- Good morning friends.
Thank you for coming to our panel,
Religion, Violence, and the
Moral Problem of Blackness.
I'm very excited to have
three distinguished scholars
on this panel discussion.
First we have Lee Butler, to my right.
Professor Butler is a
distinguished service professor
of theology and psychology at
Chicago Theological Seminary.
As an African-American
pastoral theologian,
he explores identity formation,
African indigenous religions,
American slavocracy,
religiosity and spirituality,
black and womanist theologies,
psychological historiography
and health and healing.
He's also played a major
role within the guild
in terms of mentoring young students
who are interested in
African-American religions.
Also we have a new colleague,
Dr. Alphonso Saville.
He's the Andrew W. Mellon
postdoctoral fellow
for the study of American
Religion and Slavery
at Georgetown University.
Our first postdoctoral fellow
within the Department of
Theology at Georgetown,
he's actually looking
at slavery, Catholicism,
and the sale of 272 slaves at Georgetown,
and teaching a special
class within the department
during the Problem of God session.
And he's actually taking
students over to the archives
and showing them how to investigate
and what kinds of questions to ask.
So we're very excited to have him.
He's here for the entire year.
Next semester he won't teach,
but he will put on a
number of public seminars.
So please keep a lookout for him.
And finally but not least, of course,
is Dr. Soyica Diggs Colbert.
She is the chair of the
Department of Performing Arts,
director of Theater and
Performance Studies,
and professor of African-American Studies
and Theater and Performance Studies
at Georgetown University.
She's also an alum of Georgetown.
So it's great to have her back.
She's written a number of
books and edited several books,
including, she's the author of
the African-American Theatrical Body,
Reception, Performance and the Stage,
and Black Movements, Performance,
and Cultural Politics,
which came out last year.
She's also edited a great book
on the psychic terror of slavery
within contemporary
African-American thought.
And one of the reasons why I thought
this panel might be very interesting
is in part, when we look
at the major narratives
of how people look at
African-American religion,
it's often divided into these
very neat camps of history and theology,
and historians are often trying to show,
debate whether or not,
did the African gods die
during the trans-Atlantic slave trade?
Or did they remain alive?
And in theology, the huge
debate has been really around,
well, how have African-Americans used,
particularly Christianity,
as a tool for liberation.
And what I think is interesting is that
over the last, say, 20 years,
people have begun to really challenge
those sort of two neat narratives
as the only approaches to studying
African-American religions in the U.S.
And what's interesting is that
now people are really trying to dive
into the texts, into the archives,
and look at the ways in which
meaning-making and knowledge development
has occurred among African slaves
and also among contemporary
African-Americans
who are using religion as a
way to understand existence.
And what is striking is
we're finding more and more scholars
are looking at the ways in which
violence in particular, and in
the whole legacy of slavery,
which is often sort of, again,
been sort of marginal to discussions
and really, the focus
has been on this idea,
from slavery to freedom,
this idea to show how
the American narrative
of sort of the exceptionalism
in some ways allowed
for slavery to emerge,
but then also had the tools
for slavery to actually end.
And I think this panel really wants
to kinda disrupt that kinda neat narrative
and look at the ways in which violence,
particularly violence
exerted by Christians,
is not only historical but ongoing.
And how then do we begin
to make sense of that
in terms of the texts that we're
using to understand religion?
And particularly a
people who have not been
so keen on using doctrine as the only way
to make sense of God and of tradition.
And so, one of the reasons why
I wanted to include Professor
Colbert is, in part,
because she's looking at
sorta literature, the body,
in texts that we often see as marginal,
but in fact have been very
central to the formation
of how we understand black religion.
But again, they've been sort
of marginal to the discussion.
So I won't talk anymore.
And for now, I'd like to first begin
with Professor Lee Butler who's
working on a major project
on sorta the psychological
terror of slavery.
And he'll begin with opening remarks,
and then we'll have
Alphonso and then Soyica.
- Thank you very much, and I am
very honored to be a part of this panel.
Thank you for the invitation.
I'm looking forward to hearing
what my colleagues have to say.
(mumbling)
Before I move into my full reflection,
let me say that part of what I do
is grounded in an interpretation
and an understanding
of the Atlantic world.
So with that I move ahead.
Religion is often violent.
Religious violence results
when one's orientation
to another is expressed using violence.
We have seen in countless
and untold massacres
that stipple the U.S. map and punctuate
America's religious consciousness
that violence is spiritual work
and it's the voice of the faithful.
Just as religion is a way of
seeking and making meaning,
violence has been the fundamental
religious meaning-making
system within American life.
Violence in America has
formed sacrificial rituals
for finding salvation in this life
and mediating between this
life and the afterlife.
Within the Christian heritage,
the violence of the passion and the cross,
the bodily suffering and death of Jesus,
are justified with the words.
Under the law, almost everything
is purified with blood,
and without the shedding of blood
there is no forgiveness of sins.
Violence is often religious.
It's important to highlight that violence
is more than impulsive
aggressive victimizing actions.
The violence of religion develops rituals
that maintain constructed
social relationships.
Those rituals regularly
adapt in order to maintain,
excuse me, in order to
maintain the meaning
that has been given to life.
Child sacrifice, for example,
is a ritual embedded in
the Christian narrative.
Although Jesus was an adult,
he is always identified
as the son crucified.
Child sacrifice is also embedded
in North American culture.
We first saw it on the auction
blocks of American slavery.
Slavocracy thought it
not morally reprehensible
to commodify black families
and sell off the parts.
So important is child
sacrifice to the U.S.,
it has adapted and evolved into separating
immigrant children from their parents.
The destruction of family in the land
that religiously stresses family values
reveals the violence of religion.
The ideology of making American safe again
is no different from
the scapegoating rituals
that were developed to expatiate sin.
In this case, the scapegoating rituals
are against the bodies
believed to have contaminated the nation.
Violence is embedded in and
definitive of American life.
The Atlantic world
constituted the Americas
as a European diaspora, a
land of contact and conquest.
Telling the story of the
Americas as the land of contact
emphasizes the relational negotiations
between Native Americans,
Europeans, and African peoples.
Telling the story of the
Americas as the land of conquest
emphasizes colonialism,
which ignores the differing
social histories of the three peoples
and declares the discovery
of the New World.
This past Monday was the national holiday
with two identifications.
Indigenous People's Day, contact,
and Columbus Day, conquest.
The developmental history of the Americas
cannot be told absent
religion and violence.
And due to the fact that
the ideologies of contact
and conquest were guided
by religion and violence,
interpreting the formation of the Americas
ought not to be discussed
in the absence of the bodies
that interacted and were genocide.
U.S. culture was established
on the principle of religious freedom,
framed by violence, and
sustained by terrorism.
Christianity supports this by identifying
the body as the locus of moral ambiguity
and the source of the moral problem.
A favorite Christian text that reflects
the negativity attributed
to the body reads,
"While we are at home in the body,
"we are absent from the Lord."
We are confident, I
say, and willing rather,
to be absent from the body
to be present with the Lord.
This inclination to escape the body
and to resist embodiment
is deeply embedded in the
Western Christian psyche.
Our embrace of Pauline and patristic
interpretations of the body
have many crying out, oh
wretched man that I am,
who will rescue me from
this body of death?
