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

The "problem" of blackness

History up to the present moment makes evident that to be black in America is to be a problem. As a white man, I know in neither my body nor my embodied mind what it means to be a problem in the eyes of passersby. Rather, in America, to embody whiteness as I do is to know that my very body, walking down the sidewalk, stepping on an elevator, driving in a car, is, from the beginning, free from all suspicion, de facto—and, if we’re honest, de jure. To be black, though, is to be held suspect, to be gazed upon carefully, in case one should make any sudden movement. To be black is to be—ontologically and otherwise—essentially problematic, a notion upon which a nation has been built, both figuratively and literally: on the backs and by the sweat, suffering, and death of people of color.

In terms of the everyday experience of “being a problem” (1), W.E.B. Du Bois writes in The Souls of Black Folk of the “double consciousness” borne of prejudice endured in all facets of life—“this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” (2). For Du Bois, to exist as black in America is to exist in a lineage of “strife,” a lineage marked by a “longing to attain self-conscious [personhood], to merge [one’s] double self into a better and truer self” (2). In response to the fact of being a problem, and the psychological fragmentation it can beget, Du Bois posits that African Americans must struggle for freedom by achieving the institutional means to increase their own education, political power, social standing, and economic stability. As acts of fundamental self-assertion over against a history of systematic and institutionalized racial disenfranchisement, such achievements, Du Bois might say, serve to normalize blackness.

While Du Bois’ thorough and multivalent descriptions of being black in America throughout The Souls of Black Folk continue to speak poignantly today, one might well question whether or not Du Bois’ vision for African Americans’ acquisition of freedom still rings entirely true. Despite the fact that many of the realities Du Bois hoped for—increased black education, political power, social standing, and economic stability—have become a reality (though certainly only in part), I would argue that blackness itself very much continues to be a “problem” in the United States of America, often in like manner as Du Bois describes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

For instance, poverty, sustained by a history of racist economic policy decisions, housing practices, and wage slavery that continues today, persists among African Americans, 28 percent of whom live below the poverty level (The Washington Post). Relatedly, African Americans are significantly more likely to spend time in prison than are whites, with 4,347 out of every black Americans 100,000 incarcerated today, as opposed to 678 out of every 100,000 for whites. As Du Bois wrote more than 100 years ago, African Americans suffer “an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary” (24). Today’s incarceration rates are upheld in large part by law enforcement and criminal justice procedures that in many ways criminalize blackness (for instance, stop and frisk policies in New York City and mandatory minimums sentencing for certain offenses applied disproportionately to African Americans). As Du Bois outlines—in 1903—particularly in the South, police forces and courts were originally created to monitor, criminalize, and control former slave populations, which means that black Americans “came to look upon courts as instruments of injustice and oppression,” a perspective that continues to resonate today (108).

Considering the fact that many of Du Bois’ hopes for African Americans have come to fruition for many—though far from all—black Americans, and considering the fact that blackness itself continues to be a “problem,” evidenced by the fact that it factors significantly in acquittals for murderers of black children, staggering poverty and incarceration rates, and outright racist legislation surrounding voting accessibility, food stamps, and more, it would seem that an analysis of blackness in American society should enable a response, and a struggle, that includes but extends beyond educational, political, social, and economic equality with whiteness. But developing such a vision for the struggle towards true freedom for African Americans must begin where Du Bois does: with the plain, jarring fact that to be black in America is to be a “problem.” Until we—until I—reckon with and proceed in light of such a fact, despite whatever victories may be won, racism, structural and interpersonal alike, will continue to thrive.

(Episteme #1)