I love what this trailer represents, communicates, and says and how it is itself a portrayal of what the Black Harvest Film Festival is about. Learn more about what’s being shown at the Festival this year by clicking here to visit the Siskel Center’s site.
I was gifted with the opportunity to read Racial Realities and Post-Racial Dreams when Dr. Julius Bailey asked me to review his book. It was a kind invitation, one that I am grateful to get.
This book is many things. Primarily a historical, political, and philosophical treatment of this country’s ethic, it explains the moving parts of politics, justice, civil rights, and philosophical discourse as they gather together and furnish this democracy with promise or poison. The book is history and also a glimpse into the future. Bailey writes as a concerned and prophetic scholar.
As I prepare this review, I think of the ways prophets were known in the first testament of the Bible. Prophets told the truth. They spoke forth what the community knew and what the community didn’t know. Prophets talked history and what the people of God already understood as God’s word which had been delivered through the vessels of graced hands and blessed mouths. And prophets also talked about the future and pushed the people to see a new, unknown tomorrow which was, always, a work of faith.
Prophetic work is faith work. Dr. Bailey works at his faith in that sense as he writes a compelling, interesting, and informative book about the history and future of the United States of America. He pulls up a chair for us and walks us through the perennial questions about our country and its unfulfilled promises, its strain to be an exceptional nation, and its insecure moral footing. He invites us to careful examination of those things said most loudly (which are usually the least true) relative to our country’s moral arc that has bent back from justice.
“While we are still making progress, we have lost the path (and especially the togetherness that characterized our first steps on it), and we have become more and more lost, unsure of the future.” Despite the troubling material he serves us, Bailey still has hope. And he offers his plan for locating and electing leaders with hope, with ethical strength, with generosity, and with moral courage.
He mines the current political and legal realities in Black and non-Black communities, holding out a convincing application of social-psychological theory and the clear ways our frames of reference are developed so as to prevent us from seeing. He moves through the double standards of politics and civil discourse. He talks fundamental attribution error and its relation to racism and white privilege.
He writes swiftly and clearly, “White privilege blinds those who would claim that Black America is its own worst enemy.” He continues, knowing that his truth is the truth and installs his rendition of the rise of President Barack Obama, contextualizing Mr. Obama’s campaign and victories, and noting the key agreements between those political achievements and the longer narrative of all those earlier (and all those future) acts of reclamation and recovery in previous times.
His book is a reflection of the exact and ever-present power of white privilege, the absence of non-white privilege, and the corresponding injustice that results. His book addresses these things in the slow, careful way a good teacher would and with the loving embrace of a brother and friend. He serves to us an explanation of the fear in us as a collective people and how religious views contribute since religion is a hot, undeniable area where change is most needed and most difficult. Early on he says what feels like a summary and an echo of his spirit throughout:
“Until an essential humanness replaces the hierarchized core of our racial discourse, we will continue to dehumanize the dark-skinned in both word and deed. Until the roots of structural racism are uprooted and an egalitarian worldview is planted in its place, the financial poverty of America’s inner cities will remain a reflection of the moral poverty in our nation.”
And he states such things carefully while, at the same time, challenging us to hold a “horizontal integration of the mission.” Bailey sounds like a pastor and professor, activist and contemplative. He sounds concerned and moved by love. He was hard to read–because his truths were, simply, true–and completely invitational at the same time.
The four central chapters cover in deft, artful ways topics that anyone interested in justice should sit with, including racism, xenophobia, poverty, and income inequality. Bailey speaks to the spirit while illuminating the mind. He teaches through his writing.
Tracing Civil Rights and Jim Crow, he explains what the Voting Rights Act was and how it was done true damage by the recent rule of the US Supreme Court. He takes you to school without making you feel like you missed out on the previous week’s homework.
He inspires you, hurts you, and challenges you. He tells it the way it should be told: decide what you believe about freedom and determine if those things should be offered to others.
That is the spirit of his invitation around economics and income, work and jobs. I get the sense that Bailey is dancing to the music of economics and political theory and history and morality. Of course morality is the cooler, distant term for spirituality.
There is a bottom to Dr. Bailey and though I read of portions of it, I can tell that his center is on display as he highlights moral decline in the United States. He writes of our need for a spiritual revolution even if it is not religiously based. It is a challenge and a call. It is necessary and for our own good, as well as a road we have often missed.
