Of Roosting Chickens

I've been attempting to avoid commenting on the manufactured "controversy" surrounding Trinity UCC in Chicago and their now retired pastor Jeremiah Wright. That church and its esteemed pastor have been dragged through the mud as a part of an ongoing attempt to smear Barack Obama as being of suspect religion. First he was painted as a Muslim, the new dangerous "other," and now as that is losing traction (by and large, anyway) we're back to that old dangerous other.

The controversy surrounding Trinity UCC - a controversy that exists solely because one of their members has a good chance to be the first black person elected president of the United States - is not about religion, though it is couched in religious language. Ultimately it is about race. It is about how white ears hear powerful black claims. It is about the inability of many whites to understand the prophetic tradition of black preaching, and the unwillingness of many whites to recognize the distance between white and black religious language, and to suspend judgment until they have the requisite grounding to properly interpret statements.

The best case in point of this concerns Rev. Wright's now infamous declaration just after 9-11. But, before I get to that statement, I want to echo these words from Rev. Otis Moss III (one of the key-note speakers at my seminary's recent Festival of Theology), who recently replace Wright as the pastor of Trinity UCC:

Dr. Wright has preached 207,792 minutes on Sunday for the past 36 years at Trinity United Church of Christ. This does not include weekday worship services, revivals and preaching engagements across America and around the globe, to ecumenical and interfaith communities. It is an indictment on Dr. Wright’s ministerial legacy to present his global ministry within a 15- or 30-second sound bite.

I could not agree more. To reduce a 36 year preaching career to a few statements yanked entirely from their historical and textual contexts is at best unprofessional and grossly negligent, and the main stream media should be ashamed for their participation in the dumbing down of American racial and religious dialogue. What we're seeing is at best a lazy narrative, and at worst latent racism once again rearing its ugly head in American public life.

In the coming days I may offer posts on Black Theology (Rev. Wright was greatly influenced by James Cone, about whom I have written many times on this blog - to understand Wright's prophetic message you have to have a basic understanding of the theological presuppositions and commitments of the Cone school of Black Theology) and the prophetic tradition. Today, however, I want to narrow my focus to a single quote from Wright, because the way that this quote has been represented in American media illustrates my contention that this discourse is at least lazy, if not outright racist.

The New York Times (whose article is the most responsible journalistic treatment of the manufactured "controversy" I've encountered, as it interviews both James Cone and the University of Chicago Divinity School's legendary Dwight Hopkins, two leading voices in Black Theology, making it the only journalistic attempt I've seen to place Wright properly in his theological context) reports that just after 9-11, Jeremiah Wright preached a sermon that included:

We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards,

and

America’s chickens are coming home to roost.

That same Times article includes - very responsibly - Wright's explanation for those words, and how they functioned pastorally in his congregation. However, neither it nor any other source that I've seen mentions what many in Wright's congregation undoubtedly knew even as they were hearing this sermon from their seats in the sanctuary that morning: Wright was echoing Malcolm X.

In The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X explains the controversy that served as the excuse used by Elijah Muhammad to silence him, which in turn was the mechanism by which he left the Nation of Islam. He was asked by Elijah Muhammad to give a speech at the Manhattan Center, shortly after the assassination of president John F. Kennedy:

The title of my speech was "God's Judgment of White America." It was a theme familiar to me, of "as you sow, so shall you reap," or how the hypocritical American white man was reaping what he had sowed.

The question-and-answer period opened, I suppose inevitably, with someone asking me, "What do you think about President Kennedy's assassination? What is your opinion?"

Without a second thought, I said what I honestly felt - that it was, as I saw it, a case of "the chickens coming home to roost." I said that the hate in white men had not stopped with the killing of defenseless black people, but that hate, allowed to spread unchecked, finally had struck down this country's chief of state.

Malcolm X connected the assassination of president Kennedy to the violent hatred in America; in other words, to racism. Now, to white ears this sounds at first at best a reckless stretch, and at worst - well... we've seen the sorts of labels applied to Wright for saying something very similar. However, an appreciation of the historical context quickly shows that Malcolm X had a point. For instance, on the day that Kennedy was killed, the University of Tennessee - only recently integrated, with a handful of black students - had to close. Was this in commemoration? An act of remembrance for a beloved president? Was this due to collective shock that in this unstable time not even the most powerful person in the country is safe?

