Beyond Trivial Melodies: The Black Church and Occupy Wall Street

When creative genius neglects to ally itself in this way to some public interest it hardly gives birth to works of wide or perennial influence. Imagination needs a soil in history, tradition, or human institutions, else its random growths are not significant enough and, like trivial melodies, go immediately out of fashion.

-George Santayana

I am a radical democrat or improvisational socialist—as opposed to a social democrat or left liberal— because I am convinced that the rule of capital (an interlocking network of corporate, bank, and political elites), the hegemony of white and male supremacist ideologies, the proliferation of homophobic sensibilities, and the relative weakness of ecological consciousness are the major obstacles to our task.

-Cornel West

The Black church has been virtually absent in the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Black Church, which has nearly a mythological hold on progressive religious identity in America, was born in the crucible of slavery and reached its political height in the Civil Rights movement. Asserting the humanity of Black people and demanding god-given democratic rights placed the Black Church at the left of most political discourse inside the American empire. Two generations later, save a few stalwarts from a bygone era, the most visible Black religious leaders are the purveyors of a Wall Street theology. This is a feature and function of capitalist discourse that dominates both liberal and conservative political affiliations in the United States.

Occupy Wall Street has placed economic justice (i.e. income inequality and a corrupt governmental-financial industrial complex) at the center of the public conversation. The very idea of class warfare has gained a certain salience in the American mind. Occupy Wall Street presents a unique moment in the life of the Black Church to wrestle with the class divisions and economic justice. Combined the high levels of economic deprivation that has wreaked havoc on Black communities for the past generation, the nature of what its means to be the Black Church and to have success in the Black community is up for debate. While acknowledging racism barriers, most African Americans still hold to the Horatio Algiers’ narrative—hard work is rewarded with economic success. Yet the current economic crisis has proven this axiom to be hollow.

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