“But, so often, those who cause the most hurt are those who are meant to represent love, caring, and respect for the wholeness of persons. Churches and schools are beacons of light in communities, yet our churches denounce gay, transgendered, and queer parishioners in favor of pedantic adherence to an old exegesis of scripture, while our inner-city schools arrest students before counseling them, remove them before reviving them.”
His tone is not one that is easily dismissed. Even if your theory differs from him; even where your reading of the same historical moments generate a different conclusion; even if your political vision diverges from the biblical images he calls upon to color his perspective; you cannot dismiss his enduring sentiment and its corresponding energy. You have to contend with Julius Bailey’s love. And any good teacher would be pleased with that contention.
I appreciate that my training in clinical pastoral education is giving me reason to enter into a beautiful reading list. I’m covering by necessity pastoral arts, theology, history, and supervision. I’m spending my time becoming a better minister, a slower thinker, a deeper educator of servants, and hopefully a person more responsive to these gifts in a clinical encounter, whatever form it takes.
As I’ve mentioned on my blog, I’m reading, and in an effort to “keep more of what I’m reading,” this review is, in part, in order for me to see again some of the words of the writers I’m encountering. This book, Living the Intersection: Womanism and Afrocentrism in Theology is a book on theology, particularly womanist theology in contradistinction to afrocentricism.
The contributors draw upon their reading of Molefi Asante’s use of Afrocentrism. His conceptualization is widely read and has been a persistent critique to Christianity and Islam with regard to black people. The description of the concept is in the book, so I won’t completely summarize their rendering of Asante. Still, one of Asante’s basic assertions according to the editor of Living the Intersection is the mistaken notion that Christianity is a historically acceptable religious option for African Americans. His basic critique is the mismatchedness of the Christian faith and the better natural fit of, presumably, African Traditional Religions. His notion of Afrocentrism is in conversation in this book with thinkers from the womanist theological posture.
Womanist is a term from Alice Walker who in the novel The Temple of My Familiar “has taken some of her womanist ideas and tried to run them through narratively.” As Gilkes says in the collection, Walker gives writers a rich term to capture her own artistic attempts to debate humanity and reject racism in order to push “for a larger, relational, humanist vision.” Walker used a word (i.e., womanist) started something. Note that she was moving toward a vision. I think that’s an evocative theological motive: vision.
Photo Thanks to Esther Kang
To be fair, most will tie Alice Walker’s literary genius to the conceptual offerings of others before her. Living the Intersection does the same. Deborah E. McDowell does this in her chapter on “Slavery as a Sacred Text.” McDowell reminds us of the tenuous relationship between black people and already-determined-and-already-decided-principles-of-somebody-else’s-interpretation, saying, that “Scripture is not sacred as an untamperable given; it is rather a set of texts to be questioned, negotiated with, and variously interpreted” (p. 82). Womanist interpretation is tied to the experience of a slave being told what to think and how long to think it relative to being “free in Christ.”
Youtha C. Hardman-Cromwell connects womanism to the wealth of poetic contributions written by black women. She decorates her chapter with pieces from Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Maya Angelou among others. She’s doing what the biblical psalmists did: pointing to the poetic, musical expression of a sister in order to underline some truth about life and God. Womanist theology comes out of poetry.
Given their nod to the historical connections leading to womanism, the contributors in Living the Intersection give much respect to Walker for snatching up the spirit of such fruitful work in Walker’s careful word choice. Edited by Cheryl J. Sanders, these writers are connecting language with spirituality and theological reflection in order to pursue a vision of beauty and wholeness. “We are here because we believe we have a story to tell to the nation, and our experience has something special to say to the world.” (p. 22) I wish that was on a t-shirt worn by all the people I love: I have something special to say to the world.
Living the Intersection is an anchoring text for those interested in listening to tones and songs of black women teaching foundational theology for the purpose of telling a story of faith which changes lives and builds people. This book, among those I’m reading as I study in CPE supervisory education, is about how we understand God, how we understand the lived experience of black women, and how we take cues from those two understandings for life.
Theology is God talk, language we use to express who we think God to be. It is necessarily risky. After all, theology is language about God. It relates to us, to those God has made, but it starts in relation to the One for whom words could forever be written and read. Eventually that linguistic effort ends in wholeness. Kelly Brown Douglas in the book delineates that wholeness is about triumph over oppression “so that the individual is whole even as she or he struggles for the community’s wholeness.” And “wholeness for a community indicates that it is not divided against itself and that is free, liberated from oppression.” (p. 68)
Photo Thanks to Esther Kang
As students, we draw from our various sources to unearth, examine, and interrogate the ingredients of faith, to critique forms of faith, to inspire better uses and practices of faith. In the language of Sanders, our work is about the “survival and wholeness of an entire people” and about the “affirmation, assertiveness, and actualization of women.” The book says enough times for the reader to get that the affirmation of women is never akin to the diminution of men. There is a holistic vision that womanist theologians are pushing us toward, one that names the general and boldly wrong unnamededness of women. Encouraging the regular procurement of black women’s identity from themselves (Hardman-Cromwell), we are “moving the black community toward wholeness” (Douglas).
