Deeper Shades of Purple

Womanism in Religion and Society

Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780814728413
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia delle religioni

Womanist approaches to the study of religion and society have contributed much to our understanding of Black religious life, activism, and women's liberation. Deeper Shades of Purple explores the achievements of this movement over the past two decades and evaluates some of the leading voices and different perspectives within this burgeoning field.

Deeper Shades of Purple brings together a who's who of scholars in the study of Black women and religion who view their scholarship through a womanist critical lens. The contributors revisit Alice Walker's definition of womanism for its viability for the approaches to discourses in religion of Black women scholars. Whereas Walker has defined what it means to be womanist, these contributors define what it means to practice womanism, and illuminate how womanism has been used as a vantage point for the theoretical orientations and methodological approaches of Black women scholar-activists.

Contributors: Karen Baker-Fletcher, Katie G. Cannon, M. Shawn Copeland, Kelly Brown Douglas, Carol B. Duncan, Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas, Rachel Elizabeth Harding, Rosemarie Freeney Harding, Melanie L. Harris, Diana L. Hayes, Dwight N. Hopkins, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, Kwok Pui-Lan, Daisy L. Machado, Debra Majeed, Anthony B. Pinn, Rosetta Ross, Letty M. Russell, Shani Settles, Dianne M. Stewart, Raedorah Stewart-Dodd, Emilie M. Townes, Traci C. West, and Nancy Lynne Westfield.

Part I
Radical Subjectivity

RADICAL SUBJECTIVITY—[the first tenet of womanism] 1. a process that emerges as Black females in the nascent phase of their identity development come to understand agency as the ability to defy a forced naiveté in an effort to influence the choices made in one’s life and how conscientization incites resistance against marginality

“The power analyses, biotextual specificity and embodied mediated knowledge” of Black women and girls. “The anecdotal evidence” of Black women’s lives that reveals truth, “the measure of womanism.” —Cannon

“An intelligence grounded in a wisdom that [comes] from deep within—born of the experiences of being Black and female.” —Hayes

2. an assertion of the real-lived experiences of one’s rites of passage into becoming a Blackwoman, being “womanish”; the audacious act of naming and claiming voice, space, and knowledge

“The ‘fresh,’ ‘fast,’ ‘facety’ (from ‘feisty’ in Jamaican patois), ‘force ripe,’ and ‘womanish’ behavior, attitude, and consciousness found in Black girls and women.” —Duncan

“The empowering assertion of the black woman’s voice” or the “voice that speaks when others fear to.” —Majeed

3. a form of identity politics that is not a tangible, static identity that measures and gauges the extent to which one is or is not what others had planned or hoped for one to be

“Feeling a whole lot like God” [Colloq.]—RevSisRaedorah

When Mama Was God

RevSisRaedorah

When mama was God

She made miracles happen

In the middle of a Houston ghetto

The center of my universe, indeed.

She walked on water

In three inch heels, matching bag

With us five kids in her footsteps.

She taught us to fear not

Night lightning, thunderstorms

Hard work, new things, good success.

When mama was God

She created not one but two

Fancy Easter dresses and sewed

Lace on my socks to match.

She hollered for me from the porch

Compelling me to come out, come out

From all of my favorite hiding places.

She held me close with strong hands

So close that I would inhale

Warm fleshy bosom heat for air.

When mama was God

She laid hands on us

So the cops wouldn’t and trifling men couldn’t

Healing bad attitudes and broken hearts.

She stood her ground with white folk

Those blue-eyed devils of pure evil

Of the 60s … 80s … this new millennium.

She made a dollar hollah

On the occasions of more month than money

Without robbing anyone of anything.

When mama was God

She blessed two fish and five loaves

Or was that govm’t cheese

And canned mystery meat?

She kept an open door policy

Always meant that somebody else

Would be sleeping on the living room floor.

She prayed for us and others

We eavesdropped listening for our name to be called

Knowing that no weapon formed against us would prosper.

When mama was God.

“Girl, you just like your mama,”

somebody said one day

when I was feeling a whole lot like God.

Chapter 1

Structured Academic Amnesia

As If This True Womanist Story Never Happened¹

Katie G. Cannon

What does it mean to structure academic amnesia? To whom, then, do we turn when we are told that our truth is a lie? How, it is asked, can Womanist realities be verified in institutions of higher learning where the dailiness of our authentic experiences cannot be proven by scientific methodology? Indeed, there are countless real-life dilemmas that these questions presuppose. And, this is certainly the case for Black women in the theological academy who grapple with the fact that our existential situations are oftentimes classified as questionable, anecdotal evidence; our genuine perceptions and factual registration of cutting-edge issues end up encoded as sporadic wanderings, downloaded as rambling, make-believe, episodic soap operas flowing into the institutional sea of forgetfulness. It is as if this true Womanist story never happened.

