Black Humanism: Sameness and Difference in Being Human and Being Black in the United Kingdom

This essay outlines a variety of responses to a central question pertaining to Black humanism: namely, what does it mean to be a Black human, given the existence of systemic racism within the Body of Christ and in many White majority societies in the African Diaspora, in this case, within the United Kingdom of Great Britain? In the first half of the essay, I consider three typologies for exploring how Black Christians engage with the dialectic of their Blackness alongside their Christian faith. The three typologies are (1) the Colour Blind approach, (2) Black Christian Experience and (3) Black Theology. In the second half, I map these three typologies onto an experiential exercise arranged according to a conceptual continuum predicated on notions of sameness and difference in order to show how the three typologies contribute toward a Black humanism. I conclude by examining how these alternative modes of dealing with the sameness and difference contributes to an understanding of the dialectic between faith and ethnicity, specifically the relationship between Christianity and Blackness.