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Katie Geneva Cannon
From Feminist Interpretation of the Bible
Edited by
Letty M. Russell
Westminster Press Philadelphia
The feminist consciousness of Afro-American women cannot
be understood and explained adequately apart from the historical context in
which Black women have found themselves as moral agents. By tracking down the
central and formative facts in the Black woman’s social world, one can
identify the determinant and determining structures of oppression that have
shaped the context in which Black women discriminately and critically interpret
scripture, in order to apprehend the divine Word from the perspective of their
own situation. Throughout the history of the United States, the
interrelationship of white supremacy and male superiority has characterized the
Black woman’s reality as a situation of struggle-a struggle to survive in
two contradictory worlds simultaneously, one white, privileged, and oppressive,
the other black, exploited, and oppressed. Thus, an untangling of the Black
religious heritage sheds light on the feminist consciousness that guides Black
women in their ongoing struggle for survival.
The Struggle for Human Dignity
The Black church is the crucible through which the
systematic faith affirmations and the principles of biblical interpretation
have been revealed. It came into existence as an invisible institution in the
slave community during the seventeenth century. Hidden from the eyes of slave
masters, Black women, along with Black men, developed an extensive religious
life of their own. Utilizing West African religious concepts in a new and
totally different context and syncretistically blending them with orthodox
colonial Christianity, the slaves made Christianity truly their own. C. Eric
Lincoln puts it this way:
The blacks brought their religion with them. After a
time they accepted the white man’s religion, but they have not always
expressed it in the white man’s way .... The black religious experience is
something more than a black patina on a white happening. It is a unique
response to a historical occurrence that can never be replicated for any people
in America.’ (1)
The biblical interpretation of the antebellum Black church
served as a double-edged sword. Confidence in the sovereignty of God, in an
omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient God, helped slaves accommodate to the
system of chattel slavery. With justice denied, hopes thwarted, and dreams
shattered, Black Christians cited passages from the Bible that gave them
emotional poise and balance in the midst of their oppression. In the prayer
meetings and song services, in the sermons and spirituals, the biblical texts
provided refuge in a hostile white world. Howard Thurman argued that this
stance enabled enslaved Black women and Black men to make their worthless lives
worth living.(2) “Being socially proscribed, economically impotent, and
politically brow-beaten,” Benjamin Mays wrote, “they sang, prayed,
and shouted their troubles away.” (3)
The biblical interpretation of the Black church also made the slaves
discontent with their servile condition. Under slavery the Black woman had the
status of property: Her master had total power over her, and she and her
children were denied the most elementary social bonds-family and kinship. The
Black woman was defined as “brood sow” and “work ox.”
Concession was given to her gender only when it was expedient for the
slaveowner. Much of the theology of this period encouraged slave women to
eliminate the sources of their oppression. The Black religious experience
equipped slaves with a biblical understanding that called them to engage in
acts of rebellion for freedom. The faith assertions of the Black church
encouraged slaves to reject any teachings that attempted to reconcile slavery
with the gospel of Jesus Christ. As George Rawick points out:
It was out of the religion of the slaves, the religion of the
oppressed, the damned of this earth, that came the daily resistance to slavery,
the significant slave strikes, and the Underground Railroad, all of which
constantly wore away at the ability of the slave masters to establish their own
preeminent society.’ (4)
The slave woman’s religious consciousness provided her
with irrepressible talent in humanizing her environment. Having only from
midnight to daybreak to provide love and affection for her own offspring, the
Black woman returned at night with leftovers, throwaways, discarded shells of
the white slaveowner’s rubbish to the small, crude, squalid dwelling where
she made a home for her family. Often she took into her quarters Black children
whose parents had been sold away from them or they from their parents with the
full knowledge that she could expect to have her own offspring with her for a
few years, at the most.
When the state laws adopted the principle of partus
sequitur ventrem - the child follows the condition of the mother regardless
of the race of her mate- the Black woman became the carrier of the hereditary
slave status. Absolving all paternal responsibilities, this principle
institutionalized and sanctioned sexual prerogatives and the rape of Black
women by white men. No objective circumstances such as education, skill, dress,
or manner could modify this racist arrangement. The Black woman’s slave
status extended to her children and her children’s children, a lifetime of
abject servitude, supposedly to the infinity of time [99].
