One of the things I’ve been struggling with in class this semester as we’ve explored liberation Christologies is the relationship between corporate justice and individual culpability. I was writing my paper to answer the question (ha!) “Who is Jesus in light of race relations in America?” The question of systemic and historic oppression of African-Americans informs part of my thinking on this issue. My commitment to the reconciling Christ who calls us all, oppressor and oppressed alike to account for the ways we have failed in our love for God and neighbor informs another part.

 

Part of my exploration involved Jeremiah Wright who comes from the same stock as James Cone, the father of black liberation theology. I wanted to spend some time thinking about how Cone’s message sounds to people today. As we’ve heard in the past few weeks, people don’t really like what Wright has to say.

 

One side of me, the part that has rebuilt houses in all-black sections of Katrina, worked with students in segregated schools in Alabama, left grad school a month before a cross burning and who has black friends who are followed around grocery stores, can hear exactly where the militancy of Wright (and early Cone) are coming from. While I do think some of his comment, e.g. the US created AIDS to wipe out minorities, is unjustified and inflammatory, I mostly think Wright is prophetic much in the style of Amos and Hosea. These brothers also got in trouble for prophesying against their country.

 

I also seem to be in the minority with my discontent around Barack Obama’s reaction to Wright, especially his church sermons. It is this rhetoric that Obama spoke against in his race speech. Obama describes Wright’s “incendiary language” as widening the racial divide in our country, views which “denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation.” Wright is said to have a “profoundly distorted view of this country.” While race is an issue that cannot be ignored and continues to be a central issue for Americans, the United State’s progression in affirming constitutional freedoms is a sign that racism is not endemic but rather something we can overcome, moving “beyond some of our old racial wounds.” I’m not sure O is being honest about how far we have not come.

 

The people we read this semester who most adequately speak to who Jesus is in this mess are Shawn Copeland and Rowan Williams.  For Copeland there is less clarity regarding centralized community identity than for Wright or Cone. In the opening paragraphs of the essay we read she talks about experiencing her own privilege as a black, educated woman in light of a homeless black woman picking through garbage outside her window. Copeland presents a well-spring of competing identities: female, black, financially well-off, educated, academic, housed. Instead of naming self-referencing communities of color, Copeland asks, “What sort of Christological reflection is needed in our situation? What can it mean to tell the woman who searches my garbage that God in Jesus is also alienated, a stranger, a despised ‘other’?”

 

Copeland goes on to speak about the “way of Jesus,” the complication women bring to the Gospel, the lived experience of being always at “the disposal of the cross.” The way of Jesus is to love “concretely” the outcast as Jesus did. Yet she also speaks from the double oppression of black and female. How this is lived out is not entirely in self-determination or communal identity as Other but in the cross of Jesus where humiliation and brutalization are made known in our discipleship to the crucified one. The resurrection of Jesus is our grafted-ness into the initiated kingdom in the present realities of oppression which confront us. Christology is very much something which takes hold of us, something to which we are to avail ourselves.

 

To me this sounds so much like Williams in Resurrection. I’ve written about this before if you want a refresher on the thesis of the book. The pure victim provided by Christ puts our histories into perspective because we have each condemned the lamb of God. At the same time we encounter a Jesus who resurrects our past.  One contemporary example of how this plays out is the plausibility of “black racism.” Denying black racism “carries overtones of the idea that the victimized group is intrinsically incapable of the kind of violence from which it is suffering” (11). Just as domestic violence against women exists in the white community so to does it exist in black and Latino communities. Just as this violence stands outside the iteration of Jesus’ life for white people, so to it stands outside the discipling of blacks and Latinos. Racism is evil “not because its victims are good, but because its victims are human” (11).

 

In a similar way, Copeland speaks of the God of the oppressed who calls us to the banquet table in full recognition of the suffering Other and the suffering Self. It is this recognition that puts us at the disposal of the reign of God, not simply because our identity as members of an oppressed community. Jesus resurrection is the point at which this transformation begins.