Abstract
A keynote address at the “Legacy and Mission: Theological Education and the History of Slavery” conference held at Princeton Seminary, April 8–9, 2019.
When I was a first-year student at PTS in 2004, I recall having a conversation with a student whose name I can’t remember at the moment. The student (possibly a second- or third-year black student) told me that Brown Hall, the residence hall I moved into that year, had been established in part to house formerly enslaved Africans and black servants. This is what they said. They had heard from someone, who had heard from someone else, that some of the rooms had at some point been slave quarters. So, I would lay in my bed, small and uncomfortable as it was, in wonderment—imagining the short distance between the lives of enslaved and formerly enslaved black people who resided there, in my own bed (at least according to the legend imagined and told by this student).
I did not know what to think of my studying within a seminary, whose mission is to prepare people to “serve Jesus Christ” in ministries marked by faith, integrity, scholarship, competence, and compassion, when its legacy was seemingly shrouded by its complicity in the enterprise that was chattel slavery. It’s clear now from research that has been undertaken, and the reason for our gathering, that the student’s story was exaggerated. Though its believability should be clear to many.
Brown Hall may not have been slave quarters, but we do know that the funds used to finance this building were donated with profits derived from the chattel slavery industry. I begin here because I want to mark the ways that the enterprise of slavery and institutional complicities in it, whether we choose to address them or not, haunts us. It haunted the student who shared this story with me. It haunted me as I slept many times with nagging discomfort in my room; while sitting through lectures within the halls of this institution, offered by some faculty who ignored that haunting.
I cannot recall more than one or two lectures in that time that centered the legacy of those histories, that haunting, within our contemporary times. Histories—hauntings—that we’ve been called to scrutinize today and discuss. Yet still, we were haunted. And that’s why I’m grateful that we’ve been here, that we’ve assembled at this time for what is no less than a self-reflexive reckoning that has been a long time coming.
I am here, then, in conversation with you today. Moreover, within this building established upon stolen land that was once home to the Leni Lenape people—a land that is ghosted with the presences and absences of those indigenous to this place. I am here, within this building, because it is my duty. It is our duty, in fact, to be here, to be in conversation as we confront that which haunts us: the presences and absences of enslaved Africans; those who sought refuge beyond the bounds of chattel slavery in the south only to bump up against the violent manifestation of slavery’s afterlife in the north; those who, by mandate, were freed even as they fought to materialize all they had imagined as that which was to be consigned to the free; those who labored, struggled, lived, and died to make something of a livable life possible for us; and those who were denied access to institutions of higher learning, whose highest forms of learning were steeped in anti-black, sometimes Christian-based, ideas that were meant to keep white-supremacist-capitalist-heteropatriarchy firmly in place.
It is our duty to be here today in order to be part of this reckoning. That’s why my answer to the question I’ve been asked to respond to over the short time I am with you—namely beyond the campus, “How do academic institutions contribute to conversations in contemporary society?”—is simple: the work of repair. The remarks that follow is my attempt to make clear what I now know is the work of repair. The work that we all have been called to do, and called to do here on this campus.
The black political prisoner Assata Shakur, in her autobiography, said it best, “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” You all know that! The title of my talk, then, and our response to the question of how we can best do the work of contributing to conversations in contemporary society is, borrowing from Shakur, It’s Your Duty. The work of repair is your duty. By “your,” I’m talking to PTS—challenging PTS to fight for our freedom. But, first, you must be willing to loose the chains.
Allow me to begin with an exercise of memory. I’m a writer, so I’m going to share a story that I penned for the recently released anthology How We Fight White Supremacy. How timely. You should pick it up. It’s edited by Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin.
I am reading it here because I think it offers some insights into the theological underpinnings of contemporary iterations of a long struggle for black liberation contemporarily.
