Solidarity and Defiant Spirituality

Africana Lessons on Religion, Racism, and Ending Gender Violence

Traci C. West

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781479885046
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Sexuality & Gender in Religion

How activists in Ghana, South Africa, and Brazil provide inspiration and strategies for combating the gender violence epidemic in the United States How can the U.S. learn from the perspectives of anti-gender violence activists in South America and Africa as we seek to end intimate violence in this country? The U.S. has consistently positioned itself as a moral exemplar, seeking to export its philosophy and values to other societies. Yet in this book, Traci C. West argues that the U.S. has much to learn from other countries when it comes to addressing gender-based violence. West traveled to Ghana, South Africa, and Brazil to interview activists involved in the struggle against gender violence. In each of these places, as in the United States, Christianity and anti-black racism have been implicated in violence against women. In Ghana and Brazil, in particular, their Christian colonial and trans-Atlantic slave trade histories directly connect with the socioeconomic development of the Americas and historic incidents of rape of black slave women. With a transnational focus on religion and racism, West brings a new perspective to efforts to systemically combat gender violence.Calling attention to forms of violence in the U.S. and international settings, such as marital rape, sex trafficking of women and girls, domestic violence, and the targeting of lesbians, the book offers an expansive and nuanced view of how to form activist solidarity in tackling this violence. It features bold and inspiring approaches by black women leaders working in each setting to uproot the myriad forms of violence against women and girls. Ultimately, West calls for us to learn from the lessons of Africana activists, drawing on a defiant Africana spirituality as an invaluable resource in the quest to combat the seemingly chronic problem of gender-based violence.

Part I

A Thirst for Truth-Telling

From the United States to Ghana

1

Constricted Religious Responses

I can recollect a winter evening at home when I was agitatedly muttering to myself while poring over news clippings. It was a typical moment early in my quest for more ideas about antiracist and religious responses to gender-based violence and for unconventional methods of discovering strategies to end it. I looked at the face of the African American girl pictured in a faded clipping from my local newspaper and felt a wave of deep sadness.1 The girl’s face in the news photo contorted with anguish and flowing tears as she turned away from the open casket where the body of her mother, Monica Paul, lay. The daughter was surrounded by family and friends at Christ Church, a large, predominantly black, nondenominational church in Montclair, New Jersey, a racially integrated, affluent suburb of New York City. Paul had been shot to death by her former intimate partner, Kenneth Duckett.2 The black heterosexual couple had shared a home together for several years but were separated when Duckett killed Paul after she took out a restraining order against him. The murder occurred inside the Montclair Young Men’s Christian Association in close proximity to their four-year-old son, who was attending his swimming lesson, and directly in front of their eleven-year-old daughter, whom the newspaper photographed at the funeral.

Mounting frustration surpassed sadness as I continued to skim through several other news items describing this tragedy. The articles about Monica Paul resided with a collection of other newspaper and magazine stories on incidents of intimate violence against black women in communities around the United States. The articles spilled out of bulging folders lying on my desk and the floor around it. Overstuffed manila folders containing hundreds of these clippings sat in stacked piles on the floor. I had intended to scan them all someday when there was enough time and add them to my collection of electronic files on violence against black women.

The clippings revealed disturbing cultural patterns surrounding this kind of gendered violence in the United States. One news article about Monica Paul’s murder and funeral mentioned the comforting message of the funeral sermon.3 This section of the article drew my attention partly because I have spent the past several years teaching seminary students who are preparing to be Protestant ministers. My reaction to accounts such as this one referencing the funeral sermon was deep dissatisfaction even though I had not been there. I was less concerned about the sermon’s content than the exclusive role of the minister as a soothing resource in the aftermath of the tragedy. Under what circumstances, I wondered, might religious leaders play a different, less reactive role in response to the problem of a husband’s violence against his wife? Instead of stories about ministers easing the pain of grieving victims, I wanted more examples of ministers contributing ambitious violence-prevention strategies. Religious leadership should work toward creating a world in which no grieving families require consolation after a husband’s intimate violence escalates to a wife’s murder.

In addition, too many cultural dynamics linked to the politics of race and religion in the United States inveigh against concern for ending the varied forms of intimate violence threatening black women’s lives. They can contribute to a cultural malaise, if not capitulation to the ongoing presence of the violence. Sometimes, those dynamics subtly play out in otherwise constructive community work focused on combating anti-black racism and nurturing deeply rooted African American religious commitments. Alongside of Christianity’s dominant cultural influence, non-Christian religious traditions and spiritual practices may also offer mixed moral messages to U.S. black women victim-survivors. The combined religious and racial dynamics that foster many peculiar forms of violence toleration in the United States readily adhere to other contributing factors offered in the popular media that the public imbibes on a daily basis. Ultimately, I decide to explore for how to conceptualize bolder critiques of these patterns by seeking out transnational perspectives, starting with the ideas in antiviolence values and methods of activist leaders in Accra, Ghana.

