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 11^th.  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.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

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.

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