Seriously, You Can’t Say That

Kelly Tilghman, play-by-play announcer for The Golf Channel's PGA Tour broadcasts, while bantering with Nick Faldo about young players who might challenge Woods she suggested that they "lynch him in a back alley." I can almost hear her echoing her fictional counterpart, Ron Burgundy, when he said “I immediately regret this decision.”

Of course she came out with the requisite apology (two days later). Tiger’s representatives declared it a non-issue, but she was suspended for two weeks by the Golf Channel. This wasn’t the same as the Don Imus spewing-viciousness-for-its-own-sake situation. Nor was this Tiger’s first brush with folks misspeaking around him (Hello, Fuzzy Zoeller and your fried chicken and collard greens comment).

Yet my gut reaction was to essentially give her a pass for her slip of the tongue, after all, who among us hasn’t ever said something stupid that we (immediately) regret? The greater issue to consider in evaluating the situation is to recognize that such comments happen within a certain context.

First off, Tiger and Kelly are friends. Jokes you make within family that sound horrendous when someone outside the family hears them, much less, repeats them. We can speak one way with our “boys”, one way with our family, and another way in public/on the record. Still, we have to always be mindful: some language and images need a “handle with care” label attached to them.

Because, secondly, there is a greater problem of context: such comments will always be heard within the cultural-historical context of America, with its convoluted past involving slavery, civil rights, and race relations in general. The image of lynching harkens back to an unfortunate, to say the least, time in American history. Lynching is simply not an image to be taken lightly, but rather is akin to making a rape analogy and I doubt she would joke about that. Such a comment would be heard differently to different ears.

In short, it’s stupid and you can’t say it. However, I don’t think she should have been suspended. I think her apology should have stood on its own, she be reprimanded, and allow the conversations to be had about why what she said was a poor choice of words. We can’t police every bad sentence, because that would stifle conversations that still need to be had. We have a First Amendment right to make a fool out of ourselves, but more importantly, if we truly are to turn the page on this chapter in our history, we need to allow these conversations to happen and in so doing, we need to have thicker skins.


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Follow the North Star Part III

Mud sucked at our shoes, the ground would surely devour our bare feet, rocks and twigs like endless rows of teeth. Shivering in the night’s chilly embrace, we hoped that our minds would be too focused on the journey at hand as we fled from a past that haunts our nation to this day.

No matter how good our imaginations, it is difficult to transport our 2007 mindsets to the life of 1836 eyes. Yet every fall and spring, Conner Prairie offers a special program called Follow the North Star, where the participants become slaves and escape along the Underground Railroad. Though I once compared the journey of discipleship to the journey of the Underground Railroad (part I and part II), getting a dose of the reality adds a new dimension to it.

From the first moments, you get the barest idea of what it was to undergo a process of dehumanization. Separated into bucks and breeders , we were trained to avert eyes as we couldn’t ever look a white person in the face. We were taught to never question, conditioned to never challenge, trained to be submissive, confused, always wrong. After only 15 minutes, no one, no matter their true color, looked up again. Now imagine that process ingrained over generations, that attitude of inferiority for some and superiority for others.

Behind us, we heard many footfalls closing in on us as we ran in the constant fear of never knowing who to trust. We never knew which attitude we would encounter. Maybe it was gentle ladies whose religious beliefs outweighed their desires for self-preservation. Maybe it would be an embittered southerner thrown out of work because of the influx of slaves taking away his job. Maybe it would be a Quaker family fighting to abolish slavery. Maybe it would be a “cattle rustler”, seeking to capture runaway slaves for profit. Maybe it would be free black folk, willing to take folks in and point them in the right direction. And you hoped that your fear wouldn’t outweigh your desire for freedom.

How effective the experience is depends on the group you’re with and how well you can entrench yourself in the role. With our 2007 gloves, hats, and shoes, it’s hard to fully put ourselves in the same situation. To imagine the system of conditioning to obedience, how families were torn apart. It can be intense, but it was only a taste of what the reality must have been like.


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Horror Premises: White People are You Kidding Me?

So the other day, Chesya and I got in an argument (How many blogs need to begin "So me and Chesya got in an argument"?). As is common among writers, we spend a lot of time reading each other’s manuscripts before they’re sent them out (I’ve mentioned a couple of my own first readers). Well, this friend of ours had a novel whose premise we had issue with. A single guy inherits a house from someone, though he has no idea who. He enters the 100+ year old house and, after looking around, a door materializes in front of him. He then goes through it.

He goes through it.

Our issue was a matter of believability. Who would actually go through that door? It’s the same sort of question we have to ask ourselves as writers: what would characters believably do in a given situation. But let me tell you, I just ain’t that curious (I know what you’re asking, if we’re in agreement, how was there an argument? Well, that’s just me and Chesya). She began an informal survey of her friends and family. A disturbing pattern began to emerge.
Her white friends would go through the door and her black friends/family would not.

I found that hard to believe. So I decided to do my own part in researching this racial divide. To my shock and horror, I found similar results. My family, well, we’re selling the house and pocketing the money. I asked my white co-worker ("Of course you go through it"). I called some white friends of mine. To a person, they were going through the door. Flabbergasted (and it’s not often a brotha gets flabbergasted), I turned to my white people voices of reason. First, my message board moderator, Lauren David:

Lauren: I’m torn.
Me: I’m one of your best friends, right?
Lauren: Right.
Me: My sister is one of your dearest friends, right?
Lauren: Right.
Me: Has NONE of this rubbed off on you?
Lauren: I said I’m torn.

Second, I then ask my wife of seven plus years. Seven plus years of living with black folk. She comes back with "you at least have to open it." (For the record, she spent the rest of the evening trying to justify it. "If you’re trying to sell the place, you don’t want the door just popping up." "It’s okay, honey, cling to your whiteness. It’s your cultural imperative.")

White people, are you kidding me?

The other day I was out with some volunteers from Outreach, Inc. looking to help some homeless teenagers. At one point, they start running. So I ran, passed them, then asked what they were running for. They said the hill we were walking down got muddy so they tried to get through it quickly. They asked why I ran. I said "black reflex": folks start running, I run and ask questions later. You can believe we didn’t do a Wrong Turn 2 and decide to split up (much less the only black guy in the party deciding to go investigate any strange sounds all by himself).
I even got to wondering how soon would some horror movies end if it had an all black cast:

-What’s that dude in the hockey mask doing? Am I the only person simply not that curious? How many black folks do you see at a hockey game? Credits start rolling.

-The Haunting of Hill House? I ain’t gonna lie: noisy houses, doors that don’t shut right, plumbing don’t work, and the super can’t be found? Someone tweaks and then freaks out? That’s just a day in the life. Credits start rolling.

-I just buried my cat in this hidden graveyard and it came back to life. For sale sign goes up and the credits start rolling.

White people are you kidding me?

How did you ever end up colonizing the world? Will someone explain this to me? I guess it pays to know your audience. Consider this the flip side to the writing the other dilemma.

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On Magical Negroes

These days, as Rush Limbaugh swims in controversy over his “Barack, the Magic Negro” parody, it occurs to me that I use the phrase “magical Negro” in some of my reviews, and some folks might not know what I mean by this, thus possibly taking offense at my use of it. (Of course, I wouldn’t have to use the phrase so often if I would quit seeing so many examples of it).