Being both slave and female, the Black woman survived
wanton misuse and abuse. She was answerable with her body to the sexual
casualness of “stock breeding” with Black men and to the sexual whims
and advances of white men. Virtually all the slave narratives contain accounts
of the high incidence of rape and sexual coercion. La Frances Rodgers-Rose, in
The Black Woman, describes the sexual exploitation of the Black slave
woman in this manner:
The Black woman had to withstand the sexual abuse of the
white master, his sons and the overseer. A young woman was not safe. Before
reaching maturity, many a Black woman had suffered the sexual advances of the
white male. If she refused to succumb to his advances, she was beaten and in
some cases tortured to death.(5)
White men, by virtue of their economic position, had
unlimited access to Black women’s bodies. At the crux of the ideology that
Black women were an inferior species was the belief that Black women, unlike
white women, craved sex inordinately. “The rape of the black woman by
white men or the use of their bodies for pleasure could be rationalized as the
natural craving of the black women for sex, rather than the licentiousness of
the white men.”(6) The mixed blood of thousands upon thousands of African
peoples’ descendants is incontrovertible proof of sexual contact between
white slave masters and Black slave women.
Reduced to subservient marginality, the Black slave woman
was constantly being stripped of familiar social ties in order for her owner to
maximize his profit. All of the Black woman’s relationships existed under
the shadowy threat of a permanent separation. As an outsider in society, the
Black woman lived with constant fear, and most of the time she had to endure
the reality of having her husband and her children sold away from her in the
likelihood that she would never see them again. Countless slave families were
forcibly disrupted. “This flow of enslaved Afro-Americans must count as
one of the greatest forced migrations in world history.”(7)
In nothing was slavery so savage and so relentless as in
its attempted destruction of the family instincts of the negro [sic] race in
America. Individuals, not families; shelters, not homes; herding, not
marriages, were the cardinal sins in that system of horrors. Who can ever
express in song or story the pathetic history of this race of unfortunate
people when freedom came, groping about for their scattered offspring with when
freedom came, groping about for their scattered offspring with only instinct to
guide them, trying to knit together the broken ties of family
kinship?(8)
The Black woman’s consciousness in the first two
centuries of the American colonies’ existence focused on identifying
resources that would help her sustain the inescapable theological
attacks-either Black people were human beings and could not be property, or
they were property and something less than human. “Black and white were
constantly presented as antipodes, negative and positive poles on a continuum
of goodness. In the minds of whites, Negroes stood as the antithesis of the
character and properties of white people.”(9) All of life was graded
according to an elaborate hierarchy, inherited from the Middle Ages, known as
the “great chain of being.” Blacks were assigned a fixed place as an
inferior species of humanity. The common property of white culture were certain
preconceptions about the irredeemable nature of Black women and Black men as
“beings of an inferior order,”(10) a species between animal and
human. Unwavering faith in God provided Black Christians with patience and
perseverance in the ongoing struggle for survival.
The Struggle Against White Hypocrisy
The institution of chattel slavery in America was
destroyed by the most momentous event of the nineteenth century, the Civil War,
from 1861 to 1865. Emancipation removed the legal and political slave status
from approximately four million Black people in the United States, which meant
that, in principle, these Blacks owned their person and their labor for the
first time. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of Afro-Americans, the
traditional practices of racial and gender subordination subjected them to
incredible suffering after the war. The general patterns of de facto social
segregation and disenfranchisement of Blacks, which were integral to the raison
d etre of the peculiar institution, continued as the norm. White Southerners
accepted the abolition of slavery as one of the consequences of their military
defeat and surrender at Appomattox in 1865, but they were totally unwilling to
grant Black women and men respect as equal human beings with rights of life,
liberty, and property. The “rightness of whiteness” counted more than
the basic political and civil rights of any Black person. Southern apologists
received widespread acceptance from many Northerners who had opposed slavery on
the ground of an indivisible United States while avidly supporting racial
subordination. Many academic historians, sociologists, anthropologists,
theologians, and biblical scholars dredged up every conceivable argument to
justify the natural inferiority of Blacks and their natural subordination to
whites. Institutional slavery ended, but the virulent and intractable hatred
that supported it did not.
