J. Kameron Carter on Religion and Race

this is Duke University this week on office hours the topics of race and religion continue to permeate discussions about American politics and society J Cameron Carter a professor at Dukes Divinity School studies the complex forms of identity particularly race that have come to define us all he draws upon slave narratives cultural criticism and early Christian theologians to counter modern misunderstandings of race Christian theology at its best should be a fugitive discourse Carter said it thanks from the position of the slave who steals away as the Negro spiritual puts it professor Carter joins us today to take your questions on the intersection of Christianity and race welcome to office hours I'm James Todd with Dukes news office and I am here with J Cameron Carter associate professor of theology and black church studies here at Dukes Divinity School professor Carter thank you for holding online office hours glad to be here very glad to be here all right so in talking about this intersection of faith and race and politics the Trayvon Martin case comes to mind in fact we already have a question about that that's been tweeted in from Cameron and here he asks how can theology respond to the current political and racial issues surrounding Trayvon Martin's murder cameras words yes it's a big question it's a very big question because it's a very big issue the Trayvon Martin case I've been thinking about it a lot in fact I was telling someone the other day that I had three offices one office here I do another office at home I do a lot of work at both these office but probably lately we all do most of all office work is that Starbucks coffee shop okay get away and give it away but but but also what allows me to do is meet different people in the community mm-hmm and just sort of you know break out of the kind of academic bubble that we can sometimes get locked into and the other day I was there and Gary sit down drink a cup of coffee I finished reading this essay I needed to finish reading and there was a man there that I've gotten to know it turns out he's a pastor in the commune white man told me tells me that is congregations predominantly life and as I sat down getting ready to just take a sip and start to finish his essay he leaned over to me said prof you call him promise it off I know you're busy but I have to ask you a question can you just give me a minute give me a minute okay sure no problem he says to me um now you know what I'm going to ask you Trayvon Martin so he said I said I know he's gonna ask me you see a Trayvon Martin he said I'm trying to figure out what to do what do I say see I've got people my church they're saying various things some of them I could see that they're struggling all the time other people they're saying thing over here that don't just don't sound like a adequate response look at TV see people wearing hoodies we are Trayvon Martin I am Trayvon Martin I see protests marches across the country I mean it's even going internationally you know he says I'm white I'm a pastor say what do I do you say you know I don't feel comfortable quite putting on a hood but it is fine right but he was really struggling I could see that he was struggling see he was really asking a version of cameras question right and what was your voice well I gave him a lot a lot of things but I've started by saying because I'm still there you know this is a very tough issue I'm still trying to think through what this means for Christian faith how the Christians respond to this you know that qualification say hey that did response on one of the things I said it told my say we in the Christian Church our various Christian churches so we have to reckon with the fact of how our churches in many ways reproduces the very social structures yet created the conditions for what happened to Trayvon what would be examples of that the church contributing to the the circumstances yeah well let's put it this way when I said to him in coming to your your your follow-up question is this I say and one of the big things that our social world produces is our social world as in many ways built on a logic of separation wants to manage who belongs to boom how social belonging can work right who can be related to whom can look at another person and see a kind of connection or not and what our social world wants to do is manage those relationships now one of the kind of technical ways in which that imagination has worked comes under the category race race is not something natural there's nothing something written in your DNA that defines you as white or my DNA that defines me as black this is a social management a kind of conceptual T through which we imagine who we're linked to or who were not linked to right so on and so forth I see it in many ways our churches replicate that very strategy of management and separation and belonging to whom into whom not just sort Sunday morning is the most segregated hour exactly so I begin to talk to him about what could it mean for our churches to have a different calculus of belonging that's because that's really but we got to get into the real crisis I think and so much of Christianity today is that it reproduces the pathologies of separation and management of belonging and have you preached on on Trayvon Martin or you were saying you've heard it preached on well this was a conversation the coffee-shop I I tried to weigh into it sir Monica Lee just a little bit recently in a sermon oh you say well III retold this story okay I'm because the sermon was Sunday actually had a church Sunday dis past Sunday it sorry for Palm Sunday I wove it into the Palm Sunday message and I brought this issue up and tried to talk about how you know as we go into Holy Week this is Holy Week this Maundy Thursday today this was Palm Sunday in which I preached this I talked about how Jesus lived a life in which he had a whole new calculus he lived a different life around belonging social belonging his life was about being with tax collectors and sinners when everything around in the society around him said this this is out of bounds how dare you say you the Messiah of God and you hanging out with these kind of people you know Jesus is killed because of the life he lived and those who follow Jesus enter into the pathway of this kind of living so what I was trying to get at in the sermon when I started to get it and talking to this gentleman's fine fine brother at the the coffee shop was we've got a reimagine how Christianity lives spatially relationally in our