The Real Blind Side

published on Monday, March 8, 2010 by admin

By Dr. Willie James Jennings
Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies
Duke Divinity School

Growing up in Michigan, I learned to love football. There are few things as exhilarating as playing football in fresh snow, running, falling, and jumping with imaginations filled with images of becoming professional football players. My friends and I channeled the actions of our football heroes even if we lacked their actual skills. My best year of high school football was ninth-grade when I was a starting guard. I loved being a lineman, down in the mud and dirt where the real beauty of football is found. By the time I entered the tenth grade it was clear that I lacked the size to remain a guard. Such work was reserved for bodies that took up much more space on this earth. Yet my love of the game remains strong. Such love drew my attention to Michael Lewis’s book, The Blind Side. Thanks to the movie of the same name, the story of the book is now fairly well-known. It is the story of the black man child Michael Oher and the white family, the Tuohy family who made Michael their son.

I must admit watching the movie The Blind Side after watching the movie Precious is a jarring contrast. The actors in Precious were simply brilliant, but the sheer power of Precious is that it presses on anyone watching with eyes and ears attuned to its messages crucial questions about the way things are, especially for many black women. Precious brings the viewer deeply inside the horror and absurdity of her situation, an absurdity unabated by the few episodic fragments of the church in the movie. The failures and failings of people surround the character Precious and we along with Precious find it difficult to discern sources and sites of love for her. No such difficulty attends the movie The Blind Side. Love is front and center, love for black bodies located in love for a big black boy. But it is precisely this front-and-center-love that makes The Blind Side a complicated and problematic movie.

I liked The Blind Side. I want to say this clearly, because my experience is that people who have seen the movie and like the movie seem to be unusually defensive and quickly irritated with any suggestion of something amiss in this piece of art. But it is not difficult to imagine the source behind this hyper-sensitivity. As one woman said to me, “I know it’s a good movie, but I am tired of stories about white women saving black boys.” It is the dynamic of white paternalism - salvation in white hands - that generate a lot of tension and fuels thorny conversation and interpretations of this movie. But there are a deeper set of problems exposed by the movie. They are exposed by the movie because these are problems primarily of the social world that informs the artistic imagination displayed in this and other Hollywood products.

As with so many cinematic renderings, the movie is very different from the book. Michael Lewis is a beautiful writer and his text, The Blind Side, is quite elegant. He offers what amounts to a secular form of predestination within the world of professional sports, especially football. Factors beyond the knowledge or control of Michael Oher or the Tuohy family are moving them toward each other. Contingency, individual agency, and choice are always present but you sense larger realities at work all around the central people of the story. The book brings the reader into an evolutionary and capitalist tale of football. The emergence of a new more powerful black athlete on defense created the need for offenses to adapt. That the new more powerful athlete is black is both beside the point and the point. That new athlete was Lawrence Taylor and the new situation was his ability through speed and strength to get to the quarterback’s body and bring him down or do him harm.

The central adaptation to this new situation was the emergence of more powerful athletes on offense who could protect the quarterback’s blindside, that is, the left side for right-handed quarterbacks. The new athlete would be unusually big, unusually quick and nimble, and very strong. He would be a left tackle and he would become one of the highest paid players on any football team. As Lewis shows us the mind of the market we come to see how money follows demand. We also come to see thanks to Lewis’ wonderful portrait how offensive schemes come to rely profoundly on the strength of the left tackle. He is the foundation on which offenses stand or fall. Of course, football remains a team sport but the real contest of strength, skill, and will begins with this crucial lineman and the defensive end assigned to disrupt the offense.

It is both brilliant and strange to insert the lives of real people into the drama of this game, but Lewis has actually found an ingenious way to present the American story of race in a way that keeps us from looking away from the familiar. Lewis lifts up the single life of Michael Oher and pulls forward a web of relations that shape not only this young man’s life but also American life. Michael is the neglected child of a single mother who is an addict and trapped in poverty. He then draws us into the Tuohy’s family life – wealthy, Christian, and conservative -- in ways that honor their humanity and vulnerability, but there is something quite ominous working in Lewis’s account. It has to do with black bodies. Anyone who understands the deep architecture of modern western slavery can sense the problem that dogs this book. The story is sandwiched between the body of Lawrence Taylor and the body of Michael Oher.

