– Thank you each and everyone. And I think we’re at capacity, but if not, we pray for those who are yet still on the journey. In lifting up today’s discussion, lecture, presentation, I wanted to share with you as our centering moment for this morning, a prayer written by W. E. B. Du Bois,
Not necessarily known as the most religious or holiest of figures, but hopefully by the end of this morning’s conversation, a little bit of that’ll change for you. This prayer is one of many collected in a volume known as a “Prayer for Dark People.” This was a collection of his own prayers,
His own devotions and meditations as they were written by his own hand, roughly in the period from 1909 to 1910, when he was on faculty at Wilberforce University, an AME HBCU, and was doing that work there, but trying to merge his social witness with his spiritual concerns.
And so in that vein, I want to lift up this, “A Prayer For The Deed That Cries To Be Done.” And those who will, please. “Give us grace, O God, to dare to do the deed that we well know cries to be done. Let us not hesitate because of ease or the words
Of men or women’s mouths or our own lives. Mighty causes are calling us, the freeing of women, the training of children, the putting down of hate and murder and poverty, all of these and more. But they call with voices that mean work, and sacrifice and death.
Mercifully grant us, O God, the spirit of Esther, that we say, ‘I will go to the king and if I perish, I perish.'” And all those who would say, amen. So for the time that we have now, I want to, especially given the theme that we’ve defined
And outlined with this emphasis on popular culture, political theology, and public witness, I want to share some insights that I’ve gleaned from the life lessons and legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois, in ways that I would trouble to think would mess with, would complicate our standard notions
Of the sacred and secular generally speaking, as well as the religious and the politically more specifically. Throughout his life labeled as a radical in so many ways, is hard to believe nowadays that Du Bois was actually ignored by those who hoped that his massive contributions, his prolific and profound writings
Would somehow be buried alongside him when he passed away on August 23rd, 1963, the same date as the now legendary March on Washington. But as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in tribute to the pioneering scholar and activist, quote, and I’m quoting here, “History cannot ignore W. E. B. Du Bois
Because history has to reflect truth and Dr. Du Bois was a tireless explorer and a gifted discoverer of social truths. His singular greatness lay in his quest for truth about his own people. There were very few scholars who concerned themselves with honest study of the Black people
And he sought to fill this immense void. The degree to which he succeeded discloses the great dimensions of the man.” And when I say that Du Bois was and still remains a towering figure, not just in African-American intellectual life, but American intellectual life. He’s one of the most prolific,
And I would dare say influential scholars, that these American shores have ever yet produced. And I’m standing as a scholar, so that’s no shame or shade, (laughs) but you always have to have a standard to look up to and I think that Du Bois has set the mark very high.
Keeping that in mind, this presentation focuses on Du Bois’s masterpiece, “The Souls of Black Folk” wherein he describes a sea change in the evolutionary trajectory of Black faith, culture and sociopolitical community in America at the dawn of the 20th century. Now this is standing in the face
As many of you all will probably know or dare to remember, this is at a time when Jim and Jane Crow was coming barreling down the track and taking greater hold of American life. America just recently, some 30 years earlier, had fought and we still have yet to reconcile
The United States Civil War. Both in terms of the trajectory of reconstruction that had to follow in the ensuing years, but then also the failure to live up to the promises that we made to at the time of emancipation, those 4 million men, women, and children who were enslaved in the deep south.
But also to all peoples, male, female, native born, immigrant, rich, poor, who were depending on America to be the multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic democracy that it could and should be, right? Du Bois was writing at a time, living in a time, where there was a tipping point,
That there was a decision to be made in these yet to be in the United States, if I borrow from Maya Angelou, where we could be the world’s first truly free and fully functioning democratic republic, or we could be the last great white empire.
That was the choice that was at hand, when Du Bois in 1903, compiled and collected the many, roughly 14 essays, that formed the heart of this book, “Souls of Black Folk.” So despite all these whirlwind, this churning of problems and politics that’s going on during this time, Du Bois is using this volume,
And he notes that a greater transformation was occurring within the Black Christian tradition, what we oftentimes more commonly refer to as the Black church, and depending on where you dwell, it might just be the “church.” (laughs) Okay. Okay. But in his influential chapter “Of the Faith of the Fathers,”
He asserts that by and large, these Black churches were shifting, and I’m quoting here, “Into groups of cold, fashionable devotees, in no way distinguishable from similar white groups save in color of skin, now into large social and business institutions catering to the desire for information and amusement for their members,
Warily avoiding unpleasant questions both within and without the Black world.” Further, in the very next line of that classic essay, I highly recommend any and everyone check this out, Du Bois proclaims, “But back of this still broods silently the deep religious feeling of the real Negro heart,
The stirring, unguided might of powerful human souls who have lost the guiding star of the past and are seeking the great night a new religious ideal.” Okay. Whereas the religious realities and political prospects that shaped his worldview at the time are somewhat different from ours today,
But I dare argue not too terribly different. I find myself wondering and thinking that those of us who are connected and committed to the Black church tradition as part and parcel of global Christianity at large, we are caught in a similarly tenuous state to the one Du Bois documented over a century ago.