No. This was because there were so many white Southerners in the streets of Knoxville celebrating the death of that n- loving president. (If you don't believe me check out the brilliant new documentary on ESPN, Black Magic. It contains both first person accounts of this, and archival footage.) Across the American south there was a large, vocal minority of the white population that saw Kennedy's death as the justified result of his stance on civil rights. It was not a stretch at that time to say that racist white anger, fear, and paranoia led either directly or indirectly to Kennedy's assassination, even if such an assertion is less credible today.

In order to understand the statement by Wright quoted above, yanked as it is out of his context, you have to have some appreciation of its use of Malcolm X. Just as Malcolm X linked an American tragedy to American sin, Wright is doing the same thing. But instead of pulling a Jerry Falwell, he is coming from a very different, more prophetic tradition.

The New York Times piece linked to above provided some space for Wright to explain his words, to place them gently back into the context from which they were yanked:

Asked in an interview last March to explain the sermon, Mr. Wright said he had been questioning the country’s desire for vengeance against the perpetrators, counseling his congregants to look inward instead.

Immediately after the attacks, the country’s response was “to pay back and kill,” he said. But before it got “holier than thou,” he said, the nation should have considered how its own policies had led to the events of that day.

The quote in question from Rev. Wright, like the Malcolm X quote to which it points, has been interpreted as saying something sinister, like America deserved to be the victim of a terrorist attack, like the attack was somehow justified. But placed in this context, neither Wright nor Malcolm X are saying any such thing. They are offering explanations, not justifications. They are using their prophetic voices to note the connection between a horrific event and social, economic, and political policies that create the landscape within which that event takes place.

If America were not such a violently racist country, built on the backs of slaves, over the corpses of the native population, it may not have produced the conditions in which John F. Kennedy was killed, and in which many white racists celebrated his death. This is Malcolm X's point.

In the same vein, Wright says, "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards." If we had not done this, then the necessary conditions for the attacks on September 11 may not have been met. This does not justify those attacks. But neither does it let us blindly ignore our own corporate participation in them.

This is not hate speech, it is prophetic speech, in line both with the prophets of ancient Israel and the prophetic tradition of black preaching. It may grate on our ears, but listening to it and taking it seriously may just do us a world of good.

(My next post will concern what I mean by the prophetic tradition.)

_______________________

Update: 3-19-08, 1:27 pm

Finally having some time to check on some of the blogs I like, I saw this excellent post by Liam. It is similarly concerned with Wright's statements, but does perhaps an even better job critically examining them and placing them in context. More importantly, Liam's focus is slightly broader than mine, and so he addresses multiple statements rather than the single one I parsed out here.

An Important Distinction

The debate here over the recent Supreme Court decision ruling Louisville's and Seattle's public school desegregation plans unconstitutional (irony # 458: the Louisville plan the court struck down was put in place when an earlier Supreme Court ruled that the city wasn't doing enough to integrate - so, essentially, a plan ordered by the Supreme Court was later ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court!) has forced me to consider an important distinction that needs to be made.

Just as, earlier (in a discussion on the theology of James Cone - see the whole series here) I argued for the need to make a distinction between the violence of oppression and the violence of the oppressed in response to their oppression, here I will argue that we need to make a distinction between kinds of discrimination.

Much has been made of this line in Chief Justice Roberts' majority decision:

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

On the surface it makes perfect sense. The thinking behind it led to Roberts' equating of desegregation plans which consider race, and as such, in some way discriminate on the basis of race, with the forced segregation that was (at least legally) overturned in Brown v. Board of Education. If what was wrong with segregation was that it was a legal form of racial discrimination, then racial discrimination of any kind must be both wrong and unconstitutional.

But the question we have to ask is this: Are all kinds of discrimination on the basis of race equal? Is the discrimination of Jim Crow equivalent to the discrimination of public school integration plans that consider race? I have to say NO!

Our country has a long history of racism and social injustice. This racism has placed many groups at a significant (and unnatural, as it has nothing to do with the inherent nature of the disadvantaged groups) disadvantage. Perhaps the single most disadvantaged group (with all due respect to the indigenous population that was nearly wiped out with the arrival of Europeans) is the group we call "black." Stolen from their native lands and forced into slavery, this group has been consistently dehumanized, to the point where our court system ruled once that blacks have no rights that whites are bound to respect.

The persistent legacy of racism - and of this there is no doubt - has long limited the educational and economic opportunities and outcomes for blacks. As such, they have been explicitly excluded from full participation in American culture, despite their great contributions to American culture, without which it would make no sense to speak of a distinctly American culture. (Jazz, blues, rock and roll - these are distinctly American forms of music, but their roots are black.)

