I Bring the Voices of My People: A Womanist Vision for Racial Reconciliation (Prophetic Christianity)

by Chanequa Walker-Barnes

And all the while, that “yes, but” voice kept echoing in my head. The voice kept suggesting that something was missing in the conversation on racism and reconciliation that was happening in evangelical, mainline, and Black Protestant spaces. That “something missing,” I finally figured out, was the voices of the women, especially those from my southern, working-class relatives, who carried centuries-old wisdom about how White folk behaved and how to survive them. It was through them that I had come to be a student of race, of racism, and of racial reconciliation.

To some degree, then, the theology of racial reconciliation that emerged through the PK rallies shaped—and was shaped by—the dominant evangelical paradigm. Central to this paradigm was a belief that racism is a form of sin that results from division based on socially constructed categories of racial identity. Critical here is the idea that separateness—particularly that separateness evident among Christians during Sunday morning worship—is the “problem.” The “solution,” then, is togetherness. In Dear White Christians, Jennifer Harvey refers to this as “the reconciliation paradigm.” She states: On the one hand, the reconciliation paradigm seems to claim that racial identities do not innately pertain to who we are as human beings created in God’s image. This version of reconciliation assumes that our separateness betrays a failure to understand our shared humanity as something that transcends our differences. The implications of this assumption seem to be that reconciliation would come if we honored the truth that at our core we are one and the same. On the other hand, these Christians argue that we must do better at learning about, understanding, and appreciating real differences among racial groups. This claim assumes that separateness comes from failing to value diversity enough. Reconciliation in this version becomes a matter of genuinely embracing particularities, or the ways in which we are not the same.15 Consistent with the evangelical emphasis on Christian identity ...

A working definition that can guide readers in the first half of the book is this: Racial reconciliation is part of God’s ongoing and eschatological mission to restore wholeness and peace to a world broken by systemic injustice. Racial reconciliation focuses its efforts upon dismantling White supremacy, the systemic evil that denies and distorts the image of God inherent in all humans based upon the heretical belief that White aesthetics, values, and cultural norms bear the fullest representation of the imago Dei. White supremacy thus maintains that White people are superior to all other peoples, and it orders creation, identities, relationships, and social structures in ways that support this distortion and denial

Taking its name from the word coined by Alice Walker,20 womanist theology can be defined as . . . the systematic, faith-based exploration of the many facets of African American women’s religiosity. Womanist theology is based on the complex realities of [B]lack women’s lives. Womanist scholars recognize and name the imagination and initiative that African American women have utilized in developing sophisticated religious responses to their lives.

as a framework for thinking about and becoming the body of Christ, womanist theology offers two important gifts that advance our understanding of race, racism, and reconciliation. The first gift is intersectionality; the second is a wholistic view of healing and liberation.

Identity is not just additive; it is multiplicative. If I were writing it as an algebraic equation, I would write it like this: RacialGenderIdentity = Race + Gender + (Race*Gender) In other words, African American women will share some experiences with African American men by virtue of their race, and they will share some experiences with all women by virtue of their femaleness. But their location at the intersection of race and gender predisposes them to experiences of gendered racism that are qualitatively and quantitatively different from those of African American men (and certainly from White men), White women, and sometimes even other women of color.

That brings us to the second gift: womanist theology is intrinsically wholistic. As Alice Walker noted in her original definition, womanists are “committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.”23 This offers several significant implications for reconciliation. First, womanist theology uses the perspectives of African American women as a starting point from which to expand and encompass all of humanity.

Thus, womanists are concerned not just with the interpersonal but also with the intrapersonal, in other words, with the wounds that racism inflicts upon the self-image of people of color and the way in which it diminishes our capacity to see the image of God (imago Dei) stamped upon us.

In essence, womanist theology takes all that you thought you knew about racism and reconciliation and tells you that you ain’t nothing but a babe wandering in the wilderness. So come on over here, chile. Sit a spell and let the womenfolk teach you something about the ways of the world.