Simply put, a magical Negro is a story-telling device, a stock character used to impart wisdom on another character. Sometimes such characters are referred to mystical negroes, though Spike Lee used the phrase “super duper magical Negro.” If you detect an undercurrent of hostility or resentment, it’s because typically the magical Negro is a person of color who arrives in time to impart critical knowledge, sometimes spiritual information, or general sagacity in order for the white protagonist to succeed in their endeavor. They are depicted in non-threatening terms, being janitors, prisoners, or homeless. They are a plot point, a Deus ex machina, and a late addition to Tom Bogle’s seminal work on the depiction of blacks in cinema, “Toms, Coons, Mammies, Bucks, and Mulattos.”

(Basically, it’s the antithesis of the “white savior” model we’ve also come to see: lone white character goes among minorities/natives and saves them. See: City of Joy, The Last Samurai, Dances with Wolves, and any of a number of white teacher in the inner city movies).

Stephen King is often guilty of employing the magical Negro in many of his works: Dick Hallorann in The Shining (1977), Mother Abagail in The Stand (1978), and John Coffey in The Green Mile (1996). For the character to be the magical Negro, they have to have several telling characteristics (from the King article):

1. He or she is a person of color, typically black, often Native American, in a story about predominantly white characters.
2. He or she seems to have nothing better to do than help the white protagonist, who is often a stranger to the Magical Negro at first.
3. He or she disappears, dies, or sacrifices something of great value after or while helping the white protagonist.
4. He or she is uneducated, mentally handicapped, at a low position in life, or all of the above.
5. He or she is wise, patient, and spiritually in touch. Closer to the earth, one might say. He or she often literally has magical powers.

From Uncle Remus (James Baskett) in the film Song of the South (1946) to The Ode to the Magical Negro, aka The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), the magical Negro has a long history. Do I consider the image racist? Part of me does, yet a bigger part of me sees them as Christ figures. The Suffering Servant calling people to their full potential, there is a redemptive element to their imparting of special knowledge and even the sacrificial death is typical of the Christ figure in a story. Stephen King being the master of the model, with John Coffey (J.C. – get it?), from The Green Mile, being tried and convicted unfairly, having the miraculous gift of healing, and dying for the sake of others. Maybe I’m just getting older and don’t have the energy for cosmetic battles when there are still real ones left to fight.

And there has been some progress: at least now black folks are beginning to live through the end of horror movies (well, mostly, or else the sites Dead Bro Walking and the Unfair Racial Cliché Alert would have no raison d’etre).

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Story, Memory, and Reconciliation

INDIANAPOLIS, Ind., USA -- Maurice Broaddus, father of two biracial
children, reflects on the stories that comprise his children's mixed
heritage and how such stories could lead toward reconciliation
between the races, in today's issue of The Storyteller and the
Listener Online.

You can read the full graphics version of the essay here.

(A text-only version is available here.)


While I’m plugging things, J.C. Hay has a story, Brothers, up on Pseudopod. By a convergence of coincidence, it is read by another friend of ours, Richard Dansky. Go listen to a great story read greatly.


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42

I’m not a baseball fan. I didn’t grow up watching the game, my dad was never a lover of the sport, nor did I ever really play it. In other words, baseball wasn’t part of the fabric of my childhood. Yet, even I have to take note of one of the most important cultural, social, and political moments in our nation’s history. Sixty years ago today (April 15, 1947) Jackie Robinson crossed the color barrier to become the first black player in the Major Leagues.

Ironically, not much of it was made in the mainstream press, though the black press covered this event as if it were the Second Coming. Think about the impact of this: when Jackie Robinson crossed the color barrier, Malcolm Little was in prison at the time, listening to the games, inspired by what black people could achieve.

"A life is not important, except in the impact it has on other lives." –Jackie Robinson

Being the first must’ve have been difficult. Not instantly accepted by his teammates or the fans of his team; challenging the paradigm that the color line was not to be crossed, a paradigm that many folks grew up believing, accepting, and living by. The racial epithets from other coaches, the death threats, opposing players refusing to take the same field as him - all alone, the only black man in the game, handling that kind of pressure, is a testament to how tough he was. His was an exercise of self-control.

Being a trailblazer is unimaginably difficult. I don’t know what it must have been like to live with the fear of failure (not just of playing in the big leagues, but to let down the hopes and dreams of an entire people) or the fear of success (to be a symbol of democracy and equality). The crap he had to go through and take … yes, he was angry. If anyone had a right to be angry, he certainly had that right. It took a restraint few of us have to not lash out, but instead channel it and use it as fuel. How he played the game, as a rookie, is a testament to the type of player he was.

Suffering so that others could come after him.

We take a lot of things for granted today, black and white folk alike. Black folks forget just how hard it was. We often take for granted the strides and struggle done for us by our grandparents. Grand parents - those are stories that can still be told. White folks, well, sixty years wasn’t that long ago. When I hear things like "why do we need a “Black Miss America” a “Black Expo” or a Black whatever?", again, sixty years ago we needed a Black press. We did for ourselves when it wasn’t being done in the “mainstream”.

There are times when sports are a mirror to our society, showing us who we are as well as who we could be. Today, when the story of Jackie Robinson has him almost faded into myth like some African-American god of integration, only 9% of baseball players are black, but 44% are minority. That’s a lasting victory and legacy. (Jonathan Eig has a book out on Jackie Robinson called Opening Day that I can’t wait to read.)

As a part of the remembrances that are going on today, some players don’t feel worthy to wear #42. I respect that position. It’s hard to see greatness and measure yourself against it; to examine yourself and how you are living up to that legacy. However, you can’t have too many people involved in celebrating this day or this man.

(A special shout out to the memory of the Indianapolis Clowns and the other Negro League teams.)

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Keeping It Real?

Dear Arbiters of Blackness,

The Blacker than Thou lobby is designed not only to shape and define a people, but also to demand a certain kind of conformity from them - forcing its members to swear allegiance to their side. With that, my new Intake column is up where I question the idea of what it means to “Keep it Real”.

Love,

Maurice (go to my website to direct your hate mail)

P.S.

I was interviewed for a new blog by my friend Lisa Baker that will reflect on various environmental issues, concerns, and events from a spiritual perspective. I was asked about my actual day job, as an environmental toxicologist for Commonwealth Biomonitoring. If you’re so inclined, you can read it here.


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Black Self-Image

A teenage girl stirred up quite a bit of controversy with her documentary re-creating Dr. Clark’s doll test that was used to make the case against segregation (in Brown vs. the Board of Education). The results of her experiment every are every bit as tragic today as it was in the 60s. Something in our culture still propagates this destructive (self-)image.

There was a reason for Amiri Baraka having to start a “Black is beautiful” movement and a reason why Ossie Davis said in his eulogy of Malcolm X, “Malcolm was our manhood, our living, black manhood! This was his meaning to his people.” It was about the reclamation of dignity. As the documentary makes painfully obvious, it is important to continue to have conversations and ask questions.

We continue to have debates about racism (what it is and how it affects people differently), reparations, affirmative action and so on. Too many times it is seen as black people wallowing in self-pity, a mentality of victimhood (although some folks also feel threatened by the rhetoric of escaping this victimhood). There is an assumed hubris of knowing the “answers” to the “Negro problem” because, as I will inevitably hear it, black people are too ignorant to work out our own solution.