During the Reconstruction Era, the Black church continued
to assume its responsibility for shaping the expository and critical biblical
reflections that would help the adherents of the faith understand the interplay
of historical events and societal structures. The biblical teachings of the
church continued to develop out of the socioeconomic and political context in
which Black people found themselves. In every sphere where Black people were
circumscribed and their legal rights denied, the Black church called its
members to a commitment of perfecting social change and exacting social
righteousness here on earth. The scripture lessons that were most important
after emancipation were those texts which focused on Christians working to help
the social order come into harmony with the divine plan.
When the Freedmen’s Bureau was effectively curtailed
and finally dismantled, Blacks were left with deadletter amendments and
nullified rights acts, with collapsing federal laws and increasing white
terrorist violence. Beyond the small gains and successes of a few Blacks, the
optimism of ex-slaves about full citizenship was soon extinguished. Hence, the
aftereffects of Reconstruction and their consequences called the Black church
forth as the community’s sole institution of power. Whether urban or
rural, the Black church was the only institution totally controlled by Black
people. It was the only place outside the home where Blacks could express
themselves freely and take independent action. The church community was the
heart, center, and basic organization of Black life. And those who were the
religious leaders searched the scriptures to give distinctive shapes and
patterns to the words and ideas that the Black commu nity used to speak about
God and God’s relationship to an oppressed people.
The Black woman began her life of freedom with no vote, no
protection, and no equity of any sort. Black women, young and old, were
basically on their own. The patterns of exploitation of the Black woman as
laborer and breeder were only shaken by the Civil War; by no means were they
destroyed. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Black
women were severely restricted to the most unskilled, poorly paid, menial work.
Virtually no Black woman held a job beyond that of domestic servant or field
hand. Keeping house, farming, and bearing and rearing children continued to
dominate all aspects of the Black woman’s life. The systematic exclusion
and routinized oppression of Black females from other areas of employment
served as confirmations for the continuation of the servile status of Black
women. As Jeanne Noble describes it, “While freedom brought new
opportunities for black men, for most women it augmented old
problems.”(11) After emancipation, racism and male supremacy continued to
intersect patriarchal and capitalist structures in definitive ways.
he religious consciousness of the Black freedwoman focused
on “uplifting” the Black community. The Black female was taught that
her education was meant not only to uplift her but also to prepare her for a
life of service in the overall community. It was biblical faith grounded in the
prophetic tradition that helped Black women devise strategies and tactics to
make Black people less susceptible to the indignities and proscriptions of an
oppressive white social order.
The unique alliance between northern missionary and
philanthropic societies afforded an increasing number of Black women
opportunities of education. The Black woman as educator attended Sunday
services at local churches, where she often spoke in order to cultivate
interest in the Black community’s overall welfare. Churchwomen were
crusaders in the development of various socialservice improvement leagues and
aid societies. They sponsored fund-raising fairs, concerts, and all forms of
social entertainment, in order to correct some of the inequities in the
overcrowded and understaffed educational facilities in the Black community.
These dedicated women substantially reduced illiteracy among Black people.
