Abstract
In this reflection, I respond to Anthony Reddie's reflections and assertions about the sacramentality of black flesh in a world shaped by white supremacy. I locate myself as Korean American and refer to my experience of ministering to university students during the rise of Black Lives Matter in the US. Instead of offering cognate claims for the sacramentality of Asian flesh, I ask what theological repentance should look like in light of the historical profaning of the black body. Using the work of two black American artists, jazz musician Robert Glasper and painter Titus Kaphar, I offer beginning reflections on how our liturgies and practices need to change as part of theological repentance—including lament.
I am grateful for the privilege of responding to Professor Anthony Reddie's moving and incisive reflection on the holiness of black bodies and his call for theological reappraisal of the ethical, sacramental, and ecclesiological import of black lives, against the false witness of a world shaped by white supremacy.
To locate myself, I am American. Korean American. I suppose one could expect that my response should be about how Asian—East Asian, South Asian, Southeast Asian—persons too have been othered by the logics of imperialism and white privilege in the Western church—and that this too is the legacy of colonization, with multiple imperialisms at play. Just as Reddie insists that if black bodies are not holy, then nothing can be holy—I could also assert that if Asian bodies are not holy, then nothing else can be understood as holy.
But I will not focus on such today. Even if I did, the question of repentance remains. What does it look like to faithfully live out Christian faith, given a theological inheritance that distorts and malforms our practices, theology, and ethics? I was taught early in my theological education that theology should lead to doxology, and that even the academic prose of the classroom was part of worship, part of doxology which forms and shapes us. How do we change—not just our ideas, but our embodied actions—to pursue the renewal of all its members? I am asking rather what it looks like to be holy as a Body, as the church, in the face of actions, transactions, and histories that have profaned the holy that is the black body—especially for us as students and custodians of theology. What should theological repentance look like?
I will focus instead on what moved me to tears when I first read Reddie's paper, because they are linked to real people whom I call friends, sisters and brothers. I imagined the black congregant, particular black friends, witnessing the reverence paid to the eucharistic elements by the white priest whose racism was widely known. I imagined witnessing this theological hypocrisy: supposed devotion to Christ's broken body despite inability to love the actual Body. What would this communicate about God himself? Imbedded in our actions, as ministers and members of the Body, are inscribed beliefs about ecclesiology, theological anthropology, and many other doctrines. There is no holiness that is not social, indeed as Professor Reddie has charged.
My tears came because I was reminded of when I was serving as a minister to university students during the 2014 murder of Michael Brown and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US. I attended peaceful protests thronging with outraged Americans filling the night air with the chant ‘No Justice, No Peace’. I remember holding friends who were parents of black teenage sons and children as they wept in grief and fear after a seeming onslaught of anti-black violence and non-indictment decisions in the courts. I remember my fear increasing for black friends attending a retreat in the woods or as I was driving with them through unknown neighbourhoods—because I did not know what kind of unwarranted evil would be targeted against them. And I tasted the bitterness of that fear in a sharper way as anti-Asian violence rose in the States, and I wondered if my elderly parents would be targeted also.
I recall being asked to create spaces of prayer, worship, and liturgy for students and Christians who were hollowed out with grief, exhaustion, and fear—including rooms that were majority black. What liturgy would serve this pain, would allow for the cry of despair? There was a time when appeal to Dr King and the civil rights movement might have empowered hope, or singing an old gospel song or spiritual might have served as a balm for the splintering grief of the room. 1 But it seemed the dream that the civil rights activists had fought and prayed for had been interrupted, stalled, or even failed. It was not the old songs of faith and prayer that powered the marches on the street. Instead, it was the lyrics of Kendrick Lamar, the cry of ‘No Justice, No Peace’. The church struggled in the early days of the movement to say anything that didn’t feel stale and old—but if you were serving university students, you didn’t have the luxury of remaining silent.
