Jason Craige Harris

“Intellectual work can itself be a gesture of political activism if it challenges us to know in ways that counter and oppose existing epistemologies (ways of knowing) that keep us colonized, subjugated, etc. Intellectual work has that potential only if the individual is committed to a progressive political vision of social change.” – bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism

“Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult.”—Michel Foucault, “Practice Criticism”

This essay proceeds not as a traditionally structured argument, but as a brief yet winding reflective journey on which will be engaged questions regarding justice-seeking formations of knowledge, criticism, and intellectual life. Works of a number of authors will be addressed in an attempt to highlight the multifaceted nature of my nascent educational ministry deeply indebted to postcolonial and liberationist Christian criticism. These diverse authors have shaped me and their ideas reshaped by me, enabling me to be a more faithful witness to education as the practice of freedom, as Paulo Freire and bell hooks have defined it. In Precarious Life, Judith Butler reminds us that the act of reading—consuming the ideas of others—helps to constitute the subject; we are formed by the enigmatic traces of others and therefore who we are and who we are going to be is yet unfolding (46). What is more, my intersectional identities as a U.S. working-class black male, progressive charismatic evangelical scholar-practitioner, who lives on the margins of hegemonic masculinity, shapes my stance as a knowing subject. It no doubt attunes me to the moral consequences of knowing—of what, how, when, who, and why we know. Describing what she terms “an ethics of knowing,” emilie m. townes writes in her response to Marcella Althaus-Reid’s Indecent Theology featured in Feminist Theology: “i see that all epistemologies lead us to ethical issues/ because knowing is, itself, an act that has consequences/ for the knowing subject/ for the community.” Knowing is never a neutral act. For example, I have experienced the tragedy induced by forms of knowledge that sustain domination, even as I have experienced degrees of liberation engendered by knowledge that refuses caricatures and gross stereotypical assessments of my being.

There is beauty in the composite, mosaic-like character of the subject, as well as in that of epistemology. Any exercise in knowledge production, if it is to significantly assist us in plumbing the depths of wisdom and expanding the contours of any understanding of freedom we currently have, has to take account of the multiple epistemic modes that together bring us closer to wholeness. No discipline on its own has what it takes to enlarge our collective way of being; injustice has drawn on a variety of disciplines to shore itself up and therefore justice cannot be expected to do any less. As a budding Christian social ethicist who, like emilie m. townes, uses an interdisciplinary framework as part of my method, I will attend to insights emerging from disciplines and fields such as theology, critical social theory, history, and ethics. Living into my feminist sensibilities, I will weave personal experiences throughout this reflection for primarily two reasons. Firstly, I actively resist the notion that any knowledge automatically has universal or objective status, since every knower is situated and therefore her knowledge is steeped in particularity. As Letty Russell reminds us in Just Hospitality, there is not one dominant truth even if there are truths rendered dominant (82). This is not something to be lamented, but embraced and even celebrated, as each of our views challenges the parochialism of the other’s. Simply put, we need each other for iron sharpens iron.

Further, this theory of knowledge gives recourse to people often viewed as only capable of generating situated knowledge, an idea that empowers elites to view themselves as inherently capable of evading what are intrinsic limitations to human cognition. Feminist standpoint theory invests in critical refusal—a refusal to allow Anglo-patriarchal perspectives to masquerade as universal or to mask themselves as “knowledge” over against “experience”—the experiences of the subaltern. This is not to say that knowledge does not have any cross-cultural currency; rather, it is to name all knowledge formations as socio-historical productions, a notion which in itself is situated and yet lays claim to the universal in a critical fashion. Secondly, attending to personal experiences enables us to appreciate the wisdom they embody, disclosing the experiential resources of the epistemically marginalized as revelatory of reality.

In addition, I see myself as a multi-site educator who tries to move skillfully, if not seamlessly, between contexts as diverse as the academy, the church, urban communities, and the public. I see my role in each of these spaces as largely continuous yet contextually manifested. As an advocate of robust conceptions of justice, prophetic social ministry—speaking truth to power and resisting oppression in contextually responsive ways—shapes all that I do (Ekblad, A New Christian Manifesto). More specifically, I see the work I do as a scholar and academic lecturer as a form of ministry and that which I do as a Christian minister a kind of critical educational enterprise. It is important to note here that I understand my overall vocation as a call to help foster spaces of critically informed dissent that engage human agents fully in working toward an expansive notion of liberation. This notion must necessitate participation in a revolutionary praxis to which self-care and “other-care,” as my dear friend and colleague Kimberly George terms it, are integral.

