“IF BLACK WOMAN WERE FREE, EVERYONE WOULD HAVE TO BE FREE”: A RESPONSE TO JONATHAN TOTTY
Combahee River Collective protest. David Fenton / Getty Images
“Jesus [is] the savior and liberator of particular bodies, specifically the bodies of black women, even as Jesus recapitulates all of humanity into a new life of union with God.” In summarizing M. Shawn Copeland’s thesis in Enfleshing Freedom, Jonathan Totty utilizes her timely womanist argument to answer the question of the relationship between universality and particularity that has not only been asked in post-modernity, but throughout Christian history since antiquity. Copeland connects the universal and the particular by recounting the stories of enslaved Black women in order to speak about the human experience and ultimately our participation in the body of Christ. Following Copeland, any specific human situation therefore finds its meaning and purpose in God’s greater story of redeeming all creation from sin and death.
I want to take Copeland’s thesis one step further by arguing that the subjectivity of the Black woman is not simply one potential particularity through which the Christian can access universality but the only structural position that can offer this access. Two Black feminist scholars will be our guide. Sylvia Wynter’s 2003 essay, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” argues that the figure of the human, from the colonial period through today, has excluded Black skin. She describes how medieval European Christians saw the rest of world as mired in original sin and their interactions with non-Christians from Africa and elsewhere as a means of bringing salvation to them. European Christians viewed their world through a theological binary: they were “True Christians” and the rest of the world was comprised of “heretics” and “Enemies of Christ” (1). The advent of the Enlightenment legitimized non-theological humanist and scientific reasoning, and this theological binary was subsumed by a worldly one. European Christians now saw themselves in nominally secular terms: they were rational “humans” and the rest of the world was comprised of irrational indigenous and Black “subhumans.” The originally theological “Other” was replaced by a secular “Other.” Moreover, “it was the figure of the Negro (i.e. the category comprised by all peoples of Black African hereditary descent) that [the West] was to place at the nadir of its chain of being; that is, on a rung of the ladder lower than that of all humans” ()2. White European culture, beliefs, and family structures were all considered “rational” and therefore emblematic of being truly human, and the non-white – especially Black – Others who did not share those particulars were considered “subhuman.”
In her groundbreaking 1987 essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers describes the specific plight of Black women, who have been denied participation in Western notions of womanhood and motherhood from the moment they were stolen from Africa through the present. The average 19th century white mother could bear children, name them, instill certain cultural values in them, and leave to them the father’s estate. The 19th century Black mother could not. Any children she bore were not her own, but her master’s. The father was most likely sold away, so the Black mother had to play the role of the “father” as well. In this context, where nothing in one’s family is one’s own, Spillers says that “’kinship’ loses meaning, since it can be invaded at any given and arbitrary moment” (3). For these reasons, she says further that “the quintessential ‘slave’ is not a male, but a female” (4). The same dynamics persist into the present, but the methods have simply evolved. Black fathers are still stolen by racist violence and mass incarceration, and Black maternal mortality is over three times greater than white maternal mortality. The Black woman continues to be excluded from womanhood and motherhood. If the West placed “the figure of the Negro […] at the nadir of its chain of being,” Black woman wereat the bottom of even this lowest rung.
What should shock and humble white Christians is the degree to which historical Christianity’s doctrine that the whole of reality participates in God’s life and work – what Totty describes as a “participatory ontology” – contributed to the dehumanization of Black women. The evolution from the medieval Christian’s conception of the world’s order “based upon degrees of spiritual perfection/imperfection” to the Enlightenment Christian’s conception of the world’s order “based upon degrees of rational perfection/imperfection” was an easy one, because of the historical Christian notion that reason “partakes of some of God’s functions” and that reason is “intended to rule over a ‘lower order of reality,’” explains Wynter (5). Humanity is defined as those who via reason participate in God’s eternal essence, and those deemed to be without reason (however defined) are relegated to subhuman status. Christianity’s historical claims to have access to the “Being, Truth, and Goodness of God” cannot be disentangled from its conflation of its own human story with God’s story. This should serve as a caution to any Christian attempt at universals.
Spillers’ and Wynter’s accounts of the history of Black women in the West rely on methodologies that questioned the story that Christians in the West told as “God’s story.” Focusing on the “human stories” recounted above dethroned the story attributed for centuries to God. How do we as Christians – who affirm God’s creation of the world and the “cosmic, universal, and eschatological aspects of Jesus’ incarnation, death, and resurrection” – participate in the universal body of Christ without repeating the same pitfalls of our forebears?
In her 2019 book, A Theology of Failure, Marika Rose recounts the same story of the 20th century as Totty and Desmond:, that of a shift towards the human as the subject of philosophy away from God. She is also critical of some figures central to this shift. But Rose cautions us that no recentering of God’s story can confidently represent a full account of how it goes. After all, if God transcends everything, then God has to transcend the stories we tell about God – even the stories about how God transcends everything! Rose says that a naïve account of God’s work in the world “is a problem because it effectively erases the […] gap between God and the world, ignoring the problems of both creation and sin” (6). God’s story in its fullness is inaccessible to us.
The Christian tradition has appreciated this inaccessibility in apophatic theology. Apophatic theology, also called negative theology, is an ancient tradition that, instead of positively asserting what God is, recognizes that God is ultimately ineffable. It asks us to tear down our claims about God’s nature, because human language cannot capture it. Moreover, apophatic theology undercuts our hubristic assertions that we can know how the ideal human looks, that we can know what it means to participate in the divine. This is Rose’s account of transcendence:, not an ideal to be pursued, but an antagonism, a challenge, that disrupts our faith from within. Recalling Spillers and Wynter above, we have to face the truth that central antagonism of Western Christian history is that it “is built on the exclusion of Blackness from the sphere of humanity” (7) especially Black womanhood.
Paradoxically, it is from the position of that unknowing, that antagonism, where we find Christ. Rose locates this paradox in Scripture in 1 Peter 2:7-8, where Jesus is both described as the “cornerstone” and a “stumbling block” (8). Jesus is the one that holds our faith together, but Jesus also is constantly challenging us, shocking us from our complacency of allegedly knowing how God’s story goes. For the Western Christian, since the figure of the human has been uniquely formed and bounded by the violent exclusion of Black women, it is there where we must look to be challenged. This is where we encounter Christ and where we are transformed into his image, not because it is another version of an ideal humanity, but because it is the structural position set against all human ideals.
To be a Christian is to be excluded. To be a Christian is to occupy the structural position of the “subhuman.” While we don’t know where it will take us, to be a Christian is to struggle from that position. Struggling from the position of the excluded in every generation is an apophatic struggle, because it prevents the Christian from ever equating our ideals with God’s. It safeguards God’s transcendence and can help us avoid the pitfalls of our forebears whose confidence about the story of God facilitated the transatlantic slave trade and genocide of Indigenous peoples. The Christian message of liberation can be stated, as Rose quotes, in the words of the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement, published by the eponymous radical Black feminist lesbian organization: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression” (9).
