“Dead End” trail sign in Fossil Springs, Arizona. Image credit: Flickr User Al_HikesAZ. CC BY-NC 2.0.
What does it mean to treat a piece of land as someone’s home? Can home be reduced to property? Can the sacred be owned? Do conceptualizations of land as wilderness exclude human inhabitants? Does the value of land vary according to whom it “belongs”? Should land be “productive” for human beings, and if so, how should the productive value of land be determined? How should the goods of the land—minerals, foodstuffs, natural materials—be valued, obtained, or preserved? The answers to these questions depend on how we understand land in general, as well as how we understand certain places in particular.
Texts from different disciplines—legal, religious, literary, ethnographic—offer competing theories of land. Land is often rendered as property and commodity, but it can also be protected or preserved as having cultural significance or as wilderness. The term “Mother Earth” suggests a kinship relationship between us humans and the land, and Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ refers to the land as our shared home. Can such divergent theories of land coexist or are they mutually exclusive? If these theories of land are competing and mutually exclusive—some argue the sacred cannot and should not be owned by humans; land that is cultivated as home is not wild anymore—which are most suited to address the ethical and political questions that present environmental crises pose to our collective well-being?
These questions touch on intimately cultural matters, evoking how different communities conceptualize themselves and how such conceptualizations relate to land. These questions are not new. Ancient Greek philosophers from Thales to Aristotle asked about the essence of the earth, and early modern political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau grounded their social contract theories in the valorization of agricultural cultivation and its relation to private property. The new politics imagined by Enlightenment thinkers paved the way for European projects of colonialism and capitalism, bringing all land everywhere under the power of possession. Alternatives to and critiques of colonial theories of land abound: from the kinship models of humans in relation to land found among many Indigenous peoples, to the agricultural commune movements of the nineteenth century; from the anti-imperial communisms of the twentieth century to the radical environmentalists of the twenty-first century.
Many contemporary philosophers, scholars, and authors share these concerns and propose scientific, political, and social critiques and solutions to our environmental crisis. These critical discourses and proposed solutions have at their basis a theory of land.
This symposium emerged from a working group funded by the Social Science Research Council. An interdisciplinary group of ten scholars—all interested in religion but also in geography, Indigenous studies, Black studies, Latin American studies, law, and anthropology—got together to discuss theories of land over the course of one year. We read texts of legal theory, environmental humanities, environmental science, political theory, and ethnography, and we discussed the question of what academics who care about land, the natural environment, and ultimately, about environmental justice, can bring to the table when what we do is theorize but what we need, what the land needs, is very practical.
The interdisciplinary collection of authors we have read together each offers a different theory of land. While author Amitav Ghosh argues that our environmental crisis is the result of our colonial view of the land as resource, Red River Métis environmental scientist Max Liboiron reminds us that we treat the land as resource, and that we assume access to Native land, not only when we pollute, but also when we recycle. While ethnographer Keisha-Khan Perry reminds us that it is often Black women who are at the forefront of land rights and racial justice struggles (in Brazil and elsewhere), and that we tend to invisiblize them, political theorist Robert Nichols argues that the notion of land rights is based on a settler colonial understanding of land as property. Geographer Nicolas Howe tells us that if we focus on our relationship with land as landscape, as something that we look at, we can learn as much about ourselves as we will about the land. What we learn will have both legal and religious implications. Ethnographer Marisol de la Cadena pushes us to consider the ethical and political implications of our interdependence with the land. Finally, Indigenous studies scholar Candace Fujikane offers a Kanaka Maoli idea of abundance, a radical approach to land in the face of capitalist notions of scarcity.
Though we came together to discuss theory, our conversations often revolved around method as well. What can religious studies scholars who care about land learn from other disciplines? And how can we learn from other disciplines without being extractive? It turns out that what is true about being in good relations with the land (you should not be extractive, which means that you shouldn’t treat the land as commodity) is also true about knowledge (you shouldn’t read texts only as sources to cite). So, can we learn things from other scholars, especially Indigenous scholars, without extracting knowledge from them? One thing some of us kept insisting on is that it is not theorists who can help make our land relations better; rather, it is communities on the ground who can help us theorize better: Black women fighting for land rights in Colombia, Ohlone peoples fighting for #LandBack in California, first-generation college students. We need to take these communities’ lived experiences into account when we work to decolonize the Catholic Church or the land-grab university. Indeed, we need to listen to the land itself—the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the Sonoran Desert—in order to theorize better, in order to live better.
Front page of May 4, 1968 edition of The Black Panther Party community news service. Image Credit: Flickr User Thomas Hawk. CC BY-NC 2.0.
When I teach classes on ethics to my graduate and seminary students, I routinely explain that I want them to include a respectful affirmation of human worth and dignity as a core dimension of the vision for ethical human communities that they espouse. I insistently tell them that such an affirmation should be explicit in the ethical leadership they offer in their professional and ministry settings. Then I usually punctuate my insistence with a slightly overdramatic warning that in actuality I will expect them to develop a much more substantive moral vision for human social relationships and ethical leadership practices than the minimal baseline requirement of a respectful affirmation of human worth and dignity. After reading Vincent W. Lloyd’s Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination I have come to realize the wrongheadedness in this warning to my students. Lloyd’s meticulous, in-depth exploration of the ideas and lived politics required for an authentic definition of dignity proves me shamefully mistaken in so dismissively and unilaterally claiming the insufficiency of an ethic that solely attends to human dignity. I am particularly drawn to Lloyd’s analysis of Black love as a crucial contributor to that definition of dignity and how it incorporates the politics of gender and sexuality, although I differ on his deployment of the ideas of Black nationalist Eldridge Cleaver as a useful resource for envisioning Black dignity.
I first want to note how this text startles me over and over again with its skillful art of interpretation of fundamental moral notions that range from benchmark concepts in social and philosophical ethics such as hope, family, and freedom, to its excavation of recent cultural theories of multiculturalism, Afropessimism, and rage. Always in service of illumining the meanings of Black dignity, these concepts are analytically contextualized within Black thought and activism. The conversation between theory and activist practice flows in a synergistic relatedness that demonstrates their complete interdependence and, at times, renders them indistinguishable from each other. A steady unraveling of the meaning of human dignity does not occur in this contextualized Black theory-practice treatment of constituent elements of human dignity. Lloyd veers away from a standard academic mode of engagement to which one might be accustomed. This form of engagement is usually composed of a series of intellectually dismembering critiques that are placed on display. It can leave the reader with the task of trying to knit all of the unraveled concepts back together in order to glimpse the whole of Black dignity as a static social good. Instead, Lloyd creatively reveals Black dignity as social movement work, more precisely, as Black freedom movement work.
The notion of love serves as one example of a core conceptualization that reveals Black dignity. Black love provides evidence of Black dignity, Lloyd argues. I have chosen the example of love because of its ubiquity both in my field of Christian ethics and in the language of activist leaders of several of the contemporary social justice movements I frequent. Declarations about the need for love are often asserted by those leaders as they try to respond to the dire consequences for so many in our communities of proliferating, hate-filled right-wing Christian political agendas. It is difficult to overstate my concern about the ways in which claims of love can function in U.S. public life to diminish attention to abuses of power and sustain a diversity of dangerous Christian hypocrisies, such as in situations of domestic violence, clergy sexual abuse, or idolatrous love of nation used as an excuse to legislatively terrorize transgender children.
In its dynamic reveals of Black dignity, Black love emerges as a struggle for freedom that Lloyd grounds in the message of Martin Luther King, Jr., “a prophet of love” (58), together with ideas from Black power advocates Eldridge Cleaver and George Jackson. Although it primarily focuses on these figures, the chapter on love also analyzes other approaches, such as those from Black feminists Audre Lorde and Alice Walker and Black nationalist activist Assata Shakur, as well as Black feminist bell hooks in other sections of the book. The text presents a range of examples from King accompanied by correctives of simplistic readings of him. The discussion of King enables us to focus on the ways in which Black love requires both the necessary constraints of justice and the primacy of struggling for freedom in order to further the process of Black dignity. I experience relief and deep gratitude for Lloyd’s emphasis on how love talk—especially when King is invoked—can drain away any authentic moral meaning and exasperatingly implant a false sense that political injustices are easily resolved if we just love one another. For King, as Lloyd stresses, justice functions as a necessary corrective dimension of love. The contrast between King’s Christian views and the Black power positions of Cleaver and Jackson are narrated as part of a particular historical context rather than represented as a destructive rivalry. For Cleaver and Jackson, “Black love requires a hard break from wrongly ordered loves” (66) that are rooted in anti-Black racist and capitalist domination.
I experience relief and deep gratitude for Lloyd’s emphasis on how love talk—especially when King is invoked—can drain away any authentic moral meaning and exasperatingly implant a false sense that political injustices are easily resolved if we just love one another.
It is the sexual politics of the “wrongly ordered loves” of Cleaver and others in that 1960s Black nationalist movement that I find extremely troubling. Lloyd bravely engages their sexual politics but may underestimate the misogyny there and how it undermines Black dignity. He points out Cleaver’s focus on White women and his love for his White woman attorney that are articulated in Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and written from his prison cell. As Lloyd explains, Cleaver’s confrontation with how his own loves were disordered involved shifting away from advocating the rape of White women as an important political tool against the White man. For me, Lloyd’s understanding of Cleaver’s assaults as disorder or wrongly ordered love is not a fitting description. I am mindful of how at the beginning of Soul on Ice Cleaver admits to perfecting his technique as a rapist by attacking Black women before he moved on to White women. There is also a long allegorical section at the conclusion of the book with admissions of brutality against Black women by an “Accused” Black man. Simultaneously, in this concluding allegorical section, Black women are depicted as culpable in the abuse they receive because of the multiple ways they supposedly provoke it, such as their alleged love of White men and concerted betrayals of Black men.
Although these examples are not included in Lloyd’s account of the ideas about Black love that Cleaver’s Soul on Ice contributes to Black dignity, they are relevant to the issues of gender, sexual politics, and freedom that he invites us to engage. I am deeply appreciative of the subtle yet profound repudiation of the dignity-denying racism of mass incarceration in how Lloyd compels us to think about freedom through the lenses of someone who is in prison. Cleaver’s perspective may exemplify the struggle for freedom from anti-Black racist and capitalist domination. But it also stresses a certain kind of domination of Black women by maintaining a Black androcentric worldview as freeing. While I must reiterate that Cleaver does eventually disavow rape, I find that I cannot stop thinking about the Black women on whom Cleaver practiced his tactics of rape. I am also stuck on my disdain for the idea that a love letter to a White woman lawyer addresses the impact of the rapes he carried out against White women after practicing on Black women. The significance of the misogyny in Soul on Ice lies not merely in what Cleaver fails to express about his impact on the lives of the women he sexually assaulted, or includes in his portrayal of women as blameworthy for intimate abuse. The consequences stretch beyond the words uttered in Cleaver’s gendered, homophobic rantings about “the Black homosexual” in his critiques of Black novelist and activist James Baldwin. The reinforcement of this misogyny must be interrupted because of the wide influence of this Black manifesto within Black political culture, history, and studies. Lloyd’s discussion of it as a resource for understanding how Black love informs Black dignity motivates me even as I strongly differ on this point. It reminds me of the urgency to interrupt the misogyny in certain iconic Black power paradigms that prove how the personal is so very political when the history of Black thought and activism are constructively engaged.