I take seriously Letty Russell’s insight in Growth in Partnership that as we partner with God for the restoration of creation to wholeness we begin to pull the future into the present in our living. Such a perspective, according to her, “produces a sense of dislocation associated with advent shock: maladjustment with the present because of the longed-for future” (33). It is this kind of theo-political restlessness, this refusal to conform to the status quo, that constitutes counter-hegemonic living, that perpetually calls into question the present in light of the in-breaking future. What is at stake for me is nothing short of planetary emancipation and the potentiality of increased proximity to a utopia conditioned by the reign of God’s compassionate justice. Like Lisa Sharon Harper in Evangelical Does Not Equal Republican or Democrat, I seek the abolition or re-ordering of all forces that seek to crush the image of God on earth. I long for the development of ever-growing, sustainable communities committed to shalom—that Hebraic conception of peace that follows on the heels of wholeness. To that end, I diligently work toward seeing the image of the Wholly Other in the faces of the other. After all, systems of injustice are rooted in forms of human blindness, as Audre Lorde reminds us, which demonize difference rather than celebrate it (Sister Outsider, 45). Justice, at least in part, is about seeing rightly.

Since one primary contribution I bring to the work of justice is that of an intellectual who engages critically with ideas that consciously and unconsciously shape our socio-political and religious practices both historically and contemporarily, it is only fitting that I should reflect normatively on what constitutes an intellectual and intellectual activity. I have taken on the term as both a marker of professional and non-professional proceedings. While the forthcoming binary is crude, it is instructive in helping us to think about two categories of intellectuals thus far instrumental to pushing communities around the world toward more just living. The professional category of intellectual is highlighted to honor the work of individuals who have devoted themselves to critical inquiry and the rigorous development of the mind (and heart) and who mainly operate and/or have been trained within traditional academic institutions. The second category of intellectuals are comprised by those who may or may not have traditional academic training, but who invest themselves in critical inquiry for the purpose of enriching and liberating the communities in which they are embedded. While this second category of intellectual is most often associated with Antonio Gramsci’s notion of the organic intellectual, both categories can (or may not) consist of organic intellectuals who are “leaders and thinkers directly tied into a particular cultural group primarily by means of institutional affiliations. Organic intellectuals combine theory and action, and relate popular culture and religion to structural social change” (West, Prophesy Deliverance, 121). They do not pursue knowledge for its sake alone, as they reject epistemic and discursive idolatry. Rather, they pursue knowledge in the interest of the common good. While I am biased toward the humanities and social sciences, I do believe that any discipline rightly oriented can contribute and likely has contributed to the well-being of creation.

I seek to be an organic intellectual who is accountable to the people about whom he researches and writes. Accountability for me means taking into account how my academic work effects or does not the lives of those with whom I say I have positioned myself in solidarity—Jesus’ least of these, Fanon’s wretched of the earth, Thurman’s disinherited, Freire’s oppressed, Spivak’s subaltern, Enrique Dussel’s underside of modernity, and Thomas Glave’s disposables. I approach the task with humility yet knowing that critical scholarship has the potential to catalyze and advance societal transformation, even though the history of the ways academic knowledge has been complicit with social evils is detestable. We must never forget the many Enlightenment naturalists who involved themselves in a circular process of racist devastation. The Transatlantic slave trade furnished them with colonial laboratories in which to discover the mysteries of the other and thereby enabled them to generate knowledge that justified the selfsame trade (Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness). We must also not forget the host of public intellectuals who helped to invent, pathologize, and virtually criminalize “homosexuality,” which fed popular resistance to perceived and actual non-heteronormative bodies/identities (Somerville, Queering the Color Line). Needless to say, I resist the all-too-easy assumption that any meaningful change primarily emanates from cultural and intellectual elites as if they alone were the movers and shakers of history—not only because the social evil they produce vies for preeminence in their legacy, but also because non-elites have often been the most forceful forces for progressive change, if the labor, civil rights, and black power movements have anything to teach us.

I do believe, however, that many academic institutions provide temporal, spatial, and intellectual resources rarely collectively in abundance elsewhere to critique and reform the often-uninterrogated assumptions that underwrite our political and cultural practices. Obviously, academics, as a category of fallen humanity, do not always use their resources toward the end of expansive visions of justice. However, those academics—like Angela Davis, Andrea Smith, Joy James, and Cornel West—that have been committed to societal decolonization and planetary liberation have found necessary links between intellectual exploration, teaching, and progressive activism and organizing, and have sought to strengthen them. They usually have access to specialized training acquired in a rigorous and focused time of study that equips them with particular skills to anatomize ideological and discursive practices and genealogies that buttress systems of exploitation and dehumanization. Indeed, these kinds of intellectuals have invented the academic field of critical social theory, which, according to Patricia Hill Collins, “encompasses bodies of knowledge and sets of institutional practices that actively grapple with the central questions facing groups of people differently placed in specific political, social, and historic contexts characterized by injustice.” What makes critical social theory “critical,” in her view, is “its commitment to justice, for one’s own group and/or for other groups” (Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice, xiv). Clearly, intellectuals invested in critical social theory refuse the de-politicization and objectification of knowledge, and “disciplinary decadence” as Lewis Gordon so aptly terms it in his book by the same title.