Some years ago I was physically assaulted by a man I did not know as I walked down the corridor of a hotel in New York City, on my way to a meeting of Presbyterian women of color. Back in those days I often wore my clergy collar when attending ecclesiastical gatherings. Ah, distinctly I remember that on this particular morning, I caught the number-one IRT train from 116th street and Broadway down to 42nd street, shuttled over to Grand Central Station, moving as fast as I could, putting one foot in front of the other, and I arrived at the appointed meeting place on time.

To be sure, I was caught off guard, completely taken aback, when a white man in a hotel service worker’s uniform walked toward me. The man looked at my clergy collar, and in one fell swoop, grabbed me by the shoulders and slammed me into the wall, screaming, “How dare you defy Jesus Christ!” I was startled, shocked, discombobulated, but I did not say one mumbling word about the body slam incident that happened in the hallway when I entered the meeting room of the women of color. I simply kept pace with the order of the day, because part of my survival strategy as a Womanist is what Alice Walker’s names as being traditionally capable. Walker defines traditional capable, in these words, “Mama I’m walking to Canada and I’m taking you and a bunch of other slaves with me.” Reply: “It wouldn’t be the first time.”²

Now, the specificity of what it means for Womanists to be traditionally capable has to do with conscientization, wherein we realize that we are walking to freedom and that we are taking our Mama and a bunch of other enslaved people with us, and that this particular liberating work that we are called to do is more than supplementing malestream theology. This capacity for resistance emerging forth from the core of our beingness moves us beyond serving as superfluous appendages, add-ons to required androcentric knowledge at the bottom of core course syllabi, as endnotes in church publications, or as impotent members, labeled as special consideration, appointed at-large to denominational boards and agencies.

Instead, a Womanist understanding of being traditionally capable focuses on the quintessential skills that are confined in the strictest sense to the collective conscious will of African American women desiring not to repeat oppressive domination in the dailiness of life. Instead, this Womanist version of traditional capability connects our cultural values, oral traditions, and social experiences to our spirit forces in the quest for meaning amid suffering.

Well, several years passed, and an African American woman from the Wall Street Journal interviewed me for an article that she was writing about clergywomen. When asked if I had encountered any hardships, any outright vicious, vindictive, violent experiences as a woman minister, for the first time I shared the story about the white man in the hotel in the service worker’s uniform who saw my clergy collar, walked over and grabbed me by the shoulders and slammed me into the wall, screaming, “How dare you defy Jesus Christ!”

The newspaper reporter drafted the story, and a few days later the sister-reporter called back to check the facts. The reporter’s voice was filled with perplexed hesitation. I sensed that this reporter was locked inside of a precarious, soul-searching quandary, because the hotel where the incident took place no longer exists and according to her fact checking, the truth of my story never happened. The reporter’s boss told her that my story was no longer plausible because there was no evidence in recent memory that there was ever such a hotel near Grand Central Station. I detested wholeheartedly, and in my struggle to regain unequivocal, unmistakable, indisputable evidence for the truth of my experience, I made the case, that just because the hotel had been torn down, demolished, scattered to the wind, that did not mean that my truth was a lie. I encouraged the sister-reporter to go to a Manhattan court of law, to the office of records and deeds, and to get the necessary signed and sealed papers for proof of property, to retrieve the rigorous empirical documentation that a particular hotel existed right near Grand Central Station at such a place and during a particular time in history. The bottom line, fundamental point is this, it is as if this true Womanist story never happened.

Thus, this essay is not only a description of some of the trials and tribulations of early Womanist scholars in the academies of religion, but it is also an invitation to all who cast their lot with us. I invite you to measure womanism in the twenty-first century by calling into question the presuppositions operative behind the following soul-searching inquiry: What does it mean that academia is so structured that Black women are severely ostracized when we re-member and re-present in our authentic interest? What does one do when told that our refusal to split, to dichotomize from God’s presence in the daily fabric of our communal lives makes us a liability to civilization? What is the role of Womanist intellectuals in institutions of higher learning, where our pedagogical styles and scholarly lexicons are derailed on a daily basis? The point that I am arguing is that anecdotal evidence does a lot to reveal the truth as to how oppressed people live with integrity, especially when we are repeatedly unheard but not unvoiced, unseen but not invisible.

