Theology for a Violent Age
Religious Beliefs Crippling African American Youth
by
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Chapter 1 The Souls of Black Folk Revisited
To know a people, their culture and the forces that shape them, look at their art forms. To understand how a live in the world, to see through the lens of a race, to perceive comprehend their world, look at their art forms. Art is the primary source material that reflects a people’s ethos and collective psyche. Art mirrors what a people say about themselves, and in reflection one catches a glimpse of their collective unconscious.
Based upon this truism, the first part of this work seeks to look into the souls of black folk—the self-knowledge of a race and culture with a peculiar history in white America—as that soul is mirrored in black drama; narratives written by African-American playwrights whose plays reflect different aspects of dysfunctional black family systems. In chapter two, I adapt narrative theology to identify dominant images or root metaphors in black drama. These images serve as keys to recognize and understand the core convictions of African-Americans—a sub-group in American culture. I argue that these root metaphors are controlling images, because they shape the distinctive character and culture of an African-American worldview. Once this task is accomplished— identifying dominant images in black dramas as a vehicle to identify and examine a people’s core convictions—I will explore the theological or religious significance of African-American experience, as portrayed in black dramatic literature about black families. In chapters three and four, respectively, I specifically interpret the theological (or at least, religious) significance of African-American experience as portrayed in LeRoi Jones’s (who later took the name Imamu Baraka) Dutchman and in James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner.
The underlying assumption that grounds this work is that a people’s art, such as their dramatic literature, can be approached as primary source material because it creatively embodies the collective consciousness of a people. Therefore, it is imperative that selected representations of a people’s art are the creative expressions of artists who share in the cultural and ethnic experience of the people under investigation.
This book is concerned with uncovering the self knowledge of African-Americans, and in particular, with the pathology that results from the systemic and structural racism inherent in American society. Therefore, we need to examine the creative expression of African- American artists whose work is representative of African American life and culture. To do otherwise—that is, to investigate the creative work of non African-American artists who happen to explore through their art the lives of black folk—would simply corrupt the purpose and process of this theological inquiry. that a person’s way of being in the world is culturally rooted. Therefore, a non-African-American’s creative expression of black folk, although possibly reflective of the black experience, is never prototypical of African-American life and culture. Their personal identity and self-knowledge is rooted in and prototypical of cultural base.
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About the Book
Any politician or pundit will agree: we live in a violent and dangerous age. Our pent-up anger and rage fills our households and spills over into our neighborhoods and streets, leaving African American families who live in poverty and with limited capability to ward off shame and self-contempt as its unfortunate victims.
“There are many ideas in this little volume and they are meaningful. They set the stage for an interpretation of certain African American youth and by implication other youth who are similarly situated in American Society.”
ARCHIE SMITH, Jr., PhD James and Clarice Foster Professor of Pastoral Psychology and Counseling, Pacific School of Religion
“In attempting to uncover the self-knowledge of African American people as reflected in Black dramatic literature as ‘conviction’ or secular theology, Woody Carter simultaneously reveals the dominant forces that influence Black life and the critical necessity to ‘stand on our own (African) cultural ground.’ All Black thinkers, from intellectuals and scholars to teachers, preachers and parents to mental health workers, futurist and community activist, who have struggled with the dilemma of DuBois’s double consciousness and the significance of religion in the Black community, both of which I believe have never been properly understood, will find Theology for a Violent Age informative, insightful, and a strong provocation and challenge for the reader to continue to seek the core essence of being Black and the searchlights necessary to envision our full humanity as more than reactions to white supremacy and racial domination and oppression. Theology for a Violent Age is deserving of a critical read and methodical application against the problems of our time.”
DR. WADE W. NOBLES Professor Emeritus, San Francisco State University; Executive Director, The Institute for the Advanced Study of Black Family Life & Culture; Co-Founder and Past President, Association of Black Psychologists and author of Seeking the Sakhu: Foundational Readings in African Psychology, Third World Press. Chicago, 2009
About the Author
Woody Carter earned an undergraduate degree from Howard University, a master's degree from City College of New York, and his Ph.D. from Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. A long-time educator, he currently serves as CEO and President of the Bay Area Black United Fund in Oakland, California.