Black Suffering

Silent Pain, Hidden Hope

James Henry Harris

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781506464381
• eBook ISBN: 9781506464398
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Christian Theology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Black Suffering, James Henry Harris explores the nexus of injustices, privations, and pains that contribute to the daily suffering seen and felt in the lives of Black folks. This suffering is so normalized in American life that it often goes unnoticed, unseen, and even--more often--purposely ignored. The reality of Black suffering is both omnipresent and complicated--both a reaction to and a result of the reality of white supremacy, its psychological and historical legacy, and its many insidious and fractured expressions within contemporary culture. Because Black suffering is so wholly disregarded, it must be named, discussed, and analyzed.

Black Suffering articulates suffering as an everyday reality of Black life. Harris names suffering's many manifestations, both in history and in the present moment, and provides a unique portrait of the ways Black suffering has been understood by others. Drawing on decades of personal experience as a pastor, theologian, and educator, Harris gives voice to suffering's practical impact on church leaders as they seek to forge a path forward to address this huge and troubling issue. Black Suffering is both a mixtape and a call to consciousness, a work that identifies Black suffering, shines a light on the insidious normalization of the phenomenon, and begins a larger conversation about correcting the historical weight of suffering carried by Black people.

The book combines elements of memoir, philosophy, historical analysis, literary criticism, sermonic discourse, and even creative nonfiction to present a "remix" of the suffering experienced daily by Black people.

13

Suffering and Hope

Black Theology must take seriously the reality of Black people—their life of suffering and humiliation. This must be the point of departure of all God-talk which seeks to be Black talk. —James H. Cone^[1]

“Come out dat do’way and shet it tight, fool! Stand dere gazin’ dem white folks right in de face!” Ned gritted at him. “Yo’ brazen ways wid dese white folks is gwinter git you lynched one uh dese days.” —Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah’s Gourd Vine

I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired. —Fannie Lou Hamer

My mother, Carrie Anna Jones Harris, died of colon cancer right before her sixty-fifth birthday. Nine months before that, my father succumbed to a massive heart attack. My family was devastated to the point of immobility, yet I had to preach, Sunday after Sunday. I remember we never had health insurance because we were too poor to pay for it, and because my daddy was too proud to ask for help. Any government assistance, such as welfare, was outside of my parents’ imagination. So when my mother got sick, she kept it to herself until it was medically too late to make a difference. She suffered in quietude and silence, which was her way. She never complained about her suffering and pain, or the many difficulties of living in poverty.

I remember during her last pregnancy, when I was seventeen years old, her pain and agony were palpable, caused by fluid retention and the ancillary effects of being pregnant for the eleventh time in twenty-five years. She never complained or expressed any contempt for our socioeconomic condition, nor for the injustices so evident throughout the land. The night she died, I cried myself to sleep, and to this day I regret that I was not there to provide her any care and comfort as she slipped away into the chilly hands of death. Then again, I was there. My presence with her and my father transcends physical location and place, such that they both are always with me.

My understanding of suffering and pain is shaped by the experience of being surrounded by suffering as a youth. We worked in the tobacco fields from sunup to sundown, year after year, to the point where I began to hate the whole enterprise and determined I would not be a prisoner of poverty and economic injustice. To be poor is to suffer in silence or in protest. It is to suffer hunger, poor health, and ridicule from the rest of society. I know the meaning of the gratuitous amelioration of suffering, and I know the searing pain of a toothache that lasts for endless days and nights because we could neither afford to go to the dentist nor the doctor unless it was a serious life-or-death issue. And my daddy was the judge of that since we had no health insurance and no money to spend except on food.

As a young seminary student at Virginia Union University, I first read James H. Cone’s God of the Oppressed in 1975 during a Systematic Theology course. Cone was to theology as James Brown was to soul music—a godfather. He was a superstar among Black students and some professors, a fresh, defiant, loving, and radical voice in the Black church and in the theological community. He was eloquent and bold, and he would not back down from the arrows of criticism thrown at him from every direction—from Black and white preachers, pastors, and theologians worldwide. It was as if they said, “How dare he challenge our established and accepted heroes and norms in theology and history!” I was later chastised by some Black pastors for critiquing Cone and Wilmore in my 1991 article in Christian Century, “Practicing Liberation in the Black Church,”^[2] in which I said the ivory tower theology of Cone consulted everybody except “Aunt Jane” and the people on the ground in the Black Church. Despite this critique, Cone created excitement and conviction in me. I never missed an opportunity to hear Professor Cone, whose words were as powerful as a freight train. My understanding of God and the Black experience would be forever enriched by his analysis of the theological enterprise—and, more than that, by his love of Black people. When I critique Black people, scholars and otherwise, it is never an ad hominem!

