A White Girl Like Me

By Dr. Amy Laura Hall
Associate Professor of Christian Ethics
Duke Divinity School

I am a woman. But this long story very short begins when I was a girl, a white girl. I was raised with an inkling of a clue, but protected from gaining more.

There was a hint that beloved neighbors didn’t have an easy time as a “mixed” couple in small town Texas. But it wasn’t until much later that I had the categories to get this. There were evidently open conflicts in my extended family over “mixed” dating, but the sketches are almost erased by hush now, one of the elders involved too-long-gone and venerated.

A few stories stick. In one, I am a mostly clueless 13 year old, in a rental van, traveling to Arkansas for a youth conference. I can’t remember now if we were all white kids, but we were definitely mostly so. One woman in charge was mostly Black. We stopped for gas in a trifling town. We piled out of the car with our carefully pre-teen selected Ocean Pacific t-shirts, sunglasses, and knowing sneers. (Looking back, this is absurd, as we were small town kids ourselves.) I laughed out “Hey, Girls! Look at all the hicks!” Claudia stopped me, brought me around the other side of the van and “clued me in.” Are you crazy? Do you have any idea how much trouble you could get us all into? Do you think a Black woman with a van full of white kids drives through here every day?

I like to think now that I was responding to some ghastly display of the confederate flag, but, I’m probably wishful thinking, and clueless thinking. Because that wasn’t the point. The point was that I had the freedom to display mock-superiority. I could opt in or out of having a clue. Claudia couldn’t.

This may be what scared me most about Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Most other novels I had read allowed me to opt in or out, trying on different moral masks. Good old Atticus. I could be Scout. Huck? Probably not. Toni Morrison does not make it easy to “try on” brown eyes. She later wrote that “many readers were touched but not moved.” I think I was tripped off kilter. Every time I put the book down, Toni Morrison had made it woundingly obvious that I was able to put the book down.

Director Kiri Davis didn’t make her film, “A Girl Like Me,” for girls like me. A student recommended I use it in teaching. Maybe she also wanted to help me get a clue. I sat there in my Duke office with tears of angry lament. Two students knocked on the door. I was caught crying, even sobbing, by two white boys. Good white boys, but, still, sobbing isn’t done. I said later to a friend, “That is it. No more. I am happy being white. I don’t want to be this angry. I don’t want to be so cursedly moved. Forget about it.”

Here’s the thing that made me write. This stuff is annoying on all fronts. Black people still know I have about a quarter of a clue most of the time. As the only white girl in Emory’s Voices of Inner Strength, as the white teacher who tries to teach Womanist texts, as the professor who weeps in lament, I opt in or out as I want, as the “spirit moves.” But I am learning that a white person with a bit of a clue is even more annoying to most white people. What is up with her? Mid-life crisis? Desperation for friendship? Too many sociology classes at a young age? (Or, my favorite, a particularly cruel reference to Spike Lee’s Malcolm X.) Why does she always have to bring up race? She is not Black.

True. I’m not Black. But I am part of a Body that is. Some day Christians will all be opted in.

The Memorial for Michael Jackson

By Dr. Willie James Jennings
Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies
Duke Divinity School

Dr. J. Kameron Carter
Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies
Duke Divinity School

Jennings: Jay, I was amazed by the memorial service for Michael Jackson. What struck me immediately was the deeply Christian, deeply “black church form” that service embodied. From the surprising presence and position of the casket adorned with flowers to the position of the podium, the setting turned the Staples Center in Los Angeles into a sanctuary. Yet beyond the setting, we saw the performance of an ecclesial memory of how to mourn the dead and how to draw the dead bodies of black men next to the body of God. This is a practice black Christians the world over know how to do very well, not because we want such knowledge but because we have been forced into its endless repetition. I was struck by how the singers such as Mariah Carey and Lionel Richie drew deeply from the well of church singing, that blues drenched, old 100s idiom. But the first highlight for me was Queen Latifah's reading of Maya Angelou brilliant poem:

Beloveds, now we know that we know nothing,
now that our bright and shining star can slip away from our fingertips like a puff of summer wind.

Without notice, our dear love can escape our doting embrace.
Sing our songs among the stars
and walk our dances across the face of the moon.