Speaking primarily of Womanist scholars, but expressing an idea that applies equally well to Mujerista and Feminist intellectuals, most women can name the exact time and the specific place when the truth of our private lives appears stranger than public fiction. In the capacity to elaborate this dilemma of oversimplified reduction of anecdotal evidence, I often share the story about two white men, one, the president, and the other, the provost, sitting across the room from me, early in my career, during a job interview. These two white men wanted to know how I, a thirty-three-year-old black woman, got my libido needs met. So, I answered saying that I read and write. The majority of people who hear this true story about this type of undressing question, this under-my-clothes kind of talk during a job interview, want to argue how such a question is forbidden, improper, and against the law and therefore, two powerful, tenured white men interrogating a brand new Ph.D. Black woman about her sensual embodiment could not have happened.

Keep in mind that this type of adversarial aggression in academic institutions is also represented by those designated as the golden boy-mind-guards in professional learned societies. Such individuals make it their business to announce to colleagues that our scholarship is mediocre because there is no evidence in our publications that we are grounded in the authoritative assumptions of white men. On one occasion, I sent the message back to one of the golden boy-mindguards that no one earns a Ph.D. in the Western hemisphere without knowing a whole lot about the evidential determinism of white men, whether we want to or not.

By this I mean that there are men and women walking among us at the annual meeting of various guilds, who check the footnotes, endnotes, index, and bibliography in each of our publications to see if their names are mentioned, and if they and their peers are not cited in our books and journal articles, then these powerhandlers, wielding tyrannical, experience-distant rationalism, devalue womanist modes of experience-near cognition. In practice, they go to great length to demand that our intellectual concerns and canons of discourse be ignored in all matters of contract evaluation, tenure review, and refereed endorsement for promotions, grants, fellowships, and awards.

From 1983 until now, storms of opposition, bigotry, and suspicion mount. Women intellectuals find ourselves giving pause daily as we reflect upon the socially constructed discursive values implied in androcentric space, a space “that proposes to be gazing from ‘human’ eyes at ‘human’ subjects but the ‘human’ in both instances is always male and masculine.”³ As Black women scholars, in an academy, which structurally excludes women from the formal systematic thinking about religious data, our scholarship is often a scholarship of struggle. In fact, because of pre-established power relations and preconceived cultural stereotypes of women, we often wonder if our experiences of being “exoticized, eroticized, anomalized, masculinized, and demonized”⁴ are peculiar to the religious academy or if these are general patterns of misogyny practiced in other fields of study where women have been traditionally barred, such as in medicine and law.

Similarly, when Black women began earning the Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Theological Education and officially entered as full-fledged members of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) in a small, but critical mass, we had no realistic picture and almost no orientation of what to expect, when we arrived. Our entry into the AAR/SBL is what Nikki Giovanni calls landing in a land-mark-less situation, dropping anchor at a place and in a space where we see very little of anything that is familiar and yet we continue to make a conscious decision to be human and humane in death-dealing situations.⁵

Yes, a careful, faithful reading of the historical milieu discloses that for more than twenty years, the investigative Womanist projects in our various disciplines of study are punctuated with utter silence in the sacred halls of the majority of the accredited colleges, universities, and seminaries. This type of deafening silence can be compared to competitive absentmindedness, or repressed, suppressed, compressed brain-fade, wherein hegemonic iconographers, who dictate “the terms under which the world is to be perceived and experienced,”⁶ degrade and/or dismiss the scholarship that emerges from our credible living labs of embodied reasoning as a threat to their respective beliefs, and they, in turn, deem us as unnecessary.

Far too many of our professional colleagues, who are defenders of androcentric, heteropatriarchal, malestream, white supremacist culture, experience our very presence as colleagues as a cruel joke. The fragility of some men, especially if they have been indoctrinated all of their lives to believe that women in general are insufficiently intelligent, and Black women in particular are “naturally” inferior, that our mere presence walking down the hall, sitting in the same classroom, offering critical comments in committee meetings around the faculty table, these men, as well as women who have not divested themselves of white supremacy, feel their scholarly homogeneity being threatened, and in turn, they assess all that we say and do as dumbing-down and diluting the very essence of so-called academic rigor.

Law Professor Patricia A. Williams sums up the situation of African American women intellectuals in traditional male space in this way: she says that, as Black women scholars, we are often greeted and dismissed as unreliable, untrustworthy, hostile, angry, powerl...