The biblical teachings of the Black church served as a
bulwark against laws, systems, and structures that rendered Black people as
nonentities. Fearful of the emerging competitive race relations with Blacks,
white America instituted a whole set of policies and customs in order to
maintain white supremacy. White people wanted to regulate and eventually stamp
out all notions of social equality between the races. Terror of Black
encroachment in areas where whites claimed power and privileges even caused
southern state legislatures to enact Black Codes, similar to slave codes,
designed to limit drastically the rights of ex-slaves
Although their provisions varied among states, the Black
Codes essentially prevented the freedmen from voting or holding office, made
them ineligible for military service, and disbarred them from serving on juries
or testifying in court against whites. Moreover, blacks were forbidden to
travel from place to place without passes, were not allowed to assemble without
a formal permit from authorities, and could be fined and bound out to labor
contractors if they were unwilling to work.(12)
“Jim Crowism” became a calculated invidious
policy to exclude the mass of Black folk from interracial contacts in public
places and on public transportation facilities. With de jure
segregation, civil rights for Black people fell outside the realm of legal
contract. Not only were Blacks granted no protection under the law, but direct
steps were taken to control even the most personal spatial and social aspects
of Black life. “It became a punishable offense against the laws or the
mores for whites and Negroes to travel, eat, defecate, wait, be buried, make
love, play, relax and even speak together, except in the stereotyped context of
master and servant interaction.” (13) Segregation took a less blatantly
visible form in the North, but it was only slightly less rigid.
The Black woman’s consciousness during this period
caused her to evaluate this extreme social impoverishment-caused by a panoply
of state laws requiring a rigid system of segregation-as an abominable evil.
She believed that Jim Crowism was contrary to nature and against the will of
God. The Black church with its own ideas of morality condemned the hypocrisy of
white Christians. How could Christians who were white refuse flatly and openly
to treat as fellow human beings Christians who had African ancestry? Was not
the essence of the gospel mandate a call to eradicate affliction, despair, and
systems of injustice? The Black church’s identification with the children
of Israel was a significant theme in the consciousness of the Black woman.
During the migratory period (1910-1925), the Black church
was the citadel of hope. A series of floods and boll weevil infestations,
diminishing returns on impoverished soil, wartime curtailment of European
immigrants for industrial labor markets, and rampaging racial brutality
accelerated Black emigration from South to North and from rural to urban areas.
Tens of thousands of Black women and men left home, seeking social democracy
and economic oppor
tunities. Black churches were used for almost every sort
of activity: as boarding quarters for migrant people who had nowhere else to
go, as centers for civic activities, as concert halls for artists and choirs,
and as lecture rooms for public-spirited individuals. During this colossal
movement of Black people, the church continued to serve as the focal point for
the structure of Black life.
This accelerated movement of Blacks out of the South
impinged on the Black woman’s reality in very definite ways. Black women
migrated North in greater numbers than Black men.14 Economic necessity dictated
that most Black women who migrated to the urban centers find work immediately.
In order to survive themselves and to provide for their families, Black women
once again found only drudge work available to them. Small numbers of Black
women were allowed inside the industrial manufacturing system but were confined
to the most tedious, strenuous, and degrading occupations
White women had no intentions of working alongside black
women; even if some of them did speak of sexual equality, most did not favor
racial equality .... Fear of competing with blacks as well as the possible loss
of job status associated with working with blacks caused white workers to
oppose any efforts to have blacks as fellow workers.(15)
The interaction of race and sex in the labor market exacted
a heavy toll on the Black woman, making all aspects of migration a problem of
paramount religious significance. Her experience as wife and mother,
responsible for transmitting the culture, customs, and values of Black
community to her children, served as a decisive factor in determining how the
Bible was read and understood. At the same time that the Black woman was trying
to organize family life according to her traditional roles, the male-dominated
industrial society required that she serve as catalyst in the transition
process. Her own unfamiliarities and adaptation difficulties had to be
repressed because she was responsible for making a home in crowded substandard
housing, finding inner-city schools that propagated literacy for her children,
and earning enough income to cover the most elementary needs.