This body of death is regularly colorized,
with names like yellow
fever and black plague.
Revisiting or revising and excerpt from
the children's church school song,
red and yellow, black and white,
all are not precious in America's sight.
Black is perceived to
be corrupt, bad, evil.
Black bodies, therefore,
are often perceived
to be the problem in America.
This locates black bodies
on the margins of humanity
and psychosocially ascribes black people
to be aliens with an assigned
task of becoming human.
Unfortunately, the
pathway to full humanity
for Africans in America is fraught.
If Americans are only able to see
white bodies as goodness
and whiteness as virtuous,
then America will always show its love
by hating the rainbow
and elevating whiteness
over our collective best interests.
Once bodies were moralized and colorized
with white and black
attributions of good and evil,
the problem of being surrounded by evil,
feeling the constant pressure of evil,
being seduced by the
sensual power of evil,
and the necessity of triumphing over evil
were attributed to the
black bodies of Africans.
The violence within the
spaces of contact and conquest
are interpreted as righteous indignation,
the preservation of the soul,
and a holy war of light against darkness.
- Good morning.
So in an attempt to
ground our conversation
in the concrete realities of history,
I'd like to reflect briefly
on Georgetown University's sale
of 272 enslaved people in 1838.
Faced with rising debt from
capital improvements to campus
and also the declining
profitability of their farms
in Maryland and Pennsylvania,
Jesuit leaders made the decision
to rid themselves of the
burden of slave-owning.
In the years leading up to the sale,
several proposals were considered.
One of the leading proponents of the sale
was then-professor Reverend James Ryder.
In an 1835 address to the Roman Catholic
congregation in Richmond Virginia,
Ryder laid out his pro-slavery rationale.
Noting the historical persecution
of Catholic communities at the hands of
"imperial tyrants" such as the British,
Ryder maintains, "the
fidelity of Catholics
"to the law of the land
cannot be misunderstood."
Though both Catholic clergy and laity
had been subjected to every species
of oppression and injustice,
Ryder assured his
audience that he affirmed
the resolution that the Society of Jesus
would not interfere in matters
between masters and their
slaves in the Southern states.
Such interference would be deemed wicked,
as it could undermine the peace
of the flourishing nation.
"Supporters of abolition," remarked Ryder,
"were responsible for
the religious fanaticism
"that had seduced rebel leaders
"like Nat Turner to rebellion and murder
"in nearby Southampton,
Virginia just four years ago."
In 1836, one year after
Reverend Ryder's address,
the issue remained up for debate.
In a memorandum recorded by
Father Stephen Dubuisson,
the pros and cons of the sale were listed.
The burden of ownership
posed a major obstacle
for the spirituality of
the Catholic fathers.
The maintenance of farms
and enslaved laborers
threatened not only to
distract Jesuit clergy
from the spiritual duties of
prayer, study, and meditation,
but Jesuit behavior was also corrupted
by imitations of planters
and businesspersons rather than Christ.
Additionally, because of the
presumed moral delinquency
and cultural backwardness of the enslaved,
Jesuit priests were obligated to utilize
violence to maintain social order.
Though not referenced explicitly,
Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion in Southampton
seemingly still lingered
in the imaginations
of the slave-owning community.
Dubuisson notes that "liberty would be
"a great disservice to the enslaved
"with respects to things
temporal and spiritual."
As he records, "Masters will be obligated
"to take severe measures,
often with weapons in hands,
"to prevent or suppress
uprisings among the blacks.
"We sense how odious will
be all things Our Father
"will have to do to
cooperate with such measures.
"Already it is moral burden enough
"for them to be forced to sometimes
"punish defiant slaves with the whip."
The memo's primary justification
for the use of violence
echoes the rationale used by Ryder.
That is, routine violence was necessary
to quell potential violence
of the enslaved black population.
The fear of potential retributive violence
by the enslaved community
is the catalyst for the routine violence
that is experienced in many plantations.
In fact, Ryder maintains in his address
that the institution of slavery
and its attending anti-black violence
was necessary for the stability
of the fledgling nation's institutions.
As Carol Anderson has argued
in her bestselling book White Rage,
anti-black violence has
long been excused in America
because white violence,
or white rage, to use Anderson's terms,
it is believed, counteracts exaggerated
or anticipated episodes of violence
enacted by African-Americans.
Ryder's assertion also underscores
the ubiquity of racialized
anti-black violence
and its role in the institutional
life of the early republic.
Future Harvard University president
Reverend Benjamin Wadsworth
warned his congregation in Boston
against denying servants
life's basic necessities,
such as food, clothing,
shelter, and medical attention,
but also instructed them
to beat their slaves
when they would not be
corrected with words.
Although anti-black violence was routine
on college campuses
throughout the early republic,
it's the American church that provides
the moral and theological justifications
for such ungodly actions.
Consequently, the moral
problem of blackness in America
is religious in its orientation.
- So thank you for having me
as a part of this conversation.
Thank you to Terrence for inviting me.
I have a slightly different point of entry
as a scholar that focuses on culture,
but I'm hopeful that some of my comments
will wed nicely with
what's already been said.
As Terrence indicated,
I co-edited a book called
The Psychic Hold of Slavery
that is set in the late 20th Century,
and the basic premise of the
volume answers two questions,
why can't black people get over slavery?
And why would they want to?
And so, the book enters
into the late 20th Century
following a quote by Henry Louis Gates
where he says it's the best of times
and it's the worst of
times for black people.
You have the first black president
in the history of the United States
and you also have the highest levels
of black men incarcerated in the world.
And so what does this inequality mean
for how we might understand
black life in the late 20th Century?
And I think that this weds nicely
with what Terrence said
in his opening comments,
because one of the conclusions
we arrive at in the volume
is that in the late 20th Century,
as a result of neoliberalism,
and as a result of the Civil Rights Acts,
there's this emphasis
on black exceptionalism
as the marker of black ascension
and the overcoming of disparity,
whereas, in thinking of that model,
you don't really consider
how the mass majority
of not just black people
but Americans more broadly
are not able to access
what we might understand
as the American possibility.
And so we think some about what it means
to herald Obama as the fulfillment
of civil rights longing
in a context where you
have so many black people
who are persistently and
consistently disenfranchised.
And so I wanted to give
that little preface
as an entry point to the
more formal part of my paper,
which is drawing from the new work
that I'm working on currently,
on Lorraine Hansberry.
And the talk is taken from a chapter about
a screenplay that she wrote
right after Raisin in the Sun.
Hansberry is most well-known for her play
A Raisin in the Sun,
which was the first play
by a black woman staged on Broadway.
And so right after Raisin
she wrote a screenplay
about slavery called The Drinking Gourd.
And so that is what the talk is about.
Soon after the premier and
fanfare of A Raisin in the Sun,
NBC Studios commissioned Hansberry
to write a play in honor of the
centennial of the Civil War.
The screenplay, titled The Drinking Gourd,
tackled a question that she'd
pondered since childhood,
who and what a master might be.
In an introduction to the play,
Hansberry is quoted describing
a trip she took to Tennessee
to meet her maternal
grandmother for the first time.
She wrote, "My mother first took us south
"to visit her Tennessee birthplace
"one summer when I was seven or eight.
