No Reconciliation Without Liberation

One of the things that drew me to Duke Divinity School was the presence of The Center for Reconciliation (CFR), an initiative the Duke made prominent on its website. I had always felt called to reconciliation work, so when I arrived at Duke, I was intentional about developing a relationship with the department and participated in most of their events. Most of my Black friends, especially the ones from the South thought I was crazy to genuinely participate in reconciliation efforts, especially those led by white folks. Many of them were of the mindset that reconciliation was about assimilating to what white people’s vision of everybody just getting along, and the co-opting of the gospel as a tool of Black submission. Black people who were really about change didn’t play white people’s games.

This perspective seemed cynical to me. I had known many a white person who shared my vision of beloved community, a community that fought together for the justice of all people. I was so committed to the cause of reconciliation that I pursued a coveted field education placement through CFR and was awarded a position in Mississippi to work with a small white Methodist church that was intentional about welcoming all kinds of people. While on many levels I had an amazing experience developing relationships with my host family, the fellow sojourner, and the pastor of the church I worked with and the congregation, my experience with my field education supervisor in Mississippi and the required follow up class, where we studied reconciliation from a theoretical perspective, left me wounded and ready to abandon reconciliation work for good. James Cone’s God of the Oppressed provides language I would have benefited from in articulating my profound disappointment in what I perceived as a lack of commitment to the most urgent reconciliation needs at Duke, and in the reconciliation movement in general, the need for liberation and racial justice.

Reconciliation at CFR focused on the poor. While this was certainly a worthwhile focus, it did not speak to the very present injustice Black people experienced on a daily basis, within the walls of Duke Divinity and the greater Durham community. In fact, the focus on the poor side stepped white people’s persistent participation in injustice and racial oppression, making it very difficult to be honest with my co-laborers in the pursuit of reconciliation. Whenever a Black person raised a concern about the dismissal and disregard of racism in our midst, we were beat back with the “but what about the poor” shtick. When we became frustrated with the evasive device we were told we weren’t living into the mandates of God with the “right” attitude and sent to read a book to set us straight. No attention was paid to the potential misunderstanding of reconciliation of the leadership. Moreover the concept of liberation was never spoken of, let alone a liberationist perspective of the Gospel. Instead, countless examples of an absolutist concept of forgiveness set in Africa was peddled as authentic reconciliation. Don’t get me wrong, these examples of radical forgiveness were amazing and affective in communicating the power of forgiveness, but it was always the act of the forgiver that was emphasized and never the responsibility of the one who was to be forgiven. Such an approach left the Black students in the class yearning for our perspective and our needs to be addressed, but they never were.

Forgiveness and love are important tenants of the Christian life, but reconciliation without liberation is, as James Cone would say, heretical.[1] What we experienced was half of the gospel. A mandate to smile, get along and forgive, without any repentance on the part of those who had abused us. Our teachers and our supervisors became our oppressors when they dictated what reconciliation must look like, what books we could read on the topic (the curriculum included no Black thinkers, save the canned MLK rhetoric white people use to for their own benefit), and labeled us “problems” or “angry” if we questioned the lack of an ethic of political action in pursuit of justice or challenged them to tell the truth about racism. In fact CFR did violence to its Black students by neglecting the urgent need for real liberation and reconciliation within them and calling them uncooperative and punishing them with bad evaluations when they failed to be happy with the methods and goal of the initiative. For me that looked like a scathing field evaluation in which I was labeled as angry, an attitude unbefitting reconciliation work, and a strained relationship with the director of CFR, when I challenged his methodology about class. After reading James Cone’s God of the Oppressed, I realize the fatal disconnect in Black and white theology that compromises most reconciliation efforts. Our social locations cause us to construct our theologies in very different ways. White supremacy compromises a liberative reading of the Gospel for white people and our experiences of oppression make liberation the most urgent aspect of the message for Black people. Cone contends, “Indeed because the values of white culture are antithetical to biblical revelation it is impossible to be white (culturally speaking) and also think biblically.”[2] While I cannot indict all white people of a failure to be biblically minded, I can identify the ways in which white supremacy infected the thinking of the all white leadership in my journey of reconciliation. My professor and field education supervisor were incapable of seeing their participation in racist oppression, even in the work of reconciliation. They wanted to set the agenda, tell me what reconciliation was and had to be and dictate my posture toward them in the midst of the work.  I had to agree with their methods, their end goal and their philosophy. Furthermore they did not take seriously the rich resource of Black theology and the Black experience.

I remember specifically being in class discussing lament. The professor went on for about fifteen minutes discussing the lack of practices of lament in the church. This perplexed me since the weekly altar call in the Black church, where believers come to the altar, and lay their weariness, disappointment, fear and every other burden before the altar in the hopes that God will hear and they will be revived seemed to be a practice that was alive and well. Yet when I offered my observation it was disregarded and a conversation about how a white person found it difficult to lament became the focus of the rest of the two-hour class. Not only did I feel like my contribution was disregarded, but I felt like the rest of my time was wasted. This solidified my perception of feeling like a second-class citizen and fed my suspicions that my idea of reconciliation differed greatly from the vision of the leaders of CFR. Perhaps my Black counterparts were right. Perhaps they did want our presence, but only if we were willing to submit to be flies on the wall without perspective, tools or expectations.

Submission and forgiveness are not the same thing. Cone argues, questions of the prevailing injustice present in the church and in reconciliation initiatives “must inform a Black theological analysis of reconciliation, and cannot be answered by spiritualizing Christ’s emphasis on love, as if his love is indifferent to social and political justice.”[3] This is what so many Black people in reconciliation long for and name, but when the theoretical approach to reconciliation is a white one, such questions are seen as divisive. As such Black people in reconciliation who speak the truth are treated as rebellious, unchristian sowers of discord.

My experience with white-centered reconciliation has been bad, but I still feel committed to a counter cultural vision of God’s community. I am not willing to say that white people can have no say in what a reconciliation effort should look like, that they should be rejected from koininia (the fellowship of God’s community) or that they are incapable of right theological thinking as Cone has said. Instead, I will continue to fight, but fight in a way that takes my needs, and the needs of those oppressed like me, seriously. I’ve decided I will no longer be a part of any reconciliation ministry unless it gives the same attention to liberation that it does to reconciliation, has Black leaders contributing to its philosophy and methodology and uses Black theology and experience as a resource for its efforts. I don’t want to have to lie to make others feel comfortable, conform to someone else’s notion of what it means to be reconciled to each other or suppress my needs for racial justice. I’d like to be a part of a reconciliation effort where white people don’t just expect for Black people to make the effort to bridge our dissonant understandings, but are willing to do the work, allowing the Spirit to heal their minds of white supremacy and understanding the perspective of the oppressed.[4] I wonder if ministries like this exist?

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[1] Cone, James. God of the Oppressed, Orbis Books: New York, 1973, p. 36

[2]Ibid, p.88

[3] Ibid, 208

[4] Ibid, 89