Fundamentally, black bodies have been about utility. Other bodies have also been about utility, but black bodies mark the way, reveal this modality of use-value. Professional sports hide this history of use-value right out in the open. The problem here is that Lewis humanizes this history, domesticates further an already demonically domesticated order of things. The line of thought is simple: sport gives a way out for poor white folks, for black folks, for young black men, thug and non-thug. Lewis adds complexity to that simple line: But college sport (bound to pre-college preparation) gives a way in, into society, into middle or upper class existence, into civilization, into hope. Trapped inside that industrial strength logic is the fragile reality of the Oher-Tuohy story, they fell in love. Leigh Anne and Sean, Sean Jr. and Collins and Michael came to love each other. Their love must find a way in the midst of the slavery haunted, capitalist driven reality of black men in sports. In truth sport is not an answer. It performs the problem.

The problem it performs is to squeeze love inside utility. It presses our imaginations to bind the possibilities of white people loving black people to the performances of black flesh: athletic, artistic, or minstrel. And it suggests the central mode of relation to be quintessentially paternal. This is the American imagination at work. Thankfully, people have and some people do break open this restrictive imagination and walk in greater realities of love and belonging. I would like to think that the Tuohys are an example of this and that their Christian faith is what made this possible. But the Christianity presented in both book and movie reflects Christianity’s problems in America. It is a Christianity bound in segregation and weak in how it imagines its world, which brings me to the problems of the movie.

The movie is certainly not the book. The movie does give us through the wonderful acting of Sandra Bullock a vision of a mother’s heart expansive enough to love a child not her own to such an extent to make him her own. The Tuohy family extend themselves in ways that gesture the central logic of the gospel, life offered in weakness and love for the sheer sake of love. But black people come off in this movie as the frontier of risk, the boundary and boarder of danger, the line that one must have absolute courage to cross. That is, black people come off as a site of an almost impossible reach of love. The movie makes nothing of the risk that brought Michael into the white community, the white school, the white world. More importantly, the movie plays in the sick logic of black exceptionalism. In the movie, Michael is kind, gentle, teachable, and protective of white flesh. He is just the opposite of the vast majority of the other black men depicted in the movie. In one sad scene, Sandra Bullock’s character faces down a drug dealer in the black community who has threatened Michael. She touches her purse and says in effect I will kill you if you try to hurt me or my family. Michael is now in her circle of protective fear. Such a scene is not in the book or in the real history of Michael with the Tuohy family, but it is in the real fears of so many people.

There is another sense of exceptionalism that is equally tragic. The effort of the Tuohy family, especially Leigh Anne, is also an exception for the white Christian community of Memphis. The movie captures the abnormality of this love as an abnormality even within Christianity itself. This kind of love is not what Christians do. It is what this particular family did. What if this kind of love, this kind of claiming was the norm for Christian existence? What if what it meant to be Christian in all the specific locations where Christians live was to be people who created places that bridge racial, social, and geographic divides? What would happen if a Christian education was indeed shaped by a scandalous joining of very different peoples who love each other and this love constitutes the very ecology of an educational experience? My questions reach for what does not exist but which we can catch glimpses of even in this flawed movie. The more decisive question in this regard is, however, will Christians here and elsewhere begin to grasp the deeper demands of community and communion implied by the faith we confess. The real question is whether we will ever begin to see our real blindside?