Because blacks have been explicitly excluded from full participation in American culture; because they are the victims of a persistently racist social structure; they must be explicitly included, and such inclusion looks a great deal like the discrimination of favoritism. This brings me to the first distinction that needs to be made when talking about discrimination:

We must make a distinction between discrimination which favors or advantages a group, and discrimination which excludes, harms, or puts a group at a disadvantage.

Of course these kinds of discrimination are related. It is difficult and often nonsensical to distinguish between these kinds of discrimination in certain cases. In a society in which "white" is considered the normative form of humanity, the favoring of whites cannot be distinguished from the excluding of non-whites from full participation in humanity. White privilege disadvantages blacks. This is why, in addition to distinguishing between favoring a group and marginalizing a group, we must make another kind of distinction:

We must distinguish between discrimination that perpetuates past inequities and discrimination that aims to level the metaphorical playing field.

Simply put, outcomes matter. Any discrimination that favors an already favored group or that pushes an already marginalized group further toward the margins has a very different outcome from a discrimination that recognizes past inequities and tries to create a more just and equitable society. It is with this in mind that I'd like to revisit the Roberts quote:

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

I don't necessarily disagree with it. However, in our effort to "stop discrimination on the basis of race" we must recognize the many expressions of harmful discrimination, of white favoritism and black marginalization, inherent in our society. Absent that, ruling desegregation programs unconstitutional, and equating them with the discrimination of Jim Crow laws, does not "stop discrimination on the basis of race." Rather, it robs those who wish to end harmful discrimination of a valuable tool to fight discrimination.

The discrimination of integration in public schools is not the same as the discrimination of segregation. In slightly favoring a disadvantaged population it helps create a more just and equitable society, which is very, very different from the discrimination of entrenched white privilege and racism.

Liberation and Reconciliation Held Together by Roberts

We've already looked (perhaps far too) extensively at James Cone's Black Theology and Black Power, which seeks to Christianize Black Power (or, perhaps, Black Powerize Christianity) within a theological framework of liberation. Cone sees Christ as black, and sees the work of Christ in the work of Black Power. He hears Christ calling blacks to assert themselves and shake off the shackles of their oppression. To that end, his work is helpful.

However, as we've noticed, there are some troubling aspects of it. First, as we've already seen, Cone offers up a theological defense of violence in the name of resisting oppression. While I have some sympathy for his position, in that I agree with the need to make a sharp moral distinction between the violence of oppressors and the violence of the oppressed as they fight against their violent oppression, I am, to say the least, highly suspicious of any attempt to see Christ working through means that the historical Jesus would have certainly condemned.

More troubling, perhaps, is the exclusivism of Cone's position. He, as best as I can tell, sees God exclusively at work within the black community. Within his framework there is little hope for the salvation and reformation of whites, and perhaps even less hope for reconciliation. Yes, Cone does offer some halting suggestions for reconciliation, and at least a tiny morsel of hope for whites, but his primary concern, it seems to me, is to condemn white oppression of blacks, and to call blacks to power. While both of those tasks are noble, in and of themselves they hardly comprise the entirety of Christianity.

I plan to go on and read much more Cone, hoping to see how he develops a more comprehensive theology that will go beyond his equating of Christianity and Black Power. However, for the moment I am sidestepping his work and moving on to Liberation and Reconciliation: A Black Theology by J. Deotis Roberts.

Like Cone, in the preface to the latest edition of his work, Roberts repents of his former sexism. Unlike Cone, however, Roberts has chosen to wash the sexist language from his work, revisiting the ways in which he speaks of both God and humanity to incorporate womanist and feminist critiques of language. This makes the book much easier to read from my perspective, but I am glad that Roberts calls attention to his former exclusively male language, so that he sidesteps the attack that Cone, too, tried to avoid: that of trying to forget past sins, and as such leave them entirely unaddressed, in the past.

Unlike Cone, Roberts is interested not only in providing a theological framework for the liberation of blacks, but also in reconciliation between the races. He sees the two as intimately connected to each other, and as together comprising the heart of Christianity:

My understanding of the Christian faith leads me to speak of both liberation and reconciliation as proper goals for the Christian church in general and of the black church in particular. I understand the church to have a center, but not a circumference - and exclusiveness to be a means to universalism and not an end. Therefore the black church, in setting black people free, may make freedom possible for white people as well. Whites are victimized as the sponsors of hate and prejudice which keeps racism alive. Therefore, they cannot know for themselves the freedom of Christians, for they are shackled by a self-imposed bondage. The cry for deliverance, for authentic freedom for existence, on the part of black people, may be salvific for all regardless of the nature or cause of oppression.

