James Cone looked evil in the face and refused to let it crush his hope
Antiblackness is outrageous, but it does not have the last word.
In college I wrote a paper on the work of James Cone in which I barely grasped the profoundness of his thought. My religion professor did not hesitate to tell me so.
Later, as a student at the University of Chicago Divinity School, I was among a small group of students keen to invite Cone to lecture at the school. Our idea was met with the response that “identity politics are passé.” It turns out I was not alone in failing to fully grasp the black power of James Cone. At almost every turn in his professional career, he was met with misunderstanding, disregard, suspicion, and outright dismissal. The persistent rejection is no doubt a testimony to Cone’s persistent truth telling about racism.
Cone’s work—including Black Theology and Black Power (1969), A Black Theology of Liberation (1970), and The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011)— illuminates like no other the entanglement of race and religion. Blackness in America is about God in America. Cone identified black power as a religious concept and racialized oppression as a thoroughgoing theological crisis at the heart of the Christian message. God is black, and to be black like God is a gift.