"I woke up on the backseat of the car
"while we were still driving through
"some place called Kentucky,
"and my mother was pointing
out to the beautiful hills
"and telling my brothers about how
"her father had run away
"and hidden from his
master in those very hills
"when he was a little boy.
"She said that her mother had wandered
"among the wooded slopes in the moonlight
"and left food for him in secret places.
"They were very beautiful hills,
"and I looked out at them for
miles and miles after that,
"wondering who and what
a master might be."
Hansberry's early experiences helped her
to conceptualize what it meant to be
a black person outside of
the structure of Jim Crow.
Blackness did not present
an impermeable barrier
to opportunity or possibility,
nor did it function to erode value
or carry a historical
stigma in Hansberry's mind.
Instead of seeking to distance herself
from the legacy of slavery,
which was the predominant
impulse in the mid 20th Century,
and we really don't get artists
taking up in mass the issue of slavery
until after the film Roots in the 1970s,
so in 1960s, when Hansberry's
writing this play,
most artists are trying
to distance themselves
from the history and legacy of slavery
as a way to mark blackness
as something that's not denigrated.
But instead of doing that,
seeking to distance herself
from the legacy of slavery
and the Gone with the Wind degradation
that typified popular
understanding of the institution,
she challenged renderings of blackness
in the mid 20th Century
through a sober depiction
of the slave past.
Her screenplay shows that
those that exercise power
to further systems of oppression
become dehumanized in the process.
And those systems,
even with the stubborn
efforts of power holders,
will not necessarily last.
Signaling the impermanence
of oppressive structures,
Hansberry sets The Drinking Gourd
on the cusp of the Civil War,
at a turning point in history.
The Drinking Gourd tells the story
of two overlapping families
split apart by slavery.
One family, the Sweets, finds
itself facing the challenge
to modernize their plantation
to maximize profits.
The other family, composed
of the Sweets' enslaved,
uses every resource at its disposal
to challenge the institution of slavery
through the daily maintenance
of the plantation.
As is the case with most depictions
of the brutal institution,
both families pay a steep
price for their investment.
Hansberry's writing of the drama
also speaks to the
shifting culture of America
in the mid 20th Century,
or what Manny Marable calls
the Second Reconstruction.
The writing of the play
coincides historically
with the movement from a
world of separate but equal
to the painful battles for civil inclusion
through bloodstained lunch counters,
sidewalks, and churches.
In as much as the Civil Rights Movement
functions as a return to
the unfinished business of emancipation,
Hansberry's play speaks
to her current time
as it does to the past.
In a journal entry, she
noted about the time,
"Some scholars have
estimated that in the three
"centuries that the European
slave trade flourished,
"the African continent lost
100 million of its people.
"No one to my knowledge
has ever paid reparations
"to the descendants of black men.
"Indeed, they have not yet
really acknowledged the fact
"of the crime against humanity
"which was the conquest of Africa.
"But then, history has not
yet been concluded, has it?"
With a name that anticipates
the setting of Toni Morrison's Beloved,
the Sweet Plantation emphasizes
the brutality of slavery through
the relative benevolence
of its owner, Hiram Sweet.
Set on the brink of the Civil War,
the beleaguered patriarch
questions the futurity of slavery
at a dinner with his wife,
sons, and family physician.
While his son Everett and
physician Macon Bullet think
the family needs to modernize
the plantation, Hiram wonders,
"Then what happens,
Macon, if it's all a lie?
"The way we live, the
things we tell ourselves."
Hiram's words echo Hansberry's character
Asagai in A Raisin in the Sun.
Both men suggest that even
in the midst of thinking
one is on the right side of history,
the contexts that shape
our choices may shift,
challenging our deepest commitments
and rendering one disposable.
The Drinking Gourd presents the potential
for a world turned upside down
through the voice of a patriarch
that has lost the power to
govern his family plantation.
And certainly our
current historical moment
might give us some insight to think about
what does it mean when power structures
are being threatened and might feel like
they're being rendered disposable
in our current historical context,
and how that was a similar feeling
that animated the Civil War moment.
Although challenging some of
the institution's governing logics,
The Drinking Gourd does not dodge
the irredeemable suffering of slavery,
but it also does not locate the pain
singularly with the
bodies of the enslaved.
Hannibal explains, "Whatever
you hear your master
"say about slavery, you
always believe the opposite.
"There ain't nothing
hurt slave master so much
"as when his property walk about from him.
"Guess that's the worst blow of all.
"Way I look at it, every slave
oughta run off fore he die."
The play's challenge to
what it means to be a master
replaces the site of return
and therefore remains
the trajectory of repair.
As an artist-activist,
Hansberry set ideas
and concepts in motion.
She animated freedom.
The space she creates onstage
serves as a site of return,
but one that does not
presume the stability
or relatability of what we think of
when we say we know slavery.
Instead, she seeks to apprehend
how changing locations
upset social arrangements,
even ones as calcified
as those at the heart
of such a peculiar institution.
Hansberry's work in
radical leftist circles
positioned her to frame The Drinking Gourd
as a challenge to the
understanding of slavery
as black people's traumatic legacy
rather than the trauma that
organized the Western World.
Thank you.
- So I'm wondering, Soyica,
if you could say more
in terms of, I love this
line, so the trauma,
slavery as a trauma to the Western World.
In part because I've been thinking through
a new course I'm teaching on
racial liberalism and law,
and what's been striking is that,
you know, often we think of, sort of,
the category of white
and whiteness and slavery
as these categories that
emerge, say, in the moral realm,
a realm that's not necessarily political.
But what Professor Haney-Lopez
in the book White By Law argues is that,
well, if we look at
certain cases in the U.S.,
we'll see that the formation
of race was solidified,
you know, in the 18th and 19th Centuries
in part by major cases in which
African-Americans who
were phenotypically white
were trying to show,
look, I have the right
to convey my slaves to my descendants,
and the judge was like, no,
you may have fooled people,
but based on, you know,
what you haven't done
in terms of your honor,
in terms of voting, were
based on characteristics
that are not necessarily Anglo-Saxon,
I'm gonna demonstrate
that you are not white.
And so there's this
really intentional effort
to try to use science and performance
as a way to dictate who isn't
in this category of whiteness.
And so I wanna, can you
say more then about,
how does then this idea that trauma,
what does that say in terms of
the categories that we hold on to,
particularly around
whiteness and blackness?
'Cause we often say, well
these categories are too,
they're too rigid, they
don't really reflect
our sort of nuanced, postmodern sorta eye,
but it sounds like you're
actually sort of pushing that
and wanting to say no, there
are some fundamental categories
that we have yet to really sorta tease out
that reflect the kind of
violence you were hinting at.
- So I think one of the
things that really interesting
about the legal history
that you just cited
is, you see the courts
in the 19th Century,
U.S. courts, really wrangling
with the contradiction
around a fundamental
American right to inherit,
and the property rights that
adhere by way of citizenship,
and the investment in
disenfranchising black people
as inheritors and maintaining
racial hierarchies.
So the courts have this tension,
and I've read about it some in terms of
white people who are
trying to bequeath things
to their black children,
because the courts wanna
maintain black people as property
and therefore ineligible
to property rights
at the same time that they wanna maintain
white people's ability to bequeath,
which are their property rights.