Nevertheless, I also wonder, what could keep a tireless critic such as Du Bois, hopeful that Black believers would overcome this religious identity crisis. Does finding ways to regain social as well as spiritual wholeness that have been long denied to people of Africans descent
Since their arrival in the new world so many centuries ago. So when I’m thinking about Du Bois, in this regard, what set Du Bois apart from many other figures of his time, of note in regard, I’m suggesting is that he’s operating in this valance of multiple selves, right?
I mean, we are all living through the world and for some of us, we’re hopefully, probably very familiar with the notion of code switching, the way in which you present to your mother and father is different than the way that you present to your church folk,
Or the way you present to the folks in the cafeteria, or the grocery store, or the dry cleaner, which hopefully is different from how you present to the folks who are nearest and dearest to you, right? Now, not saying that you you’re going through all these kind of costume changes or personality dilemmas,
But sociologists refer to this as – I think about Erving Goffman and folks like that, the presentation of self, right? How you want to be perceived, how you want to move through the world, and how you want the world to respond and react to you, bless you, in that fashion.
What I’m saying in a very similar way, more akin to our time, than probably even his own day and time, Du Bois is operating in that kind of mode. So to this point, one facet of his self was the religious scholar. As you know, as I was just contending,
Who developed much of the language and conceptual framework by which we understand religion in America, specifically, particularly Black religion, but all religion, right? Du Bois’s work, not only in “Souls of Black Folk,” but also in that same year in 1903, he was a busy, busy man.
He wrote the pioneering volume, “The Negro Church,” a social study, which was the first, if you believe it or not, the first sociological historical study of churches in America, right? Not just saying, a pastor, who was lovingly writing his diary or treatise on his church, their church, our church, no,
But actually putting social scientific methodology to work on the most sacred institution at that point in American life. Okay. But there was also in my estimation, the prophetic part of Du Bois in itself, right? This religious critic who urged Black and white churches to incorporate racial fairness, justice, morality,
And a critique of the social and political injustice of the larger society into their religious practices and theology. I would dare imagine that, especially in the shadow of Buffalo, in the shadow of Irvine, and the shadow of Uvalde, that Du Bois would wonder, okay, well, were predominantly and historically white churches,
What was being preached every Sunday proceeding but also after those mass shootings. We’ll get into that later. There was also, Du Bois, the apostate, their religious iconoclast who disregarded traditional religious dogma, just doing religion for religion’s sake rather than seeking what is best and greatest about humanity. However, there was also Du Bois,
And I’m putting this in scare quotes here, the pragmatic priest, or what I’m talking about in terms of the religious practitioner, who as I suggested before, he authored prayers, he actually wrote and lined hymns for oppressed peoples, folks who oftentimes didn’t find their way into the book of common prayer,
Who were often not on the foremost minds of most psalmists or hymnists of the era. And in fact, if you understand the tradition and the trajectory of Black sacred music, aside from the slave spirituals, when the Black church became more formally institutionalized, went from invisible institution that Al Raboteau most famously talked about,
To a visible institution. The kind of work that myself and Dr. Stacy have emphasized and spent much of our career talking about. African-American Christians had to import hymns that were not written for or about or by them, and try to transform and adapt them,
And give them a new life in a new spirit that otherwise was absent or vacant. Until thankfully, we developed a gospel blues tradition, which then more forcefully and formidably expressed a Black Christian worldview, but let me not digress. And then finally, and most importantly, he was a religious seeker who had very complicated
And sometimes even conflicting viewpoints and dimensions to his very being that he and his virtual heirs, all of us, many of us must still struggle to reflect upon and reconcile as we move forward into the future. So taking in a gestalt fashion, taking the sum,
The totality to be greater than any of its individual parts, what I’m suggesting here is that there are many ways that Du Bois is probably better equipped for the spiritual sensibilities and religious realities of our times, rather than the era in which he lived, so I think that alone,
Begs for greater attention to somebody like this, who oftentimes is seen on the outskirts rather than at the core of many of our thoughts on religion and theology, okay. So with the remaining time I have this morning, I wanted to address the complex legacy of Du Bois’s views on Black faith,
Culture and politics, and three dimensions. First, I wanted to briefly focus on Du Bois’s pivotal role in the establishment of Black church studies, especially his views on the education of Black clergy in America, and I look at this as an issue of profession. Next, I want to examine how Du Bois wrestles