Cleaver’s perspective may exemplify the struggle for freedom from anti-Black racist and capitalist domination. But it also stresses a certain kind of domination of Black women by maintaining a black androcentric worldview as freeing.
Lloyd’s intellectually provocative and complex social analysis of love will not allow me to stop probing and revisiting an understanding of how freedom practices inform Black dignity movement work. How do we count the gender justice costs in the struggles of that movement work? More importantly, when do we identify some of those costs as too high to be included in the process of how Black love constitutes Black human dignity? These questions represent the kinds of opportunities to wrestle with deep and contextualized meanings of human dignity that I am now excited to centralize in my teaching of ethics. Indeed, I look forward to addressing their wide-ranging gender and sexuality implications in my classes, particularly with my Black and Brown students in a state prison for men where I routinely teach. We often discuss moral conceptualizations in Black thought and activism. Undoubtedly, as we do so, there are opportunities to experiment with how freedom from domination might be embodied in our classroom interactions. Honestly, however, I must admit that I am not sure of the precise steps to take to authentically claim Black human dignity as Black freedom movement work at the center of our theory-practice learning in that male prison space. But I know that the students and I are committed to figuring it out, and I am methodologically inspired by Lloyd’s Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination in such a pursuit.
Traci C. West is a scholar-activist serving as James W. Pearsall Professor of Christian Social Ethics and African American Studies at Drew University Theological School (NJ). Her teaching, research, and activism focus on gender, racial, and sexuality justice, particularly related to gender violence. In addition to many articles and book chapters, she is the author of Solidarity and Defiant Spirituality: Africana Lessons on Religion, Racism, and Ending Gender Violence (2019) and Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women's Lives Matter (2006). She has also been appointed to the Professor Extraordinarius program of the Institute for Gender Studies in the College of Human Sciences, University of South Africa.
Signs from the Apartheid era indicating separate entrances for “Whites” and “Non-Whites” in Johannesburg, South Africa. Via Flickr User DJM photos. CC BY 2.0.
As a scholar of religion and politics interested in issues of race, religion, and gender, I found a compelling conceptual distinction in Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination that I believe can be useful beyond the United States (US) context from which Lloyd writes. This is the distinction between oppression and domination. In a subtle swipe (intentional or not) at Iris Marion Young’s “Five Faces of Oppression” Lloyd notes that “domination points to an ontological condition, rooted in its primal scene, whereas concepts like oppression, suffering, exploitation, injustice, and marginalization point to ontic conditions, specific harms in the world” (13). This is not to say that the ontic is therefore immaterial, but that we can’t rely only on it to point to the complex ways in which Black people continue to suffer under the regime of anti-Blackness. Consequently, Lloyd’s reading of the Black Lives Matter movement through a concern with the ontological dimension of domination as “an expansive apparatus” serves to demonstrate that anti-Blackness persists in the “ideas, habits, feelings, institutions, and laws” of American society (12). However, I would add that this is not only the case in the US, but everywhere, including places where the majority of the population is Black. That is, anti-Blackness is a borderless ontological condition that is bound by the geography of Whiteness to which even people of Color (including Black people) sometimes subscribe. Thus, in supporting the book’s big claim that the struggle for Black Dignity is the pursuit of a denied status that can only be realized through the struggle to achieve it (5), Lloyd critiques not only White multiculturalism but also the politics of Black respectability. In Lloyd’s view, the struggle to achieve Black Dignity cannot be fulfilled through the individualistic and myopic politics of multiculturalism and respectability. That is, the antidote to this form of politics is collective action.
In South Africa, where I work as an academic and which is also one of the two places I call home (the other being Canada), there is a common refrain from the White enclave (both liberal and conservative) that Black South Africans should stop blaming apartheid for their current condition since we have had freedom for over twenty-six years. From Lloyd’s perspective, the conditions of anti-Blackness continue beyond the overt system of apartheid in South Africa precisely because the ontological conditions that perpetuate anti-Black racism have continued unabated. Bouts of overt racism in the country, according to the logic of domination, are only more visible manifestations of the deeper reality of marginalization. According to Lloyd, these examples of overt racism illustrate is the fact that “anti-Black racism is not just about bad choices, or about people who failed their diversity exam. It is at the center of everything, for everyone” (xi). This means that Black people everywhere, everyday are being disappeared from spaces where their dignity is not recognized, even when they try to play by the books and be “respectable.” Whether it is at a school, university sports field, corporate office, public park, restaurant, farm, or private home, to name just a few, to be Black is to be denied dignity, full stop. Moreover, anti-Black racism is not just about Black people, but about everyone because we all participate in domination.
Anti-Blackness is a borderless ontological condition that is bound by the geography of Whiteness to which even people of Color (including Black people) sometimes subscribe.
As such, in the context of the US, according to Lloyd, what the Black Lives Matter movement has chosen to do in response to this denial of dignity is to channel Black Rage and Black Love, redefine Black Family, and use Black Magic, all in the pursuit of Black Futures. Lloyd organizes the chapters of his book around these topics. Of particular interest is the observation that, instead of hope, “those who struggle for Black justice today talk about Black Futures, a label that joins a sense of the anti-Black world’s demise and the imperative to imagine radically new ways of living together” (96). While Black Futures might sound utopian, their orientation is anything but; fueled, as it is, by the rage of ending domination and instituting the end of the world. In the South African context, one is reminded of Steve Biko’s critique of liberal assimilation, especially the assumption that nothing is really wrong with South Africa except for the lack of integration of everyone into the same system. That is, colonialism and apartheid were merely the bad fruits of what should have been Black people’s good encounter with White European civilization. From the perspective of the liberal enclave, apartheid, in particular, hindered the supposed Edenic system of governance that should have been the result of European modernity brought to Africa. Western modernity was a good thing, but it was the Afrikaans White nationalists who spoiled everything. Therefore, all that needed to happen, instead, was to remove the bad ailments of White nationalism. Of course, this view failed to account for how the whole civilizational mission of Europe had obliterated Black South Africans out of humanity—out of dignity.
Therefore, for Biko, Black Consciousness was the answer to the domination assailing Black people from the sides of both the conservative and liberal enclaves, which treated Black people paternalistically and without dignity. Hence, when Chumani Maxwele threw human feces at the statue of Cecil Rhodes on March 9, 2015, it clearly demonstrated the indignity that Black people of South Africa feel they are being subjected to each and every day; White arrogance everywhere. While Maxwele might be singled out for his act that spawned a whole set of events, now labelled Fallism, he did not act alone. He was supported by a whole community of Black students, scholars, activists, and White allies who, although out of view, were very much central to the enactment of the shared desire to be free from the monumental White arrogance represented by the statue of Rhodes, among many others, thus pointing us back to Lloyd’s argument concerning the importance of collective action in the pursuit of dignity.
For Lloyd, “if hope cannot be shared, it is mere desire, what one individual covets” (103). Thus, the only way for Black people to achieve freedom and, consequently, dignity, is by acting collectively. The Fallist movements in South Africa (#RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall) were an example of such collective action, including what it can achieve now and in the future. This collective action is also what Biko called for when he and his colleagues challenged White liberalism in all its forms and showed how it was beholden to the same anti-Black domination model as its conservative counterpart. In calling for self-reflection on the part of Black people regarding their own condition of consciousness about being dominated, Biko demonstrated the kind of dignity that Lloyd points out in relation to some key figures of the Black American Tradition, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglas, whom he wrestles from the grip of Black respectability and White multiculturalism.
A protester wearing a Black Lives Matter mask outside the Hennepin County Courthouse in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota as the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin begins. Image courtesey of Flickr User Lorie Shaull. CC BY 2.0
As is evident from this reflection on Black Dignity thus far, there are several intersecting themes and concerns that the book covers. At times, it feels like the connections between chapters are neither strong nor well clarified (the logic of beginning with rage and ending with magic is never clarified); and that even some of the differences in ideological orientation are too stark and binary in their articulation (that between philosophers and social movement organizers, for example). However, in reading the book with patience, what appear as weaknesses actually reflect very principled methodological choices that remain true to the complex reality of pursuing Black dignity on the ground, and in a way that speaks to Lloyd’s engagement with the activists of the Black Lives Matter movement. That is, the struggle against domination and the pursuit of Black dignity are multiple in nature, and sometimes these struggles coalesce with other struggles, and sometimes these struggles bump heads. Lloyd makes this point evident in the ways in which he draws on contrapuntal examples of key Black leaders in the American context who might not seem to fit together (Martin Luther King, Jr. and Samuel R. Delany, for example), but when read together can be shown to be struggling against domination and concerned with the pursuit of Black dignity. For the reader, this means that in making sense of these struggles, including how they speak to domination, one has to make connections in a way that resonates with one’s reality. In other words, one has to engage in a process of discernment—i.e., struggle with oneself and others in line with the book’s argument that Black dignity arises out of struggle. In the case of King, Jr. versus Delany, for example, this means one has to appreciate their differences and understand their struggles contextually while embracing their thought collectively as part of the greater movement towards Black dignity. Moreover, if one is really committed to freedom and not domination, some stark binaries are necessary in order to name that which kills Black Dignity and affirm that which builds such dignity.
The only way for Black people to achieve freedom and, consequently, dignity, is by acting collectively.
In the end, Lloyd leaves us with a morsel of truth in classical philosophical style, but without the pretense of having given the Truth. And this is the observation that the pursuit of Black dignity may appear inchoate, confusing, tragic, and seemingly only reiterating that our struggle is in vain. But, as Lloyd writes: “Black people struggle, and this struggle is our dignity” (xiii). This statement is not to be taken lightly, because in its embracing of a negative, it affirms a key aspect of what the book highlights: “Black humanity and dignity requires Black political will and power” (21), a “new moral and political stance” (22). Such a stance is about foregrounding the precision of domination that has been perfected in anti-Blackness, even while we hold true the argument of interlocking systems of oppression. We do this because we have the most clarity about anti-Blackness the world over (14). Anti-Blackness informs not only the logic of racism globally (finding expression in places as varied as Brazil, India, South Africa, Tunisia, and Ukraine, to name just a few where expressions of anti-Black racism have recently surged), but also domination broadly.
However, this argument raises an important question for solidarity and collective action: Does this mean that for any other oppressed group, anti-Blackness is still the normative primal scene of domination? Here one can raise the issue of class, gender, and sex difference (amongst many others) as one of many primal scenes of domination for a specific set of people. However, I think that this would be to misunderstand Lloyd’s argument in the same way as those who misunderstand the Black Lives Matter movement as problematic because, in their view, all lives matter. Despite claims of equality and the dignity of all people, Black people continually find themselves in indignity, even where they constitute the majority. This can’t be mere coincidence, but an ontologically driven reality that requires that we rethink the dismissal of race politics as foundational to modern politics. That is, and this is a provocative claim: for Black people, collective action for dignity starts from our racialization. As those who are dominated, we are best positioned to articulate strategies and radical imaginations of anti-domination; collective anti-Black resistance against domination doesn’t have to be the terminal point, but it has to be a point of departure.