I am reading it here because in many ways it is a story that illuminates, thinking with Saidiya Hartman, “the afterlife of slavery.” And I want to stop here to say that sometimes we have conversations like this, and we think through this sort of historical frame, the stuff that happened “back there.” I think Professor Taylor did a good job of reiterating the ways in which slavery and its legacies manifest themselves in multitudinous ways in our present. I’m interested in not just thinking about slavery, the project that we look back to and say, “That happened then. I’m not responsible.” I’m interested in thinking through its afterlife. We are living in its wake, in its afterlife. So to talk about contemporary issues of criminalization, of imperialism, of any sort of form of institutional violence, is therefore to talk about the rudimentary presence of slavery in our present.
The project of slavery has morphed and switched costumes and assumed different names within our present, but it’s still present nonetheless. The story: On the morning of August 31, 2014, the pews at St. John’s United Church of Christ in northern St. Louis were full. It was the final day of the Black Lives Matter Freedom Ride to Ferguson, the national convening. I partnered with Patrisse Cullors, one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter, to organize over the course of two weeks. At the beginning of that Labor Day weekend, nearly 500 contemporary freedom riders from across the USA and Canada had arrived to provide support to local organizers.
Our presence in the church that morning was a sign of our collective resistance—we refused to feign reverent acquiescence to extrajudicial killing. Black grace after all is not cheap. The streets of Ferguson were still hot when we arrived. The rage of the local black activists swelled because one of Ferguson’s young, 19-year-old Michael Brown Jr., had been fatally shot by white officer Darren Wilson. Justice seemed to be an illusion. But local organizers and our allies were determined that there would be no peace in the absence of perceptible, material amends as the response to Mike Brown’s killing.
During one of the few marches held that weekend, it seemed that many of the people in attendance had suspended grace. Some of the younger marchers were rightfully angry because their neighbor had not only been killed by a white police officer, but his bloodied body had been left on the street on public display under the heat of the summer sun for nearly four hours. They were less interested in offering solemn prayers and calls for peace. They wanted officer Wilson’s job. They demanded an end to the abuse and killing of black people by law enforcement. They were prepared to disrupt the local law enforcement unit whose bloated financial coffers were full with fees of unjustifiable bias imposed upon Ferguson’s mostly black populations.
Offerings of black grace without any hint of justice, however, is what some church leaders have preached. Biblical Scriptures like Ephesians 6:5 for example—which reads “slaves be obedient to those who are your masters according to the flesh with fear and trembling in the sincerity of your heart as Christ”—had been rendered as a calculus for black civility, and the authority to prove that enslaved Africans’ submission to white slave masters was akin to them submitting to Christ. White supremacist power, and its consideration, structured black acts and ethics of grace. But these are different (and not so different) times.
Throughout the history of the USA, black people have been expected to forgive. We’ve been asked to extend charity in advance of the freedom dreams. So many Christian leaders preach, as manifested, realities to be experienced in heaven only:
Forget the police shootings—the officers who kill black people with impunity.
Forget the incessant conditions of over policing, surveillance, and the incarceration of black communities whether rural, urban, or suburban.
Forget the economic policies and systems that continue to disenfranchise black people.
Forget housing markets established to diminish black home-ownership and economic well-being; urban renewal policies set to keep black people locked within ghettoized land zones; gentrification; voter suppression; education inequity; white racists marching under the banner of the Confederate flags on southern streets, and a sitting white, racist president who called black nations shithole countries while refusing to call white nationalists racist.
The afterlife of slavery.
In some ways, the “when we all get to heaven” understanding of justice makes sense. The black preacher’s insistence that we will someday ascend to a far-off plane beyond our present world, free of anti-black racism, economic disparity, and social death is a commentary on the state of our present realities. It’s their way of saying “Shit ain’t right in our here and now. Shit ain’t right here and now.” Black liberation theologian, James Cone, has argued as much in his writings, yet any theology that is disconnected from the material evils impelling black bodies/black communities/black life is not indicative of liberation at all.
The message we received on that weekend in St. John’s was no different. What was preached was not the typical word offered during Sunday morning services—a word that black Christians often perceive as too benign, or as a caricaturing confused in itself by the colonizer’s theology. The pastor, Rev. Starsky Wilson, preached a sermon titled “The Politics of Jesus.” He did not sermonize a white Jesus, the Christ with blue eyes and blonde hair conceived and deemed divine in the racist imagination of Modernist paintings. There was no preaching of a gospel that trivializes the demands of a downtrodden people.