It’s usually at this point in the conversation that white friends of mine feel unduly put upon. “They didn’t own slaves” and so on. They sometimes get defensive around discussions about white privilege. Why? Because the tricky part about conversations is that we aren’t always hearing the same thing. White privilege is not “all white people are evil.” It is not that all white people are out to get black people. It is not all white people are racist or “benefit” from racism. It is, however, the acknowledgment of the reality that there is a legacy of racism.

I don’t care if you agree with it or not. What I am saying is that there is a point of view, a mindset, a perspective that I’m coming from. Our story is the paradigm from which we operate. You might not “get it”, maybe because your story seems so removed from mine. You could see if you could contribute to the solution. You could see what you can do to challenge your thinking. You could see where you can find and recognize injustice and fight it where you are.

Or you could listen.

Let me try this another way. There is also male privilege in our culture. It doesn’t mean all men are evil or that they hate women. It does, however, point to the (historical) fact that the mentality that went into the founding of our society, that created the infrastructure of the culture we live in, was patriarchal. There is a legacy of patriarchal though that we have to deal with, systemic issues as well as heart issues - neither of which are easily rooted out. From closing the inequality of pay gap between the sexes to sexist attitudes in the work place as “old boy clubs/networks” are dismantled.

It’s the (sometimes perceived) attitude built into the system that causes so many to give up before they begin. It’s why I care so much about images and depictions of black people in news, movies, television, etc. It’s why I keep harping on the power of words. It’s why my mother so impressed upon us why we shouldn’t buy into being told what we can and can’t do. Look at the recent rise of black quarterback. It’s not like black people suddenly learned how to throw the football. The mentality was that black men weren’t smart enough to be a quarterback. So they were steered towards being a wide receiver or a running back. You don’t become “firsts” by buying into old stereotypes and accepting old barriers.

Progress has been made, but some battles still need to be fought. Hearts changed and lingering hatreds rooted out. This year’s Super Bowl marks the first time a black coach (much less two) has coached their team to the championship game. Lovie Smith, when asked about the significance of possibly being the first said that “Progress will really be made when something like this is not news.” The sad fact that he had to then concede was that “we’re not there yet.”

But we’re trying. One conversation at a time.


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Writing the Other Redux

Not too long ago, Jay Lake had a blog entitle Writing the Other that I stumbled across too late into the discussion to add anything valuable. So I decided to blog my response.

One of the first things we are taught as writers is to write what you know. Some writers wouldn’t dare write outside their race/ethnicity and probably shouldn’t. Unfortunately, I’ve read too many horror novels where “white author a” has inserted some black characters into a scene and I was left yelling at the novel “have you ever met a black person?” Which is what the conversation, in my mind, boils down to: creating well rounded characters. Stereotypes are not well rounded characters, they are writing short-hand. Characters who haven’t been fleshed out or researched isn’t good writing. If you are doing your job as a writer, you should be able to get into the heads of any character. If we weren’t capable of doing that, then we’d be left with stories featuring single raced, single sexed individuals, because you could only write your own race and sex. Plus, getting in each other’s skins, walking a mile in “the other’s” shoes, is how we get to know one another.

So race, class, sex, none of these are areas forbidden to us as writers in the characters we create. We just have to be aware that different races, classes, and sexes bring their individual perspectives to the characters. Which shouldn’t be a problem ... for good writers.

Stereotypes are the domain of the hacks.

However, why end a blog here when I have all sorts of tangents to go down.

Some of this if fueled by white guilt. I’ve maintained that as we continue into this age of postcolonialism, we still have to deal with the lingering attitudes of both the colonizers as well as the colonized. Under colonialism, cultures were wiped out, the memories of our histories wiped out (and I say “our” realizing that this was something far from unique to the black story). However, I don’t see writing “the other” as some sort of maintaining of a paternal hegemony nor any kind of cultural appropriation.

Think about the general plot of most of the horror stories we read: middle class/blue collar white family suddenly finding an outside force interrupting their lives. If we want to move from telling the same stories over and over again, either writers have to write “the other” or “the other” is going to have to start writing more. I’m good either way, just do your job well. Then again, I see myself as a bit of a folklorist. So no culture is off limits to me as long as I do my research well and write the best stories possible. Of course, for me, “you people” are “the other” and I write you all the time (and no one has asked “have you ever met a white person?” Yet. Now I’m sure I’ll be deluged with those e-mails).

Granted, writing the other has led to some interesting reversals in my writing. Since I am a black writer and I write black characters a lot of the time, I’ve been playing with the idea of assuming the posture of the majority (this is more intellectual exercise than anything else). In the stories I read, white characters don’t announce their whiteness or make note that they were talking to other black characters. Yet, when “an other” enters the scene, race is automatically ascribed. (I know there is a Harlan Ellison quote about this, but I can’t recall it right now). I’d notice a tendency to “announce” the race of my characters in my own stories, something that never came up when my fellow black horror writers were discussing writing black writers. So, assuming the posture of the majority, maybe I should only announce the race of a character when a white person enters the scene.

For that matter, I’m trying to figure out a way to flip the idea of the magical Negro. However, that may not work as well since a white person redeeming the colored masses is practically its own genre. Though, maybe I could establish a recurring “magical redneck” trope. (Relax, I’ll dedicate a whole blog to the idea of the “magical Negro” at a later date.)

A last rabbit trail and I’m done. One of the advantages to being one of “the other” is that a lot of times, my perspective is that of outsider. I don’t worry about it because I see being an outsider as a universal: everyone has felt like an outsider at one point or another. However, I have noticed that when I write stories with exclusively black characters I often get this feedback: I felt like I was being preached at. I think this feeling, besides my tendency to get preachy, comes from the idea of how race is perceived. This comes down to the idea of race in terms of identity politics. White people, for example, don’t think in terms of race. It’s the luxury of the majority, the luxury of privilege, to not have to worry about how race plays into the equation of life. In a black worldview, most things are defined by race. So black characters talking about racism to one another, though germaine to the story, might come across as preachy to a white reader. Yes, these are horrible over-generalizations, but I think you get what I’m saying.

And I’ll allow for the possibility that I may be wrong.


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But My Best Friend is Black

Digital is forever.

We live in a digital age. There are cameras on street corners, at ATM machines, in our cell phones - our images caught who knows how many times per day and that’s without our knowledge. How much more so when we are on stage, in front of a crowd, a crowd that has turned against you when you decide to show your behind. If things you say on the Internet are there forever and can’t be unsaid, much moreso a recorded image. Like any other screen captured image, it’s on someone’s hard drive, waiting.

Hello Michael Richards.

You were bombing in a comedy club, some folks began to heckle you. Rather than go with any of a number of standard anti-heckler lines (that most stand ups carry in their back pockets), you go to the “you’re a nigger” card. How many times do we have to go over the fact that there are certain things you can’t say? Don’t give me “if he was Chris Rock or Dave Chappelle,” he isn’t. (If you want a blog on “the N-Word,” I’ll direct you to a post by Wrath James White.) Nor was he attempting to illustrate a point or create satire. No, he was bombing on a stage and lost his mind. But you know what? Losing one’s temper, being drunk, or whatever the latest excuse is for someone’s “I’m not a racist but here’s my tirade” rant, the stuff has to come from somewhere. If you go to that place, that well of hate–especially with the vehemence and contempt that some folks go there–at some level, you believe it.