Still, the concept that we now know as race was not fully formed until the advent of the Atlantic slave trade. It was in the dungeons of the slave ports on the West African coast and in the bowels of the slave ships that the Fante, Igbo, Yoruba, Mandinka, and Wolof became simply “Black,” a term that signaled not just skin color and geographic origin, but also enslaveability. Since then, the concept of race in the United States has been shaped by a forced-choice mentality, in which people ascribe, or are assigned, to a single category. This makes sense given the country’s history. Since the arrival of Europeans on the shores of North America, race has been a high-stakes category that wholly constrains a person’s opportunities. Racial categories in the United States were constructed to “flatten” a person’s identity so that the person fit easily into one box. Being White meant that you were free; being Black meant that you were enslaveable; and being Indigenous meant that you were extinguishable. Throughout US history, the task of every immigrant group has been to prove themselves “not Black,” that is, not enslaveable. For western European immigrants, this has meant becoming inscribed into the racial category of whiteness. For other ethnic groups, it has meant reinforcing one’s non-blackness.

this is one of the things that I think is hardest for a white people to believe

The determination of race was often a matter for the legal system, as it had significant implications for immigration and citizenship. In Race and Racisms: A Critical Approach, Tanya Golash-Boza states: For centuries, the citizenship and racial statuses of people living in the United States were questioned and challenged. Some immigrants, like Mexicans and Armenians, could be classified as white. Before arriving in the United States, Armenians, like Japanese and Italians, were not white. They had not yet been assigned a race. Eventually, each national-origin group in the United States was assigned a racial category. The assignment of whiteness to Armenians and Italians and non-whiteness to Japanese would have enduring effects on their social location in the United States. . . . The relationship between common knowledge and law is circular. When judges decided who was legally white, they were not able to separate themselves from the unconscious biases inherent in common knowledge. At the same time, their decisions reinforced common knowledge about who was not white. Similar processes occurred with identification of the Irish, Jews, and Italians, people who today are nearly universally accepted as white.

social constructivist arguments are generally unhelpful in ameliorating modern racism. It made more sense to rely upon them during the civil rights movement, when the main argument for Jim Crow segregation was that Blacks and other people of color were ontologically inferior to Whites. In that case, an ontological argument required a constructivist rebuttal. Social constructivism was the argument used to expose the wizard behind the curtain. It was designed to establish the normality and full humanity of people of African descent by offering scientific evidence that racial identities are grounded in social, cultural, and historical rather than biological realities. Today—hardcore supremacists notwithstanding—it is rare to find people making explicit arguments about inferiority based upon biology or genetics. Nowadays people tend to invoke color-blind racism.

The Four Frames of Color-Blind Racism. Bonilla-Silva identifies four central “frames” for color-blind racism: abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism, and minimization of racism. The first frame, abstract liberalism, is the foundation of color-blind racial ideology. Liberalism, in this case, does not refer to a place on the political spectrum (i.e., conservative versus liberal, right versus left). Rather, it refers to liberal humanism, the core philosophy undergirding Western modernity that emphasizes individualism, universalism, egalitarianism, and meliorism (“the idea that people and institutions can be improved”). Abstract liberalism, then, dismisses the reality of racism or the need for corrective action to ameliorate racial inequality by using the language of equal opportunity, meritocracy (the idea that success is the result of individual merit), government non-intervention (the idea that social change should result from voluntary action and not from government legislation or action), and individual choice.33 The second frame, naturalization, justifies and dismisses racial disparities by claiming that they occur naturally rather than as the result of intentional practices and policies of exclusion. This frame is often employed by Whites to rationalize school and neighborhood segregation.34 For example, employing the naturalization frame, a White Christian might claim that worshipping in an all-White congregation is acceptable because people “naturally” g...