midst in the world you know we are Christianity can't follow the zoning logics that mark our cities for example right it wants the police separations right RTP can only be here over against that this living community can only be here over against that you know business is going to be here our world is kind of laid out socially spatially to manage separations and we call this the city right and so churches have to show up as followers of Jesus and in some sense contest the very kinds of boundaries of in and out who we embrace who we can't embrace well what I've taken to calling the logics and the social realities of belonging and this is what I take it at the story of Jesus is all about the life he lived is all about now of course when you live this way you gonna end it into struggle this is the whole point of Good Friday folks might not like this and they may try to kill you literally or otherwise because of this and are you seeing Trayvon Martin through that that prism I actually am you know I actually see the realities of the modern world as I've been narrating here are about the management of what the people we the people what the people is who can be included in people hood who cannot how we manage that inclusion and not we've got you know I've already mentioned that race is one of these categories of governance well I've taken the calling a strategy of racial governance this is what we're dealing with and Trayvon Martin we look at Trayvon Martin his body you know as a black body became a kind of lightening round a kind of flashpoint of a dangerous citizenship qualified citizenship if not citizenship at all dangerous humanity quasi humanity what I what I've recently called a kind of in for Humanity on subhuman and the hoodie that he wears becomes a kind of prosthetic right a kind of at the level of which one wears the sartorial becomes a kind of prosthetic and extension of his blackness and insofar as his blackness gets read as criminality and marked by that which must be contained or excluded um he becomes a kind of walking prisoner so to speak one who a Bullock is destined to find and the hoodie becomes this kind of flashpoint um an extension of that blackness so you know even though we can't make out under the hood who exactly is the darkness inside that hood coupled with the hoodie itself becomes this kind of flashpoint this danger zone of risk that the Zimmerman's of the world have been schooled to gaze upon as dangerous that's what we're looking at here we've got a question that's coming along those lines by email and a reminder to everyone watching that you're invited to participate in this office hours conversation professor Carter by emailing live at duke.edu you can tweet in your question of the tag Duke live or post to the Duke University Facebook page so we've got this came in from Reggie she says do your brother dr. Carter it appears to me that there's a connection between religion race and the approval of violence towards minorities he cites a number of examples this proportional number of black men on death row incarcerated even cites a scene in the movie Hunger Games and some online reaction to that do you see such a connection and if so what would be the cause of that connection yeah connection between race legend and the approval of violence towards minorities yeah I think there is there's much for us to think about on this question the link between um sort of race religion in a kind of that the way in which violence works what I just tried to narrate with respect to Trayvon and and then talk about this with respect to Jesus about you know when you live this way you become a lightning rod yeah they may want to metaphorically if not actually kill you is in the case of Jesus you know as Christians want to say the good news about Jesus is that the story doesn't end with Good Friday you know there's the kind of affirmation of the kind of life that he lives by virtue of the resurrection that mode of life can not finally be snuffed out but nevertheless it is a lightning rod for violence right because what I'm trying to suggest here about the way in which the racial world works through this management of in and out who belongs the the policing of loves who one can love how one can love so on and so forth this management is violence this is crucial the management is violence it can happen in the mode of law where law can become a mode of violence by other means right or it can happen in break out of the kind of so called piece of the law and actually you know break the law as we saw with Zimmerman but the point is is that it is a mode of violence the logic of race is a logic of violence to put it very succinctly we've got another question that's come in here by email from Dale and he says I often hear people say that Christians should be colorblind do you feel that this should be our goal I personally don't agree with it because I want people to see my African heritage I want people to see my dark-skinned if they care I'm not sure being blind to it would be any better than facing the race issues so we're continuing the combination about racial barriers absolutely I've given it a couple talks lately where I've had to deal with this under the rubric of the post-racial okay which is the post-racial all right President Obama and we're now in a post-racial society is that there's a kind of claim right just dial it back for a second historically not too long ago 2008 this the candidate Obama was you know I've taken to Santa Canada Obama now President Obama has been caught in the kind of vortex to kind of squeeze the the Charybdis and miss Keela of race and religion squeezed right between that in the squeezed between that squeeze coming on him at that space is the squeeze of the post-racial can we step beyond the the racial angst that has marked the modern world that has marked the United States and in many ways you know Obama has been a kind of lightning rod around which the cultural anxieties and desires to finally get this issue of race behind us he's been made to be that kind of figure the hopes pinned on him for that but then he's been in a presidency and even before the presidency the campaign election season of 2008 in which the issue of race at the very moment we wanted to be beyond it kept bubbling up Jeremy I raster right and then he gets in the office on sherry Sherrod affair they've been around that then you had the beer stomach that was provoked by the arrest of Henry I'm professor Henry Louis Gates at Harvard and the firestorm that that sort of lit and then there's always