Siphiwe Dube is a Senior Lecturer and former HoD in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is an author of numerous interdisciplinary articles and book chapters (and also supervises) on a range of topics covering African politics and religion, decoloniality, feminisms, post-colonial literature, race, religion and masculinities, religion and identity politics, religion and popular culture, and transitional justice. His current projects focus on African political theology, the religious New Right in post-apartheid South Africa, and a multi-institutional collaboration on rethinking liberation theologies. He is a United World College (Atlantic College) alumnus; a former NRF-DST Scarce Skills Development Postdoctoral Research Fellow; a former Africa Fellow at IASH, University of Edinburgh; former Senior Fellow at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa at the University of Ghana, and currently a Pan-African Scientific Research Council Fellow and South Africa’s National Research Foundation (NRF) rated scholar.
Minneapolis, Minnesota, May 1, 2015. Minneapolis students walked out of school and met at Martin Luther King Jr. park for a protest against police killings of black people. Photo Credit: Fibonacci Blue. Via Flickr. CC BY-2.0.
Vincent W. Lloyd’s Black Dignity: The Struggle against Domination theorizes Black Lives Matter intellectual thought as activists’ pursuit of Black dignity and the ending of domination through a commitment to “dignity as struggle.” In this post, I present four observations about the work: (1) my reading of Black Dignity, (2) reflection on some insights and tensions of the book, (3) discussion of struggle as dignity in relation to Black religious consciousness, and (4) a view of the book’s challenge to readers.
I. One Reading of Black Dignity
Lloyd asserts that “struggle against racial domination is the paradigm of struggle—and Black dignity is the paradigm of dignity” (14). He contends that Black struggle is the preeminent form of struggle against domination. The will of Black people to struggle against the persistence of crushing anti-Blackness expresses dignity; and hence Black struggle is Black dignity. The emergence of this view in #BlackLivesMatter brought a new Black politics and a new political vocabulary. The vocabulary—particularly Black Rage, Black Love, Black Family, Black Futures, and Black Magic—reflects contemporary Black passion for freedom and overcomes the neutralizing, distracting language and busy work of “diversity, multiculturalism, racism, and nonviolence” (viii).
Black Dignity analyzes continuities and discontinuities of pre-#BlackLivesMatter activism with the current movement to identify the usefulness of ancestors’ practices. Selectivity in determining what is useful indicates a connection between intellectual thought and activism, revealing a BLM spirituality of reciprocating critical reflection and practice. The spirituality of Black dignity is a way of living; it seeks congruity of the world with BLM’s continually developing inner visions. Selecting the useful also is a signal of BLM activists’ engagement with diverse spiritual and religious traditions, which continues the legacy bricolage work in Afro-Atlantic ancestors’ religiosity.
II. Some Reflections
The approach of analyzing activists’ words and practices to discern their intellectual contributions is an important methodological practice. In addition to presenting a philosophical reading of BLM intellectual perspectives, Black Dignity offers a survey of the variety of ways BLM participants practice dignity as struggle. Accompanying the new intensity are new practices that centralize aesthetics, imagination, and more as activism. Lloyd is weary of identifying specific goals because ontic goals distract from ontological practice, tend toward reform, and may close or distort visions of the final, not yet imagined, although impossible to achieve, future end to all domination.
The spirituality of Black dignity is a way of living; it seeks congruity of the world with BLM’s continually developing inner visions.
Black Dignity notes women’s prominent BLM leadership and parallels that recognition by including Black women scholars to theorize BLM commitments and practice. In addition to others, Black Dignity draws deeply on Audre Lorde to explicate Black rage and to affirm Black family structures that break apart the nuclear family as the norm for familial intimacy and to release legitimate Black family from patriarchy and respectability’s debilitating restrictions. Some themes of Black Dignity—the quasi-eschatological emphasis on ontological struggle toward an impossibility; the comparability of domination throughout the world from the beginning of time with the traditional western conception of sin; the privileging of “creeds” for establishing Black religious norms—may cause some readers to liken Black Dignity’s theoretical constructions to Christian doctrine. In the latter case, Black Dignity’s argument that Black struggle against domination (actions based on political orientation) contradicts its presentation of Black liberation theology: “This tendency to focus on actions and political orientations rather than creeds left Black liberation theology vulnerable to co-optation during the era of multiculturalism.” (125)
III. Struggle as Dignity and Black Religious Consciousness
There is a similarity in the specific spirituality animating BLM struggle and Black religious consciousness. I understand the origin of Black spirituality to be the legacy of enslaved Africans’ identities as persons in communities that made personhood possible, ubuntu. During the Middle Passage, Africans remembered themselves as persons in communities and encountered that memory as a sense of the sacred during unimaginable horrors. In Ellipsis…The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long, Long suggests, in their imaginations, Africans turned toward the sacred as a defining reality other than the total domination of being chained as not-humans at the bottoms of commercial ships.[1] The intellectual labor of remembering and maintaining conceptions of themselves as persons is central to Black religious consciousness, a disposition sustained and enacted in every objection, every form of resistance, every melody, thought, or gesture that expresses Black personality. Religious consciousness is a sense of the self as inviolable and an arbiter of values in the world, including awareness of one’s deep concerns and ultimate affections. Black religious consciousness includes an oppositional disposition and actions related to anti-Black discourses and practices that inhibit being Black persons in the world. Without and within Black religions—in blues lyrics and performances, in Civil Rights Movement organizing, in objection to the back of the bus, in marching through vicious crowds to integrate schools, in the communal rescue of persons needing support, in refusals to be blamed, in wearing braids and beads—Black people enact the personal and communal virtue of Black religious consciousness every day.
Black Lives Matter mural in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Black Dignity’s presentation of enacting dignity now by relying on “divine power…manifesting inside” resonates with the sense of the sacred in everyday Black religious consciousness. Black Dignity’s use of Lorde to emphasize the foretaste of freedom and power experienced during struggle with others in love also resonates with William R. Jones’s humanistic theology that affirms the energy generated through intense collaborative action and with the esprit de corps of the Black religious consciousness that many Black women drew on and cultivated during the Civil Rights Movement. Some womanist theologians and Black feminist scholars theorize this often-overlooked relational work of Black women as invisible dignity and unshouted courage (Katie Cannon), an ethic of intragroup social responsibility (Marcia Riggs), and enslaved Black women’s labor of care (Angela Davis). Some Black women religious scholars draw on Alice Walker’s term womanist (identifying courageous, willful, responsible, in charge, serious behaviors) to name their work. Like Black theologies, womanist and other liberation theologies emerged amidst and after mid-20th century resistance movements across the globe to analyze that resistance work. Similar to Lloyd theorizing BLM intellectual thought, much liberationist scholarship is drawn from activism and offers theoretical insights for living faithfully against the grain of domination.
Black religious consciousness includes an oppositional disposition and actions related to anti-Black discourses and practices that inhibit being Black persons in the world. Without and within Black religions Black people enact the personal and communal virtue of Black religious consciousness every day.
Although sometimes over-determined by Christian traditions, liberation thought of the late mid-20th century also pushed down walls of the dominating Christian orthodoxies that purportedly secularized the world, weaponized syncretism to forbid engaging Indigenous traditions, forbade full human communion with Muslims and persons in other traditions, and required respectability practices. Black women excelled in challenging these orthodoxies. Their religious consciousness in historic and contemporary activism and literature often enacts Black women’s religious consciousness as the living-against-the-grain required to pursue free, full, flourishing human life. Related to the dis-ease of Black religious consciousness with dividing life into sacred and secular realms, some contemporary womanist scholarship rejects separation of flourishing human life from living against the grain of domination. This is Tricia Hersey’s assertion in Rest Is Resistance. There is resonance, again, in Black Dignity’s description of flourishing in struggle.
IV. The Kind of Life One Lives
Black Dignity’s assertion that anti-Black racism “is at the center of everything, for everyone” offers an opening to reflect on the kind of life one lives. At a time when grab-all-you-can by any means available is stridently normalized as exemplary, Black Dignity provides a different view of the exemplary: Dignity is the use of intellectual and physical capacities for an ontological purpose. In a world structured by domination, living purposefully requires intense, conscious action with others fueled by rage, love, and family to imagine the end of domination. Although there is no road map—”the deepest kind of flourishing we can experience … cannot be achieved by following certain moral rules or copying certain moral habits” (159)—Black Dignity’s logical reasoning invites us to adopt its view of living. Identifying struggle as accompanying “the deepest kind of flourishing” possible centralizes a type of human thriving that is purposeful, encourages creativity, affirms being in touch with one’s passions (rage and love), takes account of human embodiment as both frail and a host of divine power, and as something that exists in community. If the proposition is accepted that domination has so colored visions of the world that most human time is spent accommodating domination, a central task of the commitment to being free humans is to change that worldview. Domination’s overwhelming hold means, as Lloyd writes, “To see and act rightly, to realize our humanity, we must believe we will be free and struggle to achieve our freedom” (104). The emphasis on “struggle” clarifies the idea of belief as something other than hope (for pie in the sky), because living a life of struggle is directed by the belief that there can be freedom and the sense of the future as intertwined with passionate pursuit of that to which one is ultimately committed.
[1] See Charles H. Long, Ellipsis…The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long, 280. Long writes: “The Middle Passage—chained enslaved Africans in the holds of several ships of every Atlantic maritime nation—is never forgotten by the Africans, neither during slavery nor in freedom. The watery passage of the Atlantic, that fearsome journey, that cataclysm of modernity, has served as a mnemonic structure, evoking a memory that forms the disjunctive and involuntary presence of these Africans in the Atlantic world. From this perspective, religion is not a cultural system, much less rituals or performance, nor a theological language, but an orientation, a basic turning of the soul toward another defining reality.”
Rosetta E. Ross is a professor of religious studies at Spelman College. She pioneered scholarship on religion and U.S. Black women’s activism and was an early proponent of womanist theology. At Spelman, Ross transformed the study of religion from exclusive focus on Christian theology to a diverse religious studies curriculum. Her research explores religious consciousness in Black women’s social action, and Africana women and religions. Author of Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights, co-author of The Status of Racial and Ethnic Clergywomen in the United Methodist Church (with Jung Ha Kim), co-editor of Unraveling and Reweaving Sacred Canon in Africana Womanhood(with Rose Mary Amenga-Etego), Ross is co-PI (with Monique Moultrie) on the Henry Luce Foundation funded Garden Initiative for Black Women’s Religious Activism. Her current research project is Black Religious Consciousness and Women in the NAACP, 1927 to 1979. Ross is founding editor of the peer-reviewed e-journal Black Women and Religious Cultures.
A young man is taking into police custody following during a protest against a parade in Jerusalem on “the Day of Unification” during which anti-Arab slogans were chanted by marchers. Via Flickr User Tal King. CC BY-NC 2.0.
The history of human civilization is a history of domination. Perhaps it began with Cain and Abel, or maybe the serpent and Eve, but in any case, it has continued ever since. Human conflict is almost always rooted in the struggle of those who are dominated against their domination, and then against those who are against domination. To be dominated is not only to be without rights, or to be denied goods and services; it is to live under domination and to be robbed of dignity. It is an erasure of selfhood and self-worth. This underlies the argument in Vincent Lloyd’s excellent new book Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination. Lloyd lays out the way Blackness and anti-Blackness in America, from Civil Rights to Black Nationalism, from Afropessimism to Black Optimism, all constitute a struggle to achieve dignity where dignity is denied—and for Black people in America dignity is always denied, even when a Black man becomes president.