An Impregnable Fortress. Color-blind racism is especially difficult to dispel because the four frames “form an impregnable yet elastic wall that barricades Whites from the United States’ racial reality.”42 The solidity of the wall “provide(s) whites a seemingly nonracial way of stating their racial views without appearing irrational or rabidly racist.”43 And the flexibility of the walls allows the discourse of racism to shift in response to discrepant information. Color-blind racism’s frames are pliable because they do not rely on absolutes (“All Blacks are . . . ” or “Discrimination ended in 1965”). Instead, color-blind racism gives some room for exceptions (“Not all Blacks are lazy, but most are”) and allows for a variety of ways of holding on to the frames—from crude and straightforward to gentle and indirect. . . . The pliability of the color-blind wall is further enhanced by the style of color blindness. For instance, if whites find themselves in a rhetorical bind, such as having disclosed a personal taste for whiteness or a dislike for blackness, they can always utter a disclaimer such as, “I am not prejudiced,” or “If I ever fall in love with a black person, the race thing will never be an obstacle for us getting together.” They can tiptoe around the most dangerous racial minefields because the stylistic elements of color blindness provide them the necessary tools to get in and out of almost any discussion.44 The flexibility of color-blind racism means that reliance...

Symmetrical treatment is the dominant Christian approach to racial reconciliation. The argument follows along these lines: Race is socially constructed, that is, a human rather than divine creation. Race obscures God’s intentions for humanity; therefore, it is sinful. All racial categories are equally sinful, that is, blackness is as problematic as whiteness. The solution is for Black people to stop seeing themselves as Black, for White people to stop seeing themselves as White, and for all of us to see ourselves as Christians.

Multiplicity recognizes that we are always raced and gendered, but also acknowledges that, in varying contexts, different aspects of our identity will be more salient. For example, in a predominantly White environment, my blackness may stand out and be the primary lens through which I interpret my experience. If I am in France, my Americanness may be the most salient factor. This approach to multiplicity is similar to the tendency in antiracist and antisexist organizing to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive domains that can be engaged separately from one another. When women of color are engaged in antiracist work with our male colleagues, we are often expected to assume a “race first, gender second” mentality, that is, to effectually relegate the non-raced layers of our identity to the background. When we are engaged in antisexist work with our White female peers, we are expected to do the same thing with respect to gender, focusing upon the universal experience of womanhood (as if such a thing exists). Both represent single-axis frameworks. And both are highly problematic for women of color.

In contrast, Crenshaw used the term “intersectionality” to describe how race and gender (and likewise, racism and sexism) uniquely interact to shape Black women’s identities, experiences, and needs. Intersectionality recognizes that the layers of our identities are neither discrete nor separable; they are fused. Every layer is raced; every layer is gendered; and so on. Again, using the mathematical equation, we might represent this in the following way: RacialGenderIdentity = Race + Gender + Race*Gender This is an oversimplification, but it demonstrates the idea that identity is not merely additive; it is also multiplicative. Indeed, it is even nonlinear (the statistics nerd within me really wants to add some quadratic functions to that equation). In other words, as an African American woman, I share some aspects of my experience with African American men and others with women of all races, but there are also unique experiences that are part of my Blackwomanness. This means that I am not only a target of racism and sexism; I am also a target of gendered racism and racialized sexism. Other layers of my identity—especially my class, sexuality, and nationality—further attenuate my experiences of oppression and privilege. Intersectionality’s core insight, then, is “that major axes of social divisions in a given society at a given time, for example, race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and age operate not as discrete and mutually exclusive entities, but build on each ot...

Crenshaw identifies three forms of intersectionality: (1) structural intersectionality, the qualitative differences in the experiences of women of color relative to White women based upon their location at the intersection of race and gender; (2) political intersectionality, the ways in which feminist and antiracist organizing marginalizes the issues of women of color; and (3) representational intersectionality, the representation of women of color in popular culture.8 The concept of political intersectionality is especially critical for racial reconciliation and gender egalitarian movements among Christians, as both movements tend to ignore or minimize the needs and experiences of women of color.

Summarizing research on the impact of colorism on Blacks in America, Norwood and Foreman state that, overall, “lighter-skinned [B]lacks are often better educated, have higher occupational status (better jobs, careers, higher incomes), earn more money, have more overall wealth, tend to marry higher on the socioeconomic ladder, and are perceived as being more competent than darker-skinned blacks.”55 The findings of this research document the following disparities among African Americans: Darker-skinned Blacks have lower individual and family income, higher rates of unemployment and poverty, lower educational attainment, and lower occupational prestige than do lighter-skinned Blacks, even when studies control for factors that might account for the differences. For example, most Blacks in leadership roles within corporate and government institutions are light in skin tone, as are most tenured and tenure-track professors at US universities. Light skin is even preferred over academic credentials when it comes to employment interviews and callbacks.56 Skin tone and Afrocentric features (skin color, hair texture, and lip shape/thickness) have been associated with disparate treatment in the criminal justice system for adults, increasing contact with law enforcement, rate of criminal convictions, and sentencing lengths. Darker-skinned Blacks are arrested, incarcerated, and even sentenced to death row at higher rates than lighter-skinned Blacks; they also serve more of their sentence...

