Rhetoric Race and Religion
by Andre Key
R3 Contributor
*Read Part 1 here
I think that the obsession with the critique of whiteness found in the Five Percent Nation teachings and other black nationalist oriented religious traditions found in the African American community misses the point entirely. A question that is not often asked is, ‘what should the religious mythologies and theology of Black folk reflect if not a response to the experiences of…well…Black folk?’ The fact that after centuries of racial enslavement, brutal and oppressive Jim Crow segregation that some aspects of Black religiosity responded to it in theological and even in mythic terms should not be surprising. To equate whiteness and white society as the function of some demonic force hell-bent on oppressing and enslaving black folk is just as logical an conclusion as those who generations earlier believed that enslaved Africans due to their circumstances were the recipients of a divine curse (a la curse Of Ham). The more intriguing question to be asked given the historical circumstances of enslavement and racial violence during the late 19th and earlier 20th century is, ‘why didn’t the belief that the white man is the devil became more widespread in the African American religious worldview?’
Perhaps, it is a function of white privilege that African Americans and other non-whites can be subjected to yearly doses of white Jesus films and other re-enactments that are supposedly historical in nature that feature the whitest of actors playing biblical figures in order to reinforce the sacredness of whiteness. The fear and angst exposed towards the teachings of the Five Percent Nation is a cosmos in which whiteness is not revered.
The Five Percenters and its parent group the Nation of Islam offer is a normative religious cosmos for black existence. This is often overlooked in favors of criticizing the elements which are unpleasant to white ears. But lets us imagine that ancient Egyptians, Canaanites, Jebusites, and all the other “ites” from the Hebrew Bible could be resurrected; would modern Jews abandon their faith in order not to offend their one-time foes? And even as the Catholic Church and mainline Protestant denominations have officially abandoned the charge of deicide against “the Jews” there still exists a sizable number of Christians who hold Jewish people responsible for the death of Christ. This gets at the crux of the matter, religion as a human phenomenon responds to the human experience with particularity rather than universalism. The ethical and moral universalism of religion is filtered through historical and cultural myths, rites and rituals that give meaning to the particular religious community. For most whites, black religion operates as what noted historian of religion Charles Long calls an opaque theology. The inability to comprehend a reflective inner life for Blacks which sacralizes its historical experiences leads to an obsession with the elements that openly criticize whiteness (i.e. white man is the devil). Therefore the traumatic slaveocracy and Jim Crow segregation that produced the “blue eyed devil” myth is ignored or marginalized and black religious groups are treated as irrational hate-mongerers.
To be Continued…………
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