“Whither Now and Why”: Blackness and a Critical Thinking of Religious Studies in the 21st Century

At the 1960 meeting of the Association of Negro Social Science Teachers held on the campus of Johnson C. Smith University, W.E.B. Du Bois delivered a bold prospectus on the future needs of a transformative education for African Americans. Writing in a Cold War context that was being dramatically challenged and changed by the global decolonization movement and the Black Freedom movement in the United States, Du Bois's statement, "Whither Now and Why," takes stock of the changing status and political condition of African Americans recognizing, "There is much hard work yet to be done before the Negro becomes a voter; before he has equal rights to education and before he can claim complete civil and social equality. Yet this situation is in sight, and it brings, not as many assume, an end to the so-called Negro problems but a beginning of even more difficult problems of race and culture" (Du Bois 1973, 149). For Du Bois, the "more difficult problems of race and culture" involve not only critically addressing the status and standing of African American education in light of changing political and social conditions but also engaging the more complex issues of ethics and epistemology that will guide and inform the new Black education. The response to these more complex issues will necessarily inform the education and formation of new political subjects and citizens, indeed new humans for an emerging world. For Du Bois, the critical question for African Americans was, "Are we to assume that we will simply adopt the ideals of Americans and become what they are or want to be and that we will have in this process no ideals of our own?" (1973, 149). Du Bois's question raises a number of substantive issues that he goes on to address in "Whither Now and Why." W.E.B. Du Bois's "Whither Now and Why" is acutely instructive for scholars of religion as we critically engage the fiftieth anniversary of Religious Studies Review, particularly since the theme—"Religious Studies—Whither and Why?"—carries an echo of Du Bois. This Du Boisian echo does not call for a repetition of the same, but rather to begin to elaborate some initial thoughts of a thinking that offers new possibilities for the project of religious studies. The fiftieth anniversary of Religious Studies Review offers us an opportunity to chart a trajectory for a field in light of the complex ways in which religion challenges our world today. Much like Du Bois, we inhabit a conjuncture that is rapidly changing in light of new political, economic, and cultural configurations emerging in the third decade of the 21st century. From religiously inspired forms of political authoritarianism to planetary realignments of religion to evolving hegemonic formations of political and economic power, the question for religious studies is not only one of mere description and characterization but, more importantly, one of ethics and epistemology. The question of religious studies that we face is far from the bibliographic essay by William A. Clebsch and Rosemary Rader's "Religious Studies in American Colleges and Universities: A Preliminary Bibliography" published in the first issue of Religious Studies Review (Clebsch and Rader, September 1975, 50–60). Indeed, the contested configuration of pluralism, politics, and power deeply imbricated with the complexities of religion requires a radical rethinking and reorientation of the religious studies project. The ethical and epistemological challenges of "Religious Studies—Whither and Why?" are neither singular nor simple. Thus, revisiting the temporal moment opened by Du Bois's "Whither Now and Why" may offer us a glimpse of some fresh opportunities for a thinking of religious studies for the 21st century. The 1969 publication of James H. Cone's Black Theology and Black Power marked a pivotal moment in religious and political discourse. In a decade dominated by the public faith of the Black Freedom movement and new pessimistic forms of religious thought such as the death of God movement, James Cone joined in a tide of thinking guiding the spirit of the incorruptibles—the trinity of Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault—as Black Theology and Black Power extended a spirit "by means of metonymy, of an approach, an intransigent, even incorruptible, ethos of writing and thinking …, without concession even to theology, and not letting public opinion, the media, or the phantasm of an intimidating readership friend or force one into simplifying or repressing" its revolutionary message (Lawlor 2018, §2).1 The book aimed to theologically express what Lerone Bennett termed in 1964 as the "cataclysmic shift in the mood of Negroes" (Bennett 1964, 8). However, the book entered a dominant social and intellectual context whereby it could only be misread. Scholars of religion did not know what to make of an ostensibly religious discourse that staked ultimate claims on the historical experiences and material conditions of African Americans. Indeed, religious studies scholars did not understand the poaching of the language of Black power within religious discourse. The foundational misreading was facilitated by the existential conditions of blackness as the condition of possibility of humanity that exceeded the limits of whiteness alone. Hence Cone's text was an ontological violation. Moreover, by wedding Black religion and Black power—thus making explicit the always already conflict of sovereignties that lie at the heart of the project of the modern nation-state—the text instantiated a political violation of the conceptual universe of American democracy proper. Black Theology and Black Power simply could not be read. The only way to comprehend it was by a legitimate and legitimating misreading by way of an/other text that preceded it by a decade—The Hate That Hate Produced. The 1959 two-and-a-half-hour documentary produced by Mike Wallace and Louis Lomax provided the categories and frameworks aligned with a general economy of White supremacy to read, if you will, Black Theology and Black Power. That is, Black Theology and Black Power was and could only be read according to a logic elaborated within an ontology of whiteness, which served as the governing