Many discussions about rape and race follow much the same script. Consequently, women of color who experience rape are silenced, and White women remain the iconic victim. “The historical experience of Black men has so completely occupied the dominant conceptions of racism and rape that there is little room to squeeze in the experiences of Black women. . . . The fact that Black men have often been falsely accused of raping white women underlies the antiracist defense of Black men accused of rape even when the accuser herself is a Black woman.”105 This patriarchal bias has led many antiracist advocates to overlook the fact that depictions of sexual aggression among both men and women of color have been critical to defending systems of social control such as slavery, mass incarceration, and anti-immigration laws. It is certainly true that accusations of rape have been used as a form of social control and a tool of terror against men of color. But it is also true that actual rape has been (and continues to be) used by men to police, punish, and control the bodies of women of color.

Mammification, Hypersexualization, and Racial Reconciliation Stereotypical images of women of color—whether mammified or hypersexualized—cast an ominous shadow over the lived reality of African American, Native American, Asian American, and Latinx women. To be a woman of color in predominantly White spaces means grappling with the impact of these images on others’ expectations in some way. This happens for all people of color, to some extent. If one of racism’s consequences is that people of color must continually appraise whether their experiences are impacted by racism, gendered racism adds another layer for women of color, who must continually gauge whether people view them as mammies or jezebels, that is, as subservient race traitors or as sexual deviants. “I am not your mammy!” is the internal cry of Black women in work and ministry settings where women of color are expected to carry a heavier load than their White and/or male peers, where they are expected to give sacrificially without recompense, and where they are judged for their failure to perform caregiving duties that are not part of their job description. At the same time, women of color must walk the tightrope of proving their femininity while remaining sufficiently desexualized to avoid being labeled jezebels. For many women of color, these stereotypes present a no-win situation. If they are guarded and reluctant to share details about their personal lives with White colleagues who have not proven their trus...

If the racial reconciliation movement is to move beyond its complicity with White supremacist heteropatriarchy, it must get intersectional.

Drawing on May’s aforementioned definition of intersectionality, we clearly can see that an intersectional approach to racial reconciliation that is centered upon the experiences of women of color: (1)will view identity and systems of oppression as interlaced and inseparable; (2)will be particularly attentive to gendered racism and racialized sexism, and how those shape issues of sexuality, disability, nationality, and/or class; (3)will use a nodal approach in which it probes lived experience and examines what is needed to effect change from the position of the interstices, the points where the lived identities and systems of oppression hinge or touch; (4)will expose how privilege and oppression co-occur to produce both between-group power dynamics (such as those between Whites and people of color) and within-group inequities (such as those between women of color and men of color); and (5)will be both pragmatic and idealistic, focused upon the racial-gender realities of the here and now and also upon the possibilities of eradicating injustice at the micro- and macro-levels.106 Theologically speaking, an intersectional approach to racial reconciliation is prophetic and pastoral, incarnational and eschatological, systemic and practical, sacred and profane. An intersectional understanding of racial reconciliation rejects outright the lie that reconciliation is about relationship. It instead centers upon dismantling White supremacy and White power structures. This understandin...

There is an adage that states, “The devil’s greatest trick has been to convince the world that he does not exist.” The same could be said of systemic oppression, which maintains its power in part by labeling the oppressed as opportunistic liars who are not to be trusted about the telling of their own stories.