The struggle for justice
Black religion and the Black church served as a sustaining
force, assuring boundless justice. During these stormy times, the Black church
tradition renewed hope and spiritual strength, touching these women’s
lives in all their ramifications, enabling migrant women to carry on in spite
of obstacles and opposition. It was the interpretive principle of the Black
church that guided Black women in facing life squarely, in acknowledging its
raw coarseness. The white elitist attributes of passive gentleness and an
enervative delicacy, considered particularly appropriate to womanhood, proved
nonfunctional in the pragmatic survival of migrant Black women. Cultivating
conventional amenities was not a luxury afforded them. Instead, Black women
were aware that their very lives depended upon their being able to decipher the
various sounds in the larger world, to hold in check the nightmare figures of
terror, to fight for basic freedoms against the sadistic law enforcement
agencies in their communities, to resist the temptation to capitulate to the
demands of the status quo, to find meaning in the most despotic circumstances,
and to create something where nothing existed before. Most of the time this was
accompanied by the unceasing mumbling of prayers. “But nothin’ never
hurt me ‘cause de Lawd knowed how it was.”(16)
World Wars I and II brought the most visible changes in
Black life. Under coercive pressure from the Black community, the federal
government was forced to take definite steps to halt discrimination in war
industries. With white labor reserves depleted, large numbers of Black women
and men were hired. In segregated plants and factories, Black women attained
semiskilled, skilled, and supervisory positions. A few were even granted
limited rights in auxiliary unions. Most Black women, however, were assigned
the most arduous tasks, worked in the least skilled jobs, and received lower
wages than their white counterparts.
The biblical teachings of the Black church continued to
initiate and envision the fundamental truth claims operative in the community.
The ministers’ expositions of the biblical faith corresponded to the
efficacious ways that the Black community dealt with contingencies in the
real-lived context. The scriptures made a significant difference in the notions
Blacks used to see and to act in situations that confronted them .
For instance, during this period, segregation was still
legally maintained in almost every area of social contact, the horrors of
lynching became an accepted reality, and blackface minstrel-burlesque shows
were used to reinforce the stereotype of Black people as inferior. Black
churchwomen became crusaders for justice. They recorded and talked about the
grimness of struggle among the least visible people in the society. Given their
hostile environment, deteriorating conditions, and the enduring humiliation of
the social ostracism of the war years, these women exposed the most serious and
unyielding problem of the twentieth century - the single most determining
factor of Black existence in America - the question of color.
In the years following the world wars, white mob violence,
bloody race riots, and “hate strikes” broke out in northern and
southern cities alike. Innocent Blacks were beaten, dragged by vehicles, and
forced out of their homes. Substantial amounts of Black-owned property were
destroyed. Throughout the country, extralegal barriers resurged to prevent
social equality. Lynching, burning, castrating, beating, cross-burning, tarring
and feathering, masked night rides, verbal threats, hate rallies, public
humiliations, and random discharging of shotguns in windows were all used by
white vigilante groups “to shore up the color line.”
Blacks served in World War II as soldiers and civilians.
Thousands worked in noncombatant labor battalions. All returned home calling
for the “double V”-victory abroad and victory at home. Black veterans
objected to the second-class treatment traditionally accorded to them. In their
cry against the ideological supremacy of racist practices and values, they
appealed to the religious heritage of Blacks that began in the invisible church
during slavery.
Black Womanist Consciousness
From the period of urbanization of World War II to the
present, Black women find that their situation is still a situation of
struggle, a struggle to survive collectively and individually against the
continuing harsh historical realities and pervasive adversities in today’s
world. The Korean and Vietnam wars, federal government programs, civil rights
movements, and voter-education programs have all had a positive impact on the
Black woman’s situation, but they have not been able to offset the
negative effects of inherent inequities that are inextricably tied to the
history and ideological hegemony of racism, sexism, and class privilege.
The Black woman and her family continue to be enslaved to
hunger, disease, and the highest rate of unemployment since the Depression of
the 1930s. Advances in education, housing, health care, and other necessities
that came about during the mid- and late 1960s are deteriorating faster now
than ever before. Both in informal day-to-day life and in the formal
organizations and institutions in society, Black women are still the victims of
the aggravated inequities of the tridimensional phenomenon of race/class/gender
oppression. This is the backdrop of the historical context for the emergence of
the Black feminist consciousness.