Black people were encouraged to throw up weary hands, to not resign themselves to torment from the violence meted out by individual actors, anti-black institutions, and the state. His sermon was peppered with words like “radical” and “revolutionary,” not moderation and restraint. The state, in Rev. Wilson’s estimation, was to be the target of Ferguson organizers. Whether the cross, the Lynching Tree, the bullet from a police officer’s gun, or the unjust judgment of a court, the black body was likened to Christ’s tortured frame. Both which figure, almost always, as enfleshed targets upon which the state and white racist vigilantes (sometimes the same) aim their weapons.
As the congregation of the effected leaped from their seats, swayed arms in the air, and cried out affirmations, it was clear to me that the spiritual pulse of this particular iteration of a long-standing movement for black lives, like freedom struggles of the past, would be won—electrified by a fierce rejection of the status quo and submission. The movement for black lives has presented contemporary black churches and professed Christians with the necessary task, namely a push to reconsider the context of faith as steeped in patriarchy, sexism, militarism, xenophobia, rape culture, homophobia, Zionism, and anti-blackness.
Black people have used church and organizing to critique anti-black Christian theologies that have been used to douse black rage in the past; but now it’s time to consider the ways that some churches have perverted ideas of grace—the type of twisted and unmerited favor granted by some Christians who will sooner praise Jesus alongside racists and rape apologists like Donald Trump and Mike Pence while condemning and disposing of other marginalized people.
In the past, too many organizers have been told by some Christian leaders that black feminism, transness, queerness, our liberated gender expressions—our unconventional black politics, our rootedness in African traditional religion, our disbelief in deities, our lack of faith in the state, the ways we love, the ways we fuck, the ways we resist—are unholy, or worse, damnable. With some leaders even preaching that hell would be the obvious end for us; people like so many of the black activists in that sanctuary—because of their beliefs, their political views, or ways of being.
The black people assembled in St. John’s that Labor Day weekend had shown up because of their profound love for black people. The sermon was emblematic of the politics of the people. It insisted that we must fight for black liberation for all black people. Black people must never do to each other what systems do to us, and we must never acquiesce to the inequity, the evil, the collective sin that is white supremacy. Black grace is costly, and its costs are the end of violence which does us harm and its many-sided consequences; our transformative justice; and the making of the world as we need it and want it in the name of black liberation (not with white tears, our white guilt, our white and self-invested liberalism).
This all amounts to a reflection on what I sense were a set of profound theological concerns at the heart of the movement for black lives, or what has been taken up within media and popular culture as Black Lives Matter. It’s a movement iteration that has been historicized and written about widely. Its expansive theological underpinnings have yet to be fully studied and articulated. However, there are a few lessons here for us: one that has bearings on what we might imagine as our critical posture (a response to a range of social concerns in this moment), and one that demands of any Christian professing a love for God and a vision of a just world to practice what I have named costly grace.
I imagine costly grace as a practice of accountability, redress, and the ending of any form of harm. Aren’t we, those of us assembled here, in the work of theorizing and theologizing grace, of training servant leaders to do justly in the world? Isn’t that our work to do? But that’s not why I’ve chosen to read this reflection tonight.
In a sanctuary that morning was a motley crew of black people, many of whom had long distanced themselves from the church, from Christianity, because of the ways the church has distanced itself from the tangible project that is black liberation. Some of the people in that sanctuary practice a form of African traditional religion and practice within a range of cosmological systems beyond Christianity. Some of the black people in the room had grown tired of theologies which lacked a liberationist analysis with reference to our theologies and the prophets of the faith. All of this alongside theologians articulating liberation in material ways in their lives. In fact, several of the black people in that sanctuary, many of whom were responsible for a national movement gathering that catalyzed the eventual development of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, were students and alums of Princeton Theological Seminary.