Dignity and Respectability
At the outset, Lloyd draws an important distinction between dignity and respectability. “Respectability,” he argues, “is the illusion of dignity.” “Ordinary language often treats ‘dignity’ and ‘respectability’ as interchangeable, yet from the movement perspective, dignity is laudable, respectability indictable. The latter connotes an attempt to perform for a white audience, fulfilling white fantasies of how ‘good’ Black people look and act” (5). Lloyd brings an example of the unconscious way that Joe Biden, as a vice presidential candidate, defined his soon-to-be boss, a Black man, as “clean and articulate” (5). That is, respectable (from the White man’s gaze). That is not dignity. Liberalism, Lloyd argues, and I agree, does not really grant Black people dignity, even as it may aspire to grant them respectability, and even equality. This is why Martin Luther King Jr. was so suspicious of White liberals whose “love of Blacks” may have been, even inadvertently, a “false love.” Lloyd writes, “The love that some of those subject to domination purport to have for the things most associated with their own domination may also prove a false love” (64). One can love those one dominates, but such love does not grant dignity, it rather controls access to society. This is because dignity is a revolutionary struggle against domination, and thus against society, which is why Lloyd provocatively claims that Black Lives Matter (or BLM) does not emerge from multiculturalism but is a rejection of it. As Lloyd sees it, “multiculturalism arose out of a desire to institutionalize—and, consciously or not, contain and control—struggles for racial justice…it is about managing diversity by reducing political claims about domination to claims about the need to recognize and celebrate diverse cultures” (18). It can be likened to the term “civilized,” which Jewish Studies scholar Harry Wolfson noted is not to be legitimized as much as to be “Christianized.”
Black Dignity, Domination, and Zionism
Reading Black Dignity I kept coming back to the question of Zionism and Israel/Palestine, which is a very different conflict. It is one that also revolves around, as most conflicts do, domination. Zionism arguably began as a movement against domination: the domination of Jews in Europe who no longer wanted to live under the aegis of a White Christian society that dominated them, often brutally. Zionism was one answer to the “Jewish Question,”—as Theodore Herzl famously wrote in his 1897 essay “The Jewish Question”—which on one reading is a question of perennial domination, the plight of the unassimilable other. In Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Immanuel Kant referred to the unassimilable Jews as “the Palestinians among us” (100). So, Zionism was, on this reading, a revolt against European Christian domination. And by escaping the “Jewish Question” they created the “Arab Question,” and many early Zionists knew that when they coined the term “the Arab Question.” That is, by becoming liberated from domination, they became dominators. Was this inevitable? My answer is an equivocal yes, except among very few such as Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt, as well as others such as Hayyim ben Kiki (1889-1936), who understood the dangers of domination, and warned Zionist leaders against it, to no avail.
Having said that, the early Zionists in Palestine were the distinct minority, and domination is often, but not always, the privilege of the majority (the classic counter example being South Africa and colonialism more generally). And yes, as Jonathan Graubart notes in his new book Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism, “long before the Biltmore declaration (1942) or even the Peel Commission (1936), the Zionist movement had declared and implemented a set of policies aimed to bring Jewish predominance and diminish the status of the majority indigenous population…. The leaders’ primary concern was Jewish predominance, not a shared space with Palestinians” (21). Domination which required a demographic project of becoming a majority through settler colonial mechanisms, and not equal co-existence, may not have been operational in pre-state Mandate Palestine but it was arguably aspirational, as Alon Confino recently argued in his essay “The Nakba and the Zionist Dream of an Ethnonational State.” Dominance needn’t be violent, in many cases it is institutional and structural, it is the way a population with power treats a population under its power. And yet, as Lloyd riffs on Lauryn Hill’s 2012 song “Black Rage,” “at its heart [domination] is about violence to souls, about making a human believe she is actually less than human, about making domination seem right and natural” (40). In the language of Afropessimism, borrowing a term from sociologist Orlando Peterson, it is about “social death.”
Naturalizing Domination
Domination often hides behind the veil of “security,” making it “unfortunate” but “necessary.” This is true of American anti-Blackness. Here we can think of Black men being seen as threatening to White women (or their White husbands) in the Jim Crow south, the urban ghetto as a hotbed of crime—potential and actual—that required increased measures of policing and security. In Israel/Palestine domination is programmatically justified by security. But of course, there is both a real concern and a circularity to the argument. Security is a subjective category, it depends upon who is defining an imminent threat and who is able to question it. And domination itself procures the rage that makes the dominated more threatening. One need only view the film The Battle of Algiers to see how this plays out in horrific ways under a regime of domination. And as James Baldwin said in a 1961 interview, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time—and part of the rage is this: It isn’t only what is happening to you. But it’s what’s happening all around you and all of the time in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference, indifference of most white people in this country, and their ignorance.” Insubordination doesn’t exist before subordination, it is produced by it. The real question about the Intifada that broke out in Israel in 1989, after twenty years of occupation, and forty years since the Nakba, is not why it happened, but why it took so long to happen.
Security is a subjective category, it depends upon who is defining an imminent threat and who is able to question it. And domination itself procures the rage that makes the dominated more threatening.
Lloyd tells us, “Domination tells a false story, and it contaminates our perception to make that story seem true” (159). As I see it, Zionism as it is being lived today in Israel and promoted in the diasporas, largely tells a false story. Or, perhaps, it is a distortion of a true story. Zionism may have been a necessary solution to an intractable problem of European Jewry. But a solution to domination is not domination. Many early Zionists understood the precarity of the “Arab Question,” or perhaps today we might call it the “Palestinian Question,” even claiming that the success or failure of Zionism depended on how it was addressed. But the “Arab Question” is hardly talked about these days. Domination has become so institutionalized and structurally embedded in Israeli society that the question itself has all but disappeared. There still may be a question about how to deal with, manage, or resolve the Israel/Palestine conflict, but the “Arab Question” within Zionism has largely become moot. Zionism as lived in the state of Israel is a form of Jewish domination, even in benevolent terms. Among many Israeli Jews, there is no “Arab Question” anymore.
Reframing the Question of Zionism
In the early days of Zionism there was a category called “the good Arab.” The good Arab, not unlike America’s Uncle Tom, was not “good” because they were unthreatening but good because they succumbed to domination. As Hillel Cohen writes in his 2010 book Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948-1967, “The aspiration was to reshape Arab consciousness and identity in accordance with the hegemonic Israeli worldview by controlling society’s political discourse. Through its [Arab] loyalists, the state sought to indoctrinate Arab schoolchildren with the Zionist narrative…to promote obedience to the authorities, and to challenge non-Israeli national identities” (3). The “good Arab” is one who accepts Jewish domination and even protects it through collaboration.
Critics of Zionism often use negative terms to describe the relationship between the Jew and the Palestinian in Israel: Jewish superiority, Jewish supremacy, Jewish chauvinism, ethnonationalism, etc. Defenders of Zionism often cry foul, claiming that these terms are derogatory, overly polemical, and misleading. I too have occasionally used such terms and I think they apply to some extent, knowing their complexity but also frustrated with how to describe a reality of systemic injustice. This is one reason I found Lloyd’s book so helpful. Lloyd seeks to re-frame the question of anti-Blackness in America outside the common descriptors such as White supremacy, systemic racism, etc. He does not deny that they point toward something real, but also acknowledges that they do little to move the majority toward a real confrontation with the injustices the US perpetuates. Choosing the language of domination and dignity, less volatile but no less cutting, offers a different way to assess the reality in which we live.
Zionism as lived in the state of Israel is a form of Jewish domination, even in benevolent terms. Among many Israeli Jews, there is no ‘Arab Question’ anymore.
I think that domination and dignity are also useful terms to describe the situation of Palestinians in Israel. To illustrate the nature of domination of the Arab minoritized in Israel, Asa’d Ghanem in his 2010 essay “State and Minority in Israel: The Case of Ethnic State and the Predicament of its Minority,” offers a helpful distinction. The more common approach to the minoritized Arab in Israel, certainly among many Jewish Israelis and many scholars, is what Ghanem calls the “normal development approach.” As he writes, “this approach describes the development of the Palestinians in Israel as resembling that of other minorities in the Western democracies” (438). That is, since 1948 Palestinian Israelis have developed along two lines: Palestinization through an increasing identification with their belonging to the Palestinian people; and Israelization through their experience as Israeli citizens. In short, he states that many scholars suggest that Arabs in Israel are going through a process of normal development, including ethnic identity formation and integration into a wider society.
Ghanem contests this claim to suggest another approach, what he calls the “predicament development approach.” On this approach, Palestinian Israelis are not faced with a normal case of minority integration but are faced with “state policy that is rooted in the ‘settler society’ behavior, which characterizes the Jewish majority views and the state policy toward the Arab citizens” (444). In short, Palestinian Israelis confront state policies of domination that actually prevent, or at least dissuade, Israelization (unless they are willing to succumb to such domination). This pushes them further toward Palestinization, which can sometimes lead to radicalization and, even if it doesn’t, does lead to a sense of permanent marginalization, which is different than simply minority status. To those who would note that Palestinian Israelis enjoy increasing success in Israeli society, I would counter that may be so, but that is about respectability, and not dignity. It may be true that many Palestinian Israelis enjoy better lives than their Arab counterparts in other Arab countries. But that again is about respectability and not dignity. There is no dignity granted to a population living under domination; and domination remains the state policy in Israel, even codified into law in the 2018 Nation State Law that claimed that Israel is the state of the “Jewish people.” That is, Palestinian Israelis can live in Israel, they can be citizens of Israel, but Israel is not their country, it is the country of the Jewish people.
The Limits of Protest
This brings us to the Spring 2023 protests in Israel. The impending judicial “reforms” in Israel have ignited massive protests. This is because these reforms would erode the autonomy of the judiciary and thus the very existence of democracy. All of this is true and laudable and I support the protests. What the protests are not about though, or certainly not primarily about, is systemic Jewish domination. There may be many good reasons why the protest organizers chose to sideline the occupation; for example, their desire to create the broadest coalition possible. But in doing so they have chosen to leave the status quo of domination in place. Hopefully, these protests will pivot from the erosion of democracy for Jewish Israelis, to the limited democracy of Palestinian Israelis, and then to the lack of democracy for Palestinians living in the West Bank and those under blockade in Gaza. The hazard of such a pivot is that the protests may get much smaller because a true protest against the erosion of democracy will be a protest against a society of domination, what some Israelis might simply call “majoritarianism,” but what are more accurately described in my view as state polices of Jewish domination, even if enacted benevolently.
There is no dignity granted to a population living under domination; and domination remains the state policy in Israel, even codified into law in the 2018 Nation State Law that claimed that Israel is the state of the ‘Jewish people.’