These intellectuals do not only teach in the academy, however, as they are deeply committed to breaking down elitist barriers that restrict access to academic knowledge to the few and that assume that the masses do not also generate emancipatory wisdom. Similarly to them, the goal for me is to facilitate spaces in the church and academy in which critical conversations on oppression and justice-making will be regular occurrences. This will likely require translation and code switching to be integral to justice work, so that we do not reproduce by our method the very dynamics of injustice we say we seek to unsettle. It will also require us to disrupt the dichotomy between doing and knowing and mark it as antithetical to justice-making, as Joy James contends in Resisting State Violence. For James, as for Freire, “only when one acts on the material studied does one know it and so becomes Freire’s integrated person…who works…to act in the world to free up possibilities for change” (191). People who have less potential to be docilized by the dominant mode of western academic learning can hold academics and public intellectuals accountable to a definition of knowledge that already implicates progressive action. If the church and the academy are to be true formational sites of critical consciousness, a counter-hegemonic epistemology and pedagogy are necessary. In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks bemoans racial integration for bringing her to a school in which “[k]nowledge was suddenly about information only. It had no relation to how one lived, behaved. It was no longer connected to antiracist struggle” (3). Instead, hooks “celebrate[s] teaching that enables transgressions—a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom” (12). I stand with hooks in my desire to produce in community oppositional knowledges that enable us to imagine and actively live into life beyond the status quo, what is known as “prefigurativism” (West, Prophesy Deliverance, 136). I seek to invite and to be invited into deeper analyses of reality that penetrate the confusion that so often disables informed action. I take seriously Paulo Freire’s point in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that “[a]ny situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence” (85).

Here is where I as a budding academic locate my potential contribution to the work of justice. I seek to serve as an embodied counter-memory, who through diligent study is able to offer informed encouragement to folks that current unjust arrangements of power are not rooted in nature despite their ideological naturalization (Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil). In others words, these arrangements have not always existed as such and therefore do and can change—the key is to change them for the better, since anti-progressive change is always possible as well. I endeavor to research, write, and teach materials that are in some way relevant to my being raised by a single, working-class, black Jamaican immigrant who has continually struggled for her survival and that of her children. Her living has been constricted by racist, sexist, and classist forces that refuse to see her as human and therefore as inherently valuable. I became invested in progressive politics and critical inquiry, in part, as a way to honor my mother’s struggle, as a way to work toward the dismantling of those arrangements and representations that have sought to limit her life chances. For this reason, I continue to resist uncritical assimilation to the pretensions of upward social mobility so characteristic of (black) academia. Like bell hooks and Cornel West express in Breaking Break: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life, I want to remain committed to working-class people, particularly those of the African American variety who continue to experience the worst edges of economic globalization and multinational corporate growth. As I write this paper, I am sitting in a two-bedroom apartment located in an urban community in which my less-able-bodied mother conducts her in-home family daycare. This material context grounds my work. In Killing Rage: Ending Racism, bell hooks cogently writes: “Black intellectuals who choose to do work that addresses the needs and concerns of black liberation struggle, of black folks seeking to decolonize their minds and imaginations, will find no separation has to exist between themselves and other black people from various class backgrounds” (234). My deep commitment to progressive change is inspired by my mother and therefore must never separate me from her.

Academic work gave me the chance to sit with structural forms of violence—forces that deleteriously affected my family, my community members, and me—that presuppose and seek to instantiate the inferiority and inhumanity of black folk. It enabled me to sit with them in a way that precluded them from silencing the intellectual and emotional knowledges that told me another world is possible. It furnished me with a critical vocabulary through which to name and understand my experiences of injustice. I doubt that I would have come to such critical awareness without the resources that my particular undergraduate and graduate training afforded me. (I realize that the particular progressive educational experience I had does not always resonant with those of others and for that reason I am all the more committed to emancipatory education within and without traditional academic structures.) Here I am reminded of the critical theorist Joy James, whose students often encountered in her a relentless agitator who continually provoked them to take over her class as a way to help them break out of socialized docility into revolutionary dissent. I look forward to teaching and ministering in ways that invite participants to the table of critical inquiry and dissent, feasting on a delicious meal of possibility. Furthermore, academic work enabled me to address the forms of historical amnesia and stereotypical representation on which structural injustice relies for intellectual legitimacy. Domination must present itself as the only possible and true representation of reality—of the past, present, and future. Therefore, my work performs an intervention. It does not feign political neutrality, but proudly embodies liberation theology’s preferential option for the oppressed, which, as Ivan Petrella argues, ought not be restricted to the theological disciplines (Petrella, Beyond Liberation Theology: A Polemic).