U.S. Cultural Problems That Demand Response

Studying my news clippings that night in my home reminded me that for religious leaders and others trying to address gender-based violence, the topic of race introduces an array of stumbling blocks related to U.S. intercultural conflicts and competition. Any evaluation of religious and other communal responses that draws attention to black women’s experiences must take into account regressive politics of race. Unfortunately, antiviolence advocates who want to create sympathetic responses to intimate violence by black men against black women can unwittingly foster gradualism. They may find it prudent to start with a focus on translating the significance of black women’s particular victim-survivor experiences in more universalistic terms that represent them as general, society-wide concerns that cut across all cultural groups. The impulse to take time to provide such translations of black women’s experiences of violence usually rests on a strategy of developing one-size-fits-all public understandings and responses. Some advocates prize this kind of approach as more broadly efficacious for achieving policy changes for all women victim-survivors precisely because it prioritizes gender commonalities and minimizes, brackets, or erases cultural and racial particularities. In a contrasting but equally problematic approach, discussing the blackness of victimized black women like Monica Paul might serve to isolate them and consequently attenuate concern among those who identify as non-blacks of Hispanic or Latin American descent, Asian Americans, Indigenous/Natives, Pacific Islanders, whites, or racially mixed members of U.S. communities.

In a twenty-first-century context of an increasingly racially and culturally diverse U.S.-American society, religious and nonreligious advocates require advanced abilities for negotiations of intercultural and interracial realities. Such skills enable leaders to muster the empathy, solidarity, and activism necessary to incite greater public intolerance for gender-based violence. In order to truly galvanize the public and generate a sufficiently broad response, leaders must invoke a sense of a shared, immediate crisis of violence as well as directly confront the deep polarization, denial, and confusion about culture and race that exist.

Additionally, violence terminology matters for the mobilization of public concern by advocates and scholars. Terms such as interpersonal violence, domestic violence, intimate violence, and gender-based violence offer slightly different emphases for categorizing the patterns violence assumes. Interpersonal violence is an umbrella term for the varied patterns of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse perpetrators inflict on their victims (whether the perpetrators are familiar to the victims or not). Domestic violence magnifies the abusive behavioral patterns exhibited in an offender’s abuse and violence within an intimate partner or romantic relationship.

I most often apply the terms intimate violence and gender-based violence in a coordinated fashion, sometimes interchangeably, in order to stress the range of dynamics these terms encompass. Intimate violence refers to various forms of physical and sexual assaults committed within intimate relationships as well as sexual assaults by less familiar acquaintances or by strangers. Even when the perpetrator is a stranger, the sexual nature of the attack renders the violence intimate. The context of intimate assaults is wide-ranging and may include childhood sexual abuse by your family member, physical assaults by your adult intimate partner, or sexual harassment by a prison staff member in a housing unit where you are incarcerated. The term intimate violence highlights how the violence is experienced by women and girls who are victimized, not how the perpetrator behaves. The term points to the fact that the violence is so very intimate in part because its destructive capacity can be so comprehensive—assaulting a girl or woman’s body, mind, personhood, and spirit.

The term gender-based violence calls attention to the ways in which gender expression is a key aspect in the targeting of women and girls. It highlights how violence thrives on widespread cultural assumptions about appropriate gender behavior that often reflect constricted binary and heteronormative criteria. In this way, for instance, violence or the ongoing threat of violence helps ensure conformity to heteropatriarchal norms while feeding on social devaluation, stereotypes, and stigmas often attached to black women’s sexuality in the broader culture, especially that of poor black women.4 The emphasis on the gendering of the violence in the use of the term gender-based violence therefore highlights a link between vulnerability to male violence and the politics of sex/gender expression for black women in their varied communal settings. Besides a link to the intimate nature of sexuality when one is sexually assaulted, the use of the related term intimate violence also signals a refusal to neglect the insidious impacts that may lurk in one’s spirit and emotions during and in the aftermath of the multiple forms of assault and abuse mentioned above. Those effects represent violations of trust, human dignity, and spiritual wholeness that can accompany the sexual and other bodily assaults of black women victim-survivors. The combined implications the two terms illuminate offer guideposts for responses to the intimate and cultural politics of the violence. Of course, when contemplating any such response one must be mindful of the intricate ways in which issues related to black women’s racial identities permeate their experiences of abuse and violence. And it is important to note that the impacts never occur in an identical, assembly-line pattern as if every black woman had the same personality, emotional makeup, family background, socioeconomic status, or experience of skin color prejudice.

