Who is the judge?
The judge is God.
Why is He God?
Because He decides who
wins or loses. Not my opponent.
And who is your
opponent?
He doesn’t exist.
Why doesn’t he exist?
He is a mere
dissenting voice to the truth that I speak.
Speak the truth.
I watched the Great Debaters
again (repeatedly) in the past few weeks. And my mind keeps replaying the scene
when character James Farmer, Jr. lodges his closing arguments against the
Harvard debaters. He opens with the grim statement: “In Texas, they lynch
Negroes.”
Following the dramatized version
of history, I open this essay with the thought – in Mississippi, they lynch
Negroes. I spoke with my Father earlier today, and he recounted the story of
his discovery of a dead man in 1966 in Greenwood, Mississippi. Daddy would’ve
been eight years-old then. He was in the woods along with his stepfather, when
he looked up – there he was hanging helplessly. A young man. His age was
uncertain. But his fate was clear. He had been lynched. Left there lifeless.
Waiting on someone to discover him and restore a semblance of dignity that his
life ever mattered. And so, it was that my Daddy – as a little child – was tarnished
with morbid image of the punishment for simply being Black.
He has never shared intimate
details with me. Only the bare necessity of factual information so that I could
understand the truth. Having blocked out the memory until he was 28 years-old,
he tried desperately to erase it from his psyche for the early part of his
young adult years. But it never could be erased nor washed anew. It was there.
Not gone, and not hardly forgotten. And, it occurs to me, that this is where
Black Liberation Theology finds itself – smack dab in the middle of ugliness of
lived experience of oppression and the freedom found in the love of God.
In God of the Oppressed by James
Cone, he outlines the basic truth of Black Liberation Theology. He says:
Jesus Christ is not a proposition, not a
theological concept which exists merely in our heads. He is an event of
liberation, a happening in the lives of oppressed people struggling for
political freedom. Therefore, to know him is to encounter him in the history of
the weak and the helpless. That is why it can be rightly said that there can be
no knowledge of Jesus independent of the history and culture of the oppressed.
It is impossible to interpret the Scripture correctly and thus understand Jesus
aright unless the interpretation is done in the light of the consciousness of
the oppressed in their struggle for liberation (Cone, 32).
Cone asks a very provocative question that he says Black theologians must
face head-on: “To what extent is the God in Black Theology limited to the
biological origin of its advocates (Cone, 77)?” It is to this question
that I gather in my mind and spirit an insight that I do not readily know the
answer to. My Daddy told me that his Father, my Granddaddy, taught him this one
very important thing as a Black man: dying is better than bowing down to any
White man. My paternal Grandfather was a reverend who was the product of a
slave owner and slave – and he vehemently rejected every part of the White in
him. Similarly, my maternal Granddaddy – an austere deacon and Civil Rights
activist – lived to his dying age of 93 still calling White people peckerwoods
(which is a derogatory name for Whites). There is a liberty that I think my
Grandparents never got to experience for themselves. Regardless of the good of
Black Liberation Theology, I do not think that it was able to help my
Grandparents (and people with similar experiences) see a God past the limits of
biological origin.
Maybe Black Theology was never supposed to help them get past this vision
of Jesus. Maybe it was only supposed to help them achieve liberation from
racism. Yet, I often times wonder about if my both my Granddads, along with the
other great cloud of witnesses to Black Jesus, ever got to see just Jesus. It
is not as though I am trying to negate the prime necessity for Black Theology.
Nor am I trying to overturn its credence. But I struggle with knowing if Black
Theology really gave our people, my people, an applicable knowledge of how to
overcome oppression and how to rightly identify with Jesus by treating others
with love and grace. If so, then why are there so many oppressions that
presently exist within the Black Church. We preach liberation, yet are we
really free? I believe that we like to think that freedom is the absence of
oppression. But this is not so. Taking from the laws of physics, it is darkness
that is the absence of light. Therefore, it is oppression that is the absence
of freedom. Anywhere there is injustice, there is no freedom. And if my
foremothers and forefathers felt that the proper response, in light of Black
Theology, to their own oppression was to secretly (or publicly) disdain,
mistreat, or look down upon White people, women, gays, or any other group of
people – then we have failed.
Black Theology must distinguish its origin and its action. It has
equipped us with a response to hatred and bigotry. But has it showed us our
responsibility? Yes? No? Maybe? Those are all valid responses – yet it would be
irresponsible of us to simply say ‘I don’t know.’ We need to know what kinds of
implications a Black Liberation Theology has had on those who have reared us.
Did Black Jesus help wash my Dad's memory as white as snow? Did He liberate him
from the understanding of race or just the reality of racism? We must ask our
parents and grandparents the tough questions about their understanding Christ
and Church. For it is their experiences that taught them. And without engaging
them on those experiences, we miss out on some of the directives of Black
Theology.