Confronting domination, Lloyd argues, echoing Critical Race Theorists and many in the BLM movement, calls for societal revolution. Domination is not incrementally erased, in fact, incrementalism is often the enemy of the battle against domination. This is clear in Lloyd’s criticism of multiculturalism as a tool for muting calls for justice by regulating diversity. In this way, the protests, as constructive as they are, have exposed a deeper fissure in Israeli society, namely that Israel is a society where the Jewish majority structurally dominates the Arab minority in ways it is not willing to abandon. It is willing to grant respectability to the Arab, but not dignity. Of course, Jewish “majority” is itself a complicated term since it all depends on how one counts and how one relegates territory. If one includes the occupied territories and includes all its residents, most of whom are under Israeli sovereignty (perhaps excluding Gaza which is more complicated) then the Jewish majority largely collapses or is certainly greatly diminished. However, majoritarianism has been from the early days of Zionism the sine qua non of Zionism’s success and Israel functions politically and militarily as a majority even as its claim of majoritarianism is itself a product of domination.
What the protests show is that the “Arab Question” and the “good Arab” are largely things of the past. In fact, the protests are not really about the Palestinian at all even as we do see anti-occupation signs scattered throughout the crowd. They are largely about democracy for the Jew, which of course will impact the Arab. The settler state that has cultivated and continues to cultivate brutal domination over the Palestinian Israeli sector is now turning against the liberals, as should have been predicted. One should also mention the Mizrahi Left who have their own claims against the domination of the Ashkenazi-dominated government which, while not as extreme as it was during the Wali Salib protests in 1959 or the founding of the Israeli Black Panthers in the early 1970s, still remains a fissure in the Israeli social fabric.
The liberals are those who do not quite contest domination—they do not contest Zionism as an ideology of domination, which I believe it is—but seek respectability (yet not dignity) for their Palestinean neighbor. In this way, they have become the enemy of the brutality of domination exercised by the present far-right government, but also to some extent the enablers, and certainly the beneficiaries, of the structures of domination.
Confronting the push and pull between theory and practice has long challenged scholars in the field of religion and humanities more broadly. Should we take what our interlocutors say at face value without critically questioning their claims? Or should we apply a scholarly apparatus that ignores the content of their claims and instead prioritizes our theoretical concepts, whether it be the idea of the social (Durkheim), power (Foucault), or linguistics (Derrida or Butler). These questions, for much of the past century, even when they are attempting to take interlocutors “on the ground” seriously, have been asked behind the walls of academic institutions. Here, in spaces saturated with the norms of Whiteness the privileged could debate epistemology while ignoring (or instrumentalizing) those who suffered. The scholarly gaze is almost always directed from on high down to the people below, marking empathy and critique equally as practices of the dominant.
In Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination, Vincent Lloyd reverses the scholarly gaze and attempts, as he puts it, “to sketch out the vision of today’s racial justice movement.” In doing so, he goes on to note, “I also think with that vision, probe it, and give it shape and coherence that I did not find in the words of movement participants even as I take those words as starting points” (viii). Here Lloyd attempts, from within the academy, to outline an approach to “the object of one’s study” that refuses abstraction and empty displays of empathy.
Lloyd’s book begins in the midst of struggle, not at its end or beginning. In the preface he describes his own path to engaging Black thought by reflecting on the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and his attempts to reckon with the movement that arose in that event’s wake. Through chapters conceptualizing Black rage, Black love, Back family, and Black magic, Lloyd thinks with the Movement for Black Lives, not as a singular moment in history, but as part of a tradition of engagement among Black thinkers and activists. The central feature of these chapters is the concept of Black dignity, which Lloyd defines as “the struggle against domination” (2). Dignity, for Lloyd, is a praxis rather than an essential aspect of identity; it is not fixed, it is found through struggle rather than preceding it or following it. Dignity is accompanied by a “moral vocabulary” that has been constructed over years of building movements in the struggle against domination. In Black rage, for example, we find anger multiplied because of the all-invasive nature of racist domination in our society. “Once we collectively attend to the uncomfortable truths [Black rage] reveals, we are moved to act together against those parts of the world that are built on lies” (54).
In the essays collected here, scholars reflect on the impact of Lloyd’s argument for those invested in struggles against domination in the communities in which they find themselves. Shaul Magid, for example, draws on Lloyd’s work to think through Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel. For Magid, Zionism mirrors anti-Blackness in the US by telling a false story to justify its dominance. It does so, further, in ways that continue to hide the deep and pervasive asymmetry in power that exists in Israel/Palestine today. Siphiwe Dube, meanwhile, takes Lloyd’s argument to his own South African context. Dube contends that the domination that Lloyd describes as present in the US is also present in South Africa and indeed many other countries with majority and minority Black populations. The antidote to this continued domination is collective action and active discernment by those involved in the struggle to meet the demands of the moment.
Rosetta Ross reflects on Lloyd’s emphasis on the voices of Black feminist and womanist scholars in his book and the way they help flesh out the parallels between his conceptualization of dignity and the concept of Black consciousness. Ross ends her piece by noting the impact of Lloyd’s work for imagining an everyday way of living that is responsive to the reality of domination. Traci C. West, finally, delves more deeply into Lloyd’s consideration of Black love, noting that the balancing of love with justice that Lloyd argues is required in the struggle against domination is one that corrects simplistic readings of figures like Martin Luther King Jr. She pushes Lloyd to further consider the misogyny of a figure like Eldridge Cleaver, who exercises an important influence in Black political movement spaces. She does so in the spirit of discernment that is characteristic of the way Lloyd approaches other figures in the book.
Weaving these various responses together is an abiding concern with rooting out domination where we find it and remaining relentless in our criticism of those people, institutions, and discourses, that would preserve it. As Lloyd remarks towards the end of the book, doing so requires not merely virtue, but a willingness to continually confront domination in our communities and in ourselves. We are called to an asceticism that refuses the comforts of domination. Here the rigors of the life of the cloistered monk who denies the pleasures of this world for the sanctity of another are reimagined towards a world without domination.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Abu Dis Checkpoint, East Jerusalem, 2006. Image via Flickr user Kashfi Halford. CC BY-NC 2.0.
In this post, I share some of my personal experiences with Archbishop Desmond Tutu during his life and his impact on Israel/Palestine. The core of my reflections connects Tutu’s calling to pursue justice and the resonance of that calling with the Palestinian quest for liberation. In his practice, he embodied both the ideals of justice and liberation in ways that called on us to recognize our common humanity.
I grew up under Israeli military occupation in the city of Ramallah. I am the daughter of an Anglican pastor, a Nakba survivor from Al-Lidd (Lydda), who was a deputy mayor prior to becoming the mayor of Ramallah.
Having grown up in a household that was not only focused on activism but was also religious, my understanding of what it meant to be both Palestinian and Christian was intertwined with the pursuit of justice. My Christianity placed justice at its core, and it was a justice that guaranteed that each human being had equal worth. Likewise, my Palestinian-ness was very much built around a strong sense of justice, and this included seeing the Palestinian struggle in partnership with other struggles for liberation in the world, which included South Africa.
As a little girl, I remember skipping around our home singing along to a familiar refrain I heard daily on the news hour of radio Monte Carlo: Free, Free Nelson Mandela!
Another memory I have is of a visit to our home by a bishop from Namibia, who taught us to sing their song of freedom. I don’t remember the words of the song he taught us, but I remember it ending with Namibia and us lifting our fists in a gesture of solidarity and acknowledgment of their struggle for freedom. I remember this visit vividly as it inspired me to know more about other people’s struggles for liberation; it made me feel that I was part of a larger collective, which in turn gave me hope that we might all overcome oppression.
My teenage years started with the onset of the first intifada in 1987. This shaped me in ways that continue to guide me in my life to this day. It was during these years that we cultivated what we refer to as the “culture for liberation,” and that I developed a heightened awareness of the struggle to end Apartheid in South Africa. Like many Palestinians, I recognized that our struggle for freedom in Palestine was the same as that in which opponents of Apartheid were engaged with in South Africa. It was during this time that Archbishop Desmond Tutu became a household name for us.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu was loved by all Palestinians, Christians and Muslims. His message was simple: God created us for freedom. This is a freedom that does not belong to one group of people more than another. Here was a courageous church leader who centered justice within his Christianity and whose South African-ness was likewise concerned with justice for a greater humanity. I strongly resonated with the connection between one’s identity as a Christian and the struggle to end injustice wherever one faces it.
His message was simple: God created us for freedom. This is a freedom that does not belong to one group of people more than another.
Archbishop Tutu visited Palestine in 1989 during our first intifada, before Apartheid had ended in South Africa. Unfortunately, his visit took place while I was away at college and I missed meeting him. Nonetheless, many of my family members and friends remember his visit and I still recall how his arrival captivated all of us. The pressures on him were immense, and his visit with us was not welcomed by the Israelis. In fact, some hateful graffiti welcomed him to Jerusalem. Outside the walls of the St. George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem, some Israelis had scrawled: Go Home Black Nazi Pig. In the church service he led that day he began his sermon by making a joke about the graffiti. Later, I learned much more about the nature of this joyous remarkable man, but here was an early example from my memory.
Jerusalem viewed from the Mount of Olives, 2014. Image via Flickr user Michael-Ann Cerniglia. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
My friends can still recall the church service in the shepherd’s fields in the Bethlehem area on Christmas Eve. The fields were overflowing with people coming to hear the archbishop and the area was also surrounded by Israeli soldiers. The atmosphere was tense as those in attendance did not know how the soldiers would react to the crowds or to what the archbishop had to say. In his sermon, many recall Tutu describing situations that were familiar to them— humiliations at checkpoints, home demolitions, mass imprisonment, deportations, etc.—and at the end of his descriptions he would say that “of course” he was talking about apartheid in South Africa. The crowd would erupt in laughter. They heard him speak to the situation that they faced, and in doing so he further solidified the idea that our struggles were integrally linked. During this same visit, he met with the burgeoning Palestinian liberation theology movement that was just evolving. He later became the international patron of that same movement—now called Sabeel.
It wasn’t until 2007 in Boston that I had the honor and privilege of meeting Archbishop Tutu in person for the first time. I was one of the main organizers of a Friends of Sabeel conference, which aimed to highlight the apartheid situation in Israel/Palestine. Archbishop Tutu agreed to be our keynote speaker.
Experiencing Archbishop Tutu in person was not only a personal highlight that I will always cherish, but one that endeared a hero of mine to me even further. Being able to spend time with him commuting from one place to another I was able to witness his boundless joy, his humor, and his cheeky way of getting his messages across. There were several instances where we got lost on our way to somewhere and he was always ready with a witty remark followed by his adorable chuckling.
At the conference itself we were met by hecklers across the street from Old South Church, where the conference was taking place. At a moment when we weren’t paying attention, we found the archbishop across the street speaking with the pro-Israel protesters, who seemed stunned and were all of a sudden in silence. At the conclusion of the conference, we held a rally in Copley square, and we witnessed the archbishop dance through the crowd of hecklers on the way to the Square. That day we were all fortunate to have experienced this joyous, fearless, dancing archbishop who could not remain silent about the world’s injustices.
As I reflect today on the legacy of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, I recognize how privileged I was to have experienced him in person. I also recognize the tremendous impact that he has made in the world because of his character and commitment to justice, both of which I was able to see him embody during that conference. I feel strongly that his message that “God created us for freedom” was what led him in his path to speak for those seeking liberation, to use his platform to speak truth to power, and never to waver in his message. For Palestinians, whether Christian or Muslim, we saw him as our voice precisely for this reason.