Luckily, he apologized. Whew! Good thing he did that, I might have thought he was racist. Apologies are becoming a tough sell with me lately, especially celebrity apologies, and they especially ring hollow if the person apologizing is a repeat offender. Contrition is tough to gauge because when all is said and done, we can’t know what’s in another person’s heart. However, it’s going to take a while before I buy his apology. Granted, his career isn’t necessarily over, because he is well on his way toward Hollywood penitence: you screw up, you apologize (going on the circuit of late night talk shows; Oprah if you’re lucky), go into rehab (if applicable - maybe a good anger management) or otherwise lay low for awhile. Time heals a lot and our memories are notoriously short. On the whole, we as a country are pretty forgiving, but you have to show contrition or somehow demonstrate that you’re trying to change.

You have the right to say what you want. You also better be prepared to bear the consequences of you running your mouth, wherever you run it. You also have the right to apologize; howefver, we have the choice to forgive and I doubt anyone will forget. Because digital is forever.


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Crackernomics

I love it when Anthony Smith, PostModernNegro, steps into a debate on my message board. Yes, we were debating a post by Wrath James White. I remember this exchange between him and another board member like it was yesterday ...

(... cue the harp music as we go back in time ...)

Still I cannot believe that one must do a study of slavery to understand the political issues that face us today, or have an understanding of current events.

I guess the same can be said for the current debates surrounding Supreme Court nominees. The 'original' intent of the founders don't matter right? I mean...it’s the past right? I has no bearing whatsoever on our present...right? That's my point. We can be very selective about which past historical events have a bearing on our political present. Why is that? And why is it the race and slavery issue that normally gets side-lined? Its quite arbitrary. Not saying you are saying this green...but because we don't read the histories with serious scrutiny this is typically the kind of response we will continue to get...our racial past has no bearing on the present. Such a suggestion is a very selective view of history. And it reveals other things that I don't think we are ready to delve into in this particular discussion...such as white privilege. White people don't have to acknowledge that America's racial past has a bearing on our political present.

Slavery or Vietnam doesn't make little Johnny steal, or entitle Little Susie to a lifetime of welfare.

Again...if I can point out the arbitrary and selective nature of such a common observation. You often hear conservative Christian bemoan the fact that prayer has been taken out of schools...that the introduction of evolution in course curriculums has had detrimental effects on young people in our country. But these happened years ago. It’s the past right? They have no bearing on our political present...right? I am not saying that you, Green, are saying this, but this is the common response we often hear from people who believe that slavery and race-ism have no bearing our political present but somehow Darwin and the absence of school prayer do. Why? Because it effects certain racial groupings. Take for instance school shootings in the suburbs. When a white kid goes off in the suburbs and kills dozens of kids...who is at fault? Do we hear diatribes about personal responsibility? No...that is usually a secondary mention. We get white conservatives going to D.C. to address Congress about the 'culture of violence'. When black folks shoot each other...what? lack of personal responsibility.

So what I see in a lot of these discussions in a selectivity that reveals how little we understand America's racial legacy. I appreciate your response as well...but I hope that we are willing to have a true dialogue and not a monologue. I am willing to learn and listen...and to read whatever you throw my way.

This kind of sets the stage for my new INtake column. I originally titled it after the game, but raised your hands if you thought the title “Crackernomics” would stick? And because I’m all about making friends, here’s a new one defining “white privilege.”


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Miracle of the Black Church: Ancient Future African Faith

“I have never understood how African Americans could be Christians when the church did condone slavery for so long. Our enslavers were Christians. We were not.” –Wrath James White

I have been thinking about this comment ever since he made it in reference to my “A Theology of Slavery” posts (parts I and II). My initial response got me thinking in general about the miracle of the black church. But I wanted to look specifically at some of the aspects of African faith that carried us through this time and led to the development of the historic black church. And I think there are some lessons that we in this modern/postmodern age can learn.

Whenever beliefs seem to be in conflict, bridges can be built across the differing faith systems. In this case, they had to be. For example, I would imagine that animism, in essence, seeing God in all things, lines up nicely with the passage in Acts 17:28 “'For in him we live and move and have our being.'” With even such a tenuous connection made, conversations can begin. Suddenly we can re-evaluate how we perceive and create reality; something especially important in light of how we over-emphasize a logic-engineered reality.

Community was a vital part of African culture, representing the idea of belonging before believing. Even today, many people are searching for a safe community in which to belong. This is something I want to get back to later. However, I think the idea that resonates so much with we can learn from the ancient-future idea of African faith is the idea of the sacred performance.

“Three things characterized this religion of the slave–the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy.” –W.E.B. DuBois “Souls of Black Folks”

The Preacher saw himself as the voice of freedom and inclusion, modeling himself similarly to how Jesus threatened the establishment of his day with the same thing. He was God’s poet: part leader, part orator, and part story-teller.

As leader, they were rhetorical representatives attempting to close the gap between words and actions. They stirred up the moral imaginations of their listeners to fight against (social) sin. Overtly–and sometimes less overtly–political, they tried to raise the consciousness f their congregation and community.

The sermon is also part of the sacred performance. The rhythm and emotion of language, the cadence, the whoops and chants make up part of the tradition of Black sermons. They arose and spoke to the pain and joy, troubles and blessings - affirming truth in spite of circumstances. Call and response, the back and forth interplay between speaker and hearer, was about participating in the sermon. From the Amen corners (those seats on either side of the pulpit filled with the older and prominent members of the congregation who responded enthusiastically to the service) that developed to simply encouraging the preacher as he spoke, the messages spoke to the congregation and they spoke to the sermon/sermonizer. The congregation became both witness to and participant in the sermon.

What cannot be over emphasized is the importance of The Preacher as The Story-Teller. The ideal preacher has style, humor, and a gift for stories. Story-telling has always been important, vital to the culture and the community. The story captured people’s imagination, creating image before the word. This dates back to the African griots, the keepers of history and traditions in an oral cultural. They were the tribe’s memory and tale-tellers. Folk tales passed down from generation to generation, kept alive the ancient tribal stories, as folk figures provide hope. Trickster characters illustrated the weak triumphing over the strong through cunning and perseverance. In narratives, personal accounts of ex/slaves in their triumphs and defeats. The important thing is that the stories be true. They knew that while truth was a component of story, story was the medium of the truth. Preaching naturally embraced this, as it lent itself toward story telling and making the story relevant to people’s lives.

“How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” Psalms 137:4

Music (and by extension, dance) is also part of the sacred performance. Music was an expression of human life, as W.E.B. DuBois put it, “adapted, changed, and intensified by the tragic soul-life of the slave, until, under the stress of law and whip, it became the one true expression of a people’s sorrow, despair, and hope.” Even under the worst circumstances, you have to sing sometimes. The circumstances were not the definition of who we were. Songs encouraged the individual and then the community, to find their voice and work toward their hope.

The songs were produced by manifold suffering. Sorrow songs, as W.E.B. DuBois called them. Negro spirituals. Vehicles of communication and unification. The songs were another aspect of our oral tradition. Handy, since we weren’t allowed to read were even punished if caught. And the songs expressed a dimension of our faith that could only be done through art. Experienced.

Songs sang the truth as lived by the people, much like the Psalms. The shouts, hums, and moans that punctuate the spirituals and Gospel music were expressions of emotional truth. Words without words. The songs also expressed home as eschatological reality as well as speaking to their present reality. Phrases like the “Other side of Jordan” and “Down by the riverside” not only told of yearnings for heaven and their spiritual hope, but also served as code for escape routes. Faith met social action even in song.

