The 2013 Theology & Peace conference, "Lynching, Scapegoating and Actual Innocence," just concluded in
Chapel Hill N.C. Our reflections were led by two black theologians and one
white. It was a life-changing experience for the racially mixed group which attended. Here is a first response after our return.
Ah, dear God, no! Suddenly those images appear in my head.
Drifting into view between moments of sleep and awaking. Not
a dream but a daylight nightmare. Hateful historical postcards from the
heartland.
Ah, my white soul, my massacring white soul. Where can I go
to get away from you?
In the old spiritualized, immaterial, Greek sense that soul of
course is colorless. But as Kelly Douglas Brown showed us so convincingly
this theory actually became a cover story, a philosophical fiction playing out in the real world with terrible consequences of white privilege and violence. The Greek soul belongs to a
heavenly, higher, perfect realm of “light”. A
white body bespeaks something closer, “nearer” to this heavenly space. While
something black, the color of the earth, must be lower, inferior, perhaps not
even having a soul at all, just a body. A black body.
Ah, my platonized Christianity, what horror!
Up there, as Julia Robinson showed us in so many mind-rending
slides, swinging between the bright sky and the dark earth is the black body, beaten, tortured, monstrous, surrounded by a host of onlookers, white in their
white-souled innocence. A holocaust offering of sheer meat for a platonic god
who is also a sacrifice-demanding wrathful deity. For, after all, this god
needed the death of his very own son as a displacement for universal divine wrath, so why not
demand the death of these expendable black bodies for instances of human wrath? It was ever the one and same cultural frame.
Meanwhile, all
the other black bodies know in their hearts and memories it could have been
them as the selected victim.
Oh, body and soul, where will we go to find freedom?
Where indeed! Black theology allied to Girardian theory shows
us that the God of Jesus has always been with the black body suspended
lynched and crucified on a tree. That’s the point, and it always was the point, and now the whole
post-platonic community of Jesus is beginning to understand this, white and black. White because Jesus reveals the victim and undoes all the
violence fastened upon him or her, and now the meaning of Christianity is not to get to an
ethereal otherworld, but to transform the violent material existence of this
one. Black because as James Cone wrote “’Calvary’…was (always) redemption from
the terror of the lynching tree.” “Oh see my Jesus hanging high” Black
Christians sang, and they knew that Jesus’ death already transformed their body
terrors, and by extension those of all other human victims.
Lynchings are now faith, in the strange paradoxical,
subversive language of the gospel, and they are faith for black and white
alike. They are a faith which leaps beyond the dangling monster on the tree
into a radical future of life. Because Jesus was the first monster: for the
temple authorities—“He has blasphemed”; for the emperor—“There is no king but
Caesar”; for the ungovernable crowd—“Crucify him!” But for the God who raised
him from the dead he was the beloved Servant and Lord of creation, of a new creation
without violence, without victims.
The Black body knew this truth, despite Anselm, despite
Calvin, and before Girard. This for me was the great discovery of our
conference. From now on Theology & Peace cannot go forward without the
active participation and leadership of people of color. (This was
already evident in the splendid election of Julia Robinson to our board!) The
black body experience has become an icon and pathway for the transformative post-platonic
Christian faith that we long to build.
Tony Bartlett