Damien Connors, Teddy Reeves, Taylor Johnson-Gordon, Nyle Fort, Rev. Dr. Regina Langley, Asher Ray Gray, me. Those students and alums raised money to support calls for transportation and accommodations for about 50 black people from the New Jersey and New York areas. Over the course of two weeks, folks like Teddy Reeves and Regina Langley worked diligently to raise money to fund the bus that picked us up at Union Theological Seminary and drove us halfway across the country to St. Louis. They raised money so that the contemporary freedom riders could eat. They raised enough funds to cover all housing costs.
These students and alums were principal architects of black queer feminist philosophy and theology, the radical politics that would be the ground upon which the Black Lives Matter Global Network principles were founded. I’m going to say what I’m about to say because I love PTS, and to love is to speak the truth. I wasn’t on campus at the time, but from my recollection and based on the word of one of the organizers who was a student at the time, PTS did not provide substantial financial support to the students who journeyed, and labored, and prayed, and protested, and cried, and strategized and built with us even though those students understood the movement to be central to their ministerial call and formation as servant leaders.
I am not aware, but I’m pretty certain that upon our return we weren’t called upon to report back to the administration and faculty. The exception being a few dialogues that were set up by the Center for Black Church Studies in which Teddy Reeves was a part, along with his then director Dr. Yolanda Pierce. I received, since that time, many a write-up about PTS students and alums who have gone off to perform various forms of ministry in the world, but I have not read one write-up chronicling the contributions that black PTS students have made to one of the most consequential movement iterations of our time.
Where was the institutional support for Rev. Nyle Fort and Rev. Lukata Mjumbe, both students at the time, who would return to campus energized and ready to bring their local communities a prophetic fire that had been burning in the hearts of black people across the country, by co-organizing a preaching series on what they named the Seven Last Words of the Black Slain; the first of which, by the way, was hosted at Shiloh Baptist Church where the Rev. Darrell LaRue Armstrong is pastor (another PTS alum). What happened to the teachings; the campus-wide lectures; the localized organizing; the media alerts; the feature stories and the alumni/ae publications?
The experiences of the alums who were a part could have been instrumental in shaping the seminary’s pedagogical approaches, its curriculum, its culture. The absence of any of the above signal to graduates like me a missed opportunity, the failure on the part of PTS at the time to center the most urgent needs of black people. What does it really mean, as Karl Barth is known to have remarked, to hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other but to not attend to the particularities of our times? The utmost concern of those among us who exist on the edges of the edges margins is “what are we to make of these silences?” Silences which might be the size of our fears or our complicities—especially when these silences are loud.
That moment signaled a fissure at least to me that seemed to have separated justice as talk from justice as practice. PTS missed an opportunity to engage in the liberatory work of the ministry that is the black freedom struggle; and PTS didn’t have to travel far to engage it, because several of its most committed champions were in its midst. But what we have ahead of us, if you didn’t feel hope coming, is a way forward. That makes the work of liberation, of material equity, of transformative justice, of community building, of repair, of costly grace, of radical love of the gospel, all possible.
This is what I mean when I say that it is your duty to fight for freedom, especially when the freedom we are fighting to obtain has been trivialized in part by the institutional legacies we are now gathered to name and correct. This is what it means to do our work in critically responsive ways in these times, and so engage in the work that resolves and repairs.
Transformative justice is to engage in the work of spirit. I often think about M. Jacqui Alexander, the transnational feminist scholar and founder of The Tobago Center for the Study and Practice of Indigenous Spirituality, who often asked, following the question asked by her celebrated friend, Audre Lorde, “What is your work, and why have you come?”
After posing those questions, she would often say, “and I’m not talking about why it is that you’ve come here to this place, this room, this campus, this city. But what is it that you’ve come into being, into this plane, to do?” Tonight, we’re gathered here because we have been called together to answer her question: Why have we come? What is our work? These are questions which illuminate an understanding of spirit work that runs counter to neoliberal conceptions of labor.
We sometimes commoditize the good by turning good works into means on which we might capitalize. For example, I cannot recount the number of Black Lives Matter symposia I’ve been part of on the campuses of colleges whose policies, or lack thereof, often suggested that the murdering of black lives didn’t extend beyond the presentation of a nicely packaged conference. This is why those of us who are part of this PTS community, for instance, must be vigilant after having produced a report on our institution’s complicity in chattel slavery and its afterlife by committing to creating material forms of equity that form a more obvious proof of our loving accountability. In other words, we can’t talk good talk and not walk good walk.
