say about the drones being dropped on our precious brothers and sisters in Pakistan, and Somalia, and Yemen? Those are war crimes just like war crimes in Vietnam. Martin Luther King, Jr., what would you say? ‘My voice hollers out’…don’t tame it with your hand on his Bible.

I believe Dr. West’s critique here is one our nation can’t do without—and one that is particularly salient in a consideration of the sources of African moral philosophy that places the wellbeing of the community above all else, and which only understands the individual as part of a community. Based on much of his rhetoric, it would seem President Obama grasps, and perhaps is even guided by, the moral frameworks of the Africa from which his father came. And yet, it would also seem that the President struggles to extend that philosophy of mutuality to all people.

Where else might these considerations go, and in what ways might considerations of the sources of African and African-American spirituality be extended into public dialogue around the policies and procedures of a nation like the U.S.? I would find it helpful to see raised examples of more contemporary models of nation-states or cities or even smaller communities that took the risk of structuring their common life as if there really were a common good, as if each person could truly say, “I am because we are.” South Africans under apartheid, of course, offer an important example. But what other recent examples are there of peoples who found creative ways to integrate the virtues of African sociality into policies that guide a people? Perhaps by holding up such examples, we might learn more about the power of African spirituality in the publics of the U.S. and around the world, and in the process, call to account leaders who just might have ears to hear and be able to respond in kind to the wisdom of the African and African-American moral tradition.

Episteme #2