With the paradoxical nature of Black faith as outlined in the “Souls of Black Folk” in terms of confession. And as a good Baptist, I got to follow this up in a threefold fashion, so my third leg is going to be, to discuss Du Bois’s development of an African centered worldview
For the redemption of African peoples throughout the diaspora from Eurocentric frameworks, as a means of a paradigmatic succession. Pray for me. (laughs) Most definitely. You’re welcome. Okay, no worries. No, but I… No, if you need to jot it down, please. But to begin, when I talk about profession as a means of establishing
The formal study of the Black church tradition, formally known as the invisible institution of the 19th century into a more visible and viable institution attuned to the modern realities of the then 20th century, for all my people born in the 1900s, holler. (laughs) Okay. Hello. Du Bois offers the most cogen examination
Of African-American Christianity’s transition from slavery to freedom. In fact, he is, I mean, I don’t know how you put a trademark on this, but embedded in the pages of “Souls of Black Folk,” he actually marks that transitional phrase from slavery to freedom, which then gained new life with the masterful study text
By John Hope Franklin “From Slavery to Freedom,” from my history nerds out there. Although his relationship with the Black church was often viewed as troubled at best, it was Du Bois’s comments and critiques about the church and its totality that generally shaped the perception surrounding the most central,
If it is not always the most sacred institution and modern Black life. Primarily trained as a historian, Du Bois made his earliest and most prodigious contributions in American social scientific research, particularly on African-American Christianity with this pioneering work. In ways that were deeply indebted to many of the German sociological giants,
Such as Max Weber, Wilhelm Dilthey, Émile Durkheim, and other scholars who either directly instructed or influenced Du Bois during his graduate studies at the University of Berlin. By example, in his 1897 essay, the problem of amusements, he explains that the Black church is, and I quote,
“A broader, deeper and more comprehensive social organism than the churches of white Americans. The Black church is not simply an organism for the propagation of religion, it is the center of the social, intellectual, and religious life of an organized group of people, it provides social intercourse, it provides amusements of various kinds,
It serves as a newspaper and intelligence bureau, it supplants the theater, it directs the picnic and excursion, it furnishes the music, it introduces the stranger to community, it serves as the lyceum, library and lecture bureau, it is the central organ of the organized life of African-Americans for amusement, relaxation, instruction, and religion.”
Some years later, once again, we’re revisiting “Of the Faith of the Fathers.” Yes, most definitely. Yes. He events, he offers up, in “Of the Faith of the Fathers,” three definitive elements of the Black church tradition in America, characterized and it’s listed on the screen, but you can follow along with me. Oh, sorry.
Not only talking about the institutional church in and of itself, but also talking about the preacher, the music, and the frenzy. This descriptive three-part typology of the Black church’s core essence has been hugely influential in the study of Black Christianity to date. Moreover, in text, his own text, right?
Not even talking about the books that he helped bring into existence, but his own published works such as the “The Philadelphia Negro” in 1899, and “The Negro Church” I mentioned earlier, Du Bois offers many student sites concerning the political, cultural and economic impact of the Black church as a social institution,
Using theories and methods that were still uncommon within the American Academy. In this sense, it can easily be argued that Du Bois’s landmark, historical and sociological research on the African-American church greatly contributed to the setting the standard for the social scientific study of religion in the American scene.
Especially interesting for me, and hopefully to you as well, is Du Bois’s emphasis on the distinctive role of the Black preacher within the African-American community. Towards this end, Du Bois described the African-American preacher as quoting, “The most unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil.” And further notes that,
“The Black preacher early appeared on the plantation and found his or her function as the healer of the sick, the interpreter of the unknown, the comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong, and the one who rudely but picturesquely expressed the longing disappointment and resentment of a stolen oppressed people.
Thus, as bard, physician, judge, and priest, within the narrow limits allowed by the slave system, rose the Negro preacher and under him and her, the first Afro-American institution, the Negro church.” To his credit, it should be noted that Du Bois was not above criticizing Black ministers for their shortcomings. For instance,
During the 1898 commencement speech at his undergraduate alma mater, Fisk University down in Nashville, Du Bois states, “What we need is not more but fewer ministers, but in that lesser number we certainly need earnest, broad, and cultured people, people who do a good deal more than they say.
The severest charge that they can can be brought against the Christian education of the Negro in the south during the last 30 years, is the reckless way in which sapheaded young people,” I’m being kind here, “without ability, and in some cases, without character have been urged into ministry.