When I was at Vassar, they wanted me to organize a Black Lives Matter conference on campus, I told the chair of the department “no” because I wasn’t interested in putting together a conference so that they can tell somebody through publications, and through emails, and go on the media and say, “We had a Black Lives Matter conference”—as they were profiling black people from Poughkeepsie in their library, as the amount of students and faculty of color did not mirror the type of mattering of black lives they profess. I was less than interested.
By investing in what we might want to call performative sorts of markers of justice, it means nothing if we gather here looking nice and having this really polite kind of conversation. If we don’t leave here and do something, it means nothing. That’s what I mean by neoliberal conceptions of justice and commoditizing the good. It’s easier to get lost in sentimentality and blame, but as Audre Lorde once remarked to James Baldwin in a 1986 interview in Essence magazine, “I’m not interested in blame. I’m interested in change.” But what does change look like?
And to that end, how might academic institutions like PTS better position themselves in such a way that they contribute to conversations in contemporary society? First, academic institutions must be intentional, deliberate, conscious, aware. We are living—well, some of us are—through the death-dealing politics of empire, a time of dissolved community, a time when white hoods have been replaced with crew cuts and red MAGA hats, a time when freedom fighters can be mowed down in southern cities where white racists are still celebrating Confederate generals and fighting hard to maintain a specter of respectable anti-black racism, a time when women must still insist their bodies are their own, a time when LGBTQIA and gender non-conforming people are still legally disregarded in some places, sometimes killed throughout the country, a time when undocumented people are likened to parasites.
And while I don’t want to assume that we share the same political beliefs, or that we’re all in agreement (that we are actually facing critical problems, or that we’re all similarly impacted by such problems, or that we all agree on how and if we might move forward, or that we’re bearing witness to the consequences of anti-black, white nationalist, neoliberal, xenophobic, anti-women, anti-queer and trans militarist, patriarchal capitalism), my sense is that those of us here can agree that, for PTS at least, the transformation must begin with intentionality.
Academic institutions must be intentional interlocutors and partners in the collective work of transforming our world, which means those working within academic spaces must be careful readers, interpreters of the times in which we are living through. How can we go on to teach classes as usual, for example, without critically engaging all that is ailing the world and expect students to leave prepared to do the work of growing souls in it? The optics through which we assess the world cannot be myopic, or centered only on the lived experiences of the sum as opposed to the many.
No longer should we be comfortable with a curriculum that does not include black and other non-white thinkers as central to knowledge production. No longer should it be the case that the only time students are engaged in courses, on the experiences, or theologies, or homiletics, or pastoral care approaches from within the histories of black people is when a black professor is at the helm of such a course. I cannot tell you how many times I sat in class on this campus wondering, “What world are we living in?” How can one be comfortable giving a lecture on papers that have been sitting for 30 years, never once thinking about how the lived experiences of the people, the students in the classroom, might be reflected in the lecture that you’re giving?
That is a type of a violence. This is what we mean by the afterlife of slavery. I sat in courses with professors who had no intention, who didn’t care because they’ve been doing it so long, because of their status on this campus, because of their status in the field that did not give two shits enough to go search out any persons beside dead white folk to read. To be quite honest, it made for a very uncomfortable position for me. I left campus. I didn’t live on campus after my first year. I started creating courses because the things that I needed to feed my soul were not present here.
Intentionality is quite difficult to practice when academic institutions are organized around, and operate according to, principles that run counter to freedom. This transformative work proves to be quite difficult when academic institutions, especially those that have been founded as centers of theological exploration and ministerial preparation, are swayed by the ways of the systems that actually harm. See, this is what I mean when I say we need to be self-reflexive. To sit here and to act as if we are not implicated in the critiques that we’re offering is a position that is not engaged in the work of justice.