In the instant that Michael is gone, we know nothing.

No clocks can tell time.

No oceans can rush our tides with the abrupt absence of our treasure.

Though we are many, each of us is achingly alone, piercingly alone.

Only when we confess our confusion can we remember that he was a gift to us
and we did have him.

He came to us from the creator, trailing creativity in abundance.

Despite the anguish, his life was sheathed in mother love, family love,
and survived and did more than that.

He thrived with passion and compassion, humor and style.

We had him whether we know who he was or did not know, he was ours and and we were his.

We had him, beautiful, delighting our eyes.

His hat, aslant over his brow, and took a pose on his toes for all of us.

And we laughed and stomped our feet for him.

We were enchanted with his passion because he held nothing.
He gave us all he had been given.

Today in Tokyo, beneath the Eiffel Tower, in Ghana’s Black Star Square.

In Johannesburg and Pittsburgh, in Birmingham, Alabama, and Birmingham, England
We are missing Michael.

But we do know we had him, and we are the world.

Angelou's genius was beautifully framed by the powerful commanding presence of Queen Latifah. Angelou's stunning biblical cadence captures one of the deepest realities of black artistic performance as we witnessed it in Michael Jackson, and that is, the ability to carry others inside our bodies, inside our pain and inside our expressive transcendence.

Carter: Yes Willie, your observations are spot-on. The Jackson memorial service calls for serious intellectual, I would go so far as to say, Christian intellectual reflection. For indeed, as again you rightly say, the service mimed in many ways signal features of black church life, so much so that the Staples Center metamorphosed into the Staples Sanctuary. It was replete with soloists and choirs, testimonials and witnesses, and alas preacher and all ─ in the person of Al Sharpton as eulogist.

Sharpton’s remarks roused the crowd and raised the roof. There was his homiletically polished line: “To the Jackson kids I say, there was nothin’ strange about your dad; it was strange what yo’ daddy had to deal with.” And there was the ever-so subtle alignment of MJ’s life with the wider strides of the civil rights movement and with Martin Luther King, Jr. Some, I’m sure may feel that such a suggestion goes too far. But Sharpton as preacher at Staples Sanctuary was making a point certainly worth pondering.

Martin and Michael, Sharpton intimated, were “dreamers ─ dreamers of a different social world, a different social reality. King dreamed in the heat of the 1950s and 1960s. His dream bore its greatest fruit in the world of politics and policy with the great Civil Rights legislations. Jackson dreamed in the soul and then post-soul eras of the 1970s, 80s, and beyond. The fruit of his dream was the transformation of the world of artistic and musical culture. Linking the two eras and the two figures as he did ─ and here Sharpton’s rhetorical gifts and genius piqued in its subtlety ─ was the “dream.” Both dreamed ─ as has Afro-Christianity the world over ─ a different world in the midst of this strange world. Invoking black church life as the form in which to funeralize Michael Jackson powerfully evoked this deeper and wide tradition of black folks in the modern world.

It also struck me, Willie, that something else was accomplished in memorializing Michael Jackson in black church form. It profoundly humanized him in the midst of media narratives in which Michael often came off as freakish or that otherwise put a question mark next to his humanity. Well, true to black church form, the memorial service ─ from the cracking voice of Jermaine Jackson to the funny anecdotes of Smokey Robinson to Brook Shields’ tears to the groans of Jackson’s little daughter Paris ─ captured a Michael Jackson. Michael the human being ─ the father, the friend, the humanitarian, someone who gave almost a third of his income to do good works. And insofar as the memorial service humanized Michael, it followed in the tradition of black churches the world. It humanizes those who have had a question mark placed next to their humanity, calling it into question. Between the media presentation of Michael Jackson and the memorial presentation of him in black church form, we see a struggle of narration, the wages of story telling. It does remind one of King again, for the March on Washington also narrated civil rights inside of the form of the black church.