In the section surrounding this quote Roberts is principally concerned with two things:

1. Understanding a concept of "chosenness" as relates to the black people in general and the black church in particular, and

2. Offering up the family as a proper model for the nature, structure, and role of the black church.

To this end, Roberts devotes a great deal of time to understanding the history of "chosenness" as it applies to other groups who have claimed titles such as "the people of God" for themselves. He also devotes a great deal of time to understanding the history of the black family, both in Africa and especially in diaspora. He is particularly concerned with the impact of slavery and its aftermath on the nature and strength of the black family.

But within that project, he is also building to his understanding of the need for a black theology to be a Christian theology that is concerned with more than just black people. And, as a Christian theology, he stresses the need for black theology to be concerned with both liberation and reconciliation at the same time. In the above quote he is, within that context of both liberation and reconciliation, offering up a brief glimpse at the connection between black deliverance from white oppression and white deliverance from white oppression. He sees both the oppressed and the oppressors as the victims of oppression, with each being held in a kind of bondage to the evil power of oppression. This concept of the joint victimhood of oppression - even if only one party is morally culpable for the oppression - sets the stage for a joint deliverance from oppression, with blacks acting as a kind of "chosen people" whose deliverance makes possible the deliverance of whites, as well.

While Roberts is building here a black theology, it is not a theology that is solely concerned with black persons. Insofar as it is a Christian theology, it is primarily concerned with Christ, even if it is principally concerned with how God through Christ speaks to the black experience. Within this concern for Christ, the notion that ultimately "all are one in Christ Jesus is very important for Roberts. And this notion helps inform Roberts' view on black-white relationships, and ultimately paves the way for reconciliation between the races:

The assertion that all are "one in Christ Jesus" must henceforth mean that all slave-master, servant-boss, inferior-superior frames of reference between blacks and whites have been abolished. This principle must operate not merely on a spiritual level, but on the plane of human social relations as well. The slave must be set free, but the slave system must likewise be destroyed so that the suture will be free of human bondage. The black church, as a family, as a corporate expression of the Christian faith of black people, is called forth into empowerment actions. It must become a gestalt, a structure of mass power of black people operating against oppression under Christian sponsorship. The black church must use all its resources to launch a massive assault against white power in church, community, or state that is responsible for the oppression of black people. But even in our revolutionary action for the liberation of black people, we must hold up at all times the possibility for black-white interracial fellowship and cooperation. Reconciliation between equals, no less than liberation, is the mission of the black church.

Like Cone, Roberts calls the black church to the cause of liberation - the liberation of black people. Like Cone, Roberts sees black pride, black power, as an integral part of this work of liberation. The black church is called to help lift up the black people, and in doing so to help build them up. As such, the black church is called to fight against white power everywhere that white power oppresses blacks, even within the black mind.

But while Roberts shares the urgency of the "by any means necessary" crowd, he does not share their ethics. The black church is called to be a Christian church, not just a black church. As such, while the liberation of the black people is imperative - and is, in fact, a Christian duty - that liberation cannot be used to justify the full exclusion of all white persons from the process of making blacks equal to whites, both in reality and in the minds of both blacks and whites. Where Cone is willing to at least in part justify the use of violence to force whites to consider the basic humanity of blacks, Roberts reminds the black church that the church must always hold liberation and reconciliation together. And racial violence from either side makes the task of reconciliation that much harder. In other words, the violence of white oppression of blacks does not justify revolutionary violence.

Yes, the church is to "assault" white power, but that assault is not an assault against white people. Rather it is an assault against the structures of power ingrained in our culture. And, as we have seen from other sources, the best assault against what Walter Wink calls "the Powers" is a nonviolent assault.

At first glance Roberts' views may be much more comforting to white Christians than Cone's theology of Black Power. But, while Roberts calls the black church to act like Christians as they fight for liberation, he no less than Cone issues as strong rebuke to the white church, an anti-Christian church that serves as a vehicle for the oppression of blacks rather than the propagation of the liberating Gospel. Just as Roberts calls black Christians to act like Christians, he also calls white Christians to act like Christians. And he is pretty clear that, as far as he is concerned, most are not.