In essence, the Bible is the highest source of authority
for most Black women. In its pages, Black women have learned how to refute the
stereotypes that depict Black people as minstrels or vindictive militants, mere
ciphers who react only to omnipresent racial oppression. Knowing the Jesus
stories of the New Testament helps Black women be aware of the bad housing,
overworked mothers, underworked fathers, functional illiteracy, and
malnutrition that continue to prevail in the Black community. However, as
God-fearing women they maintain that Black life is more than defensive
reactions to oppressive circumstances of anguish and desperation. Black life is
the rich, colorful creativity that emerged and reemerges in the Black quest for
human dignity. Jesus provides the necessary soul for liberation.
Understanding the prophetic tradition of the Bible empowers
Black women to fashion a set of values on their own terms, as well as
mastering, radicalizing, and sometimes destroying the pervasive negative
orientations imposed by the larger society. Also, they articulate possibilities
for decisions and action which address forthrightly the circumstances that
inescapably color and shape Black life. Black women serve as contemporary
prophets, calling other women forth so that they can break away from the
oppressive ideologies and belief systems that presume to define their reality.
Black feminist consciousness may be more accurately
identified as Black womanist consciousness, to use Alice Walker’s concept
and definition. (17) As an interpretive principle, the Black womanist tradition
provides the incentive to chip away at oppressive structures, bit by bit. It
identifies those texts which help Black womanists to celebrate and rename the
innumerable incidents of unpredictability in empowering ways. The Black
womanist identifies with those biblical characters who hold on to life in the
face of formidable oppression. Often compelled to act or to refrain from acting
in accordance with the powers and principalities of the external world, Black
womanists search the scriptures to learn how to dispel the threat of death in
order to seize the present life.
Notes
2: The Emergence of Black Feminist Consciousness
1: C. Eric Lincoln, in his foreword to William R.
Jones's Is God a White Racist? (Doubleday & Co., Anchor Books,
1973), pp. vii-viii.
2. Howard Thurman, Deep River and the Negro Spiritual
Speaks of Life and Death (Friends United Press, 1975), p. 135.
3. Benjamin Mays, The Negro's God as Reflected in His
Literature (Chapman & Grimes, 1938; reprint ed., Greenwood Press,
1969), p. 26.
4. George P. Rawick, The American Slave: A Composite
Autobiography, From Sundown to Sunup (Greenwood Press, 1972), p. 51.
5. La Frances Rodgers-Rose, ed., The Black Woman
(Sage Publications, 1980J, p. 20.
6. Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The
Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976 (Greenwood Press, 1980), p. 13.
7. Paul A. David et al., Reckoning with Slavery:
Critical Essays in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery
(Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 59. For a detailed discussion of the
internal slave trade, see Frederic Bancroft, Slave Trading in the Old South
(Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1959).
8. A quotation by Fannie Barrier Williams in Black
Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life: Their Words, Their Thoughts, Their
Feelings, ed. by Bert James Loewenberg and Ruth Bogin (Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1976), p. 15.
9. Henry Alien Bullock, A History of Negro Education
in the South from 1619 to the Present (Harvard University Press, 1967), pp.
155-156.
10. Stated by then Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott
case, March 1857.
11. Jeanne L. Noble, Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls
of My Black Sisters: A History of the Black Woman in America
(Prentice-Hall, 1978), p, 63.
12. William J. Wilson, Power, Racism, and Privilege:
Race Relations in Theoretical and Sociohistorical Perspectives (Macmillan
Publishing Co., 1973), p. 99.
13. Pierre L. van den Berghe, Race and Racism: A
Comparative Perspective (John Wiley & Sons, 1967), p. 77.
14. According to Negro Population in the United
States 1790-1915, five Black women migrated out of the South for every four
Black men.
15. Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, eds., The
Afro-American Woman, Struggles and Images (Kennikat Press, 1978), p. 8.
16. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
(J. B. Lippincott Co., 1937; reprint ed., University of Illinois Press,
1978), p. 34.
17. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens:
Womanist Prose (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), pp. xi-xii. Walker
indicates that the term "Womanist" is "from womanish (opposite of'girlish,'
i.e., frivolous, 'irresponsible, not serious'). A black feminist or feminist of
color." Among other things she loves women, is committed to the survival of her
people and their culture, loves herself. "Womanist s to feminist as purple is
to lavender."
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