African influenced worship marked a shift in how people look and experience church. The parishioners weren’t simply an audience that watched worship, but participated in it. Music (and dance) was a form of language, body prayers and a dynamic representation of faith. Worship should be zealous, private and public. There should be a spiritual rhythm to life, symbolized by the drumbeat and dance. To be in sync with the Spirit, to rest in, be caught up in the transcendent, worship in God-consciousness, dependence on His will in and for life.

“Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with your: a gift of story and song–soft, stirring melody in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil ... the third, a gift of the Spirit.” W.E.B. DuBois

Difficult to explain what DuBois means by ‘the Frenzy.’ Maybe it’s one of those things where the experience comes before the explanation. However, basically I’d say that the sacred performance has to be responded to. Some people look down on black worship services as emotionalism over substances and thus (in their condescension) miss the whole point.

There is an ecstatic element to African religious expressions. Getting hit with the Holy Ghost is not too distant from the spirit riding of voodoo/animistic practices. The Spirit seizes you if you open yourself up to it, going from silence to wild abandon, murmurs to wails. It’s a “communion with the Invisible.”

As Ralph Wiley puts it in his book “Why Black People Tend to Shout”: “Black people tend to shout in churches, movie theaters, and anywhere else they feel he need to shout because when joy, pain, anger, confusion, and frustration, ego and thought, mix it up, the way they do inside black people, the uproar is too big to hold inside. The feeling must be aired.” We join a proud history of shouting as I read the Psalms. Shout, stomp, shriek, weep, laugh ... worship experience springs from life experience.

Ultimately, the sacred performance is life.

In African religions, there is an interplay between community and the individual: to be truly human, you had to become part of, feel a responsibility to, and serve the community. What happened to the communal gathering affected the individual and what happened to the individual had an impact on the community. This stands as antithetical to western Christianity’s embrace of individualism, with the message of salvation often reduced to some brand of “getting my butt into heaven”.

Faith becomes tied to social praxis. How we have understood our history and culture. How that is related to our faith in Christ. Faith becomes a matter of asking a different set of questions from a different social and historical context.

Most importantly, faith revolves around moving from the sacred performance toward action. To take the generous orthodoxy of transforming faith (that wellspring that allows Christianity to find its way into any culture, bringing differences in faith) and let it guide generous orthopraxis.



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Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

(Or “Ruminations on a Black Jesus”)

I don’t want to set off one of those geekier-than-thou debates like “which is the best Star Wars movie?” (The Empire Strikes Back, for those in need of the answer), so I’ll just state my bias upfront: not counting the original series, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was the best of the modern Star Trek incarnations. The show found its groove a lot quicker than The Next Generation (whose first two seasons are practically unwatchable). It featured steadfastly unsentimental, fully developed characters like Lt. Commander Worf (Michael Dorn), Constable Odo (Rene Auberjonois), Major Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor), Garak (Andrew Robinson) and Quark (Armin Shimerman). And it had the most action of all of the Star Trek incarnations.

One reason I believe that the show never quite got the due it deserved was because it was seen as the “black” Star Trek. Hear me out. The show was a black show like The Wire or Homicide: Life on the Streets–a predominantly black cast that didn’t create a lot of fanfare about it being a “black” show. This was the first incarnation of Star Trek to feature a black Captain, Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks, though he was only made Captain later in the series, I will only refer to his as Captain; he even had to wait a few seasons to get his own ship). There was a substantial black supporting cast, including his black son Jake Sisko (Cirroc Lofton) and a black love interest, Captain Kasidy Danielle Yates (24's Penny Johnson). Captain Sisko’s interests were unapologetically black (jazz, Negro League Baseball, collecting African art). This isn’t even including Worf, whose struggles with his Klingon culture (delving into it like some black people delve into their Afro-centric culture) closely mirrored the struggles that a minority faces having grown up cut off from his people.

Brooks could chew scenery with the best of them, easily on equal footing with Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard) as demonstrated in the pilot episode. Captain Sisko was under-utilized the first two seasons, though I think part of it may have been his discomfort in the Star Trek universe. By the fourth season, head shaved and goatee in place (becoming, for all intents and purposes, Hawk–his character from the show Spenser for Hire–in space), Brooks had come into his own.

The premise of the show led to a lot of early comparisons to J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5 since both featured an orbiting space station as the only thing standing between humanity and invading forces. To understand the rest of the review, a bit of the mythology of the show has to first be explained. In the Alpha Quadrant of the galaxy, Deep Space Nine orbits the planet Bajor, which had been occupied by Cardassians who had only recently withdrawn. A stable wormhole, known to the Bajorans as the Celestial Temple of their Prophets, is discovered by the crew. The wormhole leads to the Gamma Quadrant, home of the Dominion, and intergalactic alliance of dominated species led by the Founders (Odo’s changeling people) whose will is administrated by the cloned Vorta and enforced by their elite warriors, the Jem’Hadar. The political landscape of the Alpha quadrant shifts as old enemies unite, tentative allies betray, and all out war is declared.

Another comparison to Babylon 5 is the fact that the examination of faith and the importance of religion undergirds the series. Bajorans draw their courage from their spiritual life, their life force (read: soul) referred to as their Pah. Benjamin Sisko is revealed to be the Emissary, a figure fulfilling Bajoran prophecy, to carry out the will of The Prophets. The nine orbs of the Celestial Temple have shaped the theology of the Bajoran people, basically relaying scripture and commandments from on high. So it is not a leap on my part to conclude that the Emissary is meant to be Christ. The main part of Captain Sisko’s character development involves him developing a Messianic consciousness, him growing into the role of Emissary.

Faith is a journey.

There is not just a Christian worldview represented on the show. Most of the characters have some sort of faith to their lives. Obviously, a Jewish worldview is seen through the eyes of Major Kira Nerys and the Bajoran people. Subtle in that Star Trek sort of way, the Cardassians represent the rule of Nazi Germany. Worf follows the traditions and mythology of the Klingons of old. Vorta Weyoun (Jeffrey Combs) walked and worked alongside his gods, the Founders. Constable Odo, in a way, represents a Buddhist notion. A drop of water losing itself in the ocean. Becomes absorbed in the whole of things. The goal of many Eastern religions is to lose your personal identity and become one with the oversoul. Even Quark lives out his faith (The Emperor’s New Cloak, 7-12), offering this prayer (while sticking gold laced latinum into the statue of his god) which is how some people view/treat God anyway: “Blessed Exchequer, whose greed is eternal. Allow this humble bribe to open your ears and hear this plea from your most devout debtor.” However, I wanted to examine some of the pivotal episodes that shape the essentially Christian spiritual worldview of the series.

The Emissary (season 1-episode 1)

“It is the unknown that defines our existence. We are constantly searching not just for answers to our questions, but for new questions.” –Benjamin Sisko

The Emissary is the bridge between humanity and the divine, a combination of both (we come to find out later). Sisko, at the time of his calling, exists at the moment of his greatest pain, the death of his wife. He carried it with him so long that it defined his existence. Our humanity is so often shaped by the pain that we carry with us, and the scars that it has left on our souls. His encounter with the Prophets jump started his healing process, putting him on the path to being fully human and fulfilling his created role.

The first two seasons followed the intricacies of Bajoran religion/politics. Candidates vied for the position of Kai (religious leader of the people, basically their pope). The show followed the political intrigue of the varying interstellar governments. However, soon the show was overshadowed by the brewing war between the Federation and the Dominion, moving away from the Bajoran focus of the first couple seasons. By Season 4, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has become the most action-packed of the Star Trek franchise. To the surprise of no one. For a start, the Federation-Dominion war is heating up and you have a command staff (Captain Sisko, Major Kira, and Lt. Commander Worf) who adhere to a shoot first policy of engagement.