Similarly, I have been shaped by the ethical priorities of ethnic studies, which was birthed as a response to the cultural, intellectual, economic, social, and political marginalization of people of color in U.S. American society. Ethnic studies resists the eurocentricity (and oftentimes the androcentrism and heteronormativity) of traditional disciplines that have historically produced knowledge that has fed into imperial and colonial projects. Sometimes these disciplines have acted as if they have not done so and other times they have announced their colonialist proclivities as wholly justifiable. The ideological justifications and rhetorical mechanisms of domination, then, occupy a central place in my intellectual explorations, as I see them as sites in which the political ambivalence of religion comes to the fore—religious modes of reasoning and meaning-making conspire against and work to secure democratic freedom, often simultaneously. I ask questions regarding how the human has been defined in hegemonic and dissident social formations and the complex relationship of religion to such processes. With Sylvia Wynter, I ask who is made to be sub- or non-human so that another can come to exclusively represent the human? As Anthony Bogues writes in Black Heretics, “For the black radical intellectual, ‘heresy’ means becoming human, not white nor imitative of the colonial, but overturning white/European normativity—in the words of Robert Marley, refusing ‘what you wanted us to be’” (13). For whose self-understanding have some people been made to inhabit the space of the unfree, other, unredeemable, and vanished? Whose deaths are continually unmarked by public mourning and whose lives are deemed unworthy of recognition? (Butler, Precarious Life) How do contemporary practices of violence achieve “intellectual legitimacy” and the status of necessity in our culture? (West, Prophesy Deliverance, 61) To what forms of inequality have we become anesthetized and by what mechanisms and at what cost has our silence been secured? (Segrest, Born to Belonging)

I investigate the pregnant silences that sustain (neo)colonial programs in an effort to push us toward willful engagement in decolonizing activity. Toni Morrison keenly writes: “We can agree, I think, that invisible things are not necessarily ‘not-there’; that a void may be empty but not be a vacuum.” She continues, “certain absences are so stressed, so ornate, so planned, they call attention to themselves; arrest us with intentionality and purpose” (“Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” 136). Our collective silences in the face of creational suffering suggest that such suffering is not worthy of our words, that our silences somehow mean that we are not responsible for those acts of devastation carried out in our name. The role of critical education, in my view, is to continually bring to our attention those dimensions and sites of creational suffering that too quickly teeter on the edge of willful oblivion. Becoming conscientized is a process as much about the mind as it is about the heart, as much about what we say (or do not say) as it is about what we hear (or do not hear). It is a refusal “to believe that revolution is a one-time event, or something that happens around us rather than inside of us” (Lorde, Sister Outsider, 141). Conscientization means breaking our silences—those conditioned by privilege and those rooted in fear. For Audre Lorde, it is silence above all that immobilizes us (44). We have a moral responsibility to transform silence into language and action, to seek out the words of those who have been forcibly (but never wholly) silenced by the brutal practices of repression (40-43). We have a responsibility to others and to ourselves—to others in ourselves and to ourselves in others—to locate and invent language that helps us to re-shape reality for the sake of freedom.

I am particularly interested in religiously inflected silences in which it is assumed that God does not care about certain causes and by extension certain peoples. Figurations of divinity that sanctify homophobia, unchecked nationalism, white supremacy and racism, patriarchy and misogyny, capitalism, and militarism figure prominently in my work as constructions that require both analytical and constructive attention. How we think about God has ethical implications for our daily living. As Catherine Keller and Leonardo Boff have pointed out, in nations that seek to be omnipotent and dress themselves in hyper-masculine and capitalist drag, the omnipotent, capitalist Alpha Male God rules supreme. Critical analysis is necessary to uncover theology as a politically invested activity. Katie Cannon frames this process as the demystification of domination, a mode of unmasking those demonic powers that enshroud themselves in theological rhetoric as they wreak havoc on creation in the very name of God. Demystification thus construed involves unmasking evil, analyzing the established power relations that sustain it, and envisioning a future beyond it in which the well-being of all is embraced and pursued (Katie’s Cannon, 138-142). I seek to expose religion’s lack of innocence in social productions of evil, its claim to innocence as itself laced with wicked tendencies, but I also aim to highlight its disruptive qualities—the ways it can infuse progressive social criticism with cosmological significance, what some call the Jeremiad (Smith, Disruptive Religion). In this sense, I aim to use religion to recover and to produce insurgent knowledges that contain within them seeds for emancipatory living.

My research and writing are principally concerned with black life, Christianity, (post)colonialism, empire, violence, feminisms, critical social theory, and ultimately planetary flourishing. Concerns arising from the academic study of Africana religion, philosophy, and ethics especially inform my inquiries. Through an interdisciplinary framework informed by Foucauldian discourse analysis, I probe the systems of values and (popular and elite forms of) moral discourses that undergird dominant epistemological, rhetorical, cultural, political, and religious forms to determine to what extent they impede the realization of robust conceptions of justice and freedom. With an eye toward contemporary social problems, I consider the religious strategies and visions that historically marginalized peoples have created to respond to conditions of living and being delimited by restrictive understandings of race, gender, religion, and nation. For example, I have recently been considering African American Pentecostal constructions of history and the extent to which they collude, perhaps inadvertently, with unchecked nationalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. I try to get at the anxieties that would provoke racially oppressed people to accept dominant renderings of history that suggest that their enslavement was a punishment executed by the divine because of the so-called heathenish ways of their ancestors.