Who is the judge?
The judge is God.
Why is He God?
Because He decides who
wins or loses. Not my opponent.
And who is your
opponent?
He doesn’t exist.
Why doesn’t he exist?
He is a mere
dissenting voice to the truth that I speak.
Speak the truth.
Shantell, thank you for bringing your family's history into this reflection. I see that as precisely what Cone has in mind as the beginning of theological reflection, even if you're bringing questions to his conclusions. Even though I know intellectually that lynchings and racism were alive in a different way only a few decades ago, I am always shocked to hear such stories so close in time and location. Thank you for sharing the tragedy and injustice that your dad witnessed. Your questions about what black liberation theology has done, or how much liberation has actually happened, in society are important ones. I also think your questions about your ancestors' antagonism toward white people are important. I personally have gotten to the point where I feel more and more willing to affirm and allow space for such antagonisms, because they are so human. Whether or not they ought to function as a final word, I do not know. But I'm a white male living generations later, so I can't say; I can only allow space in my world for such antagonisms to resound, because they are real. Apart from those antagonisms, do you have a sense of whether the hope and the belief in Jesus and his saving power were, themselves, liberative for your parents, grandparents, and beyond? I hear Cone saying that liberation comes, not always in large movements that overturn systems of oppression, but at times in small pockets of life-affirmation over against the power of death, in small actions of faith, hope, and resistance. Have you ever looked at texts of enslaved persons' religious practices? I haven't much, but I noticed in one of Paris's footnotes a book called 'Slave Religion'. There's also one by Dwight Hopkins about slave religion and black theology. Perhaps those could provide further insight into the forms of slave religion in relation to white oppressors.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Andrew. Your ability to leave room for antagonism is noble and fair. I believe that both my grandparents and parents found great solace in liberation theology, as do I. I do not think that my grandparents hated white people at all, though I did make sure and ask my parents about this upon reading the book. After talking to my Mother and Father further about my Grandparents, I realized that my Grandfathers didn't antagonize Whiteness because they did not like White men. But they abhorred the idea of the White moral agency that kept Black people beaten down and left behind. I have a lot of catching up to do as it relates to self-education on religious practices of enslaved people as well as continued reading on Black liberation theology. Overall though I am coming to understand why the need to wrestle with my theology as it relates to this knowledge is vitally necessary.
DeleteShantell,
ReplyDeleteWhat you wrote was thought provoking and communicated the amount of personal reflection and time that you invested in interpreting Cone’s writings. I appreciate how much you participate with the text. Thank you for sharing your father and grandfather’s stories. I enjoy learning through getting to know you and through your interpretation of Black Theology. Your families’ personal stories will aid in shaping a healthier perspective for me on the broad idea of race and black theology.
I like how you wrestle with defining Black Theology, what kinds of liberation it offered its people and how the existence of injustice yields an absence of freedom. What I received was that by identifying with and/or being liberated by Jesus there is an abundance of love and grace that is present. I identify with many, when I say that one of the things that I admire about Jesus Christ the most was Christ’s selflessness, grace and love towards the enemy. Shantell, how have your life experiences and the context for which you interpret your own theology caused your Christology to be different than your Grandfather and Father’s? Another question I have for you is, how do you respectfully and carefully navigate those sacred conversations with your family members about their own path to liberation through Christianity? Thank you for sharing!
Lara, I do think about my contextual understanding of Black Theology in comparison to my Grandparents and Parents. And it is still something I am wrestling to fully understand. Because I grew up in it (traditional Black Baptist), I don't know that I ever questioned some of my faith practices. Now that I am older and more willing to step outside of Black church traditions for multi-cultural congregations, it has made me be very cognizant of how my Blackness has shaped my Christian perspective of my own identity and the identity of Christ. But I am also aware that because of the level of 'equality' I have experienced is why I do feel comfortable enough to venture outside of the Black church walls.
DeleteShantell, your reflection is quite moving. I appreciated the commonality that your grandparents and my father share. The comments that your grandparents made concerning whites are reminiscent the comments that my father would make in the past. He too was born in the south during the early 40s, so he was intimately acquainted, by both first and second-hand account, with the injustices and travesties of that period of time against blacks. My dad was filled with so much anger against whites that his disdain against them would bubble over into what seem to be every conversation we had. He seemed bound by the anger he had within himself. It wasn't until recently he began to let those feeling go and free himself, at least in some way, from the negativity of those experiences. For blacks, do you feel that there are better (more effectual) ways of responding to oppression than Black Liberation Theology? What might they be? What might those responses look like? I would like for you consider looking into non-religiously centric responses to oppression and examine how the results can be transposed to the black experience. Again, thanks for your thought provoking post.
ReplyDelete