And so the courts come down
in different ways around this question,
but it's a key legal battle
because they wanna maintain
that being American
fundamentally means
your right to property.
And so, I say that to say
that I think this is one of the ways
that we can see race
both being concretized
but then also showing
some of its complexities.
When we think about how the family,
and so this is often taught in terms
of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings,
as the most famous case of this,
but thinking about how family
and how we conceptualize family
becomes complicated via
the institution of slavery.
I think one of the ways that we might
understand this informing
what we see as blackness
is once again going
back to the examples of
how blackness is being rethought
in the late 20th Century.
And so we talk some, in the
Psychic Hold of Slavery,
about Pharrell Williams' proclamation
that he's the "new black."
He has an interview with Oprah Winfrey
and he talks about he's,
you know, a new black
that's not related to
slavery or degradation,
he's related to thriving and wealth.
And one of the things that's really
fascinating about that assertion
is how that coheres in his individualism,
which is, you know,
a primary American mode of identification,
but might not translate if he's
facing violence by the state.
And so, even with all his
wealth and recognition,
there's ways in which his blackness,
as it's being perceived by his phenotype,
limits that access.
And so, that double-edgedness comes up
both in popular culture as
well as in legal history.
- So Alphonso, can you
say more about this idea
of the church as sort of the foundation
for creating the moral
problem of blackness,
and how is the church particularly
sort of performing violence
against black bodies,
how's that performance sort of reinforcing
this link between, say, law and religion,
in ways that I don't think
people have really thought about?
Often we see law in one sphere
and the church in another,
but you're showing how the
church is, in many ways,
sort of reinforcing, through performance,
very sort of bad politics
and bad legal decisions.
- Sure.
So, primarily I think
about this relationship
referencing Cory Walker's
work, A Noble Fight.
In this text, in his
definition of democracy,
one of the things that he asserts is that,
in light of the historical experience
of African-Americans with
democracy in this country,
that democracy has to be redefined.
It has to be redefined and it
must, in this redefinition,
include experiences of
violence and intimidation.
Because we have not seen the formation
of a successful democratic state
in the absence of such foundations.
I would say that the same is true
in the case of the American church.
Thinking about this history
from the perspective
of black people in America,
I think the church has to be redefined
as a violent institution,
and that violence
cannot be sort of understood as accidental
or incidental to the church's success
and to the church's fundamental
identity in America.
And so I think that, on the one hand,
utilizing this similar kind of example
that's been applied in
the sphere of politics,
I think that that same idea
is translatable to the field of religion.
Additionally, though, as we
sort of think about performance,
one of the ways in which
the problem of violence,
and anti-black violence in particular,
remains fundamentally a
religious or theological issue,
is because many of the nation's leaders
are having these ideas reinforced
in theology courses on college campuses.
And following their graduation,
they matriculate into
various positions of power
within the republic, right?
Many in state power, many
at the federal level.
And so, these ideas now
get put into practice
through some of these early
college university presidents and leaders,
many of them being primarily
religious leaders, right?
Religious ministers and clergy.
And so, they're being
informed by a particular
view of theology that then gets
sorta disseminated throughout
the remainder of the republic.
- So Professor Butler, say more about,
in terms of how then is
this sort of characterizing
state violence against black bodies
as a kind of religious slash moral act,
what does this say about the practitioners
of American Christianity
or religion in general,
in terms of, what is it doing in terms of,
what kind of citizens slash moral actors
are these acts creating?
And how do you see, in particular,
African-Americans sort of,
how should they respond given that
so many are either Christian and/or
practice African indigenous traditions?
- This is just so complex,
and we want to uncomplicated it, and yet,
we don't want to be
reductionistic in the conversation
or how we approach these things.
Excuse me.
Because, as I see it, the
U.S. is grounded in violence
and it was founded on this whole
question of freedom and unfreedom,
so you have some that
are striving for freedom,
those that are striving to maintain
that there will be a group
that would never be free,
you have this being moved through
an understanding, an ideology,
that the nation is a Christian nation.
And so, it becomes complicated because of
this separation of church and state idea,
this idea that laws are developed
to ensure that there will
be an unfree population.
There is, I mean, as we've been talking
and thinking about these things,
I've recalled Leon Higginbotham's
book Matter of Color,
where he documents, looking
at state legislature,
the number of laws that were put in place
to ensure that black bodies would always
remain at the bottom, remain
identified as property.
And so, in order to keep
this property as property,
violence has been one of
those modes of operation
to ensure that the
system remains as it is.
I mean, if you just
think in terms of how we
practice child rearing, it's
often through punishment.
And you maintain the household
structure through punishment.
And so, the household
then gets extended to
this plantation idea as a household
and a household of faith that gets
maintained through punishment.
And if you sin you get punished.
And so you have these black bodies
that are constantly being punished,
and then you have the idea of
projecting your negativity
out into the world.
And once you can project
it out into the world,
you can control it and you can
cleanse your own self, and
so all of the negativity
gets colorized, gets
attributed to black folk,
and now you can control it and punish it.
And all of this is religious,
because religion is all about how
you orient yourself to the world,
how you orient your activities
and your relationships,
and how you give meaning
and attribute meaning
to the life that you live.
So I hope I'm getting
at what you're asking.
- That actually leads to the next point
in terms of, how would
you all then characterize
President Obama's sort of eulogy
at Mother Emmanuel in 2015?
'Cause on the one hand,
as I was listening to it,
I thought it was a
remarkable kind of moment,
I think, for the nation
sort of to galvanize itself,
you know, around this
idea of a violent act
against nine innocent people,
but also I thought, it's also
kinda tricky in part because
it, I think, reduced or
eliminated conversations
around Christianity's ongoing role
in its sort of terror
against black bodies.
So how does Obama's sort of representation
as the president of the U.S.
coming in as a sort of
priest to console the nation
and to console African-Americans,
and yet, at the same time,
consoling within the context
of a very brutal history?
So how do we come to terms with
what appears to be a very contentious
or a very tentious kind of doubleness?
- I looked at that less as
President Obama's
functioning as the priest
and more at the moment as
this collective response,
this cry of grief.
Within the African-American community,
we often identify ourselves as being
the most religious and
forgiving people in the world.
And so that moment, I
saw, as a classic moment
of black folks acting in a
forgiveness in order to survive.
Forgive to survive.
Because that's one of the
things that was stated,
that, you know, we
forgive you, Dylan Roof.
Well, if you look at the
dynamic of forgiveness,
it is a relational process.
It requires that one confess
and request reconciliation,
and then the other saying, okay,
I will engage in a
reconciling process with you.
So forgiveness is relational.
So when you heard folks
declaring that day,
"we forgive you," that was really
a forgiveness in order to survive.
And it comes out of, if I act on this
rage that I'm feeling, I will kill you.
And if I kill you, I make
myself even more vulnerable
because I'm in a position
of not being in power.
And so what we saw that day,
through that experience,
was forgive to survive,
and it wasn't really
forgiveness as an outcome.
- But does that act of forgiveness
also reflect the ongoing
terror in terms of
the threat of violence
against black bodies
foreclosing the opportunity
to actually exert
what one might call human reaction
to respond to violence against them?
- It's not foreclosing
because it is a process of
I'm surviving.