If God vexed the heart of the “white man” against the “black man,” as Earl Carter argues in his 1997 No Apology Necessary, white folk are not responsible for their participation in the Transatlantic slave trade, since it was God’s plan for African redemption. Indeed, the Deuteronomic God—one strand of biblical construal of divinity—in black face selects African people as chosen. For Carter, the Emancipation Proclamation was a providential intervention that signaled that sufficient numbers of black folk had converted to Christianity as to satisfy the punitive impulse of the deity. He argues that symbolic apologies by whites for the enslavement of blacks only robs God of his power and thereby teeters over the edge into idolatry. In an ironic twist, this move seeks to sever the symbolic link between whiteness and omnipotence by narrating white people as mere pawns or automatons in a divine game of redemption. Carter even goes as far as to resist biological claims of African inferiority yet does so on culturally racist grounds that regard contemporary African civilizations as steeped in depravation caused by their so-called departure from an ancient monotheism commensurate with the Judeo-Christian worldview. For him, the Christianization of blacks renders any continuation of racist oppression obsolete as it has already served its purifying purposes. If whites continue to institutionalize black subjugation divine punishment against whites is sure to come. While Carter sets forth a program of liberation that poses some threat to white power, he ultimately renders supreme Euro-American cultural values. In the end, this Afrocentric perspective stereotypically reduces Africa, African diasporan subjects, Christianity, and blackness in service of a limited framework of justice. Therefore, I try to understand and yet destabilize claims that confine black freedom to a narrow African American Christianity that ultimately works to reduce the complexity and diversity of black life and thereby disfigure it.

I also aim to unsettle the troubling masculinist and nationalist politics that underwrite African American theo-political views in ways that likely marginalize me as a “race traitor” and mark me “unpatriotic.” My commitment to dismantling inter-structuring oppressions puts me squarely on the side of a feminism that works to end the very ideology of domination in the West rather than just particular manifestations of it (hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center). As Audre Lorde writes in Sister Outsider, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives” (138). Whenever I lecture, whether in classrooms or church basements, I do my best to describe a complex picture of social domination, so that hearers might come to understand that all of our pasts, presents, and futures are intertwined. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in “Letter from a Birmingham jail,” “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” I resist any notion of freedom that does not include the liberation of my sisters from sexist oppression and my queer siblings from homophobic violence. I reject visions of the beloved community and of altruism that are bound by national territories rather than made to include international terrains. A truly just hospitality would not wage a global war on terror that was not at once a war on our own terrorizing. A truly beloved community would stand in opposition to constructing any human and non-human inhabitant of our planet as simply expendable in our search for collective freedom. Holding onto a robust vision of freedom comes with its costs, as those invested in unfreedom or limited notions of freedom rarely let challenges to their power go unanswered.

When I became vocal about the horrors of sexist and homophobic violence, people in my home community began to marginalize and demonize me, threatening me with assaults on my Christian identity. Yet, it was my very Christian framework of justice and love, and my expanded understanding of self-interest, that sustained me. I have come to believe that in the end the gain truly exceeds the cost. That said, I do not mean to suggest self-righteously that I am somehow beyond the need for critical introspection through a decolonial lens or that I, informed by a misguided presumption of self-purity, can easily other people I perceive to be oppressive; rather, I believe that we all must do our own work lest we continue to enact violence on and distort each other and ourselves.

For me, as for Cornel West, intellectuals are those invested in the creative exploration and production of ideas in ways that expand human wisdom and freedom. The intellectual resists forms of dogmatism and idolatry that threaten to thwart that quest. For West, compassion and courage are essential components of this search (Prophesy Deliverance, 8-9). By this definition, some academics would find themselves wanting and plenty of non-academics would find themselves newly honored. Because the term “intellectual” is often associated with “academic,” we forget the fissures between the two. I readily prioritize being an intellectual over an academic, but I am working to leverage the resources of the latter in service of the former. I see my task as helping people to live into the following Foucauldian imperative: “We must free ourselves from the sacrilization of the social as the only reality and stop regarding as superfluous something so essential in human life and in human relations as thought” (“Practicing Criticism”). Similarly, Edward Said understands the intellectual to be “a spirit in opposition, rather than in accommodation, that grips me because the romance, the interest, the challenge of the intellectual life is to be found in dissent against the status quo at a time when the struggle on behalf of underrepresented and disadvantaged groups seems so unfairly weighted against them” (Representations of the Intellectual, xvii). Said’s conception pushes me to consider the prophetic functions of the intellectual as one who engages not in foretelling, but in forth-telling. Cornel West maintains a similar understanding of the intellectual, as he advocates a mode of advocacy and intellectual activity called prophesying deliverance. According to West, “To prophesy deliverance is not to call for some otherworldly paradise but rather to generate enough faith, hope, and love to sustain the human possibility for more freedom” (Prophesy Deliverance, 6). I take West not to be condemning the otherworldly impulse in Christianity, but to be re-orienting it by his pragmatist lights so that Christians (and others) do not find themselves so heavenly minded that they are of no earthly good. Otherworldliness, when properly oriented, can equip freedom fighters with alternative visions of reality that enable them never to settle, but always to agitate and critique, knowing that there is always a greater measure of freedom and justice beyond that which we experience in any present.