been these kind of continuing insinuations and echoes of the problem and issues around race in the Obama presidency and where Obama and holder for example the Attorney General I felt you know very um cautious and tepid about taking on and speaking directly to the issues of race though the issue of race keeps in some sense finding them and now we're at the Trayvon Martin thing you know esident obama did speak out that my son would if i had a son he would look like you look like Trayvon Martin he is that was as far as he would but that was an explosive kind of and very important kind of claim I can talk about a little bit more if you want but the point is is that the post-racial is more of a kind of yearning not a reality it's a yearning and it's a yearning in some sense to be beyond race well actually without having to go through the issue of race race is not something we can just close our eyes to and then we'll just get over it race is the kind of issue because the way in which it socially locates us and positions us in the world you go through it you must deal with the issues that the race question presses upon us and so a short answer to this query is you know the post-racial can we be beyond race in some sense that I've taken to put it this way the yearning to be beyond race is the new mode of thinking race okay and you mentioned President Obama just now in this campaign cycle Rick Santorum and February caused quite a stir and I know you noticed it he said President Obama believes in some phony theology not a theology based on the Bible so not not a racially charged comments airily but certainly they it's a faith yes actly right and that brings up the other side of this what was your reaction of that is ridiculous that's redo yes I mean that's the short version but but do something a longer version and he does go this issue of race the race religion connection right I said that Obama's collar is caught you know it just says even black people I was just reading this thing that W the great WEP Dubois had written in 1952 I think it was at the very beginning of the Cold War era post-world War two Oh Dubois had gone to Warsaw he went to a war song when he was in war song which got leveled in the war there was but he went back when they were rebuilding it and he uses this language of Resurrection in his um in his essay called the Negro in the Warsaw Ghetto he used this language of Resurrection to talk about the speed and the seriousness in the tenacious with today is the dish with which Warsaw was being rebuilt but then he talked about how there was this Jewish ghetto that he wanted to see that was sort of outside the gates of Warsaw so he goes there and it still has all of the marks of tragedy it's not beginning to even be rebuilt in any significant serious way and the boy says that when he went there he was he had been there three times and this essay he reminded us he had been there three times once was when he was a student at the University of Berlin like 1893 then again in like 1936 right inside of the Nazi machinery that was working there and then in 1952 on the other side of it he said all three of them moved him deeply to think very carefully about how the race question works but then he says this at each time that he visited there and as he thought about the Jewish situation that was before him he was pressed to think about how the color line cross right between the question of race and religion okay you know and it's important is we're getting the thesis of your books we get into the thesis of the book because I mean in many ways let me say if I if you don't mind before we go to the book and sort of try and begin to crystallize the claim I want to make around this you know when we think about Obama if we kind of play with the boys framing between race and religion we think about Obama there's a sense in which on the pull on the other side of 911 what happens is is that the race question starts to increasingly get refracted through religion right we see this around the angst and and scare and worry the kind of cultural were in anxiety over the over the Muslim Islam and so when Obama is in his presidency he gets rather than being confronted directly around race it always comes and routes itself through religion so he becomes either read as a questionable Christian Jeremiah Wright black theology too radical it's not really Christian or it gets routed through he's really a Muslim we don't care what he says about being a Christian but again the place of anxiety for race becomes the anxiety of religion enter into Santorum's comic phony theology it's still carrying all those echoes imbalances okay there's a racial overtone we've gotten other questions coming in related to we're talk about liberation theology in a reminder to everybody watching that you're invited to participate in this office hours conversation by emailing live at duke.edu you can tweet in your question with the tag Duke live were posted to the Duke University Facebook page so Kyle asks dr. Carter how do you how do is of theodicy from evil huh function within liberation theology Wow it's a good question the big problem evils been around for a while right I'm nipa ting God yet we still see evil and referencing liberation theology right well let me put it this way I'm teaching this class on atonement this semester and you know just for purposes of people who might not be in the know of these technical theological terms atonement is their area in Christian theology that wants to think very carefully about the death of Jesus Christ and what is shall we say accomplished in that death so atonement is their area of theology where we try to think about that very carefully it's a whole history of reflection on and so I'm teaching a course on this so we go through the history but I try and ultimately try and read the question of the Tony in relationship to the question of modernity and if the question of atonement is the question of the crises around death in life the way in which death and life becomes strategies about social organization about people hood by designating some as those destined to die and designating others as those properly the living those who are properly human those who are properly citizens subjects and therefore citizens Saints the living versus the dead those who are destined for death in modernity dark bodies have been if you want to use the vocabulary of atonement discourse um get you know atonement discourse gets socially displayed on black bodies as bodies bounded by death in some sense destined for death