John McWhorter defends fried chicken, dancing and Ebonics.

My recent piece on a definition of blackness seems to have created some misunderstandings. Many seem to think that if all people of African descent do not exhibit a cultural trait, then there are no grounds for designating that trait "black."

Upon which I note: ostriches do not fly; bats do. Does this mean that we are "stereotyping" in making the generalization that birds fly?

Of course not. Most birds fly. My quick list of some traits that can be considered "black" was based on the same logic. That is: There are definable cultural characteristics and behaviors that link black people to one another culturally, and this complex of characteristics and behaviors can be designated "black culture." This particular complex of characteristics and behaviors does not describe Jewish people or Armenians. It describes black Americans.

Black English was created by black people; most black people speak it to some extent. If there were no black Americans there would be no Black English. It is a black cultural trait.

Christianity is a bedrock of cultural blackness. There are, of course, Black Muslims, but not as many as Christians. Barack Obama was counseled by black ministers that if he was to have credibility in the community where he was organizing, he would have to join a church. Their counsel would seem to suggest that Christianity plays a central role in black culture. Were they "stereotyping" black culture? Christianity played a central role in the Civil Rights movement: that is, the black people with most influence over the community were Christian ministers.

In the program to the original Broadway production of the musical Hairspray, six of the eleven black cast members thanked God (not Allah) for their success. One the 24 white cast members, only one did that. This was another indication that Christian faith plays a central role in black culture – unless for some reason white actors have a commitment to suppressing evidence of their faith in their program bios, which obviously they do not.

Or: in the film of Waiting to Exhale, there is a quick exterior sequence of the protagonists leaving church on Sunday, despite that the movie is not about religion. Think about how much less likely that shot would be in the latest film with people like Drew Barrymore, Julia Roberts, or Katie Holmes. If they were seen leaving church – especially four characters together – then the movie would likely be about the church in some way. In Waiting to Exhale, that sequence was a nice touch of authenticity – in that Christianity is part of the warp and woof of the culture.

Fried chicken is a part of black culture. It was created in the South, and black Americans once mostly lived in the South. Naturally, fried chicken would remain popular with black people. In addition, black people helped develop its seasoning, and ate it especially often because slaves were only allowed to keep chickens.

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John McWhorter gives an interesting (given his past publications) and honest assessment on "blackness." He argues, "Some people are blacker than others."

In the The New York Times last Sunday, Jill Nelson dismissed the idea that black people ever really wondered whether Sen. Barack Obama was "black enough." My memory of how Obama was being discussed a year ago is different from Nelson's. Today, however, black people who question Obama's authenticity are indeed a fringe.

So what's that all about? Well, with Obama, it was whether he was committed to the black community's concerns. He was--as a black community organizer in Chicago. And he is, in his commitment to programs on prisoner re-entry and responsible fatherhood.

However, when the question of whether someone is "really black" comes up outside the realm of politics, we tend to lapse into a kind of doubletalk. One ploy is to swat away the issue of blackness as a real quantity. In that case, "What's that all about?" is not so much a query as a rebuke that the question is inappropriate, illogical, or even underhanded.

When Michelle Obama dismissed the question about her husband as "silliness," that was sensible: Barack Obama has proven that he understands black concerns. Too often, though, we are taught that it is "silly" to address blackness as a gradient at all. But this is evasive. We're tiptoeing around something, and it's black culture. Some people are more rooted in it than others – and there isn't a thing wrong with that.

Some say that blackness is simply a matter of color. By this analysis, anyone who raises the larger questions about black identity is apparently visually impaired. Last year, Gwen Ifill, for example, dismissed the question of whether Obama is black enough because someone who, like her, is a child of immigrant blacks might not be considered "black." But I think we all know it's not that simple. The brown-skinned person implying their skin color renders the whole issue moot is leveling a coded challenge: "Are you saying that all black people talk like rappers and eat fried chicken?"

But this implies that there is no such thing as black culture in a legitimate sense. But there is – and it includes Ebonics and chicken!

What is black culture? Definitions will differ. But we can't treat the definition as so "fluid" that it isn't a definition at all. I will toss out a few parameters of what "black" is:

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This is sure to become a classic interview - Dr. Jeremiah Wright, a Black pastor of a self-conscious African/Black church with a Black theology of liberation arguing about his church's views with a White theologically and politically conservative pundit, Sean Hannity. No matter what you think about Wright and his comments, he as a Black socratic thinker/theologian, would not be defined by another. Now if only more Black (Reformed) Christians would have such courageous and critical intelligence.




Related: “Perspectives on Jeremiah Wright's Sermon Excerpts and Obama's Speech.”

On August 9th, I was a guest on the "Morning Coffee with Tracey & Friends" program, a program for the Black community, hosted by Tracey Winbush, on WGFT - AM 1330 in Youngstown, OH, discussing a whole myriad of issues in the Black community. Tracey Winbush, an absolutely provocative radio host, and her entire group of African American “friends” offered an interesting and lively discussion (“y’all know how we do” especially when you get a bunch of us in a room talking about God!) To my surprise, I spent nearly an hour defending the existence of the Trinity. Didn’t we cover that at Nicea in 325 AD?

During our conversation I came to one long conclusion: Christianity in Black America is in serious trouble. Much of it is dying, moving toward old errors and heresies while some orthodox circles are not addressing contemporary issues, and we are in desperate need for a new generation of Black theologians. Here’s why I’m worried:

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In case you haven't heard, there is a new film called, What Black Men Think. The film attempts to debunk many of the stereotypes and myths about Black men. I definitely want to see it because I don't even know what I think as a Black man half time. But seriously, has anyone seen this yet? I've read some reviews. I just hope it is beyond the normal political propaganda from the left or the right.