In conclusion, I return to my Christian commitment as the ground of my intellectual vocation. Ultimately, service to my neighbor constitutes service to Christ. When I seek justice for the least of these, I am seeking justice for Christ. Intellectual exercise can be incarnational ministry if it provokes us to see, hear, and live in ways that reject the idolatry of domination and embrace the eschatological reality of New Creation.

Jason Craige Harris is a third-year master’s candidate in Black Religion in the African Diaspora and a Marquand merit scholar at Yale Divinity School, where he was recently awarded the Mary Cady Tew Prize for exceptional ability in history and ethics. His research and writing are principally concerned with black life, Christianity, (post)colonialism, empire, violence, feminisms, critical social theory, and ultimately planetary flourishing. Concerns arising from the academic study of Africana religion, philosophy, and ethics particularly inform his inquiries. He is a general editor at the Journal of Postcolonial Networks, where, among other things, he helps to facilitate conversations on race and postcolonial/liberation theologies.

Download PDF Copy of This Post

Michelle A. Gonzalez

 
A few weeks ago I stared at a sleepy class full of undergrads failing to engage in a discussion on the function on gender, power, and race in God language and imagery. Frustrated, I proclaimed loudly, “If God is male, where is God’s penis?” This provoked a series of nervous giggles, shocked faces, and finally a provocative discussion. Later that day, I ran into another student who was not in my class but nonetheless inquired, “Did you ask your class about God’s penis today?” Surprised I answered yes and asked her how she knew. A friend of hers was in the class, and had posted my question on her Facebook page. At that moment I felt a mixture of pride that my lecture merited a Facebook status, fear that I had gone too far in class, and betrayal that the privacy and the sanctity of the classroom had been violated. At that moment, identity, power, and technology came together.

I am a scholar of religion that spends much of her teaching and research looking at the intersection of identity and religion. Whether it is race, class, culture, or gender, the manner in which religion shapes and contests identity construction has challenged my intellectual imagination since I was an undergraduate much like the very students I try to inspire and engage in the classroom. And it is because I teach undergraduates the question of what this generation thinks about these issues has been on my mind quite a bit lately. It is quite clear from my classroom experiences that these issues are important to them. While they are not always the most attentive in class, identity and religion are subjects that fascinate them. However, often when I bring the function of power into the discussion the conversation deteriorates.

I struggle to teach students about racism when many of them do not know anyone who is explicitly racist. What do I mean by that? I grew up in a world, sadly, where my parents made racist slurs and my friends’ naively proclaimed racist stereotypes were part of my everyday life. I remember my parents pulling me out of the sun constantly as a child (no easy task growing up in Miami) for fear that I would get “too dark” and be mistaken as biracial. When I speak to my students about how they understand racism shaping their everyday lives, many, even my students of color, stare at me blankly. They equate racism with racial slurs, with denied opportunities. As students at a prestigious university, they do not see roadblocks. As young adults with a black president, they do not see the world as one in which skin color negatively impacts their lives.

Sexism does not always fare much better in the classroom. Female students, an overwhelming presence in university classrooms, seem to have no self-awareness that they are recent arrivals to the academic scene. They take for granted the struggles of their foremothers, and on bad days they appear to me to be quite ungrateful. They do not see their biological sex as an impediment to their future. While many women and men in the classroom will begrudgingly admit to gender stereotypes they overwhelmingly speak of them with a reluctant acceptance that this is “the way things are.”

These comments are anecdotal, and in many ways are products of the particular setting in which I teach and live. Miami is an extremely diverse city and the University of Miami is a very diverse school. This is a city where Latinos/as have strong political and economic power. And yet this microcosm of the diversity that will eventually consume the United States as a whole often masks the subtle ways in which racism and sexism saturate our lives. Students find it hard to identity the subtlety of oppression in their midst, which I argue, makes its presence all the more sinister.

Over the years I have tried to develop strategies in the classroom to make students more aware and dare I hope contest the subtlety of racism, ethnic prejudice, and sexism in their midst. I would like to focus on the classroom, because I find little merit bringing this discussion to the academic world of my colleagues. My research, while extremely important to me, is written for a very small community of scholars who often self-select given their own theoretical and political commitments. These books do not have a strong public intellectual voice. I suspect that most academics who read my books tend to agree with me on broader, more substantial issues. Even when I present in public academic settings such as the American Academy of Religion, individuals in the audience have chosen my session, my paper in the midst of a sea of other options. I do not have to spend too much time convincing them. The realm that I do see as the extension of the classroom is when I am given the opportunity to speak in public settings, both academic and ecclesial. Whether it is talks at churches or speaking engagements at universities, these public presentations, while based on my research, feel more like an extension of my time in the classroom.

It is my vocation to teach. There are very few things I can say with 100% certainty, yet this is one of them. I understand my teaching as a mission and a service. And fortunately, I love it. My role as an academic, researching and writing, and attending academic conferences is inextricably linked to my teaching and my relationships with my students. They force me to be clear and concise, not allowing me to hide behind words like “hermeneutic” and “epistemology,” and they push me to confront the relevance of academic discourse in people’s concrete everyday lives. This understanding of teaching as vocation is also connected to my concern for social justice.