What separates Roberts from Cone, however, is that Roberts holds out more hope that whites will eventually see their own participation in the oppression of blacks as a denial of Christ and the Gospel, and will thus eventually repent and convert. Then, finally seeing blacks through the eyes of Christ, and as such as their fundamental equals, they will finally be ready for reconciliation between equals.

More on Cone and "Revolutionary Violence"

Despite having now devoted 3 posts to the subject (see here, here, and here) I'm not quite done with James Cone's Black Theology and Black Power. I am especially not done with his wrestling with the role of violence in revolutionary struggles.

I have already discussed this subject at length, but this morning, in the closing pages of the book, I read an even more thorough argument concerning the role of violence in the revolutionary struggle for Black Power. It is first interesting to note that, despite the appearance given from some earlier readings on the subject, Cone does not that the subject of violence poses some real problems for his equating of Black Power with Christianity:

Our chief difficulty with Black Theology and violence... arises from the New Testament itself. The New Testament picture of Jesus seems to suggest that he was against violence as a proper redress. He certainly never resorted to violence. In fact, he seems to have avoided the term "Messiah" as a personal designation because of the political (violent) implications. Also his constant references to love and turning the other cheek seem to indicate that the Christian life cannot be one characterized by an "eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." ... Can we then, by strength of the imagination or clever exegesis, interpret his command to turn the other cheek to mean a turning of the gun?

Cone, then, is aware that the Christian argument against violence rests on something much more compelling that just the comfort of whites or the perpetuation of oppression. It rests on the very words and actions of Jesus of Nazareth. How, then, in the face of Jesus' powerful witness against violence, does Cone justify the Christianizing of violence in the struggle for Black Power? By once again attacking the assumptions of those who question the appropriateness of revolutionary violence:

The real danger of these questions is the implied literalism in them. Like the fundamentalist who stressed the verbal inspiration of Scripture, this view suggests that ethical questions dealing with violence can be solved by asking: "What would Jesus do?" We cannot solve ethical questions in the twentieth century by looking at what Jesus did in the first. Our choices are not the same as his... and thus we are placed in an existential situation in which we are forced to decide without knowing what Jesus would do. The Christian does not ask what Jesus would do, as if Jesus were confined to the first century. He asks: "What is he doing? Where is he at work?" And even though these are the right questions, they cannot be answered once and for all. Each question has its own problematic circumstances which force the believer to think through each act of obedience without an absolute ethical guide from Jesus... Therefore, simply to say that Jesus did not use violence is no evidence relevant to the condition of black people as they decide what to do about white oppression.

There is a great deal here that I can affirm, especially Cone's rephrasing of the question concerning violence. I agree that we - in a social, cultural and historical context far removed from first century Palestine - cannot decide what to do today merely by copying step for step the actions of Jesus of Nazareth. This is as absurd as imposing the laws of ancient Israel on present day America. That which was of God, and therefore effective, at one point in history does not, simply by virtue of its being ordained by God in a single place and time automatically become a universal fit for all places and all times.

However, I disagree with his assertion that Jesus' refusal to use violence to help the Israelites break free from oppression under the Roman domination system does not speak powerfully against the use of violence in the struggle for racial equality in America. First century Jews were an oppressed people, a violently oppressed people. Yet, in the face of this violent oppression, Jesus explicitly forbids the use of violence as a tool for resisting oppression. He did this, I suspect, not because he failed to see the innate violence in oppression, but rather because he saw nonviolence as the most powerful tool for fighting oppression. And, that his nonviolent method of resistance has been translated effectively to a wide variety of setting throughout history speaks powerfully to its enduring effectiveness as a resistance strategy.

To assert that one cannot simply copy the actions of Jesus should not be to say that one should do things that Jesus would never have approved of, in his name. Rather, to assert that one cannot simply copy the actions of Jesus should be an invitation to act creatively while resisting nonviolently. As both Walter Wink and Marcus Borg have noted, to take Jesus' instruction to turn the other cheek so literally that in all occasions of assault one simply turns their other cheek to be struck again is to miss the creative power of that strategy. It is offered not as a hard and fast rule, but as an example of how one can resist violent oppression with creative nonviolence, by refusing to allow their basic humanity to be stripped by the Powers.

