Black Church is my mother tongue
To speak Black Church is to dwell in a world of metaphors about a God who is engaged in the lives of Black people.
Illustration by Diana Ejaita
I speak Black Church. That is my mother tongue. It is the language I learned at the feet of my grandmother, church mothers, and elders. It is the language I learned in the storefront church of my youth. I speak Black Church in my private devotions with God and when I am among the saints. I speak Black Church, the language of my ancestors, as a theological language centered on the justice of God.
When I learned in college that Black English, also known as African American Vernacular English, was a language, I wasn’t surprised. Encountering the scholarship of Geneva Smitherman in her classic Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America confirmed what I had always known: Black children are raised bilingual. They are taught to code switch between the language they speak at home and the language they must use in public discourse. There is a distinct grammar, vocabulary, and structure to Black English that can be parsed and studied like any other language. It is neither “broken English” nor slang but rather a distinctive dialect with a history, origin story, and construction.
As a womanist theologian, I posit that Black Church is a specific linguistic category of Black English: that is, Black Church is a language. The hymns, parables, wisdom expressions, and biblical narratives have combined with Black speech to create a distinctive mother tongue for those who grow up in the Black church. All aspects of this speech are theologically inflected.
