For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter, John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, Americanah, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.
I am a US psychoanalyst who comments on books, movies and conferences from a contemporary psychoanalytic perspective. Intended for those curious about applied psychoanalysis, this site grows out of a project - the 10,000 minds project of the American Psychoanalytic Association - to help the public become aware of contemporary psychoanalysis. I post 2-4 times per month and limit posts to about 2,000 words.
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Sunday, November 20, 2016
James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree
James Cone is a Black Liberation Theologian who delivered a “last
lecture” at my school this week. His
thesis is so simple, clear and direct that it is hard to believe that we don’t
all know it, not just the theologians among us.
He believes that the best way for Americans to understand the New
Testament – the best way to read about and understand Jesus – is through the
eyes of African Americans. He says this
because White America, post slavery, used the Lynching Tree in the same way
that the Roman Empire used the cross – to terrorize and maintain suppression
of oppressed peoples. The experience
of blacks in America is more like that of the Jews in Israel in the first
century than is that of the whites and, if we are to understand the message of Jesus, we should be
thinking through the eyes of those who have lived like the people he led lived –
not through the eyes of those oppressed him and those like him.
In this age of Trump, it is more the rule than the exception
for everyone to be functioning from the role of the oppressed. Just this week, Trump is demanding an apology
from the cast of Hamilton for violating the safe space the theater is supposed
to afford to all people, including the Vice President elect Mike Pence who was called out
after the performance to listen to a message begging him to lead all peoples in
his new role in a National office. While
it is true that the fourth wall is one whose violation can lead to problems, it
is also hard to see how the theater – especially a ground breaking theatrical
performance like Hamilton – is supposed to be a safe place. The whole intent of the musical is to
simultaneously tell history and to question our primary assumptions about what kind
of place the United States is.
And it is concerning that our President elect would consider citizens articulating their beliefs to those in power as inappropriate in a democracy. But I
think that is a consistent theme in our National rhetoric, and Cone is trying
to call our attention to it.
Before getting back to Cone, though, I think it is important
to note that not all of white America has always been empowered. A painting in our local museum depicts a poor
white farming family headed north before the civil war. Indeed, the painting is intended as a
political message calling for the abolition of slavery as it is damaging to the
poor southern white farmers. They are depicted
leaving the south because they cannot compete with the rich landowners who have
slave labor. The hardships of their
lives are depicted in the sorry state of the livestock they can take with them
and their bedraggled appearance.
Cone, in his appearance here, delivered an electric
performance in which he summarized his writing career, which culminated in the
writing of The Cross and Lynching Tree.
He clarified that he was working, from his first book forward, to
articulate “the cry of black blood” spilled in the process of keeping blacks
oppressed. He noted that Lynchings did
not occur before the end of the civil war because blacks were property and
anyone lynching someone would have been tried for damages and would have had to
compensate the owners. After the war,
especially where blacks outnumbered whites – and where whites had mistreated
blacks when they had been slaves – there was tremendous fear of what the blacks
would do to whites. Lynchings –
including spectacle lynchings which thousands of people, black and white,
attended were intended to instill fear and to retain political, physical,
economic and social control.
In the face of bodily control, religion, then, afforded
Blacks freedom. There are two forms of
this freedom – the first is spiritual.
Here, they are able to think and feel what they will in a religious
context. They are also able to
experience the feeling of freedom that comes from surviving – and remembering –
the damage that is done to one’s child, brother, sister, or parent. The sharing of these memories – which is
intended to retain social control, does that, but it creates a shared cultural
experience – the experience of being the oppressed. From our current election, we can see the
power of that experience – it can motivate people to come together and to vote
the bums out – to vote in a person with no job experience into one of the most
complicated jobs in the world.