I began to incorporate the tenets of Cone’s writings into my sermons and papers. It has never been easy for the Black church to face white supremacy and call it the demon that it is, but Cone gave some of us the courage to try to do it. Mac Charles Jones—or “Big Mac,” as we called him—was the leader of the radical wing of students in our class and I was his little brother, both in age and stature. Mac was as huge as a Mack truck and just as powerful in his thinking and action. Our theology professor was a white United Methodist who completed his doctorate at Drew University and was considered liberal; however, he was challenged by Cone and all of us to rethink the inadequacies of a theology that was grounded in Americanism and Eurocentrism. Professor Cone, Gayraud Wilmore, and J. Deotis Roberts, our dean, provided us with a new interpretation and understanding—a more balanced explanation of the meaning of God and Black people’s pain and suffering. Cone’s opening bevy of questions in his chapter, “Divine Liberation and Black Suffering,” is as timely today as it was forty years ago. Cone writes:

The reality of suffering challenges the affirmation that God is liberating the oppressed from human captivity. If God is unlimited both in power and goodness, as the Christian faith claims, why does He not destroy the powers of evil . . . If God is the One who liberated Israel from Egyptian slavery, who appeared in Jesus as the healer of the sick and the helper of the poor, and who is present today as the Holy Spirit of liberation, then why are Black people still living in wretched conditions without the economic and political power to determine their historical destiny?^[3]

The connection between suffering and the evils of society is evident. The wielders of power are the earthly architects of Black pain and suffering. The Black preacher feels this pain like everybody else. Preaching in silent pain has been the lot of the Black preacher from “before the Mayflower” to the age of Donald Trump.

During a worship service at Second Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia, not long ago, I was visibly disturbed—shocked really—by a young lady and her middle-aged mother standing as I preached and walking out at a pace so brisk it appeared they had seen a ghost. Pain and anger were palpable in their countenances, their faces were visibly contorted, and the daughter’s body language indicated her distaste for what I was preaching. The biblical text was from Job and I was speaking on Black pain and suffering. I had just read James Cone’s latest book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and was actually quoting from the text when these two people had stood and left the church. I was careful to correlate Job’s pain and suffering with those of Black people in America, and even more careful to make sure I focused the sermonic discourse in textuality, as I am always committed to doing. I am the first person to admit Cone’s book is hard and painful to read, but read it we must! It is the most compelling and descriptive theological explication and correlation of Black suffering to Christology that I have ever read. Cone makes his case in terms of classic liberation theology and provides searing insight every serious Christian, no matter their race, needs to understand if they want to overcome the illusion of a pietistic and evangelical religion that is endemic within the Black and white church, and society at large. On that day, as well as on others, I was preaching liberation in my silent pain, and Black people were offended, angered, and blaming me for even bringing up the subject of Black pain and suffering in the Black Church on a Sunday morning. A “blaming the victim” mentality was evident. The church prefers a pie-in-the-sky sermon against one that deals with social justice.

The next day, I received an excoriating correspondence saying my sermon was nonbiblical and outright blasphemous. To wit, the lady wrote: “Unfortunately, I had to leave in the middle of the sermon. I don’t know if the sermon ended up on a good note because I just couldn’t stomach any more of your ‘preaching’ that was going on.”^[4] And yet I, too, was in pain—preaching in silent pain. It is a fallacy to think, as so many do, that the Black preacher is not in pain. But they must preach. It is a silent pain that must not silence the preacher. Preaching is a rebuffing of the silence, but it is not an obviation of the pain. The pain remains even as the sermon mitigates against the silence. In this sense, preaching in silent pain is an oxymoron, a conflict of terms, a rhetorical fallacy.

In the book God of the Oppressed, Cone provides a theological framework of Black suffering:

There is the experience of suffering in the world, and no amount of theological argument can explain away the pain of our suffering in a white racist society. On the one hand, the faith of Black people as disclosed in their sermons, songs, and prayers revealed that they faced the reality of Black suffering. Faith in Jesus did not cancel out the pain of slavery. But on the other hand, Jesus’s presence in the experience of suffering liberated Black people from being dependent upon the historical limitation of servitude for a definition of their humanity. This sufferingto which we have been called is not a passive endurance of white people’s insults, but rather a way of fighting for our freedom.^[5] [Emphasis mine]

There is something about this “call to suffer” that I vehemently reject because Black suffering is often...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Black Suffering
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Prelude: “The Color of Suffering”
• Evil and Black Suffering
• Interlude: “Brothers of Randolph Street”
• W. E. B. Du Bois and Black Consciousness: An Awakened Self
• Interlude: “The Prison Visit”
• Nat Turner: Insurrection and Freedom
• Interlude: “Plantation”
• Reading Toni Morrison: Suffering and Hope
• Dimensions of Suffering and Hope
• Interlude: “Powell Street Station—Purgatory in Paradise”
• Black Suffering and Struggle: In Silent Pain
• The Un-Silent Side of the Oppressed: The Gift and Travail of Life
• Suffering and Hope
• Endnotes
• Index