A Theology of Race and Place. Andrew Thomas Draper
For Cone, the hopeful miscegenation envisioned by Carter could only breed a loss of election. The telos of Cone’s framework is a reification of ontological blackness.
There is little room for the realities of ethical complication in a schema of static ontology. Cone finds it hard to allow for the possibility that the objectified “subjects” of whiteness could acquiesce to living out the politics of objectification or that members of the regnant social order could repent and call objectification into question by choosing to be identified with those objectified. While he does not negate the latter scenario, he declares it to be “the rare possibility of conversion among white oppressors.”161 He maintains that “it must be made absolutely clear that it is the black community that decides both the authenticity of white conversion and also the part these converts will play in the black struggle of freedom” and that “[t]he converts can have nothing to say about the validity of their conversion experience.”162 While he astutely diagnoses both the chronic resistance of white theology to submit to unlike others and its propensity to co-opt the struggles of others in its own self-reflexive identity-struggles, the effect of redirecting the agency of reconciliation from the free work of God to the judgment of “the oppressed” is a weakening of the theological ground upon which the problematic patterns of white views of reconciliation may be criticized. While Cone’s stated intention is to escape “a view of reconciliation based on white values,”163 his solution is theologically problematic, based on his own insistence upon “the objective reality of reconciliation” as “an act of God.”164 Encouraging the passivity of whites in the process of reconciliation may also further encourage the problematic interior reflective patterns of whiteness. Cone recognizes this self-absorptive tendency in white theology, which he refers to as “a bourgeois exercise in intellectual masturbation.”165
While I suspect that Cone is overstating his position a bit in order to make a necessary point about the objectifying nature of most white talk about “reconciliation,” Carter reads Cone’s work as not being sufficiently “trenchant” in diagnosing what makes white theology “white.”166 Cone’s overstatement is displayed in his envisioning of a process of “reconciliation: black and white.”167
Whites must be made to realize that they are not only accountable to Roy Wilkins but also to Imamu Baraka. And if the latter says that reconciliation is out of the question, then nothing the former says can change that reality, for both are equally members of the black struggle of freedom. Unless whites can get every single black person to agree that reconciliation is realized, there is no place whatsoever for white rhetoric about the reconciling love of blacks and whites.168
While Cone’s point is that if whites are “truly converted” to the struggle for liberation they will “know that reconciliation is a gift that excludes boasting,”169 thereby precluding the possibility that “white converts” could use experiences in the “[black] community as evidence against blacks,” it seems improbable that Cone actually desires a logistical scenario in which white people try to “get” (a word that invokes manipulation) “every single black person” to validate them in their desire for community. There is not much that could more effectively encourage the paternalistic and self-obsessed psychology of whiteness than such a pursuit of reconciliation. Shifting the agency of reconciliation from the dominant social order to the objectified “other,” rather than recentering it on the particularity of the divine work in human history through the Jewish Jesus of Nazareth, reconfirms the binary logic of whiteness. Cone more sufficiently summarizes his position when he notes that “liberation” is the “precondition for reconciliation.”170
Cone appears to recognize that freezing ontological status based on relative sociological status may not be an entirely valid move, allowing himself several moments of vulnerability in reflecting on his contention that “Jesus is black”:
If Jesus’ presence is real and not docetic, is it not true that Christ must be black in order to remain faithful to the divine promise to bear the suffering of the poor? Of course, I realize that “blackness” as a christological title may not be appropriate in the distant future or even in every human context in our present . . . But the validity of any christological title in any period of history is not decided by its universality but by this: whether in the particularity of its time it points to God’s universal will to liberate particular oppressed people from inhumanity. This is exactly what blackness does in the contemporary social existence of America . . . To say that Christ is black means that God, in his infinite wisdom and mercy, not only takes color seriously, he also takes it upon himself and discloses his will to make us whole.171
This is the point at which Cone’s argument gains the most traction and most clearly anticipates Carter’s later conclusion. Further clarifying this contention he states:
I realize that my theological limitations and my close identity with the social conditions of black people could blind me to the truth of the gospel. And maybe our white theologians are right when they insist that I have overlooked the universal significance of Jesus’ message. But I contend that there is no universalism that is not particular . . . As long as they can be sure that the gospel is for everybody, ignoring that God liberated a particular people from Egypt, came in a particular man called Jesus, and for the particular purpose of liberating the oppressed, then they can continue to talk in theological abstractions, failing to recognize that such talk is not the gospel unless it is related to the concrete freedom of the little ones.172
By insisting on theological particularity, Cone prefigures Carter’s argument regarding supersessionism. Cone laments the divorce of theology and ethics, maintaining that this separation is a result of the Western imbibing of Greek philosophy rather than the Judeo-centric nexus of biblical revelation. This misstep has influenced the “exorbitant claims” Christian theologians have made regarding the “universal character of their discourse,” which “was consistent with the God of Plotinus but not with the God of Moses and Amos.”173 For Cone, questions related to theology and race cannot be considered without recognizing the misstep the Church took in substituting Greek discourses of philosophical power for the biblical discourse of liberation. This disregard for situatedness carries with it a universalizing motif that finds expression in certain “cultural values.”174 These cultural values are named by Carter as whiteness.
While Cone’s account of Jewish theological particularity prefigures Carter’s theology, his disallowing of transcendence locks him in a static ontology. Whereas Cone freezes humans as either “oppressed” or “oppressor,” Carter names them “Jews” and “Gentiles,” thereby more sufficiently decentering the creature in light of the free agency of the Creator, rendering both oppression and objectification theologically untenable. While Cone should not be expected to bear the burden of reflecting upon white identity, Cone’s theological trajectory tends to lock whiteness into a self-reflexive pattern that has trouble moving beyond “white guilt” into concrete work for justice, liberation, and relationship. If the white, Western worldview cannot be filled with a new spirit following the casting out of its demon, then it will produce little more than an “evil generation” filled with “seven other spirits more wicked than itself,”175 a reality we are witnessing in the escalation of racial violence in “colorblind” twenty-first-century America. Static ontologies are unable to contend against this evil.
Cone and the Lynched Flesh of Christ
In his most recent work, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Cone more strongly states the universal import of his theology, suggesting the redemption that is possible for all people as they are together identified with the flesh of the oppressed and crucified One. In God of the Oppressed, Cone held out the possibility of repentance from whiteness, referring to it as “white people becoming black.”176 This suggests that even in his earlier thought, his static categories of identity were a bit more permeable than he overtly allowed. Just as “white” and “black” are not for Carter about racial reification, so for Cone blackness may be more about the flesh of Jesus than about racial essentialization. “Becoming black” is akin to Carter’s language of miscegenation, through which fictive blood lines are rejected in the desire of people for one another. If miscegenation threatens what Carter calls “the idolatrously false purity” of whiteness,177 then it is not inappropriate to envision repentance as blackness. For Carter, this does