In the episode Accession (4-17), time lost acclaimed Bajoran poet, Akorem Laan, returns claiming to be the true Emissary. Captain Sisko relinquishes the title to him. However once Akorem begins instituting policies more indicative of his time, such as caste systems, Sisko challenges him for the role of Emissary. They go to the Prophets to have the issue settled. Much like the spirit coming down on Jesus like a dove at his baptism, the Prophets make it clear that Sisko was the Emissary that had been prophecied.

(On a more badass note, in the episode Call to Arms, 5-26, Sisko was forced to abandon the station, but he left his beloved baseball on his desk because he intended to reclaim it. Nothing necessarily spiritual, just a favorite moment of mine.)

The Reckoning (6-21) In an earlier episode, Sacrifice of Angels (6-6), the wormhole aliens destroy the Dominion ships due to enter the Alpha quadrant, at a cost to be exacted later. By this point, Sisko is taking his role as Emissary much more seriously. Kai Winn (Louise Fletcher), her Eminence/religious leader of her people, stews in less-than-silent jealousy of his position. The Prophets announce that “The time of Reckoning is at hand” which leads to a bit of another test of faith. In a scene reminiscent of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, Sisko cries out as he tries to do the will of the Prophets: “Why do you always have to be so damned mysterious? Answer me. I am tired of your riddles. If there’s something you need me to do, say so!”

Prophecy is fulfilled, but not in the way that anyone expected, no matter how hard they studied the original texts. The Reckoning (“The end or the beginning”) is a battle between the Prophets (possessing the body of Kira Nerys) and the Kosst Amojan , a Pah Wraith (“The Evil One”, possessing the body of Jake Sisko). This would be the final battle between good and evil for the fate of Bajor. Because of whom the combatants have chosen to possess, Sisko’s faith is tested to the point of breaking. Still, he tries to convince Kai Winn that they are on the right path: “Now, sometimes, it’s not easy to see the path they’ve laid out for us. Right now, I don’t know what they want from me, but I’m willing to take a leap of faith and trust that they’re guiding me and I’m asking you to take that leap with me.”

While Kai Winn and Sisko both believe that the Prophets have a plan for Bajor, Winn’s faith is found wanting, no where close to that of “an infidel, an outsider” (Sisko). She interrupts the battle due to her lack of faith and jealous (or as Kira diagnoses, the Kai has confused faith with ambition).

Tears of the Prophets (6-26) Sisko still tries to walk both worlds as Starfleet officers and religious icon, epitomizing the clash of the scientific/modern interpretation of the universe (wormhole aliens) versus the spiritual interpretation (The Prophets). Starfleet was as uncomfortable with him being seen as a Messiah figure as he was in the role, leading to this exchange between Captain Sisko and Admiral William Ross:

Sisko: "The Prophets don't see me as a Starfleet captain. They see me as their Emissary."
Ross: "That's the problem, isn't it? And for the past five years you've tried to be both. And up to now I've been patient. I've indulged you. I've gone out on a limb for you many times, but this is it. You need to make a decision. You are either the Emissary or a Starfleet captain. You can't be both."

Captain Sisko is ordered to launch attacks against Cardassia and the Dominion. Gul Dukat (Marc Alaimo), possessed by a Pah-wraith, attempts to destroy the wormhole, succeeding in sealing it shut and deactivating the orbs. Thus the people, The Emissary included, are cut off from the Prophets. A devastated Sisko takes a leave from the war, and not knowing whether or not he would return, took his treasured baseball with him.

Sisko didn’t realize how much the Prophets meant to him until he was cut off from them. By Season 7, Sisko had fully embraced his role as Emissary for the Prophets. He learns that to ensure his birth and guarantee his destiny, a Prophet possessed his mother, thus taking her form for the rest of the series. This proves a clearer image of the relationship between the Prophets and their Emissary and also called to mind the image of Mary comforting Jesus.

Covenant (7-9) Kira’s faith in the Prophets was so strong–was so much of who she was, and took up so much of her time–that it made Odo (who, in essence, worshiped justice’ logic and reason being his preferred method of communing with it) want to accompany her to her services. His detective’s mind wanted a sign, some evidence, some experience to allow him to believe in the Prophets. Kira explains that it doesn’t work like that, “Faith has to come first”, to which Odo replies “That’s too bad. I have a feeling it must be very comforting to believe in something more powerful than yourself.”

Kira’s faith is challenged by the Pah-wraith cult, led by Gul Dukat (still seeking to be loved and accepted by the Bajorans despite his role in overseeing their occupation). The Pah-wraiths claim to be the true gods of Bajor, cast out of heaven for trying to assert themselves. As evidence, they ask the tough questions such as why would the Prophets, who claimed to love the Bajorans and have a plan for them, allow the Cardassian occupation of them that killed tens of millions of their chosen people? What if everything you have been taught was wrong, not just wrong, but the inverse to how you were taught?

However, Kira knew what she believed and had no time for their attempts at deception. “In fact, I’ve always found that when people try to convince others of their beliefs, it’s because they’re really just trying to convince themselves.” There was no room for compromise between their two faiths because “There’s only one problem: we can’t both be right.”

Til Death Do Us Part (7-18) “Your path is a difficult one. She cannot share it with you,” the Prophets inform Sisko in the episode before this one (Penumbra (7-17)). This typifies the classic “hero’s journey” wherein part of the cost of being a hero is that while you may have a love interest, you don’t get the “happily ever after”. In Sisko’s case, the Prophets tell him that “If you do, you will know nothing but sorrow.”

Sisko is forced to count the cost of his devotion. The Prophets didn’t say that he couldn’t marry Kasidy, only that he shouldn’t. He still had a choice and like all choices, it has its consequences. Kai Winn also had choices to make regarding her faith. She had long lamented, after scrapping and scheming her way into the role of religious head of her people, that the Prophets had never spoken to her. Sisko regularly communed with the Prophets, yet the (co-)spiritual head of her people didn’t. She finally has her ecstatic experience, and “Prophets” speak to her. Unfortunately, the “Prophets” where actually the Pah-wraiths. Hearing from spirit beings is a tricky business, since it is difficult to tell the difference between a “good spirit” and a “bad spirit”; for example, the Pah-wraiths were only fallen Prophets, but could easily be taken as Prophets themselves. Without commenting on the nature of Kai Winn’s faith, one can see how easy it is to stray from the path of your faith. Deceptive spirits speak with just enough truth around their lies to sound true and with just enough error to make you stray from true doctrine.

Sisko and Kira debate his chosen course of action, and the possible consequences of going against the will of the Prophets. They both know that the Prophets wouldn’t ask him to do something without a reason. He could trust in the past (since the Prophets have never led him astray) or doubt his present situation (there’s always a first time). He opts to marry Kasidy.

What You Leave Behind (7-26) “We live in uncertain times.” –Garak

The war between the Federation Alliance and the Dominion comes to its bloody end. If this show were truly about the war, the episode would have ended there. However, the second half of the episode focuses on the climactic role of the Emissary. Initially aided by a fallen Kai Winn, Gul Dukat evolves into an anti-Emissary, with all the attendant imagery of a demon from the flaming pits. In a pitched one-on-one battle, Sisko topples himself and Gul Dukat into the fiery pits. The Emissary’s triumph and death fulfills his earthly mission and binds the fire demons. His story doesn’t end there. Following his death, the Emissary ascends to the Celestial Temple. He learns that he still has a great deal to do, so he promises to one day return.

