Rhetoric Race and Religion
The lack of a consistent Womanist presence places Union in turmoil. To fill the empty space, the administration hires well-trained and talented Womanist scholars to teach intermittently, but that fails to account for the absence of a full-time, tenure-track, black woman on the faculty. This is the humiliating predicament in which a seminary most known for its liberation identity finds itself.
But on April 7, during the premiere of a new documentary, the school saw a glimpse of its history, a reminder of its raison d’etre. The premiere of visionary Womanist filmmaker and Union alumna Anika Gibbons’s “Journey to Liberation: The Legacy of Womanist Theology,” brought the voice of Katie Cannon inside James Chapel to disrupt the “epistemological sea of forgetfulness” and admonish us to “tell our truths, ‘anyway’, even when they tell us our truth is a lie… tell it, ‘anyway’.”
Attendees felt the kinesthetic energy of Kelly Brown Douglas (above) as she explained her struggle with her faith in the church while the church was unloving towards her dear friend, Lloyd. Douglas also described how black male preachers, her brothers, radicalized her by insisting on what she could and could not do as a female clergyperson. The documentary sat viewers at the feet of Jacquelyn Grant as she explained how we must “move beyond those single issues and develop real liberation for all of God’s people.” And with passion and wisdom, we felt the heart of Emile Townes as she preached how the moral imperative for black women is to “not live in the foils of old, old wounds. It is not life giving; it is not healthy…”
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