It is time to now to halt. It is time now to say to these young people, like you, qualifications that would be of no service elsewhere are not needed in the church.” I mean, he’s straight no chaser. He is not one to play with. “Rather than being dismissive or dysfunctional.”
The fact that Du Bois could extol the virtues as well as the vices of the Black church and especially its leadership, was a precious act of scholarly engagement with the Black church tradition, which unfortunately has bitten too few and far between. As has been argued elsewhere,
This rift has largely resulted from Black intellectuals who despise the church’s anti-intellectualism and conservative social outlook, while conversely countless Black churchgoers who have been victimized by self-alienated academic elitist on one side, and thin theological teaching by lazy parasites parading as pastors on the other. Now that’s me, that’s not Du Bois, okay?
But I learned from the best. Okay. (laughs) Even though it can easily be argued that Du Bois did not walk the fine line between the academy and the church perfectly or precisely, his attempts to fuse the sacred and secular within the arena of modern Black life
Should be considered in many more meaningful ways for the future. Furthermore, I also hear an early echoes of Du Bois’s “Talented Tenth” argument, and for those of you all unfamiliar with “The Souls of Black Folk,” he makes a very pointed concern about the training and preparation of African Americans
In that lauded transition from slavery to freedom, and the necessity that to build a Black middle class higher education is vitally necessary, and he’s lifting up this “Talented Tenth,” but not saying it in this kind of rarefied mode of exceptionalism equaling excellence, right? He’s not saying that “The Talented Tenth” should be exclusive.
He’s not saying that… And folks who know, they know what I’m talking about, in terms of being adorned and anointed and appointed to certain rare social organizations, sororities, fraternities, getting all puffed up about their status, the cars they drive, the dwellings in which they live,
The cloud that comes with their bank account, no, that “Talented Tenth” wasn’t supposed to be a city on the hill so to speak, he was claiming that as a radical remnant. Du Bois was making the concerted argument that if the Black community such as it was then and now
Was ever going to survive, even 1/10 of the population who could be honed into the leading edge of Black America to then go back, as a exercise in Sankofa, go back return to the communities from which we come and recommit ourselves to that, reinvest in that, strengthen and renew those spaces and places
That we come from so that we can acknowledge that all of God’s earth and all the people on God’s earth are God’s property. Okay. But also attached to this, most particularly, I hear in Du Bois’s writings and speeches, I hear it when he strives to emphasize the quality, and I’m emphasizing this,
The quality of individuals being prepared for prophetic and pastoral ministry in a desperately needful society, and not simply the quantity of people running around calling themselves apostle, elder, prophet, bishop, or some other lofty likewise title, simply out of the desire for a luxurious lifestyle or luminous social media feat. That being the case,
I would hope that we could interpret Du Bois’s critique as being more concerned with increasing the pool of truly talented and dedicated religious leadership, and not simply keeping the circle of preachers as a hermetically sealed entity and also an expanding carnival of fortune hunters and fame seekers,
Who consider doing God’s work as just another hustle and God’s people as ready victims right for the picking. But let’s move on. Okay. Next, the act of confession in Du Bois’s writing becomes clearer when viewed, considering how he wrestles with, what I call, the unbearable burden of souls.
It’s impossible to about WEB Du Bois, at least at this time, and not mention the primacy of “Souls of Black Folk,” both as a masterpiece in its own right of scholarly writing in the 20th century, and as a centerpiece of Du Bois’s own evolving body of work and research.
Du Bois in concepts, such as double consciousness, I’ll mention that soon, “The Talented Tenth,” which I was just talking about, the problem of the color line, the veil, and so many others. So thoroughly dominate ontological conversations of race and racism in the modern world that even in rejecting or ignoring them,
One still finds oneself caught within the matrix of ideas that Du Bois himself articulated more than 100 years ago. What is most fascinating to me is that, this regard in how Du Bois provides critical perspectives into Black sacred realities is in so many ways deceptively subtle. First and foremost,
The very use of souls as a central motif throughout the book is a vitally important example. Because of the ubiquity of soul, especially in African-American life and culture, as a reference to cuisine, music, in terms of fictive kin, soul sister, soul brother, as a semiotic modifier, soul train, right.