4 comments | Add a comment

A Sense of History

published on Monday, March 1, 2010 by admin

By Dr. Mary McClintock Fulkerson
Professor of Theology
Duke Divinity School

As a member of the Pauli Murray Steering Committee and participant in a Pauli Murray reading group at Asbury Temple UMC, I am having my own sense of history turned upside down. By “sense of history” I mean my family history to be sure, but also my larger conception of U.S. history and church history. The recounting of Pauli Murray’s family history in Proud Shoes is a complex and riveting story of the personal and everyday as well as institutional realities of slavery, Reconstruction, segregation, and the class and “color” fissures that continue in Durham, Chapel Hill and northeastern areas where her ancestors were located. But, of course, it’s not the “official” history of these matters; it is the story of how a white woman married to a slaveholder in Chapel Hill brings up four daughter who are the result of her sons’ rape of women slaves; or the mixed and complicated loyalties of descendents of such rapes; the real and complicated humanity of persons, black, mulatto and white who have to bear the burden of grotesque social sin even as they live out face-to-face, day-to-day interactions with their ‘enemies’ who are also their caretakers and blood kin. These white ancestors are displayed in their vicious racist dehumanizing behavior toward persons of color, their sporadic kindness and humanity, and their total obliviousness to dehumanizing objectification of black bodies entailed by their lives.

What is riveting for me about these “history” lesssons is not just learning about life on the “other side of the tracks” in segregated southern towns very similar to my own family’s life in Arkansas, Texas and North Carolina. I do know something about the embarrassing history of our country, which even today continues to claim to be “colorblind,” and to have moved beyond racism. What is riveting is sharing stories with African Americans my age and younger and hearing what it was like to be told by your parents how to protect yourself from people like me and my family. While I “know” about and acknowledge racism---have written about white obliviousness to racism---having its complexities personalized in ongoing conversations is a deeply rich and painful experience.

I continue to think about the sacrament of communion in relation to this storytelling. Womanist theologian Shawn Copeland has described the character of Jesus’ call to the table in a most compelling way. Her account of Eucharist resonates profoundly with the dynamics of our shared memories, but also invokes a logic that might create a new consciousness. The Eucharist is to create an alternate imagination, as Copeland says, an imagination shaped by the “dangerous memory” of Jesus’ suffering, crucifixion, death and resurrection. An alternate imagination, then, cannot be a ‘gathering’ that simply repeats the biblical/theological ritual, failing to surface, acknowledge and attend to such contemporary realities as the continued realities of racism and the exploited, devalued, despised black body. To remember can be a kind of museum activity --- lets us white folks just admire the biblical past; never mind about remembering in order to honestly face and name the present. Faithful Christian memory, then, should do what reading Pauli Murray’s history is doing--- namely, surface our racialized history in all its complexity. It should also open us to move beyond awareness and pity, the sometimes superficial “community” of table fellowship…to enter the deep water of grace that entails lived, honest, and risky connecting.

2 comments | Add a comment

Why, Lord? Haiti and the God-Question

published on Monday, January 18, 2010 by admin

Dr. J. Kameron Carter
Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies
Duke Divinity School

Last Tuesday a magnitude 7 earthquake, the same strength quake that rocked San Francisco in 1989, brought the little island nation of Haiti to its knees. It has been reported by some news outlets that nearly one-third of the nation’s population, or somewhere in the neighborhood of about 3 million people, have been affected either by being killed or personally injured or maimed or by being left homeless. It is not an exaggeration to say that the devastation strains one’s abilities to describe.

And it is just this inability to fully capture and conceptualize the devastation that usually presses us, both individually and as a society, to turn to what I call the “God-and-suffering” or theodicy question. Why Lord? Where is God in this? Why has God allowed this? These are all versions of the God-and-suffering question.

Now let me say directly and without equivocation: I don’t like these questions and you shouldn’t either.

I don’t say this to dismiss out of hand the lived reality of pain and suffering that the Haitian people are enduring. Far, far be it from me to do that! And I don’t say it to dismiss the God-question or the question of God-and-suffering. I’m a theologian, so far be it from me to do that either!

Quite the contrary; I don’t like these questions precisely because of how seriously I want to take the lived reality of pain and suffering that the Haitian people are enduring now, and precisely because of how seriously the God-question and the God-and-suffering question must be taken.