And so it becomes this creative moment
where I am releasing the
rage that I have against you,
and you no longer have the
power over me in that sense.
But that's still not
saying you're forgiven.
I'm just saying I'm releasing the power
that you've exerted over
me, and I am claiming life.
- I agree with everything that's been said
and the only thing that I woudl add
is two things resonate in
addition from your comment.
One is thinking about Obama
as representation of the state
and how his blackness becomes mobilized
to have us in some ways not
think about that centrally
as him giving a presidential eulogy.
Like what does it mean for him to be
the representative of the
state and in some ways
extending what we understand
as state violence?
But then the other piece is,
it also makes me think about
the site of the black church
as a site of political organizing
and the 16th Street church bombing
as that church being bombed because it was
where activists were going to meet.
And so it was intentional
that children be killed
and not by accident that these young girls
were killed on that day.
And so what does it mean
to target the black church
in that Civil Rights Movement moment
as a site of organizing
and the terror being taken to
what is supposed to be an
esteemed part of our culture
that is off guards from violence.
Which is really thinking about it
historically based on
what we've just said.
And so the last piece I'll say to that
in going to creativity
is we know that after the
16th Street church bombing,
Nina Simone wrote one of her most
famous songs, Mississippi Goddamn,
and she says she writes
it to channel her rage,
because her first
instinct is to find a gun,
and then her husband was
like, what are you doing?
And so then she decides
to write a song instead.
And so, it's interesting to think about
how artists have responded,
and that art is one of the only spaces
where black people are able
to express rage in the public context,
because in political contexts
it's almost forbidden
for them to appear angry.
And we see this in people's responses
to Obama and his temperament,
thinking about why he is
fit to be presidential
is precisely because he's unflappable.
And so, thinking about
the political context
for expressing rage I
think is very interesting
in relationship to the eulogy.
- Just to add briefly,
I also think that, to go
back to Dr. Butler's point,
I don't think you categorized it this way,
and correct me if I'm
miscategorizing your statement,
but an almost rush to
forgiveness could be superficial.
I think, in many ways,
the reason, and I agree,
I think that it's motivated
by a need to survive,
I also think it's
informed by a much broader
historical context that
I referenced earlier
when we talk about white rage
acting in anticipation of
black retributive violence,
the expectation of violence.
And so I think that that has shaped,
black religious people in particular,
has shaped their response
to episodes of violence.
In terms of violent reactions,
either non-actions or
finding other avenues
to channel violence,
artistic being one of the,
one of the sort of primary
modes of expression.
Thinking specifically about
what happened in Charleston,
and tying to Soyica's
point about performance,
I'm reminded of the Childish Gambino song,
or the video rather, This Is America.
So at the beginning of,
so the song is rather upbeat, you know,
aesthetically, in terms of
its sort of aural qualities,
but the visual representation
is several scenes of meaningless violence,
meaningless gun violence, right,
that the protagonist portrays against
black actors, black
communities, black people.
In one scene, there's a
choir, there's a gospel choir
dressed in traditional church robes,
and they're singing a
positive song about uplift,
this is a moment where, in the song,
the tenor and the tempo has
shifted and it's upbeat,
and it switches back to the
regular tempo of the song
when, you know, the
artist turns, using a gun,
and just mows down the entire choir.
And then he goes on to just
perform the next verse.
And in the backdrop is repeated,
this is America, this is
America, this is America.
And so we see senseless violence
being acted out against black bodies.
But again, you know, where
is the opportunity to have,
in a political context or
even a religious context,
genuine dialogue about this phenomenon.
So again, I think, yeah, in many ways
arts has become the kind of regulated
accepted space, to kinda
echo Soyica's point,
for expressions of black rage.
And one of the only acceptable spaces.
- You named 16th Street Baptist Church,
but I would also say
that the Emmanuel, AME,
was selected for the same reason,
because of that deeper history
of the leaders that came
out of that church community
during the Antebellum Period to revolt.
So even in the contemporary,
they're still targeting
because of a history of uprising.
- And so, I wonder then, I mean,
do our religious spaces
really have the capacity now
to handle this contemporary
moment of Black Lives Matter,
sort of refocus attention on
violence against black bodies,
because I think Soyica's right, I mean,
one way that even Dubois
dealt with his rage
was to write short stories.
And fiction as a way,
because he knew there
was a constant threat.
And I find that, even in
terms of my own personal life,
you have to lie to yourself,
because every moment you
run into a police officer
or someone, an authority
in terms of an officer,
there is this onslaught of fear, right?
And there's this constant concern,
even how you raise your kids, in terms of,
you wanna make sure they're safe.
And these are sort of, I think,
narratives that most people
have no idea you're dealing with.
But it's like, there's this constant fear,
this constant, it's like Dubois says,
you actually, you feel the rage.
The question of, how
does it feel, you know,
you see someone, and the question is,
they don't care about your name,
they wanna know, how does
it feel to be a problem?
And so, I'm wondering,
my sense is that it's yes and no,
but my fear is that
traditional black church spaces
that were amazing all throughout history
in terms of providing what Higginbotham
calls a counter-public space,
place for understanding
politics, religion, civic life,
I wonder, in light of the role
of the politics of respectability,
do those places still have
not only the space but the
kind of spiritual capacity
to deal with the kind of psychic terror
that African-Americans are living in?
Because we're constantly trying to
prevent additional violence,
so we have to put on
this good face, right?
So at what point to people actually
have a breakdown, are allowed
to have an emotional breakdown
to deal with this threat
that's always present?
- The emotional breakdown has been a part
of the life of the
church, the black church.
I wouldn't characterize it
as an emotional breakdown
as much as being permitted to actually
express yourself emotionally,
where it is not criticize
but it is understood,
where you are actually cared for.
The other panel, there was a conversation
or at least a moment
where they talked about
what's going on in Brazil and Candomble,
and when I visited there and watched folks
being mounted by the spirit,
it became very obvious that
that was one of the ways
of really dealing with
the tremendous violence
that was experienced under
that system of slavery.
And so, we have the same experience here
of being under constant threat
of death, of being tortured,
our bodies being traumatized,
and where can we go to release that?
It has been within religious spaces.
Because if we release it in public
it's always interpreted
to be something else
and it's reacted against.
And so, it's been in
those religious spaces
that we have actually found our humanity.
I mean that has been one of the major
creative moves of the black church,
to help black folk to claim human dignity,
to claim our humanity.
And it's through that
interaction, those relationships,
because we're told we're not human,
we're told we're three-fifths human,
we're told we don't matter,
we're told we are animals with tails,
and so we get together,
and it's in those spaces
that we say no we are not what you say,
we are truly human beings
created in the divine image.
- Just to sorta piggyback
on Dr. Butler's point,
I'm reminded of the scene from Beloved
where Baby Suggs leads the
community to the clearing,
the clearing being a brush harbor
or an outdoor ritual space
that typically housed
African and African-American
worship in the U.S.
And when she leads the community there,
she delivers a sermon, and in the sermon
she essentially reminds
them that they have,
so she tells them to physically touch
and to look at their own bodies, right?
Touch your hands.
And then she reminds
them to love their hands.
And so, for me at least, this is
the origins and foundations
of black spirituality.