Okay. And I could go on and on. No, I will not. Okay. Okay. (laughing) All right, I take counsel very well and wisely. We tend to underestimate the revolutionary stake involved in any Black person, especially in that moment, that crisis of Jim and Jane Crow segregation, and white racial terrorism
That was emerging at the time that he wrote this book to dare openly declare to a world, deeply entrenched in white supremacy, that yes, Black folks did indeed, do indeed have souls. That was a radical act. Okay. In his reflections on this text, theologian Anthony Pinn,
Suggests that throughout the book, Du Bois offers, and I’m quoting here, “A soft assertion that Black bodies have weight or soul that is not fully accounted for through talk of the existential dimensions of race and race relations. It is through this soul, the inner and more opaque dimensions of life
That the creative impulse for fullness of being is developed and nurtured, and imposed notions of meaning, do not penetrate to this level of existence.” It’s precisely this opaque internality to which Pinn root first, I myself would call it more the meaningful messiness of Black humanity,
That Du Bois unfold in the pages of souls, which has made the book a timeless and venerated classic. Yet, while Pinn asserts that “The Souls of Black Folks” illustrates a hermeneutic sealed in an aesthetic of Black embodiment, I would contend that is the realm of the ethereal that Du Bois analysis truly excels.
As Du Bois’s favorite professor, and eventual advisor during his doctoral studies at Harvard, the influence of the psychologist and philosopher, William James, looms large throughout much of “Souls”, but most especially regarding religiosity as it would later be proven and manifest in James’s own work, “The Varieties of Religious Experience,”
Which was published a year earlier in 1902. Charting James’s impact on Du Bois’s thinking is helpful here because to the end of revisiting James’s own definition of religion as, “The feelings, acts, and experiences of individuals in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation
To whatever they may consider the divine.” Throughout many of souls of Black folks chapters, it seems that Du Bois adapts and incorporates James’s definition of religion within his own take on religion very much to the heart, but it is that personal intangible connection between the human and divine that initially appears absent
From his treatment on Black faith. As Du Bois unfold his insights on Black life and experience throughout this slim volume, it captures one’s attention how he clusters his discussion of Black religion for the last four chapters of the book. The detached objectivity and scholarly passivity towards the African-American religious experience
Incumbent within his seamless merger of theory and method, seems most obvious in chapters such as, “Of the Faith of the Fathers” that I mentioned earlier, of Alexander Crummell, that notable Black episcopalian figure and intellectual, and “Of the Sorrow Songs” where Du Bois does a deep dive into the origins
And evolutions of those spirituals, those 200 songs by anonymous songwriters who were enslaved. The loan exception in this case is a chapter entitled “Of the Passing of the First-Born.” Now, when I first read this book many years ago, I wondered why this chapter was even included in the book. In recent years, however,
I’ve been increasingly convinced that it is the “Of the Passing of the First-Born” in which Du Bois finally taps into the core concerns of Black faith in its most extreme sense. When confronted by the death of their first-born son, Burghardt Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois, and his wife, Nina,
Sadly approached what one writer has called the “dark night of the soul,” wherein they faced the supreme moment of deep crisis and most intimate heartache. This young Black couple found themselves becoming a different type of tertium quid, or to translate it out of the Latin, or what’s that a third thing, right?
They became childless parents, a concept so devastating that the English language still does not have a singular word that’s suitable to describe such a phenomenon, which now in our own time is becoming too prevalent. Yet, and yet, I think this act of bearing witness about the death of their son
Complicates what the historian religion, Charles Long’s notion about Du Bois had come into an understanding of self and sacred via his immersion and commitment to community. I would insist the opposite, however, by illustrating that the death of their son, possibly the most intensely personal and intimate trauma
Of Du Bois’s life was a motivating force that helped him better understand the insurmountable burden of Black pain and suffering as well as the incomprehensible capacity of Black people’s hope in the face of despair as enduring dimensions of the overall human condition. Thus, whereas Long’s brief assessment of Du Bois
Is true in part, Long was still regarding Du Bois as intellectual and not as an individual, thus creating a conceptual blind spot, if you will, that did not allow him to fully appreciate Du Bois’s act of self revelation and self-disclosure. Having read and reread this book more than three decades
Since I was a student down the road at Rutgers College, I have wrestled with this chapter against the backdrop of the crack wars, the HIV/AIDS crisis, the rise of Black Lives Matter, the opioid crisis, the trauma brought on by hurricane Katrina, rampant mass shootings, the multiple threats to human longevity
Precipitated by structural inequality and transgenerational poverty, and most recently, the ravages of COVID-19 pandemic, which in turn helped me begin rethinking my own hermeneutic. Meanwhile, my own aging process, thanks be to God, which has blessed me to become a husband and a father while also becoming quite literally a motherless child,
Now enabled me to empathize more closely with Du Bois in ways that I was not yet mature or secure enough in my earlier years. Through that gradually emergent process of, and I’m quoting here from the culture, “Having gone through some things and seen some things,
I now had to reckon with the work of processing the trauma, brief and death, occasion by losses, heightened by but not isolated to the pandemic. Unprocessed, unspoken, unreconciled grieving, remains in the background of many of our faith communities. And we are in desperate need of ways to articulate that bad tsunami of mourning
Before it tears us all apart, not only from each other, but even from our own selves.” Okay. Well, thank you. In dealing with the tragic death of their only begotten son, Du Bois reveals the paradoxical nature of Black faith as a bittersweet tension between dread and desire,
The painful dread of a precious low life loss before its time, and the urgent desire that the baby might find some great solace and sweet reward in a realm other than ours. Thus to my own mind, if Du Bois was such a stalwart voice of Black secular modernism,
Most surely his yearning for the existence of God, hearing identified by Du Bois as all love and echoes of an all abiding resilient faith in the face of unyielding agony and woe that is present throughout this chapter, and I dare argue throughout this world, surely would not exist. Hence, in many ways,
This seemingly anecdotal departure from his more deliberate analysis of modern Black religious life and culture. Herein called “The Passing of the First-Born” in which we have a window into Du Bois’s own soul, and ironically find the most transcendent and revelant offering of Black faith in the entire volume.