One last thing. And here I am thinking of the universality of Jackson the man and the universality of his memorial service. As Jackson was a black man who was a figure of universal reach (his voice brought together those from Japan to Birmingham, from Senegal and Berlin to Brazil, from Britain to the Bronx), the black church form in which he was memorialized also exemplified the universal reach of black church life. Michael Jackson (along with Lionel Richie) penned in the 1980s, I think it was, “We are the World.” Well, people the world over, numbering in the millions, watched his memorial service. But here’s the thing: as they watched it, they were drawn into the form and into the bosom of the pain and hope of the black church tradition at its best.

In all, the memorial, as I said, leaves much for us to think about and talk through.

Jennings: Jay, absolutely, in a very important way Michael’s memorial service flashed across the world the humanizing power of black church gestures. Once again, I am deeply impressed by the truth and power of Sharpton. He is also a figure like Michael often inscribed in narrative that render him freakish, fiendish or an abject political failure. None of which are true, but all of which seeks to conceal the profoundly organic power of the man. As with James Brown, the godfather of soul, so too now with the king of pop, Sharpton’s close relationship with these men and his ability to contextualize their lives on the broader landscapes of America’s story and the story of global black existence has placed Sharpton in a unique historic space.

That space is indeed a preaching space. I was amazed at his deployment of the preacher refrain, “Thank ya,” “Thank ya, Michael.” We are quite familiar with this refrain as carrying forward the celebratory climax of a sermon, evoking the work of God bound up with a dying and rising Son. Yet here Sharpton drew Michael’s life inside this majestic sigh of Christian gratitude. I never cease to be stunned by the creative power of black preachers to expand a Christological frame around any and every moment of pain.

Speaking of pain, I was also struck by the labored singing of so many of the performers. I cannot imagine what it must be like to enter the expressive mode while the pain of loss is so fresh. You could see the struggle on Lionel Richie’s face as he tried to sing his beautiful song, Jesus. You could also see it on Usher, and of course, Jermaine’s sensitive singing. Even Stevie Wonder’s poignant performance was labored as he pressed through the sadness soaked moment. My point here is that their performances exposed the clear sense that this is an untimely death, a death that should not be.

Teaching Theology Isn’t Like Teaching History?

By Dr. Brian Bantum
Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

In my undergraduate creative writing courses my professors were concerned with cultivating my skills of expression and observation. These were evaluated not on the basis of my knowledge of Morrison or Faulkner or how they drew upon philosophy or critical theory. My knowledge of Faulkner and Morrison were displayed in the incorporation of them in my descriptions, in my prose. During this time I learned that I needed to display my intent, not explain my intent. I needed to move the reader into sympathy, not explain why this character should have sympathy. In my moments of political fervor and explicit idealism the comments were simple: do not tell, show.

As I think about my own preparations as a teacher and as a scholar, I look at the faces of real students for whom I have sole responsibility. I am somewhat struck by how ill-prepared I am to train them to be theologians, to express their lives with God in the world, and how well equipped I am to be describe other people’s descriptions of God.

In my best moments, I hope my own writing and scholarship displays who God might be in the world and who we might be in relation to the one who loves us. But this is sometimes at odds with my own training in graduate school and the demands of my guild. The training of a graduate student is the formation of a teller, an explainer, a scholar of scholars. Scholarly work is the evaluation of texts.

Do not mistake what I am saying. We need those descriptions of other’s descriptions. We need folks to show us the patterns of thought and practice over time. This is part of my vocation and calling. But is this the goal? Is this what I want my students to become? What would it mean to see them as poets? To ask them to develop the eye of writers, observing patterns and details in the most unexpected places? To hope to cultivate in them the possibility witness, whether through words or forms of life, displaying God in the world in such a way that it cuts us and reveals to us who we truly are?

I am now beginning to realize the challenge of teaching theology is not in establishing the relevance of my subject within an array of subjects and disciplines. Writing and reflecting on a syllabus, settling on a set of terms to master is easy. But I suspect theology is more than this. Teaching theology is about cultivating the practice of theology. It is about participating in the formation of students who can begin to see God’s call upon them and movement in the world, and artfully display these perceptions in their own life (and hopefully their own writing!) In part, theology might be about ensuring a proper understanding of historical moments and the progression of thought in the Christian tradition. But what if we imagine our vocation as something closer to our colleagues in creative writing where our goal is not to form knowers, but poets?

I don’t know if my teaching will do this. I hope it will. But I am sure that it is a whole lot harder than what I was trained to do.