Irrespective of its
theological orientation,
I think it's primarily oriented,
whether it takes Christian or Muslim
or other religious forms,
traditionally African-derived religions,
I think the primary role
is the revaluation of black humanity,
but I think that that has to also,
in order for that to happen,
the body specifically
has to be reevaluated.
So the body is not a commodity, right?
It is a vehicle of God's image, right?
This vehicle that can
communicate love, et cetera,
and express that in the world.
- And I wonder if, because
the black church in particular
has been this sort of intermediary
between the state and black communities,
again, given that role,
does that role then lessen
the richness of their critique?
In other words, 'cause I'm
finding that people like J. Cole,
and even Cardi B, someone
like, you know, Kendrick Lamar,
they're providing a kind of insight into
the pain that I'm experiencing
or the pain that I hear
my students experience
in ways that I don't
necessarily hear on Sunday,
in part because the preacher is always
trying to, you know,
make sure these forces
don't get out of control.
So in doing so, you lose
a certain kind of passion.
Whereas the truth-telling that
I'm hearing fro the artists
is actually quite remarkable.
- So I think that the church has
the capacity to have this
type of truth-telling,
and certainly, historically,
there have been
different ebbs and flows of that.
I do think that it's
interesting to think of
the church both as, you
know, local gatherings
and then as an institution,
and what we might think about
larger questions about institutionality.
As many of you probably know,
the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee
was an organization, a
civil rights organization
that was founded with a particular
interest in not lasting forever.
So they were not building an
institution to last forever,
they were building an institution to solve
a particular problem in the South
during the Civil Rights Movement period.
And so it's interesting for me at least
to think about, what does it mean to be
invested in institutions lasting forever?
Like a particular church.
When do institutions, perhaps,
they need to be invigorated
or reformed or rethought,
and when are they still
serving their purpose?
But, you know, one of the
challenges for the black church,
in my opinion, is the
ongoing history in America
of patriarchy and how that can create
exclusion around questions
of respectability.
And so the artists that
you just named are able to
provide different
representations of blackness
that also then allow
different modes of expression.
And I do think that the church
has to wrestle with its
history with patriarchy
and it has to wrestle with
its history with homophobia
and what that might mean for
our truly liberatory politics,
and also, what black
people's own investment is
in heteronormativity given
the ways that the black family
has been used to police
and denigrate black people
from slavery to the present.
So that's not to say that, you know,
traditional families or nuclear families
are a problem in and of themselves,
but if we think sociologically
in relationship to history,
we can deduce that sometimes
they are being deployed
as a mechanism to police black people
in ways that might not be fruitful
if we're thinking communally.
- So I'd like to open up
for conversation to you, the audience.
So we have a question here.
- [Audience Member] This was fantastic.
I really appreciate it, thank you.
I have kind of a theological question
and it may be based on
some incorrect premises.
So, it strikes me, as a non-Christian,
Andrew March, Balfour Center
at Harvard's Kennedy School,
so it strikes me as both a non-Christian
and also as a non- sort of
expert in Christian theology,
that Christianity is sort of based on two
potentially paradoxical premises
with regard to violence.
One, that violence is the
normal state of affairs,
that the world is built on violence,
the world is built on suffering,
the foundation of Christianity
is based on the acknowledgement
of violence against the body,
about sort of the
existence of unjust rule,
the existence of tyranny.
So the normal state of affairs
in the world, factually, is violence.
From the normative standpoint, however,
violence is always the exception.
So there's no, I don't wanna say no,
but so the idea of using violence
in terms of exercising moral agency,
exercising religious
agency, is always the other,
it's always what Caesar does,
it's always what the world does,
but it is not the primary
way of expressing meaning.
There's a possible analogy here
to the liberal social contract,
which begins with an observation
that the world is violent,
the world is a jungle,
the world is a state of nature,
and seeks to address that,
but sort of has a myth
about its own creation
in the world of a nonviolent order
when, as you said, it's
founded on violence.
So perhaps the simplifying
or sort of ignorant premise
is that the way that
Christianity primarily
deals with violence in a normative sense
is as a way of managing or giving meaning
to violence being done to oneself,
violence being done to, you know,
so the existence of suffering.
So obviously the black
tradition in America
is perhaps the most quintessentially
Christian experience
that you could imagine.
But it leaves, and here's the impression,
which is that when violence is an option
for meaningful political action,
for meaningful sort of
realization in the world,
it strikes us as this trope
that African-Americans
are drawn outside of
Christianity for that.
Whether it is sort of
Marxist militancy or Islam
or something else like this.
And as a non-nonviolent person,
I don't have this sort of
fetishism around nonviolence,
I was wondering if there was any sort of,
anything to be added to that?
So yesterday, actually, on
the way to the conference,
I made a pilgrimage to Harper's Ferry,
and obviously you have
this sort of multiracial
exercise of Christian violence,
but you get this sense of
John Brown as the theologian,
John Brown as the one reaching
into the Old Testament.
I don't know if that's true.
So anyway, I'm interested
in a sort of fuller picture
of the ways in which
legitimate use of violence
as a means of establishing agency,
as a means of exercising
sort of justice in the world,
what is the counter-public
from the theological standpoint
within the black church
and within black theology?
- I mean, I'm certainly not equipped
to answer from a theological standpoint,
but from a historical standpoint
I do think that we have lots of figures
who are managing the investment,
at least during the Civil
Rights Movement period,
of being the moral high ground
in practicing nonviolence
as a strategy that was being
used against organizations,
knowing that there was organizations
that were not invested in nonviolence.
So, for example, Martin
Luther King and Malcolm X,
Hansberry was also compared to Malcolm X
as sort of this boogeymen who,
you know, people were afraid of,
but certainly Hansberry and King relied on
Malcolm X as a threat to then make them
in a position to be able to
negotiate with the state.
And so, the violent option was one
that actually enabled
certain modes of negotiation.
But I think post Civil
Rights Movement period
it's interesting because
violence against black bodies
does not create moral outrage anymore,
really, post Rodney King,
so then what is the political maneuver
given this new visual context?
- I guess my answer would sorta depend on
how you, which historical
period you refer to
when you ask this, because
I think theologically,
I think the black church
has a shift, theologically.
I'd love to be able to pinpoint
when this shift occurs, but I would,
so I would just say, you know,
prior to the Civil War, pre
Civil War black religion,
I think, in many ways, espouses,
maybe not espouses, sanctions
violent retribution,
and then also provides a religious
rationale for that violence.
So, as early as, you
know, 1785, John Marrant,
who's the first ordained
black minister in the U.S.,
in his autobiography,
so, as you might imagine,
as many of you probably can imagine,
the Exodus narrative, the Old
Testament story of the Exodus
functioned centrally in
the religious imagination
of black Americans, right?
It's a story about the
deliverance of enslaved people
through the agency or
assistance of a divine being.
So the appeal of this
narrative is obvious.
So in Marrant's narrative,
he has an allegory
that borrows many of the structural themes
from the Exodus story.
So, just to highlight a couple,
at the beginning of the Exodus narrative,
the context is that it's
the children of Israel
who are suffering, right?
So the decree has been
issued from the Pharaoh,
and the children of Israel,
the male infants in Israel,
are being slaughtered.
Fast-forward to the end of the narrative
and it's the firstborn in
the household of Egypt.