In this book, womanism stands next to afrocentrism, and the sister theologians–from a decidedly black, feminist, ethical, theological, and literary sphere–offer us an introduction to the foundational elements of womanism as a way of doing theology.
Doing theology is important. I can’t recall what I first meant when I started using that phrase, just after my seminary days. When I use the phrase now, I intend to mean that theology is immediately and always practiced. It is reflection with a purpose. It is considered and expressed language that is Spirit-empowered, generative, constructive, and prophetic. Theology is ethical because it meets the practice of our lives; it tutors us, trains us to be. We don’t simply write theology. We do it. We live it.
This beautiful book is full of my sisters and aunts and mothers, and they are all writing me into becoming…
Me and my friend David Swanson talked together as part of an interview with our denomination’s communications department. I had originally written a piece and submitted it, and that piece turned into an occasion to talk with a friend and brother about people we deeply care for and issues we’re drawn to address.
Read the post here at Covenant Companion.
Photo Thanks to Esther Kang
The House Girl Book Cover
How did you come to this story? Or how did it come to you? The story definitely came to me. About 7 years ago now, I was reading a biography of Virginia Woolf and came across the term “slave doctor”. The words described one of Woolf’s long-gone relations and no further explanation or description of the man was given. I found myself wondering what kind of person would occupy what to me seemed an inherently conflicted role: to dedicate your life to healing and yet your patients were destined only for more and graver harm. From that initial spark of curiosity I wrote the story of Caleb Harper, a doctor working for a slave catcher, and two women appeared in his story: Josephine Bell, an artist and enslaved woman living on a Virginia tobacco farm, and Dorothea Rounds, a young white woman active on the Underground Railroad. And I was off.
You draw from the perspectives of two very different women, but both Lina and Josephine were searching. What connections do you see between these two women? They are both very strong willed, smart and adept at hiding how they feel, both from others and from themselves. Of course, the circumstances of their lives could not be more different; Lina enjoys all the privileges and freedoms that Josephine does not. I see Lina and Josephine as vertically connected rather than horizontally, if that makes any sense. Josephine is Lina’s predecessor, her mother, at least symbolically. Dresser has a line about enslaved people “They were as much our founding mothers and fathers as the bewigged white man who lay a whip upon their backs.” And that idea resonates with Lina, both historically and personally. She has very few memories of her own mother Grace and knows very little about her, but Josephine shares many of Grace’s characteristics: a talented artist, a disappearance, a lost child. At the beginning of the novel, Lina is too afraid to really search for her own mother, and so she searches for Josephine instead. Josephine gives Lina the inspiration that she needs to move forward with her life, the courage to confront her own past. And of course in the process of finding Josephine, Lina finds herself.
The novel weaves compelling insights about slavery into Josephine’s personal decision to run. What are some reasons slaves ran while others didn’t? It’s more difficult, I think, to understand the decision not to run because most slave narratives were written by (or about) those who were able to escape. But fear must have been a huge component – fear of capture and punishment. The cutting of the Achilles tendon (as happens to Nathan in the book) was commonly done to slaves who had tried to run and been recaptured. To escape also meant leaving family and friends behind, loved ones who in all likelihood you would never see again. At a time when families were routinely torn apart, to voluntarily leave one’s family must have been a very difficult decision to make. Women ran much less frequently than men because they were more likely to be caring for young children, and fleeing with a child was much harder. There were also the practical difficulties of not knowing where to go – certainly after the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, the northern US no longer offered any real prospect of ‘freedom’ and the road to Canada was very long.