Hilary Rantisi is the Associate Director of the Religion, Conflict and Peace Initiative (RCPI) and co-instructor of an annual course Learning in Context: Narratives of Displacement and Belonging in Israel/Palestine at Harvard Divinity School. She has over two decades of experience in institution building at Harvard and has been involved in developing and pioneering collaborations across campus. Humanizing issues that affect the daily lives of people throughout the Middle East has been an overriding principle that guides her work in prioritizing research, policy discussion, and institutional growth. Previously, she was Director of the Middle East Initiative (MEI) at Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Prior to joining Harvard, she worked with civil society organizations in Israel-Palestine, which focused on religion, politics, and grassroots mobilization efforts in Jerusalem. She co-edited a photo essay book Our Story: The Palestinians and is active on several boards including the board of trustees of Aurora University in Illinois.
Candlelit vigil for racial justice, 2020. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
For some, racial distinction is a virtue, but to others, it is a sin. In either case, one can be strongly tempted to live into the realism (if not pessimism) that racism will never go away. One may have very limited optimism that human beings will ever celebrate human physiognomical differences due to the horrors of current and historical systematic racism. In my spiritual and theological work on Desmond Tutu, however, I argue that Tutu’s legacy is precisely in this hope that human beings will celebrate the image of God whose unity is known through diverse persons. Historically, and for some currently, it is argued that racial difference is the most pertinent criterion by which to judge human worth (racial classification was explicitly embedded in South Africa’s legal and legislature structure). The fallacy of this assumption is that the descriptive determination of “race” simultaneously carries with it a fixed classification, i.e., race is not just the color of skin, but also a marker of the character of the person. And the one who claims to determine a person’s race usually becomes that person’s oppressor. In other words, many people around the world had to accept the identities which Europeans gave them. Asians had to accept being Asian, Africans had to accept being a Negro or African. Indians had to accept being Indian. Rowan Williams helpfully describes this dynamic when he states, “White domination has been built on the assumption that whites may say what they are, independently of the needs and reality of other groups, who are built into white self-definition” (141). Desmond Tutu illustrates this tendency of the dominant group to define identity when he recounts the following story and commentary in a British context:
Once upon a time at a grand dinner party a gracious lady sat next to a Chinese gentleman. She was being solicitous [concerned] and helpful so she would say “Like a banana?” And he would reply, “Yes se pleasie.” “Like a Drink?” And he would say, “Yes se pleasie.” And then the Chinese gentleman got up to make a speech in impeccable and faultless English. At the end of it, he turned to his neighbor “Like a speechie?” Most of us in this land make the cardinal mistake of judging people by their external appearance. We use quite irrelevant biological features over which they have no control to determine their worth as human persons.[1]
Instead of dominant groups of people determining human worth, Desmond Tutu’s legacy invites us into a different narrative—one in which restoration of God’s image is the key determination of human worth. African saints like Athanasius inspired Tutu to take seriously that Jesus Christ became human so that we could become gods (54.3). As in Athanasius’s speculative theology, Tutu invites increased Christian imagination as to what is human identity defined in the concept of the image of God. God creates human beings to be a penultimate paradox, i.e., finite creatures made for the infinite, so that nothing less than God could ever hope to satisfy the deep longings of human bodies and souls, “not military strength not unbridled ambition, not material possessions, not reckless and unaccountable political power” all of which treat God’s children as if they were not infinite. Secular prosperity seduces persons into understanding others on account of productivity, as if people are only consumers whose value is dependent upon the production of goods. It is from such diminutive understandings of human identity that a society becomes possessed by racism and can only determine racial difference as a threat. Esther Mombo also explains this diminutive process as she discusses what continues to haunt Christianity today.
What appears to haunt Christianity today is the disconnect between the things of the spirit and what is seen as material or secular. The question that one perhaps faces is, how does one do mission in a context that is already pervasively religious? What seems to be happening is that many are using the “spiritual” to enrich themselves in material terms. So the spiritual dimension has not been omitted, but it is used to increase prosperity in the world. What appears to be lacking in this kind of mission is active and transformative engagement with injustices in society (378).
The very need of the oppressor to define human beings racially once presupposed a natural science to understand physiognomical differences. However, for economic and ideological reasons, racial taxonomy provided European Whites, and later South African Whites a hierarchical account of how their claimed superior racial identity related to lesser ones. Because people of different “races” are “different,” declared many White people like Hendrik Verwoerd, former Prime Minister of South Africa, human beings should develop separately (26). (Verwoerd is a major political figure in establishing “Bantustans” or independent homelands on which such separate development could take place.) But Tutu facilitated a restorative movement in the brokenness of the church to disagree with Verwoerd’s conclusions—even calling such conclusions heresy and sin. The particularity of race as legally defined in apartheid and used as conceptual identities for human beings, continues a dialectic with seemingly little hope of synthesis. For example, Alan Dershowitz branded Tutu as “evil” and “the most influential antisemite of our time” because of how Tutu described Israel’s rule over the Palestinians as apartheid. On Tutu’s visits to Israel and Palestine, Tutu recognized the existential crisis of his own homeland in “the forced removals, the house demolitions, the humiliations of checkpoints and systems of control on movement, the confiscation of land for Jewish settlements, and the confining of Palestinians to blobs of territory, reminiscent of the Bantustan Black homelands. Above all he saw one people controlling another who, like Black South Africans until 1994, had little say in their governance.” Any legal separation of human identity on the basis of race is a zero-sum outcome. Tutu’s legacy of restorative justice and Ubuntu theology seek a nonzero sum outcome.
Of course, such a legacy is difficult to maintain when being Black entails falling outside of dominant standards of intelligence, beauty, and worth, while at the same time, being White assumes the proper control and manifestation of these standards in a protected normality. For example, a White South African farmer, Schalk Vorster, remarks, “You must be committed to the concept of race. It’s an ugly word as used by some people. But what is the opposite of racism? Communism? Or is it the [White] man who marries a black maid? It’s important to me that people stand by their racial identity, otherwise you get bastardization.”[2] Consequently, in light of a third identity, “bastardization,” being Black also assumes the human predicament of having to accept an imposed identity in which you have the following choices: you can either redefine your alienation of being Black into heroic identity or you can surrender to the demonic forces in the world which will use God-created differences to further confuse, divide, and conquer. Instead of being chained to each other as a vicious dialectic of races, Tutu’s legacy sought both to redefine new models of being human and visualize new theological identities of reconciliation in which the church could facilitate a positive humanistic impact rather than a zero sum outcome of either being damned or being saved. In Tutu’s restorative and interdependent worldview, God’s love is so relentless that even Satan will one day reciprocate such love.
[1] Tutu, “General Secretary’s Report to National Conference of SACC,” June 25–29, 1984.
[2]Farmer Schalk Vorster interviewed in The Cape Argus, March 24, 1994.
Michael Battle is Herbert Thompson Professor of Church and Society and Director of the Desmond Tutu Center at General Theological Seminary in New York. The Very Rev. Michael Battle, Ph.D. has an undergraduate degree from Duke University, received his master’s of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary, a master’s of Sacred Theology from Yale University, and a PhD in theology and ethics, also from Duke University. He was ordained a priest by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in 1993. Battle’s clergy experience, in addition to his current church work, includes serving as vicar at St. Titus Episcopal Church in Durham, NC, rector at Church of Our Saviour, in San Gabriel, California; rector at St. Ambrose Episcopal Church, Raleigh, N.C.; and interim rector or associate priest with other churches in North Carolina and in Cape Town, South Africa.
Battle’s academic experience includes service as interim dean of Students and Community Life at Episcopal Divinity School, dean for academic affairs, vice president and associate professor of theology at Virginia Theology Seminary; as associate professor of spirituality and black church studies at Duke University’s Divinity School; and as assistant professor of spiritual and moral theology in the School of Theology at the University of the South. Battle has published eleven books, including his latest: Desmond Tutu: A Spiritual Biography of South Africa’s Confessor.
This God did not just talk. He showed Himself to be a doing God. Perhaps we might add another point about God. He takes sides. He is not a neutral God. He took the sides of the enslaved, the oppressed, and the victims. He is still the same, even today. He sides with the poor, the oppressed and the victims of injustice.
We must resist the temptation to impose our own “sweetness”—often a camouflage for our lack of courage—on to Desmond Tutu. Before the formal end of apartheid, Tutu was primarily the voice that demanded justice for the oppressed on the one hand and the boycott of, divestment from, and sanctions against the apartheid regime on the other. Only after the end of apartheid, when the regime was forced by our collective resistance to relent, free our leaders from prison, and get their boots off our necks, did Tutu, the reconciler, emerge.
Since the late seventies, I have had the enormous privilege of encountering and working with many of the giants of South Africa’s liberation struggle, including Desmond Tutu. I’m moved that Tutu, on more than one occasion, described me as a “trusted advisor.” I spoke at his enthronement as Archbishop of Cape Town in 1986. I worked with him on many initiatives in the liberation struggle, including the promotion of inter-religious solidarity against apartheid. After the formal struggle against apartheid ended, we collaborated very closely on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns against the Israeli government—often drafting statements and/or cross-checking them with one other.
Desmond Tutu: A Much-Loved, Deeply Disturbed, and Offensive Prophet
Tutu was a Christian, a mensch, and a prophet. I use the word prophet in the sense given to it by liberation theology as someone desperate to challenge power and injustice. All of these dimensions were seamlessly interwoven in his identity and his vocation. His identity as a Christian was something that everyone either joyfully embraced or with which they had to put up. His identity as a mensch, most people loved. His third identity, that of a prophet, was celebrated by people on the margins of society and either met with silence or disdain by the powerful. Many embraced all the different dimensions of his being and witness. In this essay, I will reflect on all three of these aspects of his identity and then deal with the tension between the last two, his being a mensch and a prophet. More particularly, I will discuss Tutu’s prophetic voice as one that spoke the truth to the powerful and oppressive Pharaoh as well as to his own people—even the state of their relative powerlessness. In these seemingly different voices he recognized the urgency to seek freedom from the external Pharaoh, on the one hand and sleeping Pharaoh within us, on the other.
Tutu, the Christian
I have a telling anecdote about Tutu’s identity as a Christian in the context of his work on promoting inter-religious solidarity against injustice. Knowing and observing how close he was to his Muslim comrades on the battlefield, one Muslim activist came to me and Imam Hassan Solomon (d. 2009), another leading liberation struggle icon and asked, nearly pleading: “Have you guys ever tried speaking to the Archbishop about Islam (! لعل أن يصبح مسلما )? Perchance, he will embrace Islam!” In a gentle rebuke, Imam Hassan responded: “Look, The archbishop is upright; leave him exactly as he is. If he is going to lean into a direction other than where he is at the moment, he will be skewed from the path of righteousness!”