Dr. Bantum received his PhD and Master of Theological Studies degree from Duke University. His first book “Mulatto Theology” will be published by Baylor University Press.

Slavery in Africa’s Past: Some Tentative Thoughts on Its Christian Shame and Glory

By Dr. Esther Acolatse
Assistant Research Professor
of Pastoral Theology and Global Christianity
Duke Divinity School

Recently President Obama and his family visited Ghana and like all African Americans before them took a pilgrimage to a former slave castle in Cape Coast. Though I recall not only his words but the expressions on his face, what struck me most was the demeanor of Sasha Obama. She peered through the hole in the wall through which slaves were tunneled to the dungeon, averted her eyes, and began twisting the hem of her blouse as she looked up at her father. Obvious signs of discomfiture, but tinged with what seemed like embarrassment. But why?

I’m probably the only Ghanaian who’s made the trip to the slave castles, even taken touring groups and has waited outside as they retraced the steps of former slaves, waited in the damp, dark dingy dungeons and came out through the now famous “door of no return.” Perhaps one day when I’m old enough I may have the courage to go through the place without the visceral responses that I have experienced in the past. I’m trusting my body not to recall where it has been before – in the loins of some forebear who’s walked that mile. And no one can tell me such things are not possible, especially people who’ve built a religion around an Adam and Eve and a “Fall.”

Back to the discomfiture and embarrassment I sensed in Sasha’s expression. Our people say that before the stranger dips his fingers into the communal pot, a villager must have shown him the way. Of course Africa had its form of slavery before colonial times, but it was nothing like what pertained before the emancipation bills and its aftermath. The closest inhumanity then was the 7th century Arab raids of sub-Saharan Africa in which slaves were transported to parts of Asia, and the documented female shrine slaves in parts of west Africa. Otherwise the common form of slavery known in traditional times was the kind that increased land ownership for the master. This is because the concept of individual land ownership was unknown in Africa. Land was distributed according to the need of the family for farming and domicile. The more people one had to farm a land the more land one could receive. Raiding neighboring villages for slaves, usually of other ethnicities, was not unusual for the wealthy and powerful. But usually the slave became integrated into the family with the opportunity to wealth as well as rise in military rank during war if he fought.

In the case of slavery on the coastline of Africa, sheer selfish greed and avarice from two unlikely sources colluded. The economic crisis which plagued Europe in the 14th century sent the Portuguese who had mastered the art of navigation on high seas to search for resources in distant Africa. They landed on the coastline of West Africa and raided it of its gold and ivory, naming present-day Ghana the Gold Coast, and the Ivory Coast was named so for its wealth in ivory. What tipped the scales was that the Europeans, who also brought with them religion, particularly the English Methodist and Presbyterian missionaries who established themselves as the biggest Christian denominations on these shores, discovered not only converts but cheap labor. The chiefs on the coast were more than willing to pay in slaves for rum and gin. Today, the Ghana House of Chiefs ─ a body comprising all the country's traditional kings and chiefs ─ has placed a plaque on one of the castle's walls, asking for forgiveness.

Perhaps the reason I’m unable to enter and retrace the steps of slavery is because I share a double heritage of guilt and shame ─ an African from Ghana and a Presbyterian Christian (I’m still working out which identifier takes priority). I find I still have only tentative answers for the questions raised by the atrocities of slavery and Christian??? complicity in it. How is a church atop a dungeon that houses human beings to whom a liberating gospel has been preached possible? How does one worship the God of all peoples ─ according to the Bible brought by these same missionaries ─ and treat them inhumanely? How does one sing and pray and preach at least on Sunday mornings and go buy human beings and dehumanize them, rape and torture their women the rest of the week, and many times immediately following worship? More to the point, what must it have felt like for these bound and chained humans to hear singing and praise in honor of a god of love?

If the gospel indeed has the power not only to free from sin but give power to overcome sin because of the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, then it is fair to assume that chapel or no chapel these were in no way Christians. Products of Christendom perhaps, but not those who have been confronted with the claims of Christ and given accent to them, and turned their lives over and asked that they be continually transformed.