I suspect that Cone's failure to recognize this stems from his framing of the issue of nonviolence in resistance. In the face of the violent nature of oppression, he argues:

The Christian does not decide between violence and nonviolence, evil and good. He decides between the less and the greater evil. He must ponder whether revolutionary violence is less or more deplorable than the violence perpetuated by the system. There are no absolute rules which can decide the answer with certainty. But he must make a choice. If he decides to take the "nonviolent" way, then he is saying that revolutionary violence is more detrimental to man in the long run than systematic violence. But if the system is evil, then revolutionary violence is both justified and necessary.

If Cone has correctly framed the answer here, then I suspect that we must conclude, in the end, that violence is indeed "both justified and necessary." But, must we really choose between affirming the violence of oppression and affirming the violence of revolution? Only if we fail to see the revolutionary power of nonviolent resistance.

The Christian who has faith in the methods of Jesus - and that faith is not a blind faith, but is instead supported by the success of nonviolent revolutions throughout the twentieth century - is not forced into the false dichotomy proposed here. Rather, the Christian who has faith in the methods of Jesus is free to choose the third way of creative, nonviolent resistance.

Response to Cone's Theological Defense of Violence in the Name of Black Power

Last Wednesday I noted reading this powerful passage from James Cone's Black Theology and Black Power:

The black man's response to God's act in Christ must be different from the white's because his life experiences are different. Christian love is never fully embodied in an act. Love is the motive or the rationale for action. The attempt of some to measure love exclusively through specific actions, such as nonviolence, is theologically incorrect. Christian love comprises the being of a man whereby he behaves as if God is the essence of his existence. It means that God has hold of him and his movement in the world. But this does not take away the finiteness of man, the existential doubt in making decisions in the world. To accept Christ means both self-acceptance and neighbor-acceptance with the existential threat of nonbeing. What existentialists call non-being is never removed from man's existence. Thus the love of self and the love of neighbor, which constitute the heart of one's being in God, never escape the possibility of self-annihilation and destruction of the neighbor. The violence in the cities, which appears to contradict Christian love, is nothing but the black man's attempt to say Yes to his being as defined by God in a world that would make his being into nonbeing. If the riots are the black man's courage to say Yes to himself as a creature of God, and if in affirming self he affirms Yes to the neighbor, then violence may be the black man's expression, sometimes the only possible expression, of Christian love to the white oppressor. From the perspective of a Christian theologian seeking to take seriously the black man's condition in America, what other view is possible?

It seems that the mistake of most whites, religionists included, is their insistence on telling blacks how to respond "as Christians" to racism, insisting that nonviolence is the only appropriate response. But there is an ugly contrast between the sweet, nonviolent language of white Christians and their participation in a violently unjust system. Maybe the oppressor's being is so warped by his own view of himself that every analysis made by him merely reveals his own inflated self-evaluation. Certainly as long as he can count on blacks remaining nonviolent by turning the other cheek and accepting the conditions of slavery, there will be no real pressure to confront the black man as a person. If he can be sure that blacks will not threaten his wealth, his superiority, his power in the world, there will be no need to give up his control of the black man's destiny.

Having chewed these words over and over again in my mind, I'd finally like to post a response. This is not the knee jerk response that I would have posted last week, as someone committed to nonviolence. Rather, this is, I hope, a patient and charitable response, a response that stems in part from a deep recognition of my own need to repent for my participation in an ongoing, dehumanizing power-structure that still robs blacks and other minority groups from access to all of the trappings of white privilege that I enjoy.

In this passage Cone makes a sharp and useful distinction between two kinds of violence:

1. The violence of the oppressors, and

2. The violence of the oppressed, in response to their violent oppression.

Perhaps the greatest weakness of most forms of pacifism that I have seen is that they, in condemning all manifestations of violence, fail to make the proper moral distinction between these kinds of violence. The violence of power - whether it is found in physical beatings, lynchings, murder, bombs being dropped on villages, or in the perpetuation of dehumanizing ideas and values, or the economic exploitation of the poor and marginalized - is a categorically different kind of violence from the violence of those who would violently shake off the shackles of their oppression. If we cannot clearly articulate that distinction, then we have nothing of value to say to those who are being ground under by the wheels of oppression.

Cone rightly calls the white church on our hypocrisy on this matter. He sees us preaching nonviolence in the 1960s the way that we once taught obedience to slave masters - as a way to keep blacks from rising up and demanding to be treated as human beings. Cone sees whites imposing nonviolence as a primary moral and spiritual duty, all the while benefiting from a fundamentally violent and oppressive system of domination.

