A Teachable Moment

published on Wednesday, September 9, 2009 by admin

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

It would be wonderful if the recent furor over President Obama’s comments criticizing the white police officer’s treatment of Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates proved to be a true “teaching moment.” While it is impossible to keep up with the constantly shifting version of reality offered by the news media on such things, at least two themes implicit in this story beg for theological reflection. First, why is “race” always attributed to minority populations and, secondly, why should Obama be criticized for getting “off track”—for not talking about “all of the American people” as one commentator put it—if he brings up race? These themes are connected and have significance for the church.

Race in the U.S. is similar to gender. Both are markers of identity typically associated with a particular group, in the first case, people of color, in the second, women. Think of the presidential election press coverage—only Hilary Clinton and Sarah Palin had “gender;” only Barak Obama had “race.” This assumes that only white men have no identity markers, e.g., are simply normal human beings without interests shaped by social location. Now having “race” or “gender” does not indicate “minority” in the numerical sense—women frequently outnumber males, especially in churches. No, the “marked” vs. “unmarked” designation is about power: being “unmarked” has to do with dominance; being “marked” indicates that a group has in some sense been historically marginalized.

Theologically speaking, why isn’t historical marginalization, or being “marked,” a concern of everyone? Why is race only an “issue” for African Americans, or others designated as persons of color? Why is “whiteness” -- my race and its attendant privileges— typically hidden and rarely if ever acknowledged? Why do we continue to engage in what race theorists like Ruth Frankenberg calls “dodging difference” or “color evasion”? Why do we whites continue to think things are fine-- we don’t see color-- when, in fact, “colorblindness,” as sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva puts it, is the new form of racism? Our egregious racial history still shapes our society; we cannot act as if things like racial profiling are only the problems of “minority” groups. Our country is in desperate need of discourse of the common good, so that when Obama raises issues of race he is respected and appreciated, not lambasted for playing the “race card.” Although complicated, messy, and scary (especially for whites), these are crucial issues for “all of the American people.”

In this “teachable moment,” public discourse could surely learn from the church. As it seeks to follow Jesus, the church replaces “individualism” with stories and faith practices around grace-filled community and concern for the “outsider.” However, most white churches have a great deal in common with the culture of color evasion. Only 2.5% of mainline churches have significantly interracial membership; evangelical churches do only slightly better with 6%. We may not be individualistic, but how often are “community” and eucharist gatherings with folks just like us? Our challenge: let this be a “teachable moment” for the church. Let us face one another across deep racial and other divides in sustained and grace-filled honesty. Let us do “welcoming community” with less color-blindness. Is talking about our different experiences with regard to race and the implications of racial difference for our lives difficult and scary? You bet; that’s why many of us don’t do it. But incarnation is by definition messy and worldly.

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A White Girl Like Me

published on Monday, August 31, 2009 by admin

By Dr. Amy Laura Hall
Associate Professor of Christian Ethics
Duke Divinity School

I am a woman. But this long story very short begins when I was a girl, a white girl. I was raised with an inkling of a clue, but protected from gaining more.

There was a hint that beloved neighbors didn’t have an easy time as a “mixed” couple in small town Texas. But it wasn’t until much later that I had the categories to get this. There were evidently open conflicts in my extended family over “mixed” dating, but the sketches are almost erased by hush now, one of the elders involved too-long-gone and venerated.

A few stories stick. In one, I am a mostly clueless 13 year old, in a rental van, traveling to Arkansas for a youth conference. I can’t remember now if we were all white kids, but we were definitely mostly so. One woman in charge was mostly Black. We stopped for gas in a trifling town. We piled out of the car with our carefully pre-teen selected Ocean Pacific t-shirts, sunglasses, and knowing sneers. (Looking back, this is absurd, as we were small town kids ourselves.) I laughed out “Hey, Girls! Look at all the hicks!” Claudia stopped me, brought me around the other side of the van and “clued me in.” Are you crazy? Do you have any idea how much trouble you could get us all into? Do you think a Black woman with a van full of white kids drives through here every day?

I like to think now that I was responding to some ghastly display of the confederate flag, but, I’m probably wishful thinking, and clueless thinking. Because that wasn’t the point. The point was that I had the freedom to display mock-superiority. I could opt in or out of having a clue. Claudia couldn’t.