For Celie, truth-telling begins with God. There is some safety in confessing her truths to God, even with her conflicting God-images: the loving, caring God who might intervene on her behalf, and the White male deity who is indifferent to her. But there is risk as well. Celie’s letters are a form of lament, a record of the “cries and prayers [that] . . . erupt from the human heart and voice in the grip of a painful experience.”8 She writes letters to God in order to voice truths that are too horrific to be expressed even in prayer. Consistent with the biblical form of lament, her letters are “at one and the same time the voice of pain and the voice of prayer.”9 As Miller states, “To recover the voice of lament is to recover the voice of prayer as it has defined the human reality before God. The lament is utterly human and profoundly theological. It arises out of the reality of human existence; it assumes there is something beyond that reality that can transform existence without destroying it. The laments of Scripture make clear what is present in every human cry for help, the assumption that God is there, God can be present, and God can help. As such, the voice of lament, the cry for help we call lament, is always our prayer.”

Shug and Celie’s conversation about God reveals how deeply Christian theology and tradition are embedded into the internalized oppression of women of color. Because understandings of what it means to be female are linked to our understanding of God, “a reconstruction of womanhood requires a reconstruction of God.”

Celie’s liberation begins in earnest when she frees herself from worshipping a White supremacist patriarchal God and finds God for herself beyond the constraints of organized Christianity. It is Shug who tells Celie that God is not housed within the walls of the church, but within the people who come to the church, within her very self. “Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God” (193). Whereas telling the truth to Shug may have been only slightly risky, telling the truth of one’s feelings and beliefs about God to God is considerably riskier, as it could possibly jeopardize one’s eternal salvation. Fortunately, for Celie, in addition to her image of God as distant White male authority figure, she has also internalized an image of God as carer and lover of her soul. When Celie relinquishes her negative God-images, she discovers within herself and within all of creation the God who desires more for her than survival, the God whose desire is for her to experience the joy of the color purple.

The truth-telling that we witness in The Color Purple is quite distinct from the approach that is dominant in today’s racial reconciliation movement. With its focus on symmetrical treatment and bridge building, it encourages White people and people of color to tell the truth about their lives so that they might equally repent of the ways in which they have contributed to racial separatism and then find common ground upon which to build “reconciled” relationships. It calls for both oppressor and oppressed to remember the truth in ways that facilitate the building and maintenance of relationships, what Miroslav Volf calls “remembering rightly.”15 The symmetrical treatment approach to truth-telling is a therapeutic approach that focuses on being neutral, avoiding taking sides, and minimizing feelings of guilt and shame. It may work well in conditions of equal power between dialogue partners. But when power is unequal, this strategy is ill advised, perhaps even dangerous. This is why, for example, many therapists view conjoint sessions between domestic violence perpetrators and victims as contraindicated.16 When power is unequal, the victim will usually modify her narrative in order to keep the abuser comfortable. Consequently, the counseling will never get to the heart of the matter, and the power dynamics will remain unchanged. The other alternative, encouraging open discussion of the abuse, is dangerous and professionally irresponsible in that it risks violent retaliation f...

In racial reconciliation, this strategy is clearly geared toward the comfort of Whites, because it implies that they are only half of the problem and that some of the responsibility for racism lies with people of color. But racism is not neutral; it chooses sides, the side of White supremacy, the side of evil. The primary goal of truth-telling in racial reconciliation is not to build bridges; it is to reveal the powers and principalities so that we can tear them down. To diminish this in any way is not truth-telling; it is catering to the very White supremacist system that we claim to be trying to eradicate. It is being complicit with evil. The truth that must be told—and retold over and over again—is this: Racism is alive and well. It did not happen by accident or as an act of omission, but it is an intentional way of structuring society so that White people have material, economic, social, and political power and advantages over nonwhite peoples. Racism is constructed in such a way that White people benefit from it even when they do not actively or consciously participate in it. Racism negatively impacts the historical and contemporary realities of people of color in complex, layered ways that have been shaped over centuries. We cannot root it out unless we reveal how deeply it is embedded into our systems, relationships, and lives. This, however, demands conditions of safety and solidarity in which the oppressed can grow to acknowledge and voice their truths. To force t...