Finally, I think Du Bois’s greatest challenge to our conjoined notion of Black faith, politics, culture, and history comes in the form of succession wherein Du Bois initiates a paradigm shift, which ushers forth new and divergent worldviews while forcing older systems to recede. The most fruitful and expedient illustration of this process
Is found in Du Bois’s devotion to dismantling the white supremacist legacy of philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, we’ll just call him Hegel, just too much of a mouthful for me this morning. In the early 1830s, when asked to discuss the role of Africa within the historical development of civilizations
In his legendary lectures on world history, Hegel states, “At this point, we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the world, is has no movement or development to exhibit. Historical movements in it that is in its Northern part belong to the Asiatic or European world.
Egypt will be considered in referenced to the passage of the human mind from its Eastern to its Westerns phase but it does not belong to the African spirit. We properly understand by Africa, is the unhistorical, undeveloped spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here
Only as on the threshold of the world’s history.” In one fell swoop, Hegel’s penultimate act of revisionist history, radically recreates Africans in their diasporan counterparts as “People without history to borrow anthropologist, Eric Wolf’s phraseology.” In order to understand why any of this matters, one has to appreciate that the need to rethink Hegel
Is not just an empty intellectual exercise. The openly racist disregard demonstrated by Hegel statement, demonstrate systemic as well as systematic anti-Black racism woven into much of Western philosophy since the enlightenment, right? So for instance, just to take a brief pause for the cause. Here we see the sphinx,
One of the great wonders of the world with the backdrop of the pyramids of Giza behind it. Now, what’s fascinating about this is twofold. First, the nose of the sphinx. Does anybody know what happens to the nose? This is where it gets interactive though. Is it on vacation? Like…(laughing) Right. Right.
When Napoleon and his French army come to town, right? You know, they’re like, “Hey, that’s a big target. Let’s take a crack at it, see how these cannons work.” There’s that argument that claim, right? I don’t think that the folks who could create such grand structure somehow, you know,
They could build the entire sphinx but somehow their technology around the nose would somehow come up short and it would just fall off by itself. There’s an argument to be made that there was a concerted effort by the French who invaded Egypt and wanted to claim it as part of their growing empire.
That in order to demolish the facial features in any kind of distinctive recognition that would have this great monument be more African than European in its visit and its visible appearance, that was a form of power. It was a rewriting of history in the way that we can appreciate
In terms of what happens when people battle over monuments. I don’t know, civil war generals or folks that… New world conquerors. Anyway, additionally, using a Hegelian perspective, one is compelled to view our concepts of religion, history, philosophy, and culture, as being interwoven and tightly bound together.
As such, any attempt to draw tie in and distance oneself from the Hegel’s racist dismissal in the realm of religion leads any of us to run right smack into it elsewhere within an interlocking system of thought being and doing that comprises the essential nature of modern life. Taken to another level.