In the introduction to Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Jack Halberstam quotes, If you want to know what the undercommons want, what Moten and Harney want, what black people, indigenous people, queers and poor people want, the we who cohabit the space of the undercommons want, it is this. We cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies, A, that anything was ever broken, and B, that we deserve to be that broken part.
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Intentionality, therefore, requires academic institutions like PTS to be self-reflexive—which is what we’re doing. It’s not enough to name the extent to which our feet are situated on another’s necks. We are really excellent at naming whose feet are on our necks; but part of transformative justice work is naming whose neck your feet are on. But we must do the radical work that follows such analysis. Take your feet off. Once you find out that your feet have been on somebody’s neck, justice looks like you taking your feet off, which means the giving up of power, which means the redistribution of resources, which means making space for those whose voices have been silenced, which means committing to the not so glamorous work of repair.
Second, academic institutions must increase their imaginative capacities. With regard to PTS specifically, I’m considering what might be possible if we imagine the category of ministry, for example, in more expansive ways, an example being the participation of PTS students and alums and the movement for black lives that I shared earlier. It occurred to me that organizing is not always considered a form of ministry because it deviates from the particular forms of parish ministry that many seminaries train students in preparation for.
I’m wondering then what might it mean to reimagine and reshape curricula and programs in such a way that more closely align with the needs of the times. I can recall how hard it was for me to convince the field placement officer here on campus to allow me to do field work in a policy think tank in D.C. Now, this was 2005. Things may have certainly changed by now, but even then I sensed that the work that I would end up doing in terms of ministry would be outside of the walls of the church, and because of that it was illegible here on campus. They didn’t know what to do. Dr. Keri Day knows this.
The instruction and support I needed were nearly nonexistent. What might it mean then to shape curricula and programs in accord with the growing ministerial needs of society? Which seminary or divinity school is ready to prepare servant leaders interested in using traditional and new forms of media-making to grow souls in an ever-increasing technological world? Which institution is ready to train and provide pastoral counseling and support for students who might be called to organizing as a channel for their ministerial work? Which school is specifically developing curricula and programs and faculty to train policymakers and nonprofit organizational leaders and other civic services to think critically, theologically, and practically about the work of transformative justice in our shared world beyond the global north?
Which academic institution is reassessing what its work is in the world at this particular moment in time? You all are on that journey. I know some others are as well. I was thrilled, for example, when I had learned of Vanderbilt Divinity School’s new areas of concentration for their MDiv students. Now, I share this with you because I think that they’re on the right track. Students can now elect to concentrate in several critical areas, including black religion and cultural studies, chaplaincy, pastoral and prophetic congregational leadership, global Christianities and interreligious encounter, Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies, and, get this, prison and cultural studies, and, get this, religion and economic justice, religion in the arts, religion, gender, and sexuality, and spirituality and social activism.
Vandy seems to have been intentional about creating a learning pathway that was reflective of the times and the pressing issues of the times as opposed to imprisoning itself in a cage of dogmatic traditions just because we’ve been doing this all along. But let me pause here to also say the name of the forward-thinking black woman scholar and dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School, Dr. Emilie Townes. She’s leading the divinity school towards process as it discerns what it needs to be in this moment. But Dr. Townes, let me tell you, was one of the first supporters of the Black Lives Matter Freedom Ride.
Vandy students came too, but their institution actually paid for them to come, paid for the buses, paid for their food, paid for their hotels, wrote about it. This is what it means to tap into the imaginative capacities of academic institutions, or to borrow the frame from Robin D. G. Kelley, to freedom dream. Academic institutions have to honestly evaluate the extent to which they are in lockstep with the times or run the risk of becoming irrelevant and even more bereft of spirit—well-polished but empty vessels, dead.
Finally, academic institutions, specifically those like PTS who are committed to interrogating its own connections too and push against the enterprise of chattel slavery, are in their best position to exemplify what might be described as, with the scholar of geography Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “abolition as the process through which we do away with the systems that harm us.” But abolition is also the work of imagining and building that which should be in the place of that which we destroy. You understand that.