category of intelligibility. A misreading then of Black Theology and Black Power was only possible. Thus, the question posed by theologian Paul Lehmann to James H. Cone on the occasion of his interview for his faculty appointment at Union Theological Seminary serves as the only question that could be formulated in such an overdetermined context, "Why in the hell did you write that book—Black Theology and Black Power?" (Cone 2018, 71). Black Theology and Black Power was part of a flowering of Black religious cultural criticism in a period of intense reflection on the philosophies and practices of American White Christian supremacy, the arrested development of American democracy, and the political prospects of the Black power revolution. Indeed, the year 1968, prior to the publication of Cone's text, witnessed the appearance of Albert Cleage's revolutionary collection of sermons, The Black Messiah, C. Eric Lincoln's update of Rayford Logan's 1944 collection of social criticism What the Negro Wants in Is Anybody Listening to Black America?—with James Cone's first published essay, "Christianity and Black Power," as the lead in the collection—and Tom Skinner's evangelical memoir and manifesto Black and Free.2 The emergence of Black power in the midst of the modern Black freedom movement destabilized the liberal consensus regarding American race relations and the American democratic experiment. The convergence of the modern Black freedom movement, as well as other movements challenging the prevailing postwar American social consensus, politics of the Cold War and its intensification in a decolonizing world, and the deep and systemic crisis of legitimation of democracy created a unique context whereby the emergence of Cone's text would add theological fuel to an already flaming situation. "Black Theology and Black Power," Cone reminds us in his 1989 preface to a 20th-anniversary edition of the book, "was a product of the Civil Rights and Black power movements in America during the 1960s, reflecting both their strengths and weaknesses" (1989, vii). The text not only facilitated a critical questioning of American society, it also projected a deep "cultural critique" and critical skepticism into the religious orientation that tacitly underwrote American democracy (x). Calling into question the American theo-political project forced the emergence of new categorical alternatives to Christianity and democracy—Black theology and Black power. The religious and political disruption of Black Theology and Black Power and its reverberations across the past five decades warrant a considered and critical approach not only to this text but also the project of religious studies which follows in its wake. While notorious misreadings stalk this discursive context, this anniversary symposium invites us to engage in an untimely thinking of this text and the contemporary context of religious studies. That is, a thinking of a (con)text that is not reducible to Black theology or Black Power. It is rather an invitation to re-read Black Theology and Black Power as blackness as gift—as a certain responsibility to life and life itself.3 "Blackness is," in the words of James H. Cone, "God's gift to humanity" (2018, 22). To read blackness as gift forces a confrontation with the ethical and epistemological challenges of blackness "because of the fact that at a certain level, basic conflicts of interest express themselves as conflicts of rationalities and the rationality of blackness is a total challenge to the world" (Bennett 1972). A (re)reading of Black Theology and Black Power as an open thinking of blackness informs the condition of possibility for a profound understanding of the human that emerges with a renewed project of religious studies. The charges leveled against Black Studies and Women's Studies, especially the former, in the initial period of their insaturation—that the subject(s) were "unresearched," among other indictments—were blind to a material fact of discursive production—discourses do not spontaneously appear, but as writing, as an intellectual technology, they will follow the path and the tide of generation; that is to say, books and articles beget their like only after a sufficient density of differentiated objects are available to an articulation of elements. An investigator will not "find" what he or she is partially looking for, but will have to partially "create" the differentiations against the stubbornness of tradition. (2003, x) Spillers reminds us of the differing dynamics involved in the intellectual and political production of govern emergent formations such as Black theology. In other words, Cone's book could only be misread by scholars as the conceptual universe of Black theology and the conceptual universe of Black power were linked in a theoretical formation whereby religion and power were rearticulated around a news possibilities of blackness. In thinking blackness—always already understood as problem and pathology and not possibility—Cone's text reformulated these powerful discourses such that scholars could not read Black theology except as a variation of a particular discourse of theology or as a social concern. More insidiously, blackness was and is understood interchangeably as race, thus Black theology was and is a theology of race/racism rather than a "theology of blackness." Ironically, it was the historian of religion Charles H. Long who critically reads Black Theology and Black Power. That is, he understands the project as one of wedding of the ethical and the epistemological in seeking to plumb the depths of blackness. Long emphasizes that the invitation of blackness is that "symbol invites thought" (1986, 50). He seeks to end the reign of a "hermeneutics of conquest" which has rendered Black life as problem and pathology (1968, 17). In other words, he heeds Du Bois's dictum in The Souls of Black Folk: "To the question, 'How does it feel to be a problem?' I seldom answer a word." In the space of silence, he inaugurates an/other scene of thinking. This an/other scene—apophatic and/or via negativa—that "acknowledges" in the words of M. Shawn Copeland, "the inability and poverty of language to express any experience of awe, of the holy, of divine Mystery." Copeland continues, "Always, there is more—a dense and