I have written before about the ability of terror to be atremendously effective means of communicating feeling states. We felt a whole raft of feelings in the wake
of September 11th. And many
of those, I believe, were the feelings of those who were terrorizing us –
feelings of hopelessness and rage and mistrust and, of course, fear. And they effectively put those feelings (as
it were) in us. In a similar way, the
whites, through lynching, put a whole series of feelings – feelings that Cone and I
believe they were struggling with and disavowed – into those that they
lynched. And, because those who were
lynched were actually disempowered, they had to bear those feelings – they had
to know what it means to face the very real possibility that your life can be
taken from you at any moment – including for something that you didn’t do. And isn’t that the human state? Isn’t that precisely what Freud, in Moses and
Monotheism, stated that religion was invented to help us manage – the fear of
death? And who has had to manage that
fear more than the African American community?
Cone talked about God, and acknowledged that God is not
something that we, as humans, can know.
He said that God, from the point of theology, is what we imagine – succinctly,
God is imagination. And our imagination
is culturally determined. We see the God
that our culture opens up to us. So Cone’s
image of God is an intentionally culturally determined God – Cone listened to
the Blues and Spirituals, Soul and Jazz as a means of imaging what God looks
like from the African American experience.
At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last weekend, we were told
the story of how Rock and Roll’s roots lie in that very same music. Chuck Berry, B.B. King and Aretha Franklin
were all inducted into the Hall before the Beatles, as it should be. And what Cone maintained is that, if we don’t,
as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame does, remember the roots of our identity, we are in danger of co-opting the experience of the oppressed and
interpreting it from the perspective of the oppressor. So, the Roman Catholic Church is, to my mind,
somewhat of an irony – the Romans take on the role of the oppressed in their
identification with the Christ that they Crucified. And the Puritans, who arrived on Plymouth
Rock one year after first slaves came to America, can, from a position of
power, deny their role as oppressors (even as they ran from persecution) as
they and others came to a land where slavery occurred in the north as well as
the south and where separate but equal was enforced by the Supreme Court until
1954 – and by various subterfuges after that - so that our schools are more segregated now than they were at the time of Brown vs. Board.
The danger in cathecting the experience of the oppressed
from the position of the oppressor is that, from Cone’s position, we naively
experience ourselves as being lily pure when in fact we aren’t. When Cone was asked in an interview with Bill Moyers if Cone could forgive Moyers, he responded that he could not forgive,
but he could accept Moyers, as a white, as a brother – as a bad brother – but as
a brother. By this I think he was
encouraging us to remember that we have done both wonderful and horrific things
– and that we have done those together.
Cone explicitly stated that our history is not the history of the whites
or the blacks, but a shared and common history.
He is not asking that we tell a history that excludes one or the other,
but that we tell an inclusive history.
And, from this perspective, he would rather be coming at the problem from
the perspective of the people who have been lynched rather than those who have
done the lynching. From his perspective,
it is the ones who have done the lynching that will have the most difficulty
integrating their experience.
I think this is a minority opinion. One of the reasons that we integrated the
schools in the wake of Brown vs. the Board of Education had to do with the
results of psychological tests – the first time psychological tests were
admitted as evidence in a supreme court decision. These tests were administered by Richard and
Mamie Scott and showed that black children as young as 4, 5, 6, and 7 years old
had internalized a racial identity – and the hatred of the dominant culture
towards that race. In a brilliant Saturday Night Live monologue acknowledging the election of Trump, Dave
Chapelle notes that even though he has done the best that he can to distance
himself from being black by becoming rich that, if he could, he would shed his
racial identity. Of course, he doesn’t and
he can’t, which brings us full circle to Cone.
The identity that we are given – that we must bear, becomes the vehicle
for understanding the world. Chapelle
absolutely does this. And he and Cone,
through their contact with their identities, have a lot to tell white America
about our own. To his credit, Mike Pence acknowledged today that he was not offended by what the cast had to tell him from the stage - and he stated that Trump (and by implication he, himself) would lead all the people of the United States. We will see if they can do that from the radical position that Cone proposes - a position that involves integrating our strengths and weaknesses - including acknowledging our tremendous power - and the very real limits to that power, the knowledge that this life we value so highly will, inevitably, be taken from us.
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