That's the 10th and final plague,
that's the plague that
finally convinces Pharaoh
to release the Israelites from bondage.
So we see a reversal of fortunes, right?
At the beginning of the narrative,
Israel's children are dying.
It's the enslaved that are
suffering and perishing.
By the end of the narrative,
it's the Egyptians who suffer,
and they suffer in many of the same ways,
arguably the same kind of ways.
It's the loss of one's progeny,
the loss of one's offspring,
the loss of one's future.
Marrant utilizes these
same structures, right?
So he depicts a narrative
at a brush harbor meeting,
a midnight meeting held in secret,
Lowcountry of South
Carolina, in the wilderness,
and these enslaved,
he's leading a group
of enslaved worshipers,
and the plantation
mistress has her husband
to descend upon them while
they're engaged in worship,
with two of the overseers.
The community scatters,
many of them are caught,
tied, and they're beat savagely, right?
And then two months
following this encounter,
Marrant says that it pleased the Lord
to visit this slave
mistress with an illness
that no doctor could cure.
And she passes away, she dies.
Now, given the history
of poison in that area,
given the history of Marrant's
own personal narrative,
he's traveled and has had
extensive initiatory
rituals in the wilderness
with both African-American and
Native American communities,
my suspicion is that this is
a literary representation of violence.
And it's catalyzed or signaled
by the appearance of the symbol of blood.
Initially it's the blood of the enslaved
that covers the ground,
and at the end of it, it's
the slave mistresses' sort of
idealized, or not actual
blood, but in death.
Well this same type of narrative structure
can be identified in a host of
what we might call the slave narrative,
I think freedom narratives is perhaps
a better term to categorize these stories,
but in a host of these early
African-American autobiographical texts.
So Nat Turner's confession also has
the appearance of blood that's followed by
his own actions of retribution.
Frederick Douglass has a scene
where he modifies this trope, right?
And so, I say that to say, I think,
in a particular moment,
in the early history
of the African-American church,
that violence was certainly
a legitimate response
to violence perpetrated against,
I mean even Frederick
Douglass, as late as,
you know, interprets the Civil War
as the manifestation
of Nat Turner's vision.
This is the battle, the
engagement of spirits,
black and white spirits,
that Turner envisioned.
And so, the idea that it is through blood
that transformation or revolution,
the shedding of blood, this
same idea of sacrifice,
I think that, prior to the Civil War,
prior to emancipation,
African-Americans are taking hold
of that idea and utilizing
it for themselves.
The last thing I'll say
is that, in Charleston,
so Marrant's conspiracy
happens in Charleston,
you know, just at the siege of Charleston
during the outbreak of
the American Revolution.
In 1822, Denmark Vesey's
conspiracy takes place,
in one of the alleged conspirators informs
that Vesey frequently would
read from the Exodus story
and say that the children of
Exodus used something, right?
Religion, violence, they used something
to fight against their
oppressors to be free.
And that Vesey was explicit in saying
it's no sin for us to do so as well.
So I think that they're
really taking their example
from the Old Testament narrative,
and in that narrative,
violence is fair play.
- I really do appreciate you noting
that it's important to
look at this contextually,
look at what specific historical period
you're wanting to run
this question through.
Because as you started,
yes, we can say the Bible
itself is guiding Christianity,
it's filled with violence.
Bloodshed, bloodshed, bloodshed, massacre,
slaughter everything,
leave nothing standing.
And so that is something
that is guiding us
even as we continue to say, well,
that was Old Testament, the New Testament
is the gospel of love and
peace and joy and happiness.
But even the New Testament
ends with Revelation,
which is, again, returning
to the Old Testament violence
in order to bring about
this new Jerusalem,
this new world order.
But following this, looking
very specifically at a context,
I think it's important that we do consider
what the purpose of the black
church has been on the whole.
If we wanna generalize.
And the black church in
American, I understand it
as having the primary
purpose of making citizens.
So we're coming out of slavery,
we are now in Reconstruction,
and it is the church
that begins to mediate
citizenship for the black community.
And in order to mediate that citizenship,
we are showing, excuse me, demonstrating,
because America has the identity
of Christianity as a
qualification for citizenship,
white and Christian,
qualifications for citizenship,
so we become extremely Christian.
And the church moves us in the way to say,
see, we are true Americans.
And we negotiate with that
white part differently,
but it still is a vehicle for citizenship.
Education is seen as one of those modes
for moving us into full citizenship.
So churches start schools, colleges.
And so, we come to the Civil Rights Era
with this mode of making us citizens,
and recognizing that
there is this violence
that is a part of the American system,
so we act nonviolently,
and yet we are also presenting ourselves
as the moral high ground, as the sacrifice
to bring the nation to a new understanding
of what it means to be American.
So we hear in King this notion of,
we are suffering to make America America.
I think that's something
that we've moved away from.
As a community, but not
necessarily as a church.
- And I wonder, are there
other sub-narratives
that we've also, again,
as we see the church
as a citizen-making project,
anecdotally we know that these preachers
are also protected by
deacons who have guns,
who bring guns to church
regularly to protect the minister.
We have the Deacons for
Defense in the South,
during the '50s and '60s.
So again, I do think there
are these sub-narratives
in which legitimate uses of violence,
I think, is taken for granted,
but because of the doubleness
or double consciousness
or however you wanna frame it,
people are very much aware of wanting to,
again, become a citizen, but recognizing
that there are a lot of contradictions.
So I do think that, as we
get more stories and more
historians who are looking
at these counter-traditions,
we're going to see a church
that's very different.
I mean, that's very complicated.
Yes it's citizen-making,
but legitimate uses of
violence are taken for granted.
- [Lee] Yes, but the,
there are so many churches
that are against movements
today like Black Lives Matter.
- At least publicly.
I don't know if, internally,
they actually believe that.
I think there's a public
stance against it,
but I'm not sure what's
happening internally
reflects always the public rhetoric.
- And that's where I would go with,
we have to look at it
as individual churches.
But I would say the overall narrative is,
you know, we're sort
of holding you at bay.
We might support you but we're
not gonna be engaged with you
to the extent that you are engaged.
- You had a question.
Oh, sorry.
- Hi, my name is (mumbles)
I come from Finland but
I'm now in Princeton.
But I'd like to go to Dr. Butler briefly
on your two complementary
interpretations of forgiveness.
One was out of fear, another was
releasing this action from yourself,
and just referring to,
I'm sure you're aware,
but Archbishop Tutu and his
daughter's book on forgiveness,
where they suggest that it's ultimately
the victim's right to release this action
or the perpetrator from their mind.
So I would just say that
your later interpretation
does make sense in their recommendation
as part of the project on trying to
understand the purpose of
forgiveness in these situations.
My question comes to,
based on my work in Finland
assisting in building up a
truth and reconciliation process
with our indigenous people who have been
subject to colonization and
assimilation, and a lot of pain.
And between this trajectory
of defining truth
and moving towards something
that you also mention as reconciliation
and relational process,
they come up with the question,
a phrase which has struck
me deeply, which is
"our people's right to be healed
of intergenerational pain."
You spoke a bit about the purpose of art,
of dealing with it, but that
doesn't heal, necessarily.
So I'd like you to speak about this,
how would that be possible?
Your people's right of becoming healed
from intergenerational pain
without new generations
being re-traumatized.