again think Trayvon Martin Trayvon Martin despite the fact that he lived in a gated community a sign of life good parents sign of life good family doing good in school sign of life doing what he's supposed to do nevertheless despite all of that he still gets marked as a figure who can die at any point I mean in many ways what I'm trying to do is connect Christian discourses around atonement and look at how those discourses get socially politically mobilized to create the kind of space we call modernity and position people in that space and speak would you even speak of Trayvon Martin as a martyr is that is that where you're headed with this atonement language think about that I mean it's not it's not the language I immediately wanted to go to but I mean it's worth thinking about we should say the investigations ongoing I mean you know right we get hints and bits but you know the facts are yet all to come out right so when Obama says in his Rose Garden speech when he was announcing who's gonna be the new head of the World Bank this question comes to him from the press corps and that's when he responded and you've already referenced it um if I had a son he would look like Trayvon what Obama has done is in some sense while acknowledging that the legal investigation is still going on so he clearly can't speak into that but he shifted from the register of the law into the register representation and the level of representation he was saying on some level just like Bill Cosby whose son was murdered years back similarly it doesn't matter what kind of status I have even if I'm the president if I have a son he can look like Trayvon and take the next step he wants his rhetorically he wants his listeners to take the next step and even as the president if I had a son he'd look like Trayvon he too could be killed that's the point black bodies dark bodies brown bodies and modernity get positioned in such a way that death becomes the target they become a target a kind of um uh they become a key idea trapped death to them you see what I'm saying yeah and we saw and and that's the problem now the question of evil because you know how a black folk tried to negotiate this and the short version of the answer is the what black folk in many different ways various different even religious positions not all Christian you know some Islamic Muslim various kinds of Christian religious expressions and even knowledge religious expressions how they negotiated this historically the move has been never to see themselves as over determined by the story of death there's always been something more than mmm-hmm you know and it's that space of a more than that's been this the site of hope it's been the site where people like Martin Luther King have worked you know the possibility that the social order can be different you know and so the question of theodicy the question of theodicy for meaning in you know many dark people in modernity is had to be transferred and morphed into the question of hope and the politics of hope you know the politics therefore a possibility the politics of Futurity that it does not have to be the way it is you reference Martin Luther King and you actually preached here at Duke Chapel the Sunday before the Martin Luther King holiday right I want to watch a clip of that and may get some commentary from you so let's listen to dresser Carter preaching at Duke Chapel earlier this year he fought for social and racial justice on behalf of those who were deemed abject who were called the nonhuman the subhuman the infrahuman the partially human so much so that those folks were hosed down treated like dogs in the streets King fought for in his life for economic justice he worked on behalf of the poor and indeed he died fighting on behalf of sanitation workers in Memphis Tennessee he was down there inaugurated a movement that would only catch up with him in the year 2011 an Occupy movement already in Memphis Tennessee he called for peace and for an end to the Vietnam War indeed it was his radical call for the end of the war that started to number his days King said that if you remember me for anything remember me in my efforts to be a drum major for justice but what many of us I would venture to suggest in conjecture before you this morning with many of us tend to forget is that there was a profound spiritual foundation that kept the drumline that kept the baseline of the drumbeat that is Jay Cameron Carter preaching at Duke Chapel earlier this year and professor Carter when many of us think of race religion politics here in the u.s. Martin Luther King a name that comes to mind he talked about his spiritual foundation there and that sermon can you describe a kind of King's theology and did he have a theological account of race yeah whether he had a fully worked-out theological account of race one can debate I think it's fair to say though that he had certainly a lived theology of race that is to say he had a sense a deep sense drawn from any number of sources about how race and religion worked as the two steps through which the on which the United States was walking by which they walked and he wanted to shall we say turn the way in which we were walking around race religion and so I think it's very very very fair for us to say in that regard he definitely had a kind of understanding of how Christian life and Christian theology insinuated itself and articulated itself within a kind of racial spatial frame and now we've been talking about two kings theology you've got a theology theological account of race of course your book 2008 race a theological account we got four hundred pages in two thousand years we're not gonna cover every bit of it but in in the book jacket that you've got a very short summary he said that this book is the story of how Christianity became white yeah can you expand upon that yeah what I tried this book grew out of my dissertation it grew out that the dissertation which once I came here to do can started teaching and started to try and work these ideas out in the classroom and in conversation with the five students that we have I quickly came to the conclusion that as much as I was very appreciative for the dissertation it didn't work the way I was working it and I needed to redo so I redid the whole thing and what I try to show only start to show us the beginning of a story 400 pages notwithstanding it's the beginning of a story about the kind of mutation that happened inside of Christian existence and that mutation is about how Christianity came to be ideologically tethered to a kind of