Korean American Soong-Chan Rah has long emphasized that lament is critical to the evangelical church breaking from its captivity to whiteness. 2 It was lament that was needed in this season. No Christian song, even the old spirituals, felt like that which could meet the grief faced especially by the children of former slaves now battling a different manifestation of an old evil. The only song that seemed fitting (to me) was a song called I’m Dying of Thirst by Robert Glasper. It is his musical cover of a song by Kendrick Lamar. While Kendrick's is about the loss of black life in the menacing pull of the streets in Los Angeles (and ends with an altar call to Jesus)—Glasper's jazz version is homage to black lives lost due to anti-black violence. Children's voices can be heard through the notes, saying ‘I am Eric Garner. Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown. Renisha McBride’. One of the voices is Glasper's own six-year-old son, who speaks at the end of his awareness of and love for his brown skin. 3 This was the song, perhaps even the liturgy, that allowed for lament and grief at a tearful volume which would certainly make your average Brit quite uncomfortable, to be expressed in worship that didn’t declare a false triumphalism. Whether the room was mixed race or majority black, this song of grief helped us lament in the face of current and historical othering and violence.
I share this because the liturgy—the words, rituals, and practices of faith—I needed to serve the Body in the face of current and historical injustice was hard to come by. We did not need the affirmation of God's sovereignty in face of church silence and violence enacted in a supposedly Christian nation, but instead we needed the words that expressed grief and rage over the profaning of that which was made to be holy. We needed something new.
My question for us all is what kind of liturgy—words, rituals, and theological practices—in the church and in the academy, would help us not only to acknowledge problematic paradigms and sins, but also move us towards embodied theological repentance? Towards change in how the black body—the black person and her thoughts, gifts, and worship—is not only regarded as holy, but also towards theology-making that continues that regard? I concur with Professor Reddie's observation—I have rarely seen a white person leave a church because of its racism, though they have readily raised outcry because of sexuality or gender. Pursuit of diversity often seems thin in institutions. For even if the black person is present, the challenge of her views and experience is often tolerated superficially before discomfort and disapproval emerge. Sure, there are ways things have been done in our institutions—but if those ways have been threaded with sin and idolatry, then surely some things cannot continue the way they have. We cannot and should not skip over the challenge of the black body and how it confronts our theology, accounts of Christian history, and ethical prescriptions.
We could refuse to have the elements served by the racist priest in Reddie's story—refuse the reinscribing of problematic liturgies and practices by problematic individuals. But negotiating theology's troubled inheritance often has even deeper complexities than such, including recounting a common memory, a common history. British church historian Renie Chow Choy has argued that no matter how one tries to understand Christianity in post-colonial times, there is no escaping history, the development of Christianity in Europe. 4 I am not asking so much what statues need to be toppled down or who needs to be canceled—as I am asking what it means to remember rightly as academics and as believers. I am asking how we repent as theologians and change our practices—in both confessional and secular research spaces.
The black American painter Titus Kaphar is interested in making paintings that ‘wrestle with the struggles of our past’. 5 In his 2017 TED talk, Kaphar reveals behind him a large replica of a seventeenth-century painting by Frans Hals, which has four white persons and a black boy in the background. There is a slight tremble, an ache in his warm voice, when he says that he can find more literature on the lace worn by the characters in this painting—and about the manufacturer of that lace—than about the young black person on the canvas. In a later TED talk, he explains that there are time-tested, documented formulas for painting European, white skin—but no such wealth of information for black skin. 6 Then, shockingly, Kaphar paints large white brushstrokes over each white figure, to leave only the black lad in view. As he then paints linseed oil over these strokes, he rubs the paint to re-expose the faces, explaining that with time, the applied oil will cause the white paint to fade enough to bring those figures visible again. He is not interested in eradication. He is after refocusing upon that which was not seen, which was not attended to.
If we consider the analog of this example to our context, what would need to be put aside for some time so that we could focus our view and attend to the challenge of the black body and the black believer? What accounts of the church and state are no longer viable because they fail to attend to state-sanctioned and church-complicit evils such as slavery, apartheid, and segregation? What descriptions of human agency, responsibility, and ethics adequately consider the restrictions placed upon the black body? If we cannot provide accounts which include and honor the black person, can we really seek the holiness and the ethics of the Body corporate at all?
How should we pursue theology and ethics that wrestles honestly with our post-colonial inheritance AND reshapes our liturgy and practices towards renewal of all—including the black body?