This may be what scared me most about Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Most other novels I had read allowed me to opt in or out, trying on different moral masks. Good old Atticus. I could be Scout. Huck? Probably not. Toni Morrison does not make it easy to “try on” brown eyes. She later wrote that “many readers were touched but not moved.” I think I was tripped off kilter. Every time I put the book down, Toni Morrison had made it woundingly obvious that I was able to put the book down.

Director Kiri Davis didn’t make her film, “A Girl Like Me,” for girls like me. A student recommended I use it in teaching. Maybe she also wanted to help me get a clue. I sat there in my Duke office with tears of angry lament. Two students knocked on the door. I was caught crying, even sobbing, by two white boys. Good white boys, but, still, sobbing isn’t done. I said later to a friend, “That is it. No more. I am happy being white. I don’t want to be this angry. I don’t want to be so cursedly moved. Forget about it.”

Here’s the thing that made me write. This stuff is annoying on all fronts. Black people still know I have about a quarter of a clue most of the time. As the only white girl in Emory’s Voices of Inner Strength, as the white teacher who tries to teach Womanist texts, as the professor who weeps in lament, I opt in or out as I want, as the “spirit moves.” But I am learning that a white person with a bit of a clue is even more annoying to most white people. What is up with her? Mid-life crisis? Desperation for friendship? Too many sociology classes at a young age? (Or, my favorite, a particularly cruel reference to Spike Lee’s Malcolm X.) Why does she always have to bring up race? She is not Black.

True. I’m not Black. But I am part of a Body that is. Some day Christians will all be opted in.

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The Memorial for Michael Jackson

published on Friday, August 28, 2009 by admin


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

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

Jennings: Jay, I was amazed by the memorial service for Michael Jackson. What struck me immediately was the deeply Christian, deeply “black church form” that service embodied. From the surprising presence and position of the casket adorned with flowers to the position of the podium, the setting turned the Staples Center in Los Angeles into a sanctuary. Yet beyond the setting, we saw the performance of an ecclesial memory of how to mourn the dead and how to draw the dead bodies of black men next to the body of God. This is a practice black Christians the world over know how to do very well, not because we want such knowledge but because we have been forced into its endless repetition. I was struck by how the singers such as Mariah Carey and Lionel Richie drew deeply from the well of church singing, that blues drenched, old 100s idiom. But the first highlight for me was Queen Latifah's reading of Maya Angelou brilliant poem:

Beloveds, now we know that we know nothing,
now that our bright and shining star can slip away from our fingertips like a puff of summer wind.

Without notice, our dear love can escape our doting embrace.
Sing our songs among the stars
and walk our dances across the face of the moon.

In the instant that Michael is gone, we know nothing.

No clocks can tell time.

No oceans can rush our tides with the abrupt absence of our treasure.

Though we are many, each of us is achingly alone, piercingly alone.

Only when we confess our confusion can we remember that he was a gift to us
and we did have him.

He came to us from the creator, trailing creativity in abundance.

Despite the anguish, his life was sheathed in mother love, family love,
and survived and did more than that.

He thrived with passion and compassion, humor and style.

We had him whether we know who he was or did not know, he was ours and and we were his.

We had him, beautiful, delighting our eyes.

His hat, aslant over his brow, and took a pose on his toes for all of us.

And we laughed and stomped our feet for him.

We were enchanted with his passion because he held nothing.
He gave us all he had been given.

Today in Tokyo, beneath the Eiffel Tower, in Ghana’s Black Star Square.

In Johannesburg and Pittsburgh, in Birmingham, Alabama, and Birmingham, England
We are missing Michael.

But we do know we had him, and we are the world.

Angelou's genius was beautifully framed by the powerful commanding presence of Queen Latifah. Angelou's stunning biblical cadence captures one of the deepest realities of black artistic performance as we witnessed it in Michael Jackson, and that is, the ability to carry others inside our bodies, inside our pain and inside our expressive transcendence.

Carter: Yes Willie, your observations are spot-on. The Jackson memorial service calls for serious intellectual, I would go so far as to say, Christian intellectual reflection. For indeed, as again you rightly say, the service mimed in many ways signal features of black church life, so much so that the Staples Center metamorphosed into the Staples Sanctuary. It was replete with soloists and choirs, testimonials and witnesses, and alas preacher and all ─ in the person of Al Sharpton as eulogist.