You do a lot with images and art in the book. I wonder how, with the hard work behind The House Girl, you see images of slavery, historical and modern-day. It’s requires a kind of resilience and courage to know the things you likely learned in your work on the story and keep at it. Yes, there was a point at which I had to stop researching. It became very overwhelming – the scope of tragedy, the individual horrors. Antebellum art generally tended to depict idealized visions of peaceful plantation life – the myth of the benign master, the happy Negro. Many are very pretty pictures, but I couldn’t help seeing them as quite sinister given what they omit. More realistic images were created for the abolitionist movement, and these are generally horrifying. Their intent was to provoke outrage and increase support for the abolitionist cause, and I presume they were very effective. More contemporary artists have grappled with slavery in a variety of ways. I’ve personally been most effected by the work of Kara Walker who makes intricate cut-paper silhouettes of antebellum life – shocking scenes of violence and sexual exploitation, but rendered simply, starkly, with black cut-outs against a white background. They are very powerful.
Lina’s experience was peopled with men like her father, her legal mentor, and the potential lead plaintiff. What characteristics equipped her to navigate such diverse relationships? Lina is very independent and very driven. She grew up in a single-parent, poor, urban household with a father who suffered from severe depression and has never been traditionally “responsible”. As a result, she’s had to parent herself in many ways. I think this self-sufficiency, learned at an early age, helps her to operate successfully in these diverse worlds – with her father and his artist friends, in the more conservative world of the law firm, and with Jasper Battle, a musician whom she finds both very foreign and also oddly familiar, given that his world is so similar to her father’s. The corporate law world and professional art world are very different of course, but they are both arenas traditionally dominated by white men, so I think growing up in one prepared Lina in unexpected ways to succeed in the other.
In a sentence, maybe two, imagine how Lina would explain her case to her mother, how Josephine would explain slavery to her son. What a great (and really tough!) question. First, Lina to her mother: “I’m working on a lawsuit that’s seeking to repair the damage done by slavery, at least in some symbolic way. And Mom, it’s more about memory than money.” Josephine to Joseph: “We live in a world where some people own other people based on the color of their skin. But things won’t always be this way, and you don’t have to let it define you.”
Slave Quarters
Your book made me think of the many ways people experience loss—of a hope, a relationship, an ideal, a role. On the other hand, the story is one of motivated, resourceful people moving forward. Is that a fair reflection? Yes, very fair, and thank you for it. For me, the characteristic that binds all the characters together is their willingness to face and ultimately overcome their fears. For Josephine, the fear of running, of leaving everyone and everything she knows. For Lina, the fear of discovering the truth about her mother and, by necessity, the truth about her father as well. For Caleb, his fear of caring, of investing himself in another person; and Dorothea, fear of rebelling against her father and of once again putting her faith in something large than herself. So they are all moving forward, as you say, trying to push past these fears as best they can.
There are two very striking things I’d love you to say more about. First, the musical list of names in Lina’s index. Second, the notion of celebrating and honoring slaves who have died in slavery. The list was particular, poignant, thorough, and considerate. The comment, a summation of the novel. Say more about how those emerged. Thank you for them. The list was culled from the more than 2,000 names of some of the last surviving slaves whose testimonies were taken in the 1930s under the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The testimonies are available on the Library of Congress website; it’s an amazing resource that I would encourage readers to explore. I included the names for a couple of reasons. First, Josephine’s story is very circumscribed – one day in the life of one woman on one small farm in Virginia. Her position as a house slave and the close relationship she has with her mistress, Lu Ann Bell, makes Josephine’s experience somewhat uncharacteristic, I believe. Given Josephine’s exceptionalism, I thought I would be remiss in not acknowledging, at least to some degree, the vast scope of slavery’s tragedy. I wanted the reader to be hit with the physical presence of those names – a solid page of text – and feel, for a moment, disoriented and overwhelmed. And second, before I started researching in earnest, I believed that there was a national monument or a national museum dedicated to memorializing enslaved Americans. I don’t know where this belief came from – I just assumed that such a thing must exist, and I was surprised to learn that it doesn’t. There is no national memorial or museum (although the National Museum of African American History and Culture is slated to open in 2015). I was thinking of the power of naming and how important that is in honoring the victims of a particular tragedy – for example, the inscriptions on the Vietnam War Memorial, or the reading of names after 9/11. I wanted Lina’s chart to serve as something similar, although of course on a much reduced scale.
What are you reading these days? The pile beside my bed is groaning – I’ve got so many waiting in line. I just finished two wonderful novels: A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra, which I loved and The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer, which I also loved. Now I’m just about to dive into Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – I’ve been waiting for this one for awhile. I still remember scenes from her Half of a Yellow Sun, which I read a good number of years ago.
How can readers follow you and support your work? You can find me at www.taraconklin.com, on facebook and twitter @TEConklin. I love to hear from readers and regularly participate in book club discussions via Skype or phone so feel free to get in touch.
Intersections 