The two-part series finale proved unsatisfactory to some. Probably because it didn’t have any tidy happy endings, but in fact, wrapped up the series with a less than pretty bow. The episode concluded all of the story lines bringing a sense of completeness, wholeness, to the series. It also remained true to each individual character’s arc, as each walked the paths they were meant to walk.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was the lone inheritor to the mantle of Star Trek: The Original Series, no matter how hard Star Trek: Enterprise may try. Many people debated who was the better Captain, Kirk or Picard, but who else but Sisko would’ve punched the near-omnipotent cosmic trickster Q upon his first encounter with him (leaving a stunned Q to retort “Picard never hit me.”)? Deep Space Nine explored and fleshed out the mythos of the alternate universe. Deep Space Nine’s single greatest episode (Trials and Tribble-ations, 5-6) was an ode to The Original Series classic, The Trouble with Tribbles, when the Deep Space Nine cast walked into the original episode and mingled with the original cast. Deep Space Nine didn’t stick as closely to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry's commandments, such as everyone having to get along. There is nothing sentimental about the series. Not the characters, not the storylines, and when the show tries (such as the farewell/memory montage in the finale) it doesn’t come off well. The show had multi-episode arcs and had season/series long meta-narrative (the other comparison to Babylon 5). In short, it demanded more of the viewer.

With themes involving fathers and sons (unlike other Star Treks, Captain Sisko had a son, the relationship between them being a key dynamic on the show) and rebirth/growth (the characters, like each of us, have a past, a convoluted history that we want to shed and grow past), the show’s most important lesson is that all people not only have the capacity for good and evil, but have a need for something greater than themselves. The show is about having and respecting faith.

I’m still waiting for Captain Sisko to return and collect his baseball from his desk.


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Black People in the Conversation

“What the hell have you dragged me to?” Those were the first words out of my mouth when “the man who would be head pastor” of the Dwelling Place dragged me to an emergent church. We’d been curious to see what other churches in the area who called themselves emergent looked like. Well, apparently they were about line-dancing. The pastor, in a cowboy hat, had encouraged the women of his congregation to start dancing during the music portion of the service. Yeah, I was the only black guy in the place. Yeah, the pastor had to “pull the service over” in order to explain that I was in the right place.

It was fine. They were in the middle of a series on finding God in music and the genre of the week was country music. The following week was hip-hop, and “the man who would be head pastor” was convinced that most of the congregation thought that I was the advance guy for the rap group that was due in that week. But it didn’t help ease my concerns about what a postmodern church is supposed to be about or look like.

For those that have no idea what I’m talking about, or have no idea what a PoMo (postmodern) or Emergent Church is, luckily for you PBS has been running a series of specials on the movement. Part 1 and Part 2 are up as transcripts (plus there are some video streams).

There is also a Brian Mclaren interview that opens with this question: How do you describe the emerging church? “It is a group of people who are trying to put together two things that have been apart. One of them is a fidelity to the Christian message, and a real concern about it actually being lived out in practice. And we're saying you can't have one without the other ... When you try to put those things together, you end up with a stronger emphasis on practices. It's not just doctrines that people get in their minds, although our thinking is very, very important. But also there is a desire to have practices that actually form us as people.”


This last point, the idea of practices that form us as people, has been what I’ve been continuing to meditate on. Between the Emergent Convention, my experiences in local emergent churches, and after seeing the movie Rize, I’ve been thinking a lot about the place of black people in the conversation called the Emergent Church. It didn’t help that a discussion on my message board addressing criticisms of the emergent church has erupted. As this sympathetic dude put it: What is the emergent movement doing to involve more diverse cultural groups. I see a lot of young white faces, but not much color. Is there an effort to reach the traditional black church, the growing Latino community in our country, and the larger global community of Christians, mostly catholic, that are ready to expand and develop into newer forms? Once again I will reiterate that I am a post-modern/emergent type of guy myself, but it is always going to be important to look at ourselves and be open about our weaknesses. Let's try to get that toothpick out of our eye before it becomes a plank.

So think of this as an expansion on my last bit of mental noodling on black people and the emergent church.



Let me put the nature of my dilemma in context. As another postmodern brother put it, I feel like I’ve been on a bit of a Sankofa lately. ("Sankofa" is an Akan word which means, "one must return to the past in order to move forward.") I've been going through a bit of an identity crisis, trying to work through my faith first as a Christian, then as a black man. I’ve already spoken about my spiritual journey, but obviously I’m not done yet.

In a lot of ways, the emergent church struck me as, well, the Christian equivalent of the grunge movement. A little subversive, a little edgy, and whole lot of white, middle class evangelicals trying to make Christianity look cool. In other words, originally I saw a lot of style over substance. However, once I dug a little deeper, read some of the foundational works, a lot of the substance of postmodernism resonated. I was left wondering how this would translate to black churches, wondering what an emergent African American church would look like or what a multi-cultural emergent church would look like. Better put, what would a multi-cultural church look like that drew on all worship traditions? Because, let me tell you, I ain’t feeling guitars, candles, and labyrinths. I love organs, drums, and gospel choirs way too much to give them up. Of course, part of this stems from the fact that we could all stand with a bigger definition of worship.

I guess I should start with whether or not black churches are in need of being a part of the conversation. It may sound elitist to say, but there were some issues that the historic black church managed to escape; some Postmodern leanings that have always been a part of who and what the black church is. For instance, we’ve been doing narrative theology from the jump. Looking back on the history of black Christianity, we had no choice but to focus on a narrative presentation of the faith, rather than on the development of a metaphysical system which attempted to draw infallible logical inferences from the Bible, reducing it to data in need of organizing. Not to say that this didn’t become more of an issue in the rise of seminary trained pastors, but by then, narrative theology was a part of the tradition.

Worship has always been experiential within the tradition of the black church. People tend to look at black churches and think that the attenders were in it for the emotional ride. Sure, we are an affective people, but it is a cognitive affectiveness: we feel the truth and worship is (intuitively) experiential. The emotional ride of worship has to be done within the narrative of the Gospel. Okay, I may have a bit of rose colored glasses on. Plenty of folks in my neighborhood go for the weekly show and the hollerin’, then come home and cause a ruckus during the rest of the week.

The historic black church has also been more missional in nature also. It had to be, given its context within the black community. Black people had had enough hell on earth to have to wait on the promise of an eternal heaven. Things had to start changing now, thus why the Church (big ‘c’, not solely the African American church) was the home of the Emancipation movement, Civil Rights movement, and has always set a tone of being a liberating presence in the community. With issues of poverty and economic and social justice at its forefront, the church, historically, has been socially conscious and thus relevant.

Yet the black church, too, has felt the sting of modernism and has seen its effectiveness lessened. How else can we explain our youth seeking a sense of family in gangs rather than in church? The decline of men in church attendance? The continuing break up of black families? As Brian Mclaren says of modernity and the church, what we think happened is that modern culture has been, in some ways, spiritually an arid place. It's been spiritually a place that there wasn't much room for authentic and communal spirituality. And so modernity brought us down." We think that the church has, in many ways, already accommodated to modernity. And so the Christian message has become a product almost, and it and the methods of spreading it are like sales pitches. We feel that it has been individualized.