Sharpton’s remarks roused the crowd and raised the roof. There was his homiletically polished line: “To the Jackson kids I say, there was nothin’ strange about your dad; it was strange what yo’ daddy had to deal with.” And there was the ever-so subtle alignment of MJ’s life with the wider strides of the civil rights movement and with Martin Luther King, Jr. Some, I’m sure may feel that such a suggestion goes too far. But Sharpton as preacher at Staples Sanctuary was making a point certainly worth pondering.

Martin and Michael, Sharpton intimated, were “dreamers ─ dreamers of a different social world, a different social reality. King dreamed in the heat of the 1950s and 1960s. His dream bore its greatest fruit in the world of politics and policy with the great Civil Rights legislations. Jackson dreamed in the soul and then post-soul eras of the 1970s, 80s, and beyond. The fruit of his dream was the transformation of the world of artistic and musical culture. Linking the two eras and the two figures as he did ─ and here Sharpton’s rhetorical gifts and genius piqued in its subtlety ─ was the “dream.” Both dreamed ─ as has Afro-Christianity the world over ─ a different world in the midst of this strange world. Invoking black church life as the form in which to funeralize Michael Jackson powerfully evoked this deeper and wide tradition of black folks in the modern world.

It also struck me, Willie, that something else was accomplished in memorializing Michael Jackson in black church form. It profoundly humanized him in the midst of media narratives in which Michael often came off as freakish or that otherwise put a question mark next to his humanity. Well, true to black church form, the memorial service ─ from the cracking voice of Jermaine Jackson to the funny anecdotes of Smokey Robinson to Brook Shields’ tears to the groans of Jackson’s little daughter Paris ─ captured a Michael Jackson. Michael the human being ─ the father, the friend, the humanitarian, someone who gave almost a third of his income to do good works. And insofar as the memorial service humanized Michael, it followed in the tradition of black churches the world. It humanizes those who have had a question mark placed next to their humanity, calling it into question. Between the media presentation of Michael Jackson and the memorial presentation of him in black church form, we see a struggle of narration, the wages of story telling. It does remind one of King again, for the March on Washington also narrated civil rights inside of the form of the black church.

One last thing. And here I am thinking of the universality of Jackson the man and the universality of his memorial service. As Jackson was a black man who was a figure of universal reach (his voice brought together those from Japan to Birmingham, from Senegal and Berlin to Brazil, from Britain to the Bronx), the black church form in which he was memorialized also exemplified the universal reach of black church life. Michael Jackson (along with Lionel Richie) penned in the 1980s, I think it was, “We are the World.” Well, people the world over, numbering in the millions, watched his memorial service. But here’s the thing: as they watched it, they were drawn into the form and into the bosom of the pain and hope of the black church tradition at its best.

In all, the memorial, as I said, leaves much for us to think about and talk through.

Jennings: Jay, absolutely, in a very important way Michael’s memorial service flashed across the world the humanizing power of black church gestures. Once again, I am deeply impressed by the truth and power of Sharpton. He is also a figure like Michael often inscribed in narrative that render him freakish, fiendish or an abject political failure. None of which are true, but all of which seeks to conceal the profoundly organic power of the man. As with James Brown, the godfather of soul, so too now with the king of pop, Sharpton’s close relationship with these men and his ability to contextualize their lives on the broader landscapes of America’s story and the story of global black existence has placed Sharpton in a unique historic space.

That space is indeed a preaching space. I was amazed at his deployment of the preacher refrain, “Thank ya,” “Thank ya, Michael.” We are quite familiar with this refrain as carrying forward the celebratory climax of a sermon, evoking the work of God bound up with a dying and rising Son. Yet here Sharpton drew Michael’s life inside this majestic sigh of Christian gratitude. I never cease to be stunned by the creative power of black preachers to expand a Christological frame around any and every moment of pain.

Speaking of pain, I was also struck by the labored singing of so many of the performers. I cannot imagine what it must be like to enter the expressive mode while the pain of loss is so fresh. You could see the struggle on Lionel Richie’s face as he tried to sing his beautiful song, Jesus. You could also see it on Usher, and of course, Jermaine’s sensitive singing. Even Stevie Wonder’s poignant performance was labored as he pressed through the sadness soaked moment. My point here is that their performances exposed the clear sense that this is an untimely death, a death that should not be.

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