Most missional religious traditions have their own history of compromise with political power and privilege, and of complicity in violence that has marred human history. My own tradition, Christianity, for instance, has been, on the one hand, a force that brought the message of God's unconditional love for and acceptance of all people. On the other hand, its history, sadly, is also marked by crusades, insensitivity to Indigenous cultures, and complicity with imperial and colonial designs including slavery and its attendant effects to date.

Such ambiguity and compromise with power and privilege continues to be part of our Christian heritage and shows up in places where discrimination in any form goes unnoticed, unchallenged and unchecked. All the places and times when we “gain the world and lose our souls” individually or corporately we make the gospel ineffectual. In light of the history of slavery, it is to our shame and to God’s glory that there are African Christians both at home and in the Diaspora. We see resplendent, the power of the gospel to transcend borders and transmitters and recipients. The gospel had full effect only in places of confession and repentance and desire for restitution. These are always the seeds and fruit of forgiveness. It is more than time for these to occur. Various trips to Elmina or Cape Coast castles may be therapeutic and cathartic, but we need a more enduring ritual that translates into flourishing for all.

Gifts from Tiffney

By Dr. Willie James Jennings
Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies
Duke Divinity School

The Rev. Tiffney Marley, MDiv ’96, rendered years of honorable service to the Office of Black Church Studies (OBCS) and the Divinity School, and we are greatly indebted to her. She stepped down from the directorship of the office after spring semester 2009.

I remember when Duke Divinity School Dean Greg Jones and I recruited Tiffney away from an administrative post in the Fuqua School of Business at Duke and back to the Divinity School in 2003. She served as the first non-faculty, full-time administrator of the OBCS, and under her leadership every aspect of the office improved.

Not only did Tiffney help us achieve new heights of administrative coherence, but she deepened and expanded our already strong network of relationships with the black communities in Durham, the Triangle and the Piedmont. She also strengthened our ties with our alumni through multiple efforts including establishing a regular presence for the Divinity School at the important Hampton Minister’s Conference. Tiffney also helped strengthen the school’s international ties in Peru, Haiti, Brazil and multiples places on the African continent. She was the glue that held together our pilgrimage programs, whether in Brazil, South Africa, Uganda, Durham or anywhere in between. Tiffney brought top-flight organization, joyful enthusiasm, creative energy, and unrelenting effort to each and every pilgrimage.

Scores of students rightly appreciate Tiffney’s efforts to increase field education opportunities in historical black churches and church-related organizations. All seminarians but especially black seminarians had in Tiffney an unfailing advocate and supporter in their theological formation. She also was the best host for the Divinity School’s annual Gardner Taylor and Martin Luther King, Jr. lecture series. Our distinguished guests, as well as academic and administrative colleagues from other institutions, repeatedly remarked to me how helpful Tiffney was to them. I often heard the words “first-class,” top-notch,” “professional,” and “classy” connected to Tiffney’s name. In addition to this wonderful work, during several years Tiffney served with me on the Duke University-wide MLK celebration committee, taking on even more tasks and carrying them out with superb efficiency.

I was especially pleased with what Tiffney modeled for students daily, a woman of color in ministry who was, to quote a famous preacher, “unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian.” Tiffney understood the dignity that flows from the rich legacy of black Christian existence in the world, and she unrelentingly bore witness to that dignity in every meeting, every conversation and in her every administrative gesture.

As my esteemed colleague Professor W.C. Turner often said to me, “Tiffney is an African princess that has come among us.” Princess indeed, but she was not royalty spared all indignities or crowns of thorns. Tiffney had to face what many woman of color in ministry have to face every day − frequent times of resistance to their leadership rooted in chauvinism, sexism and racism. One of the continuing tragedies of church life in the west (and especially in America and in black America) is the refusal to receive fully the gifted leadership of women, especially young black women. In her time at the Divinity School, Tiffney worked to turn that tragedy into triumph. We are a better place because she often graciously, but always tirelessly, tried.

During my years as academic dean, I could not have asked for nor received a better co-laborer in caring for students. Academic deans are the bearers of secrets. So I know the students that really brought her great joy, and the ones who poured sorrow into her soul. Yet what Tiffney gave them far outweighed what they gave her. She loved them, everyday, she loved them.