Rhetoric Race and Religion
The Trayvon Martin murder, the acquital of his killer, and the incarceration of Marissa Alexander are all messages that convey America’s disregard for the inherent worth of black and brown bodies.
Following the Zimmerman acquittal, black religious institutions were filled with crushed souls desiring to hear sermons of reassurance regarding their inherent value in the sight of God, to collectively mourn with their respective communities, and to hear a plan of action.
But not every black person wanted to rush to the altar. Wallace Best, a preeminent historian at Princeton University, did not attend church after the Zimmerman Verdict. In a recent op-ed, “The Zimmerman Verdict and the Black Religious Left,” he argued that prayer and church attending were “weak and impotent responses.”
So instead of going to church Best was, as he explained, “… at home frustrated by the inability of those spaces—deeply conservative as many of them are—to truly bring about social and political change.”
I do not agree with Best and, in fact, I think indulging in personal frustration at home about other people’s responses is more of an impotent reaction to injustice than praying at an altar.
I want to push against Best’s reductionist description of black religious congregants who, in his view, do the ‘same old, same old’. Simultaneously I want to argue against his reductionist perspective of the black religious left that suggests that we, as black liberal academics, are the only ones who can provide politically potent responses and “recover the culture of complaint and critique,” and against his implicit description of the black religious left as being constituted primarily by black liberal academics.
Read the rest here
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In