project of Western civilization euro American civilization it's a story that of course is tied to the story of slavery but as I got more into it I started to understand that the story of slavery is not just the kind of narrow story of the the kind of back story of blacks in the in North America it's actually inside of an even deeper and wider story a story that goes back through the Enlightenment I really focus on the Enlightenment but it even goes beyond the like me it has its origins deep deep inside of the very beginnings of early modernity goes back to the 15th century the 16th century and what I try and do in short is tell the story of the severance of a predominantly Gentile non-jewish Christianity from its originated Jewish roots its originated Jewish story and how the story of Jews ancient Israel is told in a story of Hebrew Bible Old Testament Christian scripture how the story of ancient Jews of ancient Israel got stripped away as well as being their story and became semiotic Li attached to the story of Western Gentile Christians such that Christians started to believe predominantly non-jewish Gentile Christians came to believe that the stories of the Bible were principally sensually about them and everybody else was outside and so they refuse it I call it sometimes the story of Gentile hubris they moved from the proper proper proper posture of humility into a kind of posture of arrogant hubris and Christianity as a religious faith became the site through which to articulate in religious terms and give divine sanction to Western supremacy Western hegemony and race became become this became this crucial imaginative category a category through which we constructed structure the imagination and through the imagination positioned bodies in a certain way to sort of articulate that logic of supremacy a logic where some are superior and some are inferior that's the story of the kind of production of white as whiteness isn't natural just like blackness isn't natural it's produced in the story I'm telling and only later did you come naturalized such that we don't know how to imagine ourselves as non rais'd because raisin reishi ality has become sort of sedimented for us just the way we see each other right and we've got a question that's come in a reminder to everybody watching that you're invited to participate in this office hours conversation with professor Carter by sending an email to live at duke.edu you can tweeting your question of the tag Duke live or post to the Duke University Facebook page so Steve asks he says we recently read your book raised a theological account for a seminary here at Baylor in Texas a former student of yours Nate Lee led us through a discussion appreciates the perspective he was left at the end wondering what now how can i implement your challenge in my white suburbia Church how can I reach across the aisle without inherent condensation which only harms race relations right fabulous question I often get a version of this question after people get through the book because the book has a little fire to it okay immediately and then people come out on the end it's like okay basically what do we do well I think the first thing to do is on one level to resist the desire to quickly go to what do we do I think one of the first things to do is to allow the force of the critique to really settle in let's pray on it yeah yeah I don't mean pray on it because I believe in prayer but I don't mean pray on it in a kind of disengaged disembodied way but really to allow the force of the creat critique to settlement because what another thing that the book is trying to do the book is trying to begin to tell the story of the very infection the kind of a kind of pathology that begins to seep inside of and sediment is so deeply inside of the structures of Christian thought itself and so we've got to really think through how those structures have been sort of taken inside of us how we think in a certain kind of way that could usually reproduce the problem and one of the ways we continue to think in such a way to reproduce the problem is this angst usually coming from certain quarters that this X that you know if we can just get our theology right we can avoid this problem but you know there's a sense in which you got to ask yourself what is the subject position that really believes it can fix everything what subject position can can think that thought some applied power there right what that's the issue well I'm trying to get at not dismiss the question what do we do because that's an important question what I want a surface is what are the power logics even inside that question okay you know because certain people have been positioned in the world to believe they can fix the world now who thinks that thought and while this was in reference to white suburban churches that's exactly what that's what I'm here to go that's what I'm getting it we've got some more questions that have come in so Candace wants to know do you believe prosperity gospel has become the dominant narrative in african-american churches and if so how do we transition yeah yeah I think prosperity gospel if not the dominant narrative is certain it certainly rising to become a dominant narrative from where I'm coming from in many ways it's problematic um and many people who know me does some tweeting on this in relationship to the way in which a certain version of prosperity theology was working inside of the sermon that was given at Whitney Houston's funeral what was example there yeah I forget the exact language but I was live-tweeting okay um and watch the whole thing I was live tweeting and when the sermon came it was an interesting thing because you really did begin to see at least at the rhetorical and sermonic level a certain kind of black sermonic performance you know I remember when he you know Margaret Winans stood up it was get ready to preach and I think I had one line in my tweet I said oh we're about to take us to church now I can hear all the cadences I'm like oh we bout to go to church now but then inside of that you had this prosperity stuff which I was very critical of in Leiria and so yes I mean I think the the question of the commenter is right that you know on this level that prosperity thinking it is becoming a dominant rope and I'm critical of that true but at the same time that I'm critical of the truth I also want to say I think I was talking to someone about this maybe a couple years ago is that it's not enough simply to have that a negative critique there's a certain social critique that