Let me explain why I say these are bad questions and that we must let them go.

The problem here is not with the God-and-suffering or the theodicy question as such. It is with the way the question is often posed and taken up, and in its deepest presupposition.

First, a consideration of how it is often posed and taken up in the public imagination:

Often the way the God-and-suffering question is posed prevents us from asking other important social, cultural and political questions. These other questions are those of how the painful effects of natural disaster (such as the earthquake in Haiti) are often made worse due to certain social, cultural and political factors. I don’t mean social factors just within Haiti itself: I mean how Haiti has come to be positioned internationally among the community of nations. This positioning has both a long and a short horizon. The long horizon partly goes back to the slave rebellion against the French that is at the origin of the Haitian nation. The key date here is 22 August 1791, the date that began the Haitian revolution, when a people of African descent became the second people of the New World to resist Old World, European rule. (The first was The United States of America in 1776).

But Haiti’s longer term history goes back further still to 5 December 1492 when Christopher Columbus happened upon this island, claiming it as a colony of Spain. Not too long afterwards African slaves were brought to the island to work the land for the enrichment of European interests.

The shorter horizon of Haitian history is the complex relationship between Haiti and the United States throughout the 20th century, which at one point saw the United States as late as 1947 retaining control of Haitian finances and thus exercising significant control in the country.

This complex and complicated long and short term history has left an indelible mark on the social realities of Haiti. It’s sovereignty as a country was not only troubled from within. It has also been troubled by interventions from other Western powers. These social and political realities, realities both internal to Haiti and external to it, have seriously marked Haiti as a country and its ability, for example, to create the kinds of infrastructure it has needed to thrive. However, the country was making significant progress, economically and politically, of late. Much of its recent progress has been thrown in jeopardy by this devastating earthquake.

Often the way the theodicy question is raised and answered, social factors such as these go unremarked and uninterpreted.

Let’s take as an example of what I’m talking about, the ridiculous (I know no other adjective for it) remarks of Pat Robertson, a Christian evangelical leader and main voice of the Christian Broadcasting Network’s “The 700 Club,” about Haiti.

“Something happened a long time ago in Haiti,” Robertson said, “and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it’s a deal.”

Robertson went on to say that “ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.” The implication here seems to be that if Haiti had not left French colonial tutelage (with assistance and support from the devil), the country would not be in its present straits. This is an interesting, if not troubling, revision of history built into Robertson’s remarks, for in them he implicitly celebrates the colonial era as one that was pre-Satanic and thus one of supposed Christian (?) bliss for Haiti, with the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period being one of chaos and devastation. Even the New York Times conservative writer David Brooks, much more circumspect to be sure than Robertson, opined last Friday that the restoration of a kind of colonial rule over Haiti by the international community might be what’s needed to bring Haiti back from this devastation and to ensure that its “corruption” and “poverty,” its chaos (my term, not Brooks’s), is held in check.

But to go back to Robertson, his remarks didn’t stop with Haiti’s so-called “deal with the devil.” In other remarks on the Christian Broadcasting Network, he went on to speak of the earthquake as “a blessing in disguise” for Haiti insofar as with so many buildings now leveled, the country will basically have to be rebuilt from the ground up. Moreover, there is the “blessing” as Robertson sees it that the nation might turn from the devil, from voo-doo and such, to God.

There is much else that I could comment upon about Robertson’s asinine remarks. But I won’t, for what I want to stress is the theodicy question and the answer he poses to it inside of his comments. I want to stress how the theodicy question and its answer operates or functions for him as an interpretive grid in this situation. His answer to the theodicy or the God-and-suffering question is an one that actually turns from the anguish of Haitian suffering. Looking away from that suffering, he positions himself as one who stands, metaphysically as it were, above fray of the corpses strewn throughout the streets of Port-au-Prince, above the fray of the mass graves on hillsides and under flattened buildings, above the fray of the cries of agony and the moans of grief coming from the living. Robertson’s is a theodical answer, one that judges the Haitian people in order to justify God or show God to be right in unleashing this devastation, or if not unleashing it, allowing it. This is his justification of God, which in reality is not a justification of God at all. It’s a justification of Robertson and more crucially the vision of the world his comments presuppose.

