How Christena Cleveland walked away from “whitemalegod”

Over and over again, while kicking around ideas about my dissertation focus, both of my mentors would ask, “What is generative about this?” and “How will this make the field better?” At the time, these questions were frustrating because I didn’t have answers to them. My scholarship explores the feedback loop between historiography and epistemology concerning the construction of African American racial identities throughout US history and in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (of which I am a member).

But now we have Christena Cleveland’s God Is a Black Woman. A Black woman looking unflinchingly at “whitemalegod” is a revolution, and it is a revolution Black women act out every day. The social psychologist’s book both names and enacts that revolution.

Cleveland—a social psychologist and the founder and director of the Center for Justice and Renewal and its sister organi­zation, Sacred Folk—uses sociology, theology, Black experience, and common sense to interrogate religion’s stubborn clinging to the fiction of a White, blue-eyed, male Jesus. In doing so, she articulates a faith that not only accounts for but centers her embodiment and experience. This happens against the backdrop of her extraordinary worldwide pilgrimage searching for “the Sacred Black Feminine.”