Humble Freedom Fighters: Examining Sacred Black Resistance to American Racial Oppression
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2017
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Haverford College. Department of Religion
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Award
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eng
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Bi-College users only
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Abstract
There has been a long tradition in Black American culture that documents the history of racial suffering. This tradition can be seen through the cultural markers of Blues music, Negro spirituals, religious culture, and social movement activity. These cultural markers have been issued from the depths of Black American life, as they represent the truest forms of Black humanity, suffering, and emotion. In the face of a racist American society that begins with slavery, Black resistance to racist encounters has always been a process of exploring the ways in which Black lives matter. The full understanding of Black human suffering as an inalienable human trait enables Blacks to resist the ways in which their society oppresses them. Ronald Thiemann’s concept of the humble sublime offers a way to see that the process of racial understanding and resistance in Black American culture is religious. This humble sublime represents the ways in which oppressed groups depict realist accounts of their humanity, therefore actively criticizing the meanings, representations, and ideologies of American culture. A new way of being in the world is therefore issued from realizing the ways in which Blacks humanly suffer in a White supremacist, authoritarian, and hegemonic culture. The works of James Baldwin, Cornel West, and Claudia Rankine are used to manifest the ways in which they are “humble freedom fighters,” or individuals who have taken up the concept of the humble sublime in order to derive life meaning. Each of the authors has developed a humanist rebellion that realizes the sacrality of their being a part of the human condition. Implications for the humble sublime therefore suggest the need for non-Blacks to realize the sacredness of Black human life in American society because everyone is bound by the nature of suffering. This humanity is what will hopefully connect Black lives with a greater social meaning. It will allow the readers of James Baldwin, Cornel West, Claudia Rankine, and many others authors and social thinkers, to move into action against America’s racial strains and complexities.