The Washington Post has a writeup here.

Excerpt:

In 2005, according to the Census Bureau, there were 864,000 black men in college. According to Justice Department statistics, there were 802,000 in federal and state prisons and jails, "even with the old heads holding on," Morton says.

Between the ages of 18 and 24, however, black men in college outnumber those incarcerated by 4 to 1.

Still, the idea that the reverse is true stems from an image that has been perpetuated, Morton says, by the government, the media and the black leadership, whoever they are.

So you ask him to ask the white men sitting behind him at the restaurant.

"I'm not worried about them," he says. "My point is I'm worried about us and what we think about ourselves."

The video that started it all:


Here's a video from the site of people's opinion about the film:

During my theological sojourn at Dallas Seminary, Eddie B. Lane [1] challenged the author on several occasions to make a contribution to evangelical thinking modalities by learning to wed Christ-centered thinking with Afrocentric interpretative applications of the Sacred text. In other words, Lane rightly avers that it is important for African American theologians to exercise critical thinking as one who `engages the biblical text concomitant to one’s communal context in order to loose the mental shackles of Eurocentric interpretive application. It seems that the African American evangelical theologian can ill afford spending an inordinate amount of time investigating false truth claims and worldviews that are not prevalent among African Americans in order to be accepted or, even more tragically, revered by the dominant culture within Evangelicalism. Rather, one must take pains to contextualize the complexities of evangelical theology to the degree that one’s African American target group (believing and unbelieving) can readily understand and appropriate the truths therein. That is, one must employ the pedagogical principle of “teaching the unknown in light of the known,” if one desires to build the necessary bridges for engaging our brothers and sisters in search of truth.

It amazes the writer how much the spirit of postmodernism, even if not philosophically understood by many adherents, has laid its fiendish grip on the African American community as well. The writer observes this spirit flowing through the minds and motivations of African American brothers and sisters who have, in unprecedented numbers, begun to reject Big momma’s and paw-paw’s “Hope” found in the Christ of Scripture (1Tim 1:1; Heb 6:13-20), for what I deem as cultural hearsay—the crafting of philosophical and theological beliefs through street corner and barber shop conversations instead of historical research. Quite honestly, I, too, was once victimized by this shoddy intellectualism.

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I wonder how many Black boys were/are influenced by the White superhero narrative that predominately portrayed Blacks as mere sidekicks and/or virtually powerless heroes, which probably led many Black boys to revere fictitious White superheroes more than the heroism of real, flesh and blood Black men, such as David Walker, Fredrick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., W. E. B. DuBois, Carter G. Woodson, Malcolm X? Could there also be a current correlation between Black (Reformed) men looking up and deferring almost always to White (Reformed) theologians/heroes?

Did you know?

In a University of Colorado at Boulder physics lab recently, Martha-Elizabeth "Marty" Baylor popped a pair of rose-colored goggles over her eyes and lowered her head under the glass of a laser system she uses to conduct optical research.

Among other challenges, Baylor, a JILA research assistant and graduate student, is working on a riddle scientists call the "cocktail party problem."

The question: How does the human brain zero in on one conversation while filtering out others? While some researchers have tackled the problem through mathematical equations or computer science, Baylor said, "We are the only ones with an optical solution, which is faster than anything out there."

Under the guidance of her adviser, physics Professor Dana Z. Anderson, Baylor is conducting National Science Foundation-funded research. One day, the team's work could lead to new applications in biomedicine, telecommunications and space exploration. Scientists already are building on clues garnered from this field to create powerful new signal-processing tools, Baylor said.

Later this year, Baylor, 30, will reach an academic milestone when she becomes the first African-American woman to receive a doctorate in physics from CU-Boulder and one of only a handful of black women to do so in the United States. It's an achievement that is not going unnoticed.

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Many in the larger culture have assumed, projected and imposed low expectations upon the very existence and nature of the Black American. And separate from such action, Blacks have created their own version of psychological dependence, victimization and inability in relation to wellbeing, performance and success. Soft bigotry is a ferocious pursuer but it is also the shameless woman in colorful garb.

Last year former education secretary and drug czar Bill Bennett stated in response to a caller suggesting that legal abortions had depleted the tax base for Social Security. "I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could—if that were your sole purpose—you could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down," Bennett volunteered. "That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So, these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky." In another instance, Paul Hornung the Pro Football Hall of Famer, NFL Green Bay Packers' star and Notre Dame Heisman trophy winner, on Detroit's WXYT-AM lamented about the poor play of his alma mater. Hornung's solution: "As far as Notre Dame is concerned ... we can't stay as strict as we are as far as the academic structure is concerned because we've got to get the Black athlete. We must get the Black athlete if we're going to compete ....” Despite the apparent irony of Hornung’s comments, in general Black America is more concerned about the Black athlete’s performance off the field than on it.

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Richard Neuhaus writes in Freedom for Ministry, “I count it among the great graces of my life that I was for a time, until his death on April 4, 1968, permitted to work with Martin Luther King, Jr. as a kind of liaison between himself and the peace movement. Among the truths that he so powerfully declared and embodied was this: “ ‘Whom you would change you must first love.’ That means we must see more in other people than they see in themselves if we are to help them in becoming what they are.”

King’s comment, “Whom you would change you must first love” is foundational to our understanding of Christ and Scripture. John 17:24: Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. Matthew writes in 25:34, “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. Notice how the theme of love and affection precedes the actual pervasive change of the individual and how God’s love for the individual is a motivation for bringing about such change.

A senior pastor told me an interesting experience about ministry and love. He stated that he needed to ask an associate pastor on his staff to step down. After the service in which the associate pastor announced his resignation to the congregation, a member approached the senior pastor with tears in his eyes and said, “You teach us, but he loved us.”

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