In his response, Solomon demonstrates the primacy of orthopraxis above orthodoxy, something defining about liberation theology in general, but, more specifically, about Tutu’s theology, as is evident in his work, God Is Not a Christian. In an interview from June 15, 2010 with Allister Sparks on this topic he responded,
I am a Christian, but the books that we hold to provide for how we should be thinking about God. […] I mean, right at the beginning, the gospel of John tells about ‘the light that lightens everyone’; it does not say ‘the light that lightens those who become Christians’; it says ‘everyone who comes into the world.’ (113)
His embrace of the religiosity and spiritual paths of others went well beyond the, however well-intended, condescending view first clearly articulated by Karl Rahner (1904–1984) that people who have never heard the Christian Gospel might be saved through Christ. On this view, as Gavin D’Costa writes, the non-Christians could have “in [their] basic orientation and fundamental decision accepted the salvific grace of God, through Christ, although [they] may never have heard of the Christian revelation” (132).
John Allen, his personal assistant of many years, recalls in an interview with Sparks on June 16, 2010 Tutu saying during a conference of interfaith leaders: “Don’t insult people of other faiths by saying, ‘Oh, actually our God is your God, too; You are a Christian too without knowing it.’ Don’t insult people by reducing their faith to that” (313).
While the God that Tutu worshipped was decidedly not a Christian, Tutu certainly was one, as demonstrated in his love for and agonized relationship with the Anglican Church. He was concerned with all its Anglo ceremonial and hierarchical trappings and doctrine, and sustained a relentless critique of its positions on the ordination of women and the recognition of gay rights, among others. While he celebrated religious diversity in public, in private, Christ was his only avenue to God. Tutu commenced every meeting with him—regardless of the religious composition of those present—with a prayer. Careful to avoid doctrinal expressions that may not sit well with any non-Christians present, he never ceded his role as the assumed leader and always offered what could only have been a Christian prayer in mode and content. Tutu spent four hours every day on his knees in silent contemplation.
Jesus Christ as Lord, saviour, and liberator permeated his speeches, prayers, and interventions—in short, his entire being. His faith in Jesus Christ was always endearing and often disarming to those who detested what Tutu otherwise stood for or what Christ represented to him. His profound belief in a personal God who hears and responds to him occasionally infuriated his comrades who did not share in his cherished relationship with a personal God. Sometimes we would spend many hours debating the wisdom of marching to Parliament, starting from St. Georges Cathedral in the Cape Town city centre, literally a stone’s throw away from Parliament. We were fully aware that we would be confronting the police and end up being arrested if we did. On a few occasions just before the march, Tutu, who was never a signed-up comrade of any of our political formations, would go into his sanctuary to pray for guidance, only to emerge from there saying something to the effect that this is not what he was moved to do by the spirit!
Tutu as a Mensch
Tutu was fully human and fully alive. He carried his power and fragility on his sleeves. He was a compelling character who was aware of his power but was never manipulative. While he was an irredeemable patriarch and an uncomfortable fit with progressive views on all the implications of gender equality, he was never a poster boy for machoism or patriarchy. In a moment of slumber, he advised the then-divorced President Nelson Mandela to get married to his partner, Graca Machel, because at his (Mandela’s) age, “He needs someone to bring his slippers to him when he gets up in the morning.” (While Machel needs no qualifications to avoid this kind of sexism, she was our neighboring country’s Minister of Education for several years.).
Tutu was fully aware of his stature in the world but never arrogant. He was always visibly and utterly dependent on the grace of the Transcendent. The one moment he could not perform was when he appeared as a humble petitioner trembling in front of God.
He loved all deeply, including his enemies, and was unashamedly desperate to be loved. He was a humble person, but was never so in the face of oppressive power. Easily moved to tears, he had a will of steel.
In what we call “struggle circles,” we found him infuriating for the simplicity of his kindness and love. He unfailingly referred to Prime Minister PW Botha, then the major enforcer of Apartheid, as “‘his brother-in-Christ.’ ‘Whether I like it or not; whether he likes it or not; PW both is my brother, and I must desire and pray for the best in him.’” Only much later did we see the value of our own humanity in never denying the humanity of our oppressors.
The world may know Tutu as a speaker, but he was also a listener. He was usually in a state of wakefulness when it came to justice and injustice, but he also fell asleep on occasion. When he awakened, he always grateful and happy to listen.
Sometime in August 2012, we learnt—and were alarmed—that Tutu was scheduled to speak alongside Tony Blair at a conference on leadership in Johannesburg. At a meeting among activists, many felt that we should publicly condemn him. I and others in Africa4Palestine said: “No, this is not how we treat comrades; the Arch is one of us in the trenches against injustice, and our first obligation is to speak to him.” Representing BDS-South Africa (now Africa4Palestine), I called Tutu and had a long conversation with him about the wrongfulness of sharing a platform with a war criminal. As was his habit, he replied that he needed to pray over the matter. Early the following day, he called to thank me (it was really “us”) for tugging at him and waking him up at a moment when he fell into an unethical slumber. Within hours the news was all over the media that Tutu had withdrawn from the conference because he refused to share a platform with a war criminal who should be in the Hague facing the International Criminal Court instead of pontificating about leadership in Africa. Remarking on his decision, he said,
The then leaders of the United States and Great Britain […] fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies and drive us further apart. They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand – with the spectre of Syria and Iran before us. [… ] On these grounds, alone, in a consistent world, those responsible for this suffering and loss of life should be treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have been made to answer for their actions in The Hague.
Tutu as Prophet
Tutu as Prophetic Witness
Archbishop Desmond Tutu had a profound moral compass that was attuned to identifying and then confronting injustice. He was impulsive in his quest for a more just world. Inexorably driven to pursue a more just world like a moth drawn to a candle, he had no option but to go towards the light, even as he was a candle in his own right. The light, for him, was a more humane and just world. His impulses were at odds with the world and trappings of worldly power. As Sparks and Mpho Tutu write,
[…] He acted impulsively, driven by a passion for compassion. That compassion itself is the product of his ever-deepening spirituality, his belief that humanity is sacred and that every individual is a God-carrier to be cherished. Not for a second did any political strategy or agenda play a role in what Tutu did […]. (83)
Tutu remained consistent in his prophetic approach, which he clearly articulated in New York in 1973 at Union Theological Seminary. When referring to Black theology, he said:
[… It ] is an engaged, not an academic, detached theology. It is a gut-level theology, relating to the black man’s real concerns, life, and death issues. My paper [he could have said “my life”] is not an attempt to demonstrate the academic respectability of black theology but rather to make a straightforward, perhaps shrill, statement about an existent. Black theology is. No permission is requested for it to come into being […]. Frankly, the time has passed when we will wait for the white man to give us permission to do our thing. Whether or not he accepts the intellectual respectability of our activity is largely irrelevant. We will proceed regardless. (138–39)
Prophetic witness is often regarded solely in the paradigm or narrative of Moses confronting and speaking the truth to Pharoah. However, there is another calling, Moses speaking the truth to his people. As Tutu once said, “White oppression is not the only bondage from which Black people had to be liberated. When the white oppressor is removed, far too often he is succeeded by his Black counterpart.” (75). Tutu is, for example, and not without good cause, revered as an icon of non-violence and a voice of moderation; this is Moses addressing his own people who stray from what the prophet believes is true of their higher selves. Other examples of this include Tutu’s intervention in cases of mob lynching or, on rare occasions, when he negatively commented on the liberation movement’s final resort to armed struggle against the apartheid regime after years of knocking and banging on the Pharaoh’s doors. He retained this fundamental prophetic calling until he transitioned into the afterlife through his consistent and often scathing criticism of the African National Congress government on a range of issues ranging from corruption to the government’s denial in 2011 of a visa to the Dalai Lama. Tutu reminds us that we have to resist becoming the evil that we abhor.
This prophetic Tutu was embraced by all, albeit for different reasons. For a significant number, he was going to be the barrier that saves the civilized White people from the potential and ever-latent barbarism of Black people that may be unleashed when their liberation comes. Their disquiet was about Black people utilizing armed struggle for their liberation. Of course, for them there was never a concern with challenging White power that resorts to arms to invade, occupy, oppress, and sustain their own economies built on the military-industrial complex. For them, it was only the “cuddly” Tutu to be embraced; his revolutionary energy was to be squeezed out amid that embrace. Cornel West, in relation to Martin Luther King Jr. describes this as “SantaClausification,” a deliberate attempt to first colonize the revoultionary heritage of the prophet and then marshal this in the service of ongoing subjugation.
Tutu As Prophetic Offender
The other Tutu is the prophet who privileges the responsibility to confront the Pharaoh and demand, “Let my people go!” above that of confronting his own people and their inadequacies. His people, their liberation movement, utterings, and practices were often profoundly problematic, but they were not the problem. Pharaoh, in this case, the apartheid regime—was the problem.
This explains why Tutu, when he was in the public arena, hardly paid any attention to the troubling questions of disunity among the Palestinian liberation movements, the decimation of the Palestinian Christian community, the disconcerting Islamization of some parts of the resistance movement, the Palestinian resort to armed struggle, and even suicide operations. The responses of the occupied to their occupation, however deeply flawed and problematic, are not the problem. The Occupation is.
More than just part of his charisma, underneath his cuddly and bubbly performance was a mad and troubled man, permanently in a state of unease with an unjust world and stubbornly resisting the idea that, in Margaret Thatcher’s words, “There is no alternative.” He was constantly in search of “the least,” as in the words of Christ: “What you have done to the least of my companions, you have done to me” (Matthew 25:37–40). He was also willing to rethink, in various contexts, what constitutes “the least.” Initially, for him, the people on the margins were Black people. He then moved on to consider all the impoverished and marginalized, and then to include those living under the boots, bullets, and bombs of Zionism, and then those who were rejected based on their sexual orientation and identity, and then those who were in excruciating physical and mental pain who were desperate to die, and then our home, the ravaged earth. The list goes on from there.
Tutu had no desire to offend but knew that he would. He embraced this offensiveness and often mischievously responded to it as if he had no clue that he would offend. From this disturbance and refusal to adjust to a fundamentally unjust world, Tutu remained a maladjusted human being all of his life. Archbishop Desmond Tutu embraced being offensive and calculatingly infuriating as the logical outcome of his unease with the world. Something is wrong with you if Pharaoh is not troubled by your tirades—if you are equally welcome in his court as you are on the streets of the oppressed, where people are barely able to survive under the boots of oppressors and/or are dying from the bullets of the soldiers of occupation.
Unlike just about every other cause in the world, that of the Palestinians can earn one nearly immediate opprobrium in the world of power. Go beyond the “peace and security for both sides” refrain and name the problem—“Israel is an apartheid state”—and you are stuck with the brand “antisemite.” He was aware of the profound offense that would cause, and he went ahead—repeatedly—with his persistent description of Israel as an apartheid state that has to be boycotted and sanctioned. Inside South Africa, where, mercifully, the Zionist lobby carries preciously little weight, they lamented his ignorance of the what they argued was the “real” situation. “He ventures where angels fear to tread, not because he is brave, but because he is ignorant.”