needs to be mobilized in relationship to prosperity Christianity especially the way in which has worked in black churches by that I mean this prosperity Christianity part of the energy in it is coming from people who are trying at the site of their church practice trying to mobilize a way to connect their religious faith to poverty meaning many prosperity thinkers are in prosperity people participate in prosperity prosperity oriented churches many of them are impoverished now of course there are preachers who leverage this negatively so that they can pilfer from people you know table and you know you give your money to me and the preachers it's succeeding but you know you're in this pipe dream all of that needs to be criticized but there's also this bigger also wider dynamic about the unevenness of economics on the way in which economy works on financial economy and the way in which many practitioners many faithful church goers are impoverished they're trying to find ways to make it and what prosperity theology does is really capitalize on that pain and that real social anguish rather than and this is what I would prefer mobilizing precisely that payment anguish this happening right in congregations across our cities across our nation's to petition for real change going down to our city government City Hall's state state houses but to voting so we can change the way things worked in Washington DC to really allow their faith to mobilize them to social action rather than have preachers pimping off of people's pain we've got another question come in this is by email from brandy a pair of theology PhD student at Vanderbilt yeah I know brandy she's wonderful all right well here's your question okay I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about how you see gender and sexuality shaping or figuring into this relationship between race and religion right wonderful question thank you brandy um you know I mentioned about how I love you know I insinuated in my comments about Marvin wine is how I love the black church well I'm also critical of the black church because I love the black church I'm critical of the church that in many ways produced me I often say that I do my work with my daughter sitting on one shoulder symbolically and my grandmother sitting on the other because of my grandmother who after my mother died now son if you gonna hang around with me you got to go to church it was all over after day so I really do my work with them really pressing upon me in how my thinking of affects their lives and this is important because it bears on the question of gender and it bears on the question of sexuality as well the racial imagination I talked about earlier about how race tries to organize as socially tries to govern us racial governance of the people one of the kind of imaginative categories ackee imagine of category through which this works is race this strategy of people management through race is always already laden with issues of gender sexuality why is that because the modern world in relationship to race the modern world mobilizes a kind of ideal figure of what the proper human is what the citizens subject ideally is all about and everybody else is evaluated in relationship to this ideal figure this ideal figured I've taken to describing and many of my writings of late as what are the Western masculine right the Western masculine is very much the white Western masculine and so the racial figure is also a gendered figure right it's male but it's also hard to bother I mean there's obviously it's oh well we might do a whole another office hours right sort of God and gender like right but I'm playing on this too because this language of a kind of normalization around gender as the kind of a symbol of what the proper human is and also the normalization of certain sexual partnerships now also is tied to this issue of race you remember again the racial imagination was about very much policing the social order now this is think about Schlabach cracy for a second in one state lockers in slovakia see a plantation the kind of plantation world the way in which the slave world was a kind of regime of social order you know you had the plantation you had a public life and so on and so forth the plantation was this kind of site that was like kind of a sone that was a non zone between the space of domesticity the proper home the domestic sphere the sphere of under the kind of protection under the kind of superintendence of the wife feminine right take care of the home producing a babies and things of this nature producing a babies again children who can go back into the if they're men into the public sphere because the public sphere is the domain of white men now slave agra see is this kind of no man zone between that right under inside the management of both and so black men and black women do this kind of work of trying to help again provide for the needs of the social order but again a big part of those knees turned around sexuality as well black women often got figured as the place where white men can have not just sex but pleasure the space of domesticity is not the space of pleasure is the space for procreation and reproduction to continue to feed the wider social order that's not about pleasure so when the master wanted pleasure where you go you go the slave women and again when black men saw how often you know i'm doing a lot of generalization now but when when black the black slave men often saw how this regime worked when age aspired to freedom that was often in masculinized terms they wanted to have the cut often it got often articulated it's the kinds of privileges that white masculinity functioned under and so you get these issues of gender and these issues of sexuality working all inside of each other and so we can't pull apart just sexuality on one side race on this side gender on the other when you look at the way in which body you get figured in social space all of this is articulating each other we're well into the office hour we got a couple more questions on this you can get them in here so Matt asks dr. Carter mentioned the need to translate the question of theodicy into a question around the politics of hope and Futurity how would he respond to someone like William R Jones usually right I don't know the name who says that delaying the alleviation of suffering to the future is foolish in light of the empirical reality of black suffering which suggests simply that God is a white racist yes we know mr jones he's got a white race is a very important book okay that's the name