Passion is the most essential component in my pedagogy. I am passionate about my students, the readings we discuss together, and the study of religion. The minute I stop feeling passion for teaching is the moment I will no longer be a good teacher. I know that my passion is what most effectively reaches my students and makes their encounter with religion a transformative event. As bell hooks notes, “Given that critical pedagogy seeks to transform consciousness, to provide students with ways of knowing that enable them to know themselves better and live in the world more fully, to some extent it must rely on the presence of the erotic in the classroom to aid the learning process” (“Eros, Eroticism, and the Pedagogical Process”). I honestly believe that students will not learn anything (and here I mean learn and not memorize) unless they care about the material and I show them that I care about it as well. Passion not only engages students at the level that African-American public intellectual Michael Eric Dyson describes as, “the erotics of epistemology”; it also refutes the notion that the intellect and emotion or the mind and the body are not somehow organically united. So I constantly encourage emotion in my classrooms, and I show emotion in them.

One of my favorite quotes by Adrienne Rich is found in a 1984 essay entitled “Invisibility in Academe,” where she writes, “When those who have the power to name and to socially construct reality choose not to see you or hear you, whether you are dark-skinned, old, disabled, female, or speak with a different accent or dialect than theirs, when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.” This quote haunts me, for it sums up in many ways my undergraduate education. It also reminds me of the power I hold as a professor based simply on the readings I select for a course or the discussions that occur in my classroom.

Another word that is fundamental to my pedagogy is humility. The spirit of this humility is best summed up by an excerpt from a poem entitled, “A Call to Certain Academics,” by José María Arguedas. Arguedas is a Peruvian poet who as some of you may know deeply influenced the theology of Gustavo Gutiérrez. Much like the Adrienne Rich quote, this poem haunts me, especially when I teach about the poor and marginalized, reminding me to make them the subjects of theology and not its objects.

They say that we do not know anything
That we are backwardness
That our heads need changing for a better one.
They say that some learned men are saying this about us
These academics who reproduce themselves
In our own lives
What is there on the banks of the rivers, Doctor?
Take out your binoculars
And your spectacles
Look if you can.
Five hundred flowers
From five hundred different types of potato
Grow on the terraces
Above abysses
That your eyes don’t reach
Those five hundred flowers
Are my brain
My flesh.

Teaching is a humbling profession. For me, the worst and yet most empowering moments in the classroom have been when a student asks a question and I have to look at a room full of undergrads, many of whom are a bit wary of a self-proclaimed feminist teaching them and say “I don’t know.” It is truly a liberating event to admit you don’t know everything. I believe our demeanor in the classroom is just as instructive as the readings and lectures. As the great Cuban leader and thinker José Marti once wrote, “to think is to serve.” For me, the service that is my teaching is at the heart of my vocation.

Connected to humility is privilege. I often teach courses that focus on the teachings of Latin American liberation theology. I am always surprised at the manner in which my students respond to these teachings. Many Christian students are surprised and pleased at the presence of such a strong call to action and appeal to solidarity with the poor within their religious tradition. They resonate strongly with the biblical teachings highlighted by Latin American liberation theology. They usually interpret it as the way Christianity should be, nodding eagerly at the preferential option for the poor and condemnation of the rich in these texts. When we read the Exodus story, the quintessential story of God’s solidarity with the oppressed within liberation theologies, the class practically cheers for the Hebrew slaves. And yet they do not realize that they are the Egyptians in the story. Students want a religion that cares for the poor, but they do not live their lives in that manner. They do not want to recognize that they are the rich.

Why are they the rich? They are the rich because they sit in air-conditioned classrooms and complain about having to read and study so much. They do not understand their education as a privilege and a gift. In many of their worlds, a university education is an expectation that they sometimes engage reluctantly. It is not surprising to me that my poorer and working-class students often take their education more seriously. With wisdom well beyond her years, a young woman I taught who worked from midnight to eight in the morning would go home to shower and show up at my nine-am class. This student, who had candidly shared with her classmates her financial struggles one day, shocked us all later in the semester when she wisely claimed, after losing her job, “I am broke but I am not poor, because I am here.” It was a jolt to the middle-class students who constantly complained about being “poor.”

This is not the only reason I classify them as rich. They are rich because they are unaware of how the lives they lead and the lives many of them will lead are interconnected with global poverty. Those who become aware often do not think that this complicity applies to them. In many ways they remind me of Lazarus and the rich man. The rich man’s sin was his blindness to poverty. He walked by Lazarus everyday but never truly saw him. The poor were nonexistent to him. And this is what amazes me with many of my students (and frankly most educated liberals I know). They can somehow claim solidarity with the poor and even celebrate it, but they do not in any way shape their everyday practices to reflect that solidarity. They do not see themselves as in any way complicit within the web of global poverty. And yet we all contribute to the global consumerist culture that is built on the broken backs of the poor whether we chose to acknowledge that or not.