To think of abolition is to not think about deconstruction or tearing down. Abolition really is a project of imagination, of putting into place the things that we need. In a 2018 interview published on the Verso Books website, Gilmore stated the following:
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“The failure of imagination rests in missing the fact that abolition isn’t just absence.” As W. E. B. Du Bois showed in black reconstruction in America, abolition is a fleshly and a material presence of social life lived differently. Abolition is figuring out how to work with people to make something rather than figuring out how to erase something. I’ve mentioned Du Bois. He shows in exhaustive detail both how slavery ended through the actions and organized activity of the slaves no less than a Union Army; but also, since slavery’s ending, one day doesn’t tell you anything about the next day. Du Bois set out to show what the next day and days thereafter looked like during a revolutionary period of radical reconstruction, and this part is key, I think. Abolition is a theory of change. It’s a theory of social life. It’s about making things, and that point is key.
If abolition is a theory of change, a theory of social life, a theory whose aims are practical, then we might define abolition theology as a theology of transformation, a theology of social life, a theology that is concerned with the making of new things, a theology that interrogates God as central to the work of cultural practices of anti-blackness, of equal justice, of queer and trans liberation, of gender justice, of transformative justice. An abolitionist theological practice then is one that moves from the proposition that the black God, the queer God, the disabled God, the immigrant God, the trans God, the God who is at work in the world not only as a prophetic force in the form of acts of justice, but as an animating force that is present in the collective imagination used to build the world that we need.
An abolitionist theological practice is freedom dreaming and freedom building. It is repair. But as Fred Moten says in his interview in the same book that I read from before, he makes it clear. He says, “I also know that what it is that is supposed to be repaired is irreparable. It can’t be repaired. The only thing we can do is tear this shit down completely and build something new.” An abolitionist theological practice is one then that is centered on the act of creation, or as Moten would say, “The tearing of shit down.”
It demands that we approach God-talk from a new interpretive frame, and it also means that our work, our witness is reflective of the the God we imagine as a creative force acting in the world working towards transformation. It means that academic institutions like PTS can play a pivotal role in creating space for this God work in ways that we have yet to see manifest within the public sphere. It is fugitive work, work that absconds from tradition, work that refuses to replicate the systems that harm us, work that is material. It means that PTS must not only confront its past and the legacies through which our present is shaped, but it must be ready to create that which we need.
Halberstam went on to state in their introduction, “We cannot say what new structures will replace the ones we live with yet because once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more, and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming.” 3 We will need institutions and people equipped to help us discern God’s presence in a world anew to imagine a transformed world, to build anew, to become anew. PTS can position itself as a leader in that work.
I’m going to end here. It is our duty to fight for our freedom. We have nothing to lose but our chains. But those of us who are the holders of the chains, chains that signify power, and position, and accumulation and dominance, must be willing to let them go. The freedom struggle requires a turn to liberatory knowledge production, abolitionist theological practice and ministries that resist the law of anti-blackness. This is the work that learning environments like this had been bequeathed by black ancestors like Theodore Wright who once roamed this campus before he set off to remake our world.
The freedom struggle requires a reckoning, and repair and creation, and now this institution must make good on its commitment to imagining and building a community of servant leaders ready to practice and embody what it preaches, teaches, theorizes, and theologizes. The freedom struggle requires redress, and if redress wasn’t important, folks would not fight so hard to stop it. If you think that everyone is celebrating this moment, check the seminary’s Facebook page. Read some of the comments left on the post announcing this very conference. Most of the people who don’t like it are white, and a lot of them are angry.
This is critical work, but I would be remiss to not end my reflection without offering words of support to the black PTS students and alum who have demanded via petitions signed by The Association of Black Seminarians that PTS matches its ideological commitments with material equity. To do so is to model intention. To do so is to unleash the power of this institution’s imaginative capacity. To do so is to practice an abolitionist theological posture. To do so is to be on the side of freedom. To do this is to engage in a transformative work that attests to the presence of God’s loving spirit among us. To do this is to materialize the radicalness of justice that some only talk about. To do so is to answer in real and felt ways the answer to the ever-abiding questions: What is your work? Why have you come here? Not this room. Not this campus. But why have you come into being? What have you come here to do?
Footnotes
1
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013) Print.
2
3
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013) Print.