But sadly, the Robertson posture and approach here is not new.

We saw a version of it in 2005 when hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. At that time, some said that the city was devastated because of religious and sexual licentiousness—“voo-doo and homosexuality are rampant,” some said. God therefore is just in allowing Katrina; those of New Orleans made their own version of a “pact with the devil.”

But what do we see here? The theodicy question was posed in such a way as to abdicate responsibility, to mute social consciousness. Theodicy became a way of rising above or to be disincarnate from (rather than incarnate with) the lived realities of bloated bodies in the streets, hungry persons in the Superdome, and trapped people on roofs and housetops. It was a way of asking the God-and-suffering question so as to never find a way to ask what it meant that race and class distinctions—that is, if you were poor and non-white—more than anything else determined if you were stuck in New Orleans and weeping for help.

But a year before that we saw another version of the poorly framed theodicy question in 2004. This was when a massive tsunami, an ocean earthquake, struck the Asian rim of the Indian Ocean and the coast of Somalia on the second day of Christmas leaving tens of thousand dead. At that time there again were those who raised the theodicy question in such a way as to stand metaphysically above the fray of the devastation of strewn corpses along the beaches. Stepping over the bodies, so to speak, they said that all we can do is “hate death and waste and the imbecile forces of chance that shatter living souls, to believe that creation is in agony in its bonds, to see this world as divided between two kingdoms . . . ,” to quote the remarks of one eminent theologian as he put it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed and then later in a book that took the tsuanmi as the occasion for its reflections on theodicy or God, suffering and evil. What was reflected upon neither in the op-ed nor in the book were the social conditions that could make a tsunami off the coast of the Asian rim more lethal than a similar tsunami off the coast, say, of California.

Put differently, what I am pointing to is the centrality of the social question along with the anthropological question framed in such a way as to doubt the humanity of certain persons (“they made a pact with the devil”; they are sexually licentious, etc.) for the theological and religious question of God, suffering, and evil. Perhaps the social and anthropological question are the real issues at the heart of the religious and theological question of suffering. But it is precisely these issues that poorly framed theodicy questions makes us blind to.

And so, just as we’ve been unable as a society to ask social questions in relationship to suffering and the tsunami of 2004 and in relationship to suffering and hurricane Katrina in 2005, so too we are proving unable to ask social questions as part of the theodicy question in relationship to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

But perhaps the real problem in what I have described to this point in this piece lies deeper still. Perhaps tragedies such as the earthquake in Haiti (and Katrina and tsunami in the first decade of the 21st century) reveal a deeper failure. This is the failure, if not the collapse, of a Christian imagination, indeed, of a Christian social imagination committed to and lodged within the incarnation of God in the flesh. For at the heart of the badly posed God-and-suffering question, on the part of Christians especially, is the refusal of the incarnation of God in the flesh and further still the inability to think inside of the incarnation.

For in Jesus, so we confess, God was manifest, not metaphysically above the fray, but in the flesh, in our condition (1 Tim. 3:16). In Jesus, pain and suffering are taken up into God’s identity. This suffering includes the realities of physical and social death, along with the conditions that perpetuate death and suffering. In the person of Jesus, these realities have been decisively dealt with not by a God who is above the fray but by one who is named Immanuel, God with Us, one who walks in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Jesus’ resurrection from the dead by the Spirit of God points to that form of life within and ultimately beyond the conditions of death. Jesus’ resurrection, which we live into by the Holy Spirit, empowers us now to work within tight spaces—the tight space confronting the world community now is the trauma of the Haitian earthquake—to bring life from death.

If I have called for a moratorium on the bad theodicy question, I’m also calling for a new kind of theodical engagement with the world—beginning right now, with Haiti—rooted in the incarnation of God in the flesh and in his resurrection from the dead.

2 comments | Add a comment

Pages