Genuine racial reconciliation, then, does not begin with soothsaying. More often than not, it begins with a curse. Like Celie, victims of racial oppression must boldly proclaim the truth of their experiences and demand justice and accountability. And, as I will demonstrate shortly, oppressors must use that proclamation as a mirror in which to see the truth about themselves and as an opportunity for repentance. Indeed, many understandings of racial reconciliation emphasize repentance from White supremacy as the critical response to truth-telling. After all, it makes sense that repentance follows confession. However, placing our primary emphasis upon the transformative work that must happen for White Christians in racial reconciliation actually reinforces White supremacy. When we prioritize the narratives of women of color, we realize that the victims of racial oppression have considerable work of their own to do, work that is both independent of and connected to that of White repentance. This is the work of liberation and healing.

right relationship with God, with humanity and creation, and with ourselves. For the victims of racism, the restoration of selfhood involves healing the damage that has been wrought by oppression and marginalization. In

overwhelmingly emphasized between-group processes, that is, the relationships between Whites and people of color, or between different racial/ethnic minority groups. By and large, it has ignored the depth and severity of internalized oppression among people of color and the enormous need for healing these wounds. Repeated and systemic experiences of dehumanization not only inflict direct harm; they diminish the capacity of the oppressed to recognize themselves as human and, moreover, as beloved by God. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu states, “One of the most blasphemous consequences of injustice, especially racist injustice, is that it can make a child of God doubt that he or she is a child of God.”

An important critique levied by womanist and Black liberationist theologians about the racial reconciliation movement has been its tendency to prioritize conciliation between Whites and people of color over—and often at the expense of—freedom from oppression. This was the crux of the historic debate

The victims of racism within the United States have lacked any meaningful opportunity or resources for voice, validation, or vindication. Even within the racial reconciliation movement, there have been no large-scale attempts to provide people of color with space to tell their truths without worrying about the impact that such truth-telling will have upon the feelings of White people. And when people of color have tried to create this space for themselves, it is often met with resistance and accusations of being separatist and counter to reconciliation—a far cry from the validation necessary for moral repair. There is even less attention to the work of healing that needs to be done for people of color. Any reconciliation that does not liberate and heal the oppressed from the consequences of oppression is not reconciliation at all. At best, it is cheap grace, an easy balm that offers forgiveness for the sin of White supremacy without seeking to correct the harm that it has inflicted.36 At worst, it is an affirmation of White supremacy in that it prioritizes the needs of White people to feel better about their relationships with people of color over the needs of people of color to recover from the psychological and material impact of oppression.

I think this is right. But I do wish the phrase “Tell their truth” was nuanced differently. People are telling their perspectives on their experience. That is a truth. But given the problems of nuanced language around truth claims I would like to avoid personalizing truth claims and instead describe giving perspectives and experience. Minor objection and this is I think the only place that phrase come up

The damaged self-identities of people of color in a White supremacist context are a form of psychospiritual sickness that requires healing, not an act of sin calling for repentance and atonement. Without such healing, equity in cross-racial relationships, whether interpersonal or systemic, is impossible.

This is the central critique of programs like BTB which I think generally Walker Barnes would agree with.

In this chapter, I have offered a model of racial reconciliation consistent with what Thurman calls “the discipline of reconciliation . . . [which] applies not only to ruptured human relations but also to disharmony within oneself created by inner conflict. The quality of reconciliation is that of wholeness; it seems to effect and further harmonious relations in a totally comprehensive climate.”78 Alice Walker’s The Color Purple exemplifies the wholistic nature of reconciliation that Thurman describes. It demonstrates how the lives and the narratives of women of color contain tremendous power to reveal the intersectional nature of oppression, the complicated legacy that it leaves, and the incredibly complex work that is required for liberation, healing, and transformation. It reveals that, more often than not, genuine racial reconciliation does not begin with an invitation to bridge building; neither does it require forgiveness of behaviors, attitudes, and social systems whose evil is of such a magnitude that they could be forgiven only by God. Instead, true racial reconciliation often begins with a curse. “Until you do right by me” is the cry that must be uttered by the oppressed, and it is the challenge that must be met by the oppressor. To revisit and expand the definition that I offered in the introduction to this volume, racial reconciliation is part of God’s ongoing and eschatological mission to restore wholeness and peace to a world broken by systemic injustice. Rac...