I think, however, that Cone - while perhaps accurately diagnosing the motives that many whites had in extolling to blacks the value of nonviolence - failed to appreciate the power of nonviolent resistance. Nonviolent resistance is not exactly the same thing as nonviolence. While both nonviolence and nonviolent resistance teach that nonviolence is (at the very least!) preferable to violence, nonviolent resistance does not teach the oppressed that their primary moral and spiritual duty is to nonviolence. Rather, nonviolent resistance - Jesus' response to the Roman domination system; the Satyagraha of Gandhi in the face of British colonial rule in his native India and apartheid in South Africa, where he once practiced law and then began his career opposing power; the "civil disobedience of Martin Luther King, Jr., etc. - teaches the oppressed that, first and foremost they are called to resistance.

Nonviolent resistance tells the oppressed that they are human beings, and should demand to be treated as such. (We have already seen here how that plays out in some of the teachings of Jesus. See, for example, how "turning the other cheek" can be seen not as a form of submission, but rather as a nonviolent yet potent demand to be seen as an equal, a human being with all the rights and respect that entails.) Then, and only then, does it tell them that the way to go about asserting their fundamental humanity is through nonviolence.

In nonviolent resistance, in other words, nonviolence is not a moral norm, but a tool - the most powerful tool - for resisting oppression. In Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way, Walter Wink notes the overwhelming success of nonviolent revolutions in the twentieth century, saying:

If we total all the nonviolent movements of the twentieth century, the figure comes to 3.4 billion people, and again, most were successful. And yet there are people who still insist that nonviolence doesn't work!

Wink attributes the persistence of the delusion about the power of violence and the impotence of nonviolence to a number of causes. First, because as a culture we are "so preoccupied with power politics and wars," our history books are full of stories of wars rather than with the success stories of nonviolent movements. Additionally, he notes the negative nature of the word "nonviolence":

It sounds like a not-doing, the putting of one's energy into avoiding something bad rather than throwing one's total being into doing something good... "Nonviolence" is identified by many as the injunction to be submissive before authorities.

But the nonviolent resistance that Wink and others advocate is neither passive nor submissive. It is not simply the refusal to act violently, but the commitment to act creatively. It is the "third way," the path between "fight" and "flight."

Wink makes a sharp distinction between the kind of nonviolence that Cone repudiates and the kind of nonviolence that Jesus calls us to. He also acknowledges, with Cone, that this understanding of nonviolence as a tool for resistance is not the understanding of nonviolence that most Christians have:

Most Christians desire nonviolence, yes; but they are not talking about a nonviolent struggle for justice. They mean simply the absence of conflict... What they mean by nonviolence is as far from Jesus' third way as a lazy nap in the sun is from a confrontation in which protesters are being clubbed to the ground.

In the face of this common Christian understanding of nonviolence, it is easy to see why Cone - writing in 1969, as cities are being burned to the ground by race riots - would dismiss Christian appeals for nonviolence in the face of the threat posed to white supremacy by Black Power. Such appeals can easily be heard as a longing for a time when things were less complicated; when blacks "knew their place" and didn't rise up demanding to be seen as human beings. After all, the riots are accomplishing something. They are giving voice to the cries of the oppressed, and forcing the oppressors to see them and hear them. As such, as far as Cone is concerned, they are doing the work of God.

God's fundamental concern, made manifest in Christ, is for the poor and oppressed, the marginalized, the victims of power. In twentieth century America, those poor, oppressed, marginalized victims of power are black. The race riots of the late 1960s - which give rise to Cone's Black Theology and Black Power, and shape the theology in it - can be seen as the rise of those oppressed blacks, who now demand that the whites who tried to steal their humanity turn and face them as fellow humans.

The question we must ask, though, is this: Is violence in general, and riots in particular, the best way for the victims of power to assert themselves? I know that Cone would bristle at the notion of a white man asking that question. Who am I, one who carries the face of the oppressor, to pass judgment on the way that the oppressed revolt against the power that favors me? Who am I to tell slaves (and Cone sees the state of blacks in the late 1960s as a perpetuation of slavery) how to (or not to!) rebel against their captors?

I can't answer that question, though I can honor the concern that gives rise to it. It is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for the oppressed to trust someone who looks like their oppressor. I recognize that many who have counseled nonviolence have had ulterior motives. I affirm that when slaves were taught the Gospel, they were taught the Gospel of submission to authority rather than the Gospel of the release of captives. I recognize that that Gospel of submission persisted long after slavery was formerly ended, as a way to keep blacks captive to an oppressive social structure.