Even though every major philosophical movement of the past, half century at least, ranging from phenomenology and analytic philosophy to existentialism and post-structuralism has marked itself, its very existence by attacking Hegelianism, this still establishes his particular worldview as a necessary point of departure and definition. Therefore the establishment of a more African-centered perspective
That would supplant this Hegelian system of thought, Du Bois offers had no alternative but to tackle this head on, but yet there’s one great problem here. So even when we look at these scenes, and I’m sorry to have to force us to pay attention to this this early in the day,
But when you have this situation of Dylann Roof, the shooter at the Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, or young men who were gathered at the Unite the Right rally/riot in Charlottesville, Virginia in August of 2017, right? This belies so many of the notions
That white supremacy was a thing of the past, or it was only the older generation, but the new generation, the millennials, and gen Y, and Z, and whatever the next generation’s going to be named and claimed as, right? Oh, they get it, they’ve grown up in a better way. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The touch screen, Sesame Street generation, they play well with others now, like it’s all good. This is a painful reminder that the ghosts of Hegel still looms large. Okay. But even, in talking about that ghost, I want to also lift up shortly and briefly,
The fact that Du Bois himself was deeply indebted to Hegel. As I mentioned before, he had gone to Germany, he fell in love with the philosophical frameworks that Hegel offered in terms of the Hegelian dialectic thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Could he live and… Excuse me? Right. Right.
And Du Bois is a devoted Marxist as well. Yeah. So much of how we operate in the modern world is, as I’m suggesting informed by this. So speaking of the history of the Negro, just to use this as an example, Du Bois contends that, and I’m quoting here, “The history of this strife,
This longing to attain self-consciousness, personhood, to merge one’s double self into a better truer self. And this merging of the Black person would not Africanize America for America has too much to teach the world in Africa. The Black person would not bleach his or her own Negro soul
In a flood of white Americanism for he or she knows that the Negro blood has a message for the world. Black people want to be both Negro and American without being cursed and spit upon by their fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in their faces.”
This is him wrestling with that ghostly presence, that ghostly demon of the divided soul. Now in an interesting kind of way, part of, I’m sorry, this got cut off, but we’ve had in recent months and years, this debate about cancel culture and a history in which…
If we go from the very origins of the new world, some people call it exploration, I dare call it exploitation, but constantly a narrative of the conquistadors, telling the indigenous peoples of this continent that this is not your land. To the Puritans, those folks who landed on Plymouth Rock,
And then picked up Plymouth Rock and tried to crush other people’s heads with it, right? Daring to tell women in religious leadership and authority that they had no right to speak their truth, a divinely inspired truth. Slave masters, slave traders, slave drivers, who dare tell folks of African
And soon to be American descent that freedom was not theirs, it was not theirs to have or hold. It’s a little more than 60, 70 years ago, when folks who were trying to live their lives in the LGBTQ community were being told that they were pathological,
That they were diseased and defective human beings, by the academy, by medical science. To once again, because some hits just keep coming back. Now in a age of segregation, being told that people of color could never ever claim access or opportunity in spaces and places like Princeton Theological Seminary.
But then finally we come all the way now to full circle where those folks who’ve helped write the history are now saying that they’re being silenced, canceled, ignored, right? Not as if they don’t have engines and organs of mass communication talking to you, Fox News, right? I don’t know how millionaires and billionaires
Who have satellites, video streaming services or whatever, somehow find themselves left without a platform. Okay. But I’ll leave that alone. As I come to a close, I find this to be an interesting moment we’re living in. The hip hop artist, Kendrick Lamar, recently is put forth this album,
“Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.” And I think interestingly enough, he’s captured, especially for many folks in his age group as millennial folks who also gravitate towards hip hop, not only Grammy Award winning, but Pulitzer Prize winning, Kendrick Lamar spokes- I think a spokesperson for a generation.
He captures so much of this bitter conflict in a bold, and I think somewhat gut wrenching poignancy. Lamar gets to the core essence of what Du Bois call double-consciousness when he defines, I’m talking about Du Bois here, “A peculiar sensation, the sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,
Of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body.” Double-consciousness describes both then and now, so many centuries between them
Struggles of so many millions of African people who have journeyed from child slavery and colonization, to racial segregation, to the present conditions of quasi freedom, and yet facing things like mass incarceration and white supremacist terror. Framed by the hope and change once promised by two-term presidency of Barack Obama on one hand,
And the rise of Black Lives Matters protests on the other, the renowned author, Ta-Nehisi Coates, frames this particularly desperate dilemma this way, “How do I live free in this Black body?” As if channeling these questions into a fine musical and metaphysical melange, Lamar embraces aspects of Du Bois’s critical analysis
On faith, culture, and social action, within the deeply contemplative and unflinchingly introspective new album, which is evenly divided between the big steppers, the moral corruption of the culture. For those of you all not keyed into hip hop vernacular or vocabulary, steppers are in fact, they’re shooters,
They’re armed gunmen, they’re the folks who do violence, either for their own sake or on behalf of the gangs or the other entities that they’re attached to. He juxtaposes that lifestyle, that reality with Mr. Morale. The moral clarity of a Christian consciousness.