fruitful residue that can never be grasped or uttered or rendered absolute. Experience of divine Mystery eludes the very structures of language; such experience is beyond words, beyond saying" (2013, 635). The problem of thinking blackness reminds us of the theoretical purchase such a thinking posits in the afterlife of the inaugural scene of the publication of Black Theology and Black Power for capturing new opportunities for critical intellectual work. Charles H. Long reminds us of the critical exploration of how and in what ways "the 'living of blackness' becomes a material way of knowing," to borrow from E. Patrick Johnson (2003, 8). Long offers us an exemplary framework with which we can exploit in pursuing "hermeneutical procedures that seek, an interpretation of the historical range of human expressions in their specificity and integrity, whether in art, linguistics, geography, etc." (2000, §2). By elaborating a critical practice of thinking blackness, Long forces us to confront the theoretical and methodological limits of thought in illuminating how "the forms of matter evoke modes of consciousness and experience" and how the dominant translations of the forms of matter within the disciplinary taxonomies of the West and the critical resistances to these translations open up new structures of meaning and being in the world (2000, §3). That is, the logical economy of blackness and the human which draws our attention to "things-in-themselves" and the "abstractions of consciousness proceeding from the vague intuitions and traces of the things-in-themselves, those things we can never know" (2000, §11). The thinking of blackness disrupts the logical economy of the thought so elegantly captured by Charles Long when he writes, "As stepchildren of Western culture, the oppressed have affirmed and opposed the ideal of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment worlds. But in the midst of this ambiguity, for better or for worse, their experiences were rooted in the absurd meaning of their bodies, and it was for these bodies that they were regarded not only as valuable works but also as the locus of the ideologies that justified their enslavement…. The totalization of all the great ideals of Western universalization met with the factual symbol of these oppressed ones." (1986, 211). It is this disruption, along with an eruption of new imaginings of cognitive and material relationships, that prevent an arresting and disciplining of blackness at a premature moment of rationalization and hypostatization of a human condition—the results of which we know from the material cum theoretical colonial ordering of things. Instead what is offered is "the historicity of the human community" and the "possibility of the rediscovery of the life of matter as a religious phenomenon—an equal and sometimes alternate structure in the face of the dehumanizing and terroristic meaning of history" (2000, §53). One of the crucial issues in the humanities today has to do with a definition of the meaning of totality in terms of human worlds. In the first instance, how are we to define the human species? Are all human beings to be defined as constituting the human species? Are all human cultures, both past and present, to be included in the study of the humanities? Are all human situations part of the possible constituting data of the humanities? In other words, the question is raised, given the actual or possible worlds we live in, is it adequate for the humanities to derive its fundamental orientation, meaning, and data from simply the Hebraic, Greek, Christian meanings of our culture? (Long 1990, 204) It is this question that confronts us in our contemporary moment with a forcefulness that cannot be ignored. The critical attention by scholars of religion to forms of Afro-pessimism, Black geographies, and Black studies/Black study gesture to emergent intellectual practices that strain against a reductionist thinking of blackness that cannot be absolutely contained, categorized, and cataloged under the current regimes of thought.4 Thus, how can we read Black Theology and Black Power as a generative mode of a new poetics of possibilities as we reflect on the fiftieth anniversary of Religious Studies Review? Let us begin not with "the noxious game of reason, saying, 'No, No, you cannot feel,' like my dead lecturer lamenting thru gypsies his fast suicide," but let us begin at that moment of beginning which "emerges from the topos of the Deep." (Baraka 1991, 73; Keller 2003, xvii). A beginning that emerges as a "double necessity between an indefinite series of opposites, such as presence and absence, genesis and structure, form and content, law and arbitrariness, thought and unthought, empirical and transcendental, origin and retreat, foundation and founded, and so on" (Lawlor 2006, 4). And if this beginning reminds us of an/other beginning, let it begin then in blackness for that is the challenge. "We believe blackness is a total challenge, and because of the fact that at a certain level, basic conflicts of interests express themselves as conflicts of rationalities. We see the rationality of blackness as a total challenge to the world" (Bennett 1972, 33). Blackness because "their categories are not participating in what we call the 'slash,' you see. That arena in which things are changed and moved around. That transcultural meaning of things" (Long 2004, 11). If blackness is the challenge then religious studies in our contemporary moment is the im/possibility. A critical intellectual project that cannot be isolated and enclosed within a general economy of affection or sutured to some form of affective and authoritative guarantee. For religious studies, the challenge is and remains a thinking of blackness for, as Toni Morrison so famously reminds us, "There is no romance free of what Herman Melville called 'the power of blackness' especially not in a country in which there was a resident population, already black, upon which the imagination could play; through which historical, moral, metaphysical, and social fears, problems, and dichotomies could be articulated" (1992, 37). Blackness is an overlooked opportunity to critically and creatively think an open discourse of religious studies and new possibilities of a new world and a new humanity.