I have seen several modern tendencies infiltrate the black church. I am greatly concerned by this rise in the “health and wealth” Gospel (have enough faith and healing and money comes your way). Being in bed with nationalistic politics is no different from white evangelicals flexing their political power within the Republican party. And the perception of the pastor as (mini-) pope, well any overly pastor-centered church is in danger of becoming simply a cult of personality.

With the diagnosis in place, the next step is figuring out what our traditions of faith are and what we bring to the table. A friend blogged about Negro spirituals as subversive Christian practice. Musically, I’d love to see jazz incorporated more, maybe a worship team that is part jazz ensemble (this is a style issue, a reaction to white evangelical churches doing 70s era light right as choruses and calling it worship). The movie Rize has driven home the importance of dance as and in worship.

As I continue to think through this, I am exploring the Coptic Orthodoxy–a branch of Christianity that, according to tradition, the apostle Mark established in Egypt in the middle of the 1st century–and seeing what they have to offer in terms of practices.

I still might not find what I’m looking for. And maybe the critics of Emergent may have some valid points. I know that Brian McLaren is purposefully broadening the conversation in Africa and South America. There’s one thing that can’t be denied, however: when all is said and done, at least the Emergent movement allows for this sort of conversation. A conversation long overdue.



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Rize

“Then maidens will dance and be glad, young men and old as well. I will turn their mourning into gladness; I will give them comfort and joy instead of sorrow.” Jeremiah 31:13

Brought to us by director David LaChapelle (the fashion photographer whose contribution to pop culture includes the Christina Aguilera’s "Dirrty" video), Rize is a documentary chronicling the practice of "Clowning" and "Krumping." Odds are that you’ve never heard of either way of dancing, though you may have seen the hyper-kinetic hip-hop dance stylings in videos (the dance moves are often so frenetic that the film has to assure us that the frames haven’t been sped up).

The movie makes the case that this radical dance form plays an enormous (potential) role in the black communities in South Central Los Angeles. The dancing is important as a serious form of spiritual and artistic expression—and as an alternative to gang participation.

The movie opens by putting the movement in a historical context, tracing the history of South Central from the Civil Rights era riots to the post-Rodney King verdict riots. It was in response to the 1992 riots that “ghetto celebrity” Tommy Johnson (Tommy the Clown) created what he would call Clowning. Tommy, up until then, had been involved in a life of gang-banging and drug dealing. "Living like that," he says, "you either wind up shot dead or in jail. I was lucky. I wound up in jail." Jail afforded him the opportunity to examine his life as he turned to God, asking for another chance to turn his life around. He started his clown group as a way of entertaining at parties, to provide laughs and make people happy. One of his early disciples branched off, developing an alternative style dubbed Krumping (for those keeping score at home, apparently all Clowns “krump”, but not all Krumps “clown”).

The movie builds to the event known as the Battle Zone, an organized competition between clown groups. This speaks to the historical competitive nature of creative expression within the black community (see the rap battles depicted in the movie 8 Mile). This fifth Battle Zone proves so popular that it is held in the Great Western Forum.

“When you’re drowning and you see a board floating by, you’re gonna grab that board.” Dragon

The cauldron that this seemingly strange dance form sprang from is the day-to-day inner city life. When presented with a situation of no money, no hope, no justice, and limited educational resources—combined with the daily reality of drugs and violence—pain and anger need an outlet. As the dancers observe, when one grows up on a steady diet of violence, robbing, and dealing, some people “catch a feel for it.” Others look elsewhere for something positive. And, as it has so often been before, the outlet comes in the form of music and dance, artists creating something useful out of what life has handed them. (It is interesting to note that the dancers resent the fact that the only after-school programs offered to them are sports, as if that was the only way for them to express themselves. Not everyone in black communities plays basketball or football.)

This isn’t the first time that oppressive conditions have spawned musical/cultural movements within the black community; spirituals, the blues, doo-wop and soul are all fueled by the focused pain and anger that gave rise to hip-hop as the dominant form of expression. This “ghetto ballet” appears to be the next evolutionary step of break-dancing. The dancers form their own troupes, much like gang sets, paint their faces like warriors, then meet to combat/outperform rival gangs of dancers and hone their skills. (An oddly surreal moment comes when one of the dancers is painted up like a character from the movie, The Warriors. All of a sudden, it felt like life had come full circle. You almost get the feel that this is a mockumentary, except that the reality of one of the dancers being randomly gunned down reminds us of the desperatel reality of this struggle for beauty in life within the constant shadow of death.)

The allure and draw of gangs is the illusion of family and love that they provide. Well, “illusion” may be harsh; the family in the streets gives “their idea” of love. Gang families, clown families, church families; you have a group of people from families that haven’t been this broken since the days of slavery, searching for respect and belonging. Krump-ness becomes “that closed chapter of your life–the hurt, the anger–that no one knows about.” The secret to surviving, as the older dancers seek to mentor the younger ones, is reduced to one simple rule: show them more love and they’ll overcome this.

“There’s a spirit in the midst of krump-ness.” Dragon

I don’t have to make spiritual connections with this movie because it does it for me. There is a natural connectedness between worship and dance, worship and spirit. This exploration of dance took the dancers back to their roots as they danced from their spirit. “I get my Krump from Jesus,” Miss Prissy says plainly. “God started me on this way,” and she uses the gift that she’s been given.

In their efforts to connect with something higher, the dancers draw on African dance and ritual (a point driven home in the movie with a side-by-side comparison to tribal dancers). The herky-jerky movements remind me of the “riding of spirits” (where people danced until “possessed” by spirits), or ceremonies of worship traditions. One dancer even hits this ecstatic plateau in mid-performance. It’s a flow, it’s a vibe, it’s a connection; or as one dancer proclaims, “once you see the real thing, you will know the real thing.”

For the dancers, Krumping takes on a transcendent purpose, becoming a way of life vital to who they are. At its core is the need to keep things real, placing itself in direct opposition to the bling-bling/commercial mentality of today’s hip-hop culture. The kids want the moral foundation, the realness of things of substance. They want to matter. This search for authenticity has gotten me thinking about the idea of the ancient-future: the idea of re-examining where you are and where you are heading in light of re-connecting to your past traditions.

There has been an on-going conversation within the (postmodern) church about the disconnect from its rich theological and ecclesial traditions. “Ancient” refers to the teachings, doctrines, worship, ethics, morality and practices of the Church, embracing the full traditions and timeless teachings of historic Christianity. “Future” is the re-contextualization of the faith—making the Gospel relevant and able to speak to the new challenges of our culture, without sacrificing our Tradition on the altar of secular, popular, and cultural traditions. Ancient-Future worship has depth, is participatory, and is passionate. Such worship wants to move past performance and get to the real thing: God-directed, genuine worship.

I’ve been concerned that this on-going conversation hasn’t seemed to include African American churches. There is a longing that goes beyond some of the modern tendencies of the church, and the consumer-driven “Gospel” that pervades it, especially in the African American church. There are African and African-American faith practices and traditions that shouldn’t be ignored if the church is to be relevant to all peoples. The movie itself ends with white people and the Asian communities embracing the dance form.

In Rize, you have inner city kids–disenfranchised people that the American society is quick to try and forget–trying to find their way in the world. In the midst of the pathologies that plague their environment, they seek to express themselves. T