of the book that's the name of the right he's got a white racist um I think is either god of white race is always got a racist but very important book it has been used to galvanize certain currents in contemporary african-american and religious studies let me just sort of say what I mean by because in many ways I actually think that critique that issue that we mr jones is pushing in that quote is right when I speak of Futurity I'm not speaking though of the very thing that he's criticizing what Jones is criticizing just based on that quote is the way in which you know we are often lulled because of religious practice to say well the issues of social injustice and and all other manner of in other injustice will be fixed in the sweet by and by so Futurity means something like heaven mm-hmm I'm not talking about that okay what's your meaning when I'm talking about future I'm talking about something again a circle back to the boys the boys has this phrase and there's in that essay the Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto after he lays out what's going on there near the end of the essay he starts to talk about how we need to think towards a different kind of future now for him he's not talking about the sweet by-and-by he's talking about new possibilities what might it mean to change the social reality the social calculus so that the social orders arranged categorically different from the way it is now in that regard I'm talking about the future as new possibility that which mobilizes us to struggle for change now right that that's the kind of thing I'm trying to go after the boys talks about it I France phenom comes to mind as well when he talks about the need for a new humanity and he mobilizes the structure of Troop of Futurity I mean that's what I'm going after where future is not you know the delay in to you know the the afterlife but rather Futurity is something like what the slaves imagined when they sent up slave songs as kind of code that the Underground Railroad was gonna be passing through and when we when we talk about the North Star going north we're not talking just about heaven are we talking about how we gonna get to Canada that's what we talking about you know so it's a specific place it's a specific place in the here and now it's in body it's on the ground it's about the transformation of life possibilities that's what I'm talking about i'ma have to email some of these to you afterwards but let's see if we get to a few more Simon asks how do we appreciate the specifics of the black church and make the church one kind of unity and diversity yes and there yes in the Divinity School okay we have a requirement and it's one of the things I love about being at Duke is that I think and maybe some emailers of the out there may want to correct me but last I checked I think that we are the only seminary among the university related divinity schools that have a requirement that all of the m.div students that's our bread and butter degree have to take a course in black church studies okay right as a requirement it's part of the church that's the signal the signal is it's a part of the church right and one of the reasons we did this because as you say what we wanted to do that the idea behind this requirement was to move us beyond simply thinking about black church in a kind of quote-unquote ghettoized fashion right now I'm all about the celebration of cultural difference but there's a way in which the rhetoric of cultural difference can be mobilized for dismissal right that's just a black thing you know that's what that's what black people do and then goal thing then go about your business right and so the the center still holds is what's really important and the periphery all those different people around the outside you know they got their reality will respect it but we don't have to integrate that deeply inside of how we think Christian thoughts well the Divinity School Duke Divinity School a few years ago not too long ago had this requirement for black church studies to be taken one course in black church studied to be taking about all Master of Divinity students now again the reason why we wanted to do that is because we wanted to take seriously right the issue of what it means using Christian vocabulary here I'm assuming every young the discourse of Christian faith at this point what does it mean that God presents God self not disembodied not in some sort of spiritual nether land but as a body a particular body she's in Nazareth Jesus of Nazareth and therefore inside of a particular history right what's that mean and so what the requirement for black church studies is trying to do is to take that incarnation or claim with utmost theological seriousness and the claim isn't that reconciliation happens you know as we come come at it with a general kind of category of reconciliation right and we all gotta agree on what that is and we all get together know what we look at when we look at black Christian faith in all of his diversity and complexities is that you're seeing a people struggle to be Christian beyond the logics of a Western hegemonic dominant Christianity what does it mean to be Christian after Christianity this was the question that black slaves if they were gonna make a move to Christian they had to start to negotiate that question because they weren't gonna go to a faith that was the faith that had them in Chains so if they gonna take up this faith they're gonna have to struggle against it with it and against it right and so when you look at black Christianity all of its problems notwithstanding you're looking at a mode of faith that struggling against the very hegemonic performance of that faith so now take take the requirement when you look at this requirement all students white black and in-between Brown everybody else are looking at an example a particular eyes historical example that's not broken off from other stories the black story is woven inside of the story with Jews woven inside of the story with a various Asian people's inside the story with brown people's etc etc but you're looking at a particular vector on the Y contact of modernity and I will pick a particular people in that context phase called modernity tried to reinvigorate what Christianity was about for all of us and so it's not an opposition right how do we talk you know if we talk about the particularity of black faith is this kind of not taking seriously the universality of the thing is actually the particular eyes entry point into what a different kind of faith as such can be like