- My operational definition of healing
is being restored to a
life of relationship.
And so, if you're
acknowledging that there is
the intergenerational pain,
you're talking about one community
who has identified themselves as the ones
who have experienced extreme violence,
that could bring about isolation,
because you have been socialized
not to be in relationship.
You've been socialized that,
if you make yourself vulnerable,
you are making yourself
vulnerable to attack
and possible destruction.
And so, you are changing
your understanding
of what it means to be in relationship
by saying, I'm going to take the risk
of being vulnerable and hope that
you will also take the
risk of being vulnerable,
which will then put us back
in relationship with one another.
That's the, inside the community.
Now, how do I take that
understanding and work with you
who has victimized me generationally?
And how am I going to be able to trust you
that this conversation we're involved in
is actually the beginning
of a new way of being?
Well, it's only going
to happen if we maintain
relationship, and that's
what is going to restore us
to have confidence in one another.
Because I'm gonna keep
watching you to see,
are you being truthful and honest
or is this just a moment
for you to be cathartic?
To let out what has been troubling you,
now you can go about your business
because you've already made atonement.
So that's why I'm saying
forgiveness is a relational process,
an ongoing working through to healing,
being restored to that
life of relationship.
- I mean there's, just to echo your point,
in James Baldwin's letter to his nephew
at the beginning of The Fire Next Time,
he says that in order for America
to cure its racial nightmare,
that whites and blacks have
to come together like lovers,
and I think part of what he's alluding to
in using that term is this idea
of intimacy and trust that's required.
And so, how one might
make themselves vulnerable
in a loving relationship,
an intimate relationship,
in ways one might not in
a political relationship.
But I think what he's trying to suggest,
just echoing your point,
is that forgiveness requires
that type of vulnerability.
And I would also say that I do think
there's been some work about art in repair
that might be useful in
thinking about these questions
about how one might put
oneself back together,
not to get over but to work through
sort of intergenerational trauma.
So Josh Chambers-Letson
has a beautiful essay
where he thinks about how art
and performance work in these veins.
- Also in South Africa, since
you did mention Bishop Tutu,
where they had the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission,
there has been an
experience, a feeling among
many of the black South African people,
the Zulu are the ones I know best,
where they're saying,
okay, we had this moment
of folks coming forward and confessing,
but what happened next?
They walked away, still
maintaining their ideas,
and never really developed
a new relationship.
So they've been forgiven by the state
and they're walking away now, free.
And that's why I said about that cathartic
moment that they've experienced.
Okay, I've said this,
it's been a burden upon me
because this has destroyed
my sense of humanity,
now I've been restored
to my sense of humanity
because I've confessed this,
and I can go on and not ever be
bothered by what has happened,
and I really don't have to
be in relationship with you
because the state has forgiven me.
And so, in your process,
that is one of the things
you have to consider.
What was the outcome of what
happened in South Africa?
It kept them from exploding
in terms of ultimate violence,
which was one of the things that
prohibited Apartheid coming to an end.
There was always this fear that
if they get freedom
they're going to kill us.
That didn't happen.
But what was the result?
- Yes, about this idea of making citizens,
the trope of the American civil religion,
incorporating the
excluded into the covenant
through first the Catholics and Jews,
then through the Civil
Rights Movement, the blacks,
you have this trope being repeated
in all the presidential addresses
from Kennedy all the way to
Obama, the last two Obamas,
inclusion of the non-Christians,
inclusion of our gay brothers and sisters.
And yet, very clearly, we are in a moment
of absolute rejection of this trope
of the American civil religion
and of white supremacy not only against,
violence against black bodies,
but antisemitism,
Islamophobia, Latino rapists.
So basically, it is a unique
moment in this context
of, if we look at this reflection
of what has happened since
the Civil Rights Movement.
And so how do you see this moment?
I mean, what does it mean?
The expansion of this
that you have experienced
always as part of the black experience
now being used against every other group
in maintaining a kind of
trope of white supremacy
as the only American, and male,
obviously white male supremacy.
- So, I guess I should preface this.
Optimism has never been my strong suit,
and perhaps that's an occupational hazard.
So, I see this moment in a much
broader historical context.
So in the course that I'm teaching,
to orient first year students,
we begin with the year
1492 and sort of talk about
its symbolic significance to this history.
For most of the students, 1492,
they associate with the
Columbian voyage, right?
I share with them that 1492
is also the year that Jews
are expelled from Spain.
And 100 years prior,
Muslims are also expelled.
Or maybe I had it backwards.
Oh, it happens together, right.
So within this 100 year period, right?
And Charles Long makes the argument
that, in this historical moment,
one of the things that
you really see happening
is this is the formation
of European identity.
Europe comes into existence,
it gains its continental
identity, by excluding
people who have ethnic
and religious differences.
So, while rhetorically,
in presidential addresses,
I think there has been the language
or the rhetoric of inclusion,
just thinking about, you know, Brexit,
thinking about bans on Muslim travel,
I think that there's
really a doubling down
on this kind of, this
fundamental interpretation
of the origins of America.
And to tie it into questions about
reconciliation or restitution,
my question is, to reconcile to what?
Restore to what relationship?
There's not a historical moment,
there's not a moment in
the historical contact
between African and European
peoples in the Americas
that I think any person of African descent
would want to be restored to.
This is as good as it's ever been, right?
And I don't know that
it can be much better.
And so in terms of the optimism, I mean,
I'll say, in terms of how
I understand this moment,
I understand this moment
as another iteration
of a kind of vehement
expression of white nationalism.
And where do we go from here?
I think we repeat the same
cycles, quite honestly.
Yeah, well.
Maybe, in America, maybe.
But I think perhaps we're headed
down a similar trajectory.
This will be the last thing I say.
I think the issue is that
when we think theologically,
because of academic silos,
we don't think, also, historically.
So there is this kind of
transdisciplinary approach
to how we conceptualize the divine
and how we conceptualize our
responsibilities to one another
as religious persons in light of that.
We don't think historically.
I think we think, we think theologically,
but theology has been isolated
from other forms of inquiry
that I think will help us
move beyond some of that.
- I am in full agreement with you.
I guess what I want to
contribute to what you've said
is, when we think about
race as a construct,
theologically, it is understood to be
an expression of, an exploration of
an attempt to define what
it really means to be human.
And in America the human being
was first and foremost the
European, and nobody else.
God bless America and nobody else.
And so, in this sense of,
we have lost our ground, we
have to return to basics,
get back to the fundamentals.
Getting back to the
fundamentals in the U.S.
is going back to that basic
definition of citizenship
which was grounded in
English, white and Christian.
And so, with folks saying
America has decayed,
been corrupted, with a black president,
we have to get back to
and save the nation,
and that means becoming more rigid
in our relationships and exclusionary.
I mean, we go through these life cycles,
we go through this period of
asking the question, who am I, who are we.
And part of that is answered
by declaring who I am not, what I am not.
We then revisit that later on in life
where we assess, did I
make the right choices?
Have I made the right decisions?
And I think we're at that point
in the kind of life cycle.
Did I make the right decisions?
And they're saying, no we
made some bad decisions,
let's go back to the basics.
- So I think we're actually out of time.
So, let's thank the
panelists please, everyone.