Though I do wrong, I know that there is the right way to be, the right way to live, the right thing to do, which will win out. And how do you live righteous in a world that rewards not just permits, but rewards our worst behavior? I think he does this in a way
That even someone who’s typically very stodgy like Dr. Du Bois would celebrate and commend. So as I wrap up, as I end, while Du Bois write this in many other statements with the sort of dramatic prose that one might only get away within the full bloom
Of his or her youthful exuberance and self-assuredness, it must also be recognized that these words about double-consciousness and combating the evils, the ghosts of Hegel, were written in a context in which the dominant political, economic and cultural and religious worldviews and systems of his time, were very much imposed upon the darker peoples
And nations around the globe, were all built to top the monumental lie that people of African descent lack both history and humanity. But thankfully, during his exceptionally long and productive lifetime, Du Bois left the plethora of interpretive resources pertaining to the study of the African diaspora
That could allow us to imagine the possibility of in my own reimagining of Audre Lorde’s words, “Using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, or better yet, helping us to build our own.” Thank you. So in the, like, five nanoseconds we have left. If we got any… Yes, please, come through.
Come forth. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But here’s the thing. And I totally and absolutely concur with what you’re dealing with. So many of us, and I touched on this a little bit on yesterday. Can we separate the creation from the creator? How can we keep the baby
And toss out the bath water, so to speak. Part of what we have to grapple with is that even as individuals or individuals as part of institutions, there is much that we have to reckon with. We can’t just have the concentrated benefits of the thing and not deal with the diffuse burdens
Or baggage of that thing. I think about Phyllis Trible, for those of you all, you should know “Texts of Terror.” She takes us through the Bible, especially these passages, and just a shout out to our preacher for the evening, Jeanette, you’re going lift up a kind of treacherous or thorny texts.
The Bible is littered with these things, but do we tear up, throw away, toss the Bible away? No. You have to interrogate that. There are many texts, right? I don’t go to most churches any Sunday morning to hear folks preaching from Philemon. Especially if a pastor’s trying to raise a healthy offering
Or trying to get more folks to come down the aisle, this is not a text you drag out. – [Audience] A lot of people are submitted to It. – Or going through it, yeah, yeah. And that’s the problem. So the issue is, if we want to just look at askance,
Or look the other way, or just kind of say, mum’s the word about the awfulness or the problematic issue that’s embedded in these theories and approaches that we use, these texts that we depend on. Hopefully the Bible isn’t just work-related reading material for you all, but it’s like, it’s actually something,
It’s actually a resource and a tool for daily living as well Okay. All right. Wow. Good to be in the room. Okay. (laughing) But the idea that, okay, well, yeah, Hegel had some awful ideas, but I can just hold my nose and just power through this, for each and every generation
Who’s comes fresh and new to this, much like each and every new soul that you’re bringing to Christ, you’re going to have to talk to them and help them negotiate and navigate. This text, there’s painful stuff here. I give you another prime example, and then I’ll…
I’ll let us do what we have to do. All of you all know, I’m hoping, fingers crossed, all of you all know, after the Sermon on the Mount, what is the miracle that Jesus performs? Besides just getting through the Sermon on the Mount. Okay, so, right, feeding the multitude, there you go.
But in most translations, I’m a little rusty, not a Biblicist but I play one on TV. Okay. (laughing) In most translations it says, “Jesus fed the multitude, some 5,000. Not counting women and children.” Okay. So just take that into our spirits here. The greatest miracle performed in the New Testament.
Now, I can also make the argument that maybe the miracle wasn’t just this magical transubstantiation of Jesus making fish sandwiches out of thin air, fish and loafs, right? Like, oh, fish sandwich. Okay, let’s just, the physics of our time. Maybe it wasn’t that,
But maybe it was the fact that taking the portion of food from this little child and the child giving all that the child had in an earnest and honest offering. Actually, got some grown folk to give up what they had, and maybe that’s a miracle
And that truly can be a greater form of alchemy than making something out of nothing. Okay. Back to the matter at hand. The fact that this describes, the fact that the folks who were transcribing and translating Jesus’s life lessons and legacy in real time, exempted at least half of the population
Because the women and the children didn’t count, literally and figuratively. What am I to do with that? How much greater could that act, at least in it’s still a miracle, have no doubt, but how much greater if we talk to and wrestle with, okay, the misinterpretation and the malintent
That happened at that time, how can we salvage the beauty of this thing while removing or reacting, responding righteously and rightfully to the problems of it. So, yeah, call Hegel out. Call Marx out, right? Call Du Bois out, right? I’m not trying to lift up one hero to take down a new hero,
But saying, okay, we need folks to tell the gospel truth, that’s the whole point of this… All right, but, thank you. No, no worries. Thank you.
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