I teach a service-learning travel seminar at my university that spends spring break in San Lucas Tolimán, Guatemala. I lived in this predominantly Mayan community for two years, which is my husband’s hometown. Prior to the trip students learn about Guatemala’s politics, culture, and religion, with a particular emphasis on the complexity of race and identity in this setting. We then travel to Guatemala and students spend a week doing service work through the Roman Catholic Church’s social justice outreach programs in this impoverished community. Students often think that the service is what will transform them and, egotistically they think, the community. They are wrong.

As part of their course time in Guatemala students receive lectures in the evening from community leaders that work with the various projects. The individuals who give these talks are poor, illiterate, and have little or no education. Yet these individuals lead the projects that are slowly but steadily improving the quality of life in the community. And for the hour or two that they spend with my class, they teach students about poverty, solidarity, and oppression in a manner that my books, the books of my colleagues, and my lectures will never come close to communicating. They have a critical hermeneutic about the world around them which life, not a textbook, has taught them. And perhaps more importantly, they put a human face to abstract words such as racism, classism, and sexism.

In inviting these guest speakers I attempt to subvert the very academy that has given me the authority to speak and write. For those of us concerned with issues of global injustice we exist in a conundrum. We want to give voice to those without voice, yet in the process we become the narrative authors of their voices. Our power and prestige as academics eclipse their voices. We have to be very careful and accountable to those communities we claim to represent.

You may ask about my other students, the ones who do not travel to Guatemala but instead spend their time with me in air-conditioned classrooms in Miami. I attempt to challenge these students in other ways. I ask them to think about the books that are assigned in their classes: who is writing the books they are required to read? Are they men? Women? Brown, black, and/or white? I also challenge them to question the very university education they are receiving and the manner in which it teaches a very limited understanding of knowledge. In their world, sources of knowledge are only those who have the ability to write and to further narrow the field—those who are published. While in no way an anti-intellectual, I do think that emphasizing that knowledge exclusively comes from books, a message we give in the university setting, ultimately leads to the assumption that individuals that do not write books or cannot read are not sources of knowledge.

Last night I gathered with a group of students to discuss the power of language and the manner in which we use offensive terms in our everyday speech. We spoke of race, sexual identity, gender, and disability. A young Haitian student raised the question of the power of words that we often don’t think of as hurtful, indicating that speech does not have to be intentionally offensive to hurt. She then shared that a fellow student had told her that she was an affirmative action admittance to UM, questioning her intelligence based on her race. So I suppose that racism isn’t always masked in subtle ways, and that for some students, racism is something they continue to encounter in very direct and explicit ways.

My entry point into these conversations is always religion. The study of religion, in my eyes, offers us an invaluable doorway into discussions of identity and power. I am always struck by the manner in which religious claims continue to have such a great influence on my students, even those who do not claim to be religious. They accept them uncritically, not recognizing that Tradition is a process, a verb, not an object that is handed to them. It is through making them aware of identity-making processes and the function of power within them that I attempt to undermine the manner in which oppression operates not only in their daily lives, but also in the broader society.

Dr. Michelle A. Gonzalez (Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado) is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Miami.She received her Ph.D. in Systematic and Philosophical Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California in 2001. Her research and teaching interests include Latino/a, Latin American, and Feminist Theologies, as well as inter-disciplinary work in Afro-Caribbean Studies. She is the author of Sor Juana: Beauty and Justice in the Americas (Orbis Books, 2003), Afro-Cuban Theology: Religion, Race, Culture and Identity (University Press of Florida, 2006), Created in God’s Image: An Introduction to Feminist Theological Anthropology (Orbis Books, 2007), Embracing Latina Spirituality: A Woman’s Perspective (St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2009), Caribbean Religious History (co-authored with Ennis Edmonds, NYU Press, 2010) and Shopping: Christian Explorations of Daily Living (Fortress Press, 2010).

Download PDF Copy of This Post

Keri Day
Assistant Professor of Theological & Social Ethics
Director of Black Church Studies
Brite Divinity School, TCU

Abstract

Colonialism’s economic and racial systems are often seen as relics of the past, systems that ended with formal European occupation. Postcolonial theologies disagree with this assessment. Postcolonial theologies expose and deconstruct the ways in which economic and racial colonial systems persist: through new forms of economic and racial imperialism, often referred to as neo-colonialism. This essay not only explores the effects of neocolonialism on people of color around the world but also suggests how postcolonial theological reflection can help fashion a transnational vision of economic justice in response to global economic hegemony people of color experience and endure worldwide. Scholars concerned with postcolonial subjects should not only deconstruct neo-colonial logic and practices but must also offer a vision of economic justice in response to the inequality and inequity postcolonial subjects consistently confront.

Dr. Keri Day is an Assistant Professor of Social Ethics & Director of Black Church Studies at Brite Divinity School, Texas Christian University. She received her B.S. in Political Science with a minor in Economics from Tennessee State University. She earned an M.A. in Religion and Ethics from Yale University and received her Ph.D. in Religion from Vanderbilt University. Her current work sits at the intersections of religion, political economy, and women and gender studies. Her work has been published in journals such as Princeton Theological Review Journal and The International Journal of Black Theology.

Download PDF Copy of This Post

Download Word Copy of This Post