let's say one more question here this is from Daniel who asks what are your thoughts about the theological logic behind the current debates on immigration and citizenship yeah yeah yeah okay all right rights go office hours go behind an hour oh yeah now well you know what's the best way to put this one way to think about the modern world and it works in tandem with the way in which a racial imaginary sort of forges and help constitute amount of world is that modernity is migrants see that's another way of putting eternity is migrant so people move that's a modern way right modernity coloniality he's a modernity slash coloniality modernity in colonial ER divided but the slash also binds them modernity coloniality has always been about movement contact when we might call migrants see forced for some right willfully taken up by others the colonists took up movement as a way to expand the reach of what was being brought online as what we call modern-day Europe so modern-day Europe is forged out of a certain movement it's a kind of hegemonic movement colonialism so on and so forth but along with that hegemonic movie which is more voluntaristic or less forced shall we say there's also a kind of forced movement migrants see black folk taken from sub-saharan Africa moved into Europe moved into the Antilles the Caribbean moved into North America moved into South America the Portuguese moving around the Cape of Good Hope South Africa moving into the Far East again movement bringing the Far East into a kind of logic space of modernity so movement migrants II forced an unforced has always been woven inside of you know what this thing we call the modern world and so the question becomes what does it mean to be Christian and negotiate the realities of migrants see forced and unforced given the ways in which the legacies of my Grassi are still on us who can enter into the United States who cannot is this project I'm working on now is looking at Thomas Jefferson and I'm looking at this moment in Jefferson now Jefferson related himself to the African colonization project he wanted to he put forward over the long course of his writing career he kept putting forth this um kind of proposal to migrate move Africans out of the United States in order to create a people hood that is racially pure and to replace the displaced you know the force the the those blacks are gonna be forcefully moved back to Africa or the Caribbean he had different places to take him at different points of his life we're gonna replace them he says with more welcomed immigrants from Europe and so even in Jefferson you already have you know this kind of logic of the acceptable immigrant those who can be woven in and assimilated and really become people the United States both versus those who cannot who are improper citizen we got to get rid of these blacks and I think the whole question around immigration coming out of South America Mexico finish way that the southern southern part of the hemisphere is a part of this longer struggle around immigrant reality you know so it's it's Holy Week so to take us out here if you have a word for for preparation for worship and prayer tomorrow Good Friday and then Easter Sunday has had been a sort of meditation you've had during this holy week yes yes I'll build on something I heard last evening I was at a church service at Covenant Presbyterian Church and the preacher was Reverend Billy Barbour William Barbour the alumnus dooming alumnus and and president of the North Carolina chapter of the n-double a-c-p and as I was I think I was telling at one point earlier today I've never heard Reverend barber preach and he didn't bring the five all right got the file last night was no exception he brought the fire and he made the connection around this issue of movement migrants see Jesus when he's born his family is a set on the move because of what he prophetically represented a change in the order of things he has to go into hiding and he only can come out once Herod is dead his life continue to follow this pattern of movement a life of expectation but expectation through movement his three years of ministry culminates in him going on with with the old Baptist preacher were called the Via Dolorosa we the the the the road of sorrow all right he come and this is where Holy Week takes us right and Holy Week is the select culmination of this movement around a new way of being in the world new possibilities for our living possibilities realized in the in the Christian tradition around this man in in this man Jesus but also realized in such a way that the wider order of things around him did did not want the change that he represented oh and the story of his movement the Stations of the Cross the story of his movement through Holy Week is the movement of a world's resistance to what he represented but Billy barber reminded us that that order of things signified by Herod will not always be it will die one day and it will die because we keep pushing against it and that's what we see in Jesus Jesus leads the way in the push against it and even when that social order pushes back to the point of killing it his life cannot be snuffed out death doesn't have the last word and so as we move to Good Friday tomorrow we're reminded that though he dies on Good Friday it's not the last word and though he lives in a kind of state of objection of the condition of death Holy Saturday that too isn't the last word he rises on Sunday morning he still bears the scars and the marks of the tragedy of death but those marks and those scars are reminder that the life on that pressed against him resisting him was not definitive and this is the energy that Christians take from what it means to follow Jesus we enter into we come to participate in the very life that Jesus lived a life that triumphed over death and this is our hope maybe somebody's got tweet out at a man right now professor Carter thank you for holding these office hours sure I'm very pleased they have been here Jay Cameron Carter is associate professor of theology and black church studies here at Dukes Divinity School a recording of this office hours conversation will be made available on the duke on-demand website that's on demand duke.edu produced by duke university online at duke.edu

Channel: Duke University

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Keywords: carter, duke, jesus, theology, christian, trayvon, race, religion

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Length: 56min 24sec (3384 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 05 2012