The barbaric murder of George Floyd spoke in a language that communicated to the deepest registers of pain within the African diasporic community, then the resonance of that pain reverberated throughout the world. The question that comes back to haunt Black people transatlantically, which was posed intentionally in 1903 on the very first page of The Souls of Black Folk by American Sociologist, historian, scholar and one of the most important civil rights activists of the 20th century, W.E.B Du Bois, is this: ‘How does it feel to be a problem ?’.[1]
To even begin to understand the premise of that question, we are required not only to begin on page one, but to attend to the very first line of Souls in which the contradistinction of differing worlds is made: ‘Between me and the other world’.[2] Du Bois is acutely aware that being Black, or a Negro as he would put it, is synonymous with being a problem in a world in which the social construction of race has reduced one’s sense of place in the world to a peculiar double-consciousness; ‘a sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others’.[3] These two worlds create a double striving as on the one hand you are viewed with contempt and on the other you are attempting to realise your own self-consciousness, and thus the tension of ‘two warring ideals in one dark body’ is maintained.[4]
In fact, the very title of his book was chosen in response to a reality in which Black people were seen as bestial and without souls. So, what we see from the outset of his work is a theological argument for the sacrality of Black life, even though he is not a theologian. Being Black always already places you at the scene of gratuitous violence,[5] subordination and discrimination as this unholy trinity converges against those classified as ‘other’ or Black and therefore deems them a problem.
In the midst of this pain we meet the counterargument that ‘All Lives Matter’, a message which has divided people. For some it is the preferred message, said to be more inclusive and less divisive. Such an argument is deeply problematic not least because it fails to attend to the ways Black people have been marginalized and oppressed systemically. It also demonstrates an impoverished analysis of race because it works on the assumption of a level playing field, which is clearly a fallacy.[6] But more than this it is problematic because, for the Christian, the assertion that Black Lives Matter is a theological statement about image bearers who have had their image distorted. This log-eyed petition that All Lives Matter, which often, but not always, comes from the quarters of well-meaning white people, makes clear the way in which whiteness is maintained by way of ‘carefully managed ignorance’.[7] To be clear, Black lives have never mattered. Black people have always been a problem and Blackness has always been placed in the ‘other world’ – the world which maintains itself via the performance of whiteness. When I speak of whiteness I don’t mean white people of course, rather, a ‘pedagogy which disciplines fantasies of becoming’ (becoming human, matured, cultured, civilized, authoritative and so forth).[8]
If we learned anything from the tragic death of George Floyd it’s this: as literal and as painful as his death was, the image etched on the minds of the African diasporic people is the one of a helpless and powerless Black body being pinned to the ground for 8 minutes, 46 seconds in the public sphere, while the barely decipherable cry for a deceased mother coupled with the diminishing cry, ‘I can’t breathe’ acts as a powerful visceral metaphor for Black life within our current society. Fanon said it well when he stated “We revolt simply because, for a variety of reasons, we can no longer breathe”.[9] This is an opportune time for action as the superstructure of racism is encountering an apocalypse, not so much a disaster, rather, an unveiling, a lifting of the lid so we can all see more clearly the ways racism has permeated every facet of society. And we thought Covid-19 was bad. Indeed it is, but it is clear that racism is the pandemic within the pandemic, which was once held at the inarticulate level or the politically unconscious level[10] for the most part, but has now come to the fore. The whole world is waking up to the reality of racism, and there is a renewed desire for anti-racist action.
As we begin to think about such action and indeed justice for the Black body as a desecrated body, a body which has been devoid of its inherent sacrality and relegated to the place of disposability, we must begin with attempting to free the Black body. Copeland in her book Enfleshing Freedom wants to remind us that just as the Black body was marked as a problem in a multiplicity of ways, so too was the body of Christ.[11] As a poor Palestinian Jew under the subjection of the controlling Roman state, Jesus knew refugee status, occupation and colonization. Indeed his body bore the marks of Roman brutality. The similarities between Christ and the Black body don’t end there. Christ also had to find ways to exist otherwise in the midst of palpable tension and his mission found its path engulfed ’between resistance to empire and the desire for basileia tou theou’ the reign/kingdom of God.[12] The body of Christ, the beaten and bruised body not only allows us to interpret the Black body as a contested site of violence, it points us beyond to that which cannot be destroyed.
As the Black problematized body is snuffed out by the boot of an officer or shot in the back while jogging by those charged with its protection, the body of Jesus stands in solidarity with Black bodies and lets us know that evil will never have the last word. As Jesus overcomes evil and death by his gracious act of love, the sin and depravity of racism within the empire of modernity meets resistance by the reign of God. The breaking in of the Kingdom of God declares that Black Lives Matter and that they cannot and should not be re/made and re/housed by the violence of racism. Christian communion as an alternative way of existing is committed to the communion of all peoples, Christians believe that the body of Christ is capable of holding all people together.[13] This means that we can and must affirm that all bodies matter and all bodies are free to commune together with Christ. But the caution here is this. If the marked body of Christ has taught us anything, it is that unless we have attended to the least of these, we have not attended to Christ (Matt 25). In attending to Black bodies as Christians, we have to imagine ourselves as bound to each other within the body of Christ (Rom 12:5). This bond requires the kind of solidarity that is costly and goes way beyond sharing a black square for #blackouttuesday, making a one-off public statement, or hosting a singular round-table conversation on race. It means declaring a #blackout every day until the ‘multiple Black everydays’[14] of Black subjection are comprehensively critiqued and rejected, until we no longer have to hashtag the names of the dead, until the Black body is no longer a problem.
Jason Shields is a pastor at King’s Church, London and has recently completed postgraduate study at the King’s College London. He writes on the intersection between religion and race.
[1] W.E.B Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover, 1994), p. 1.
[2] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 1.
[3] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, pp. 2-3.
[4] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, pp. 2-3
[5] https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/afro-pessimism-end-redemption/
[6] https://holbergprisen.no/en/news/holberg-prize/2019-holberg-lecture-laureate-paul-gilroy
[7] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/686071/Revised_RDA_report_March_2018.pdf
[8] https://divinity.duke.edu/sites/divinity.duke.edu/files/documents/faculty/Jennings-Caucasias-Capital.pdf
[9] http://www.irr.org.uk/news/we-revolt-simply-because-we-can-no-longer-breathe/
[10] J. Kameron Carter, Race A Theological Account (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 40.
[11] M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), p. 58.
[12] Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, p. 57.
[13] Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, p.82.
[14] Christina Sharpe, In the Wake On Blackness and Being (Durhum: Duke University Press 2016), p. 32.