But, in doing so, I also assert the power of nonviolence as a form of resistance, and as the form of Jesus' resistance. The way of Christ - and Cone is here associating Christ with Black Power - is the way of nonviolent resistance, and not rioting in the streets. This is not - as most whites might have asserting in the face of Black Power - because the way of Christ is the way of submission to domination. Rather, this is because the way of Christ is the most effective way, the way that best ensures the success of resistance.

That assertion - that Jesus' third way of nonviolent resistance is the most effective way to fight oppression - is, of course, an article of faith. But it is not an entirely unsupported article of faith. History is full of examples of successful, nonviolent revolutions, even if those examples are not always as neat and clean as the few mentions of them we find it books. And, of course, Cone is not entirely opposed to having faith in the way of Jesus. In fact, in offering us a theological defense of Black Power, Cone confesses a deep and abiding faith in Jesus as Christ. His understanding of Jesus as Christ shapes his view of Black Power. Why, then, does he have less faith in the third way of Jesus?

In the end I think it is because he is suspicious of those who preached nonviolence to him, whether they be white oppressors or the black pastors that he sees as taking the bribe of relative success under the white domination system. And, while I can see and understand that suspicion, I think that it blinds him to the power of nonviolent resistance. As such, seeing only two options for blacks in the late 1960s, submission or uprising, he chooses uprising.

I wonder what he would choose today...

Please Help Me Chew This

I've been reading Black Theology and Black Power by James H. Cone. Published in 1969, it is an admittedly limited book, with two critical failings:

1. Despite its attempt to build up a "black theology," it interacts almost exclusively with white, European theologians.

2. Despite its language of empowering the powerless, it uses exclusively masculine language, not just for God but also for humans.

Looking back at the book twenty years after its initial publication, Cone decided, despite having those failings brought painfully to his attention, to leave them in, unedited. This is, he claims, to remind him of his own participation in a kind of dehumanizing prejudice. One does not heal the wounds of the past by covering them up, but by letting them breathe, open for all to see.

I mention these critical failings because I am about to post two paragraphs from this book that really challenge me, and I don't want especially the second failing (the use of exclusively masculine language) to interfere with your reading.

At some point in the future, as I digest these and other words by Cone, I'll post some reflections of my own. In the meantime I am reeling. So, here are two paragraphs that have metaphorically knocked me down and disoriented me. I'd like for you, dear reader, to help me digest them:

The black man's response to God's act in Christ must be different from the white's because his life experiences are different. Christian love is never fully embodied in an act. Love is the motive or the rationale for action. The attempt of some to measure love exclusively through specific actions, such as nonviolence, is theologically incorrect. Christian love comprises the being of a man whereby he behaves as if God is the essence of his existence. It means that God has hold of him and his movement in the world. But this does not take away the finiteness of man, the existential doubt in making decisions in the world. To accept Christ means both self-acceptance and neighbor-acceptance with the existential threat of nonbeing. What existentialists call non-being is never removed from man's existence. Thus the love of self and the love of neighbor, which constitute the heart of one's being in God, never escape the possibility of self-annihilation and destruction of the neighbor. The violence in the cities, which appears to contradict Christian love, is nothing but the black man's attempt to say Yes to his being as defined by God in a world that would make his being into nonbeing. If the riots are the black man's courage to say Yes to himself as a creature of God, and if in affirming self he affirms Yes to the neighbor, then violence may be the black man's expression, sometimes the only possible expression, of Christian love to the white oppressor. From the perspective of a Christian theologian seeking to take seriously the black man's condition in America, what other view is possible?

It seems that the mistake of most whites, religionists included, is their insistence on telling blacks how to respond "as Christians" to racism, insisting that nonviolence is the only appropriate response. But there is an ugly contrast between the sweet, nonviolent language of white Christians and their participation in a violently unjust system. Maybe the oppressor's being is so warped by his own view of himself that every analysis made by him merely reveals his own inflated self-evaluation. Certainly as long as he can count on blacks remaining nonviolent by turning the other cheek and accepting the conditions of slavery, there will be no real pressure to confront the black man as a person. If he can be sure that blacks will not threaten his wealth, his superiority, his power in the world, there will be no need to give up his control of the black man's destiny.

Like I said, right now I'm reeling from the potency of Cone's words, words that I, despite my commitment to non-violence, must take seriously, because I stand condemned by them. I'm hoping to discuss this passage here, if anyone feels so inclined, and to eventually write an essay that attempts to address these concerns from the framework of non-violent resistance, rather than mere non-violence.