Abroad he was denounced as an antisemite—an accusation that alternatively caused him pain and some measure of bemusement. On several occasions he misspoke, inadvertently or not, of “Zionists” and “Jews” as if equivalent. Yet, he conveyed what would become even more oppressive in subsequent years, the inability to say anything critical of Israeli state violence that will not prompt accusations of antisemitism. Speaking in New York In late April 2002, he said: “People are scared in [America] to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful, very powerful. Well, so what? Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin were all-powerful, but, in the end, they bit the dust.” The construct—“the Jewish lobby is powerful”—does traffic in antisemitic tropes. But for Tutu, this misspoken moment unfolded because of his prophetic support of Palestinians. His misspeaking here conveys the convergence of his prophetic and all too human dimensions. That his speech verged into unfortunate antisemitic tropes does not change the fact that he could have accepted most certainly the learning such a moment could afford (in the same way that he stood corrected around sharing a stage with Blair). Likewise, this moment of a divergence from what is right does not change the depth of prophetic solidarity his support of the Palestinian struggle against the boot of the Israeli occupation and apartheid regime inhabited.
Tutu’s theology was simple: embrace the logic and the dreams of the margins.
During the days of apartheid, we never had a specific word for “Whites” who were oppressing us. We just said “The Whites” because that was the face of oppression. We used the term “Whites” synonymously as “oppressors” even as we consistently affirmed the non-racial ideal for our country’s post-apartheid future and embraced numerous Whites as our comrades. A White Jew, Joe Slovo (d. 1995), headed the revered South African Communist Party. Another, Ronnie Kasrills, led our underground army (Umkhonto we Sizwe). White Jews and numerous young Afrikaners were at the forefront of the End Conscription Campaign (ECC, est. 1983) that sought to persuade young White males to resist conscription into the apartheid army. Neither in public nor inside the circles of the liberation movement was it ever considered an issue, let alone improper, that when we spoke about “White oppression” or the “Afrikaner Reich,” that we included them or diminished the suffering of Jews at the hands of the Nazi Holocaust.
Parenthetically, for me, conscious of the larger historical demonization of Jews, I will never use “Jews” as a synonym for Zionists, Occupiers, and Oppressors—even as all Zionists insist that Jewish identity is synonymous with Zionism. Tutu’s deployment of an antisemitic trope detracted from his prophetic outcry against the actual experiences of Palestinian oppression by a regime that calls itself “Jewish.” This, notwithstanding, I do not hold the Palestinians, who daily experience the only face of their oppressor as a Jewish one, accountable to the same universalist and humanitarian logic.
In 1984 Tutu, on a visit to the US, described Ronald Reagan’s administration as “an unmitigated disaster for us blacks” (95) and Reagan himself as “a racist pure and simple.” In 1988 he condemned a speech by Ronald Reagan in which the US president defended the continued involvement of US companies in the South African economy as “nauseating” and “the pits.” For his part, said Tutu, “America and the west can go to hell.”
Upon careful reflection, these two prophetic modes of engagement—as a witness and as an offender—are not two utterly different callings. On the one hand, there is the calling to be fully human, to embrace all of humanity and our home and to hold your own, the oppressed, accountable. For there is always the element, capacity, or lesser manifestation of the Pharaonic present in all of us in our personal, public, religious, and political lives. On the other hand, there is the urgency of God’s preferential option for the marginalized to resist Pharaoh with all the might and anger at our disposal. The major challenge for us lies in embracing this dual calling along with a ruthless discernment about which aspects to the foreground in our public witness and at what particular time to bring them to the public. Which Tutu do we embrace, and at what moment?
Farid Esack is a leading Muslim liberation theologian who cut his teeth in the South African struggle for liberation. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advance Studies. In 2018 he was presented with the Order of Luthuli, South Africa’s highest national award, for “his brilliant contribution to academic research and the fight against race, gender, class, and religious oppression”. He serves on the board of Africa4Palestine.
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu in prayer, 2011. Image via Wikimedia Commons. CC-BY 2.0.
Desmond Tutu was a contemporary biblical prophet who used his prophetic voice to challenge Israel about its horrific treatment of the Palestinian people. Because he spoke in his own Christian and traditional African theological language, I will translate his message into mine: a Jewish version of our shared moral and religious commitments to peace and justice.
Tutu sometimes compared himself to Jeremiah because he could not keep silent in the face of injustice, and colleagues in South Africa believed he had the prophetic style of a man who acted intuitively, but not always consultatively (312). Like the prophets of old, however, he mixed his message of chastisement (you have woefully mistreated the Palestinian people) with a message of comfort (you too deserve safety and security in this land that you share with them). But Tutu was not always careful with his words, calling out the “powerful American Jewish lobby” for example, or failing to appreciate their adamant views about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, and that gave American and Israeli Jewish leaders an excuse to fear and dismiss him. It also gave the right wing the excuse to label him, inaccurately, as an antisemite, to which he replied:
Are you anti-Jewish? Not anti-Semitic. And then, you would have to say the same thing to the biblical prophets—because they were some of the most scathing critics of the Jewish leadership of their day. We don’t criticize Jewish people. We criticize, we will criticize, when they need to be criticized the government of Israel.
And he did so for forty years, from the early 1980s until his death in 2021. Tutu exemplified the patience of a prophet willing to repeat his message as often as necessary, until the government of Israel and its American Jewish supporters listened and changed their ways.
When our people groaned by virtue of the burden of racist oppression, we invoked the God who addressed Moses in the burning bush, we told our people that our God had heard their cry, had seen their anguish, and knew their suffering, and would come down, this great God of exodus, this liberator God as in the past to deliver us as God had delivered Israel from bondage. We told them that God was notoriously biased in favor of those without clout; the poor, the weak, the hungry, the voiceless.
It is that God that, Tutu knew, favored the enslaved over their oppressors, and was therefore also on the side of the Palestinians. Tutu’s theology had no place for the God of the conquest who oversaw the expulsion and destruction of the Indigenous peoples of the land that the Biblical authors claimed they then inhabited and named Israel and Judah, a vision of God that is also rejected by contemporary Jewish liberation theology. It is, unfortunately, the dominant theology of Israel today. This is the starting point of Tutu’s challenge: Israel must recognize the God that is being worshipped in the land today is the God of conquest and not the God of liberation, and that they are not one in the same.
Tutu delivered his message about Palestinian oppression to the Jewish supporters of Israel at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York after winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 when he said: “I am myself sad that Israel, with the kind of history and traditions her people have experienced, should make refugees of others. It is totally inconsistent with who she is as a people.” In that speech he critiqued not only the Nakba, but also the Sabra and Shatila massacre (when in 1982 in Beirut Christian phalangists murdered Palestinian inhabitants under the watchful eye of Israel’s Defense Forces who did nothing to stop the atrocities) and the barriers Israel set up between the holy places of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Jerusalem. What Tutu pointed to here foreshadowed the separation wall and the barriers that exist today in Gaza.
In the gentlest of ways, Tutu critiques Jewish American and Israeli leaders for forgetting their own history of suffering, especially during the Holocaust. He contends that these memories should serve as a reminder to not make others suffer in similar ways: making them refugees, being responsible for their murders, creating barriers to their freedom of movement and worship. Translating the message into the language of Jewish ethical tradition, I would rely here on Hillel’s retort to the person who challenged him to explain the Torah while standing on one foot: “What is hateful to you, do not do to another—all the rest is commentary” (Shabbat 31a). From a Jewish ethical standpoint, I would add a longer list of hateful things that Tutu did not mention in detail:
The seizing and destruction of Palestinian property (whole villages in 1948, houses and olive trees consistently since then), as was done to the Jews most dramatically on Kristallnacht and consistently thereafter.
Intimidation expressed via epithets: “death to the Arabs” / “no dogs or Jews allowed.”
Random acts of cruelty and humiliation perpetrated by soldiers, Israeli and Nazi.
Bureaucratic harassment (identity documents and permits, border crossings delayed or not allowed, passports destroyed).
Encouraging traitors (Palestinian informers and Jewish Capos).
Separation walls and prison-like conditions in Gaza not unlike German work camps.
Golda Meir blaming Arabs for making young Jewish men into killers; Nazis blaming Jews for all of Germany’s problems.
What was hateful to the Jewish people, Israel has done to the Palestinians.
When Tutu made a Christmas pilgrimage to the Holy Land sites in the occupied West Bank in 1989 he also visited Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem), which, according to Roni Arieli is required by Israeli protocol for all diplomats coming to Israel for the first time. He described his response in his book, No Future Without Forgiveness:
I visited the Holy Land over Christmas 1989 and had the privilege during that visit of going to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. When the media asked me for my impressions, I told them it was a shattering experience. I added that the Lord whom I served, who was himself a Jew, would have asked, ‘But what about forgiveness?’ That remark set the cat among the pigeons. I was roundly condemned. (267)
Tutu’s prophetic and Christian vision required the next step: forgiveness. This was the key to the Truth and Reconciliation process he oversaw in South Africa and was deeply embedded in the teachings of Jesus (the Lord whom he served) and in the African traditional concept of ubuntu (compassion, humanness rather than victimization or turning the tables). Tutu was willing to allow that Jews were not able to forgive the Nazis, but as a prophet he needed to raise that possibility. And, it appears, except for the likes of Simon Wiesenthal and his followers, Jews (and particularly the Israeli government) have certainly forgiven the Germans.
I understand this through the lens of the Jewish ethical principle of teshuvah, the concept of return and repentance. Teshuvah is the central act performed on Yom Kippur. Jews are instructed to go over the ways they have missed the mark (often mistranslated as sin) and make restitution. If the error was against God, prayer and fasting will clear the record. If the error was against another human, one must ask forgiveness, and, according to tradition, make restitution. For Jews and Germans this has been well accomplished. Germany has apologized, made reparations where possible, financially supported Israel, made antisemitism a crime, and created memorials to the Holocaust in almost every city. It is clear that this history will be remembered. What Germany has not done is pay attention to the fact that they exist in a moral triangle, as Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor point out in their book of that title. For while Germany has modeled teshuvah for Israel, they have not acknowledged the harm that the Holocaust set in motion that was the Nakba. This is a clear limitation on their expression of teshuvah, which in traditional Judaism is only complete when, given the opportunity, one don’t repeat one’s error.
Germany’s teshuvah, despite its limitations, could at least be a starting point for truth and reconciliation in Israel/Palestine. It must begin with Israel ending the occupation so they can begin the act of doing teshuvah: acknowledging the harms they have done to the Palestinian people, making reparations that allow for the literal “teshuvah,” or return of the Palestinians to their land, providing real financial restitution, ending acts and words of hate, correcting the historical record so that it won’t be forgotten, and being open to a different iteration of a one state solution which exists today, as Judith Butler pointed out many years ago, in abject form.
Can Tutu’s prophetic dream of peace and justice for Israelis and Palestinians come to be? Can Palestinians forgive if Israel does teshuvah? If violent and non-violent solutions have failed, perhaps what is needed is leadership, on both sides, of men and women with the religious values, moral clarity, and courage of Desmond Tutu to lead the way.
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Confronting the push and pull between theory and practice has long challenged scholars in the field of religion and humanities more broadly. Should we take what our interlocutors say at face value without critically questioning their claims? Or should we apply a scholarly apparatus that ignores the content of their claims and instead prioritizes our theoretical concepts, whether it be the idea of the social (Durkheim), power (Foucault), or linguistics (Derrida or Butler). These questions, for much of the past century, even when they are attempting to take interlocutors “on the ground” seriously, have been asked behind the walls of academic institutions. Here, in spaces saturated with the norms of Whiteness the privileged could debate 
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