My focus on male violence against black women fits into a broader landscape of patterns of gender-based violence in the United States. Gender-based assaults routinely occur in the lives of women and girls across sexual orientations, gender expressions, and gender identities. Men also victimize other men and boys. Women perpetrate intimate violence, although in much lower numbers than men, against both men and women. Women sometimes victimize their intimate partners within their same-gender intimate relationships.5

National statistics from the early twenty-first century document instructive trends about how gender matters in the frequency of gender-based violence—at least for reported violence. For example, the Justice Department studied what it called nonfatal intimate partner violence including rape, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault committed by a current or former spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend. The report indicated that the rate of intimate partner violence somewhat declined for females from 2000 through 2005 and then held steady from 2005 through 2010.6 Also holding steady statistically was the fact that females made up the majority—four out of five—of those victimized by nonfatal intimate partner violence.7 The fact that females constituted 70 percent of those killed by intimate partner violence held steady from 1993 through 2007.8 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey stating that almost 20 percent of all women (across all racial groups) in the United States had been raped in their lifetime. During just the preceding year of the survey, approximately 1.3 million women were raped in the United States.9 In general, most studies have found that black females experience intimate partner violence, rapes, and sexual assaults at higher rates than white females.10 The problem documented as “domestic violence fatalities” affects women from almost every racial/ethnic background, but evidence suggests that black women are disproportionately affected.11 Black females are four times more likely than white females, for example, to be murdered by a boyfriend or girlfriend.12

Aspiring church leaders and other community leaders who might be resources for victims and their friends and families should be aware of how many women experience an attempted or completed rape and of how frequently restraining orders that women take out against intimate partners are violated. Before deciding to offer counseling to couples, for example, religious leaders need to know that in the majority of cases in which a heterosexual intimate partner was murdered (no matter which partner was killed), the man physically abused the woman beforehand.13 Leaders serving black communities ought to be especially cognizant of how frequently black females killed in both single-victim and single-offender incidents are killed by a spouse, intimate acquaintance, or family member.14

Not surprisingly, Monica Paul’s murder embodied several of these broader patterns—her husband had abused her, and she had obtained a restraining order against him before he murdered her. Paul’s murder was also only one in a rash that year of similar incidents—six resulting in eleven deaths—in my region of New Jersey.15 The term newspaper accounts have frequently used to refer to such killings—domestic fatalities—is grossly inadequate. Why not domestic murders or even femicide, which are more precise?16 Femicide refers to the misogynist targeting of women by abusive husbands, boyfriends, or sons-in-law, and by stalkers, male serial killers, or perpetrators of massacres.17 As feminist scholar-activist Ann Jones pointed out in her aptly titled study Next Time She’ll Be Dead, even the term domestic violence is a “euphemistic abstraction that keeps us at a dispassionate distance, far from the repugnant spectacle of human beings in pain.”18 None of these terms satisfactorily accounts for the ways in which the violence is culturally informed. In describing the murders of hundreds of women in Juárez, Mexico, for example, feminist Christian liberation theologian Nancy Pineda-Madrid prefers feminicide. In her view, feminicide more accurately captures the systemic nature of that violence and how it is “rooted in structural inequalities that render some women and girls acutely vulnerable.”19 As Pineda-Madrid rightly explains, the nature of the violence is deeply informed by particular forms of socioeconomic vulnerability as well as the cultural and geopolitical location of women and girls. The language used to name violence must reflect these cultural and political ingredients before we can conceptualize adequate responses to address it. Intercultural understandings and communication skills are in turn indispensable for sharing those responses with one another across varied cultural and geopolitical settings.

As noted above, black women are disproportionately represented in so-called domestic violence fatalities.20 But more common are male-perpetrated domestic violence incidents in which no murder is committed. In the early twenty-first century in New Jersey, for instance, the state police reported about seventy thousand domestic violence offenses per year.21 And what should be especially troubling for those of us who identify as Christian, these assaults occur most frequently on Sunday evenings—a day that in a country culturally dominated by its Christian majority is ostensibly designated for honoring the religion’s custom of a weekly celebration of its communal rituals and symbols. Although no direct causal link exists between the Christian Sabbath and elevated violence rates on that day, the apparently comfortable coexistence of a high rate of male violence against women in their domestic settings on Sundays arguably communicates a subtle message of moral tolerance. At the very least, the confluence signals that a needed message about violence and gender is missing from Christianity’s powerful moral influence on society.

Monica Paul’s news clipping was only one of the many stories contained in multiple “to be scanned” folders on my floor—stories revealing painful violence inflicted within varied intimate relationships of African Americans across socioeconomic class groupings. One headline described “relationship violence” between heterosexual black college student couples. “Kira Johnson still becomes tearful,” the bold print inset on the page declared, “when she recalls the incident eight years ago when her college boyfriend held a gun to her head threatening to end her life because he feared she was about to leave him.”22 In another article, the Washington Post portrayed the anguished face and closed eyes of Aarolyn Mills, the daughter of black 1960s U.S. civil rights movement hero and Baptist preacher James Bevel. Mills had bravely broken the silence and testified how Bevel had sexually preyed upon his daughters for many years, for which the court finally convicted him.23 In still anoth...