Blackness
is not a racial designation. Although race can sometimes be a marker of
blackness, it need not be. The plight of black people and their collective
experience illustrates the framework of blackness. Anyone of any race or
nationality can engage in blackness, yet the most vested individuals are always
those who have a personal interest in the outcome of racial, class, gender, and
spiritual struggle. Blackness is a construction that presupposes solidarity
with the downtrodden, the emiserated, the least in society, the dispossessed,
the disenfranchised, and those who understand the world from the underside.
Quite often these are the poorest among us. They are those who are powerless
and have experienced generational subjugation in ways that do not allow them to
easily emerge from the cycle. Blackness reflects those whom Jesus said that he
came to set free. As such, blackness is the frontier for American Christians
because it is a call that reflects what it means to deny oneself, take up one’s
cross, and follow Christ in a market economy. Consequently, when evangelical efforts
toward integration and multiracial churches fail, the unrecognized truth is
that in a consumerist culture one cannot simultaneously repair the racial
breach among Christians while retaining unearned privilege and embodying a
faith that is complicit in the oppression of the population with whom one
intends to reconcile. Either one denies him or herself, or he or she does not.
It cannot be both ways.
Darryl
Scriven, “Theological Afterword: The Call to Blackness in American
Christianity,” in Christians
and the Color Line: Race and Religion after Divided
by Faith, eds. J. Russell Hawkins and Phillip Luke Sinitiere (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 266-267.
