Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God - Chapter Four - A Father's Faith: The Freedom of God

The Reverend Dr Kelly Brown Douglas helps us all examine Black Faith in God in chapter four. Using the Exodus Story as the primary lens, she explains that Black Faith is essentially grounded in the belief that God is completely free and therefore seeks freedom for all people. The people in the Exodus story were oppressed and that oppression led to them being God's Chosen People.

I am very appreciative of the information Dr Douglas writes about the function of music in Black Faith. "Music allowed the captured and enslaved Africans to speak to one another across the barriers of their indigenous language and dialects that their enslavers did not respect" (pg 141). The music allowed for the transfer of information, the learning of language, and the expression of hopes and fears. It also allowed the enslaved to sing about the God they already knew from their homeland, a God that was free and demanded the freedom of everyone. This was not the same God that was preached to them as enslaved people by white preachers. The God of Home was a God who called them into being the fulness of who they were created to be (pg153). Home was a free and safe space to fully be who God created them to be.

The discussion of the people who already inhabited the Promised Land is deft and challenging. It allows for the God of Freedom to call the oppressed Home, while leaving space open to say that Home might already be occupied. Dr Douglas does not condone the acts of violence that might be attributed to God that clear out Home for others. She specifically names Native Americans again and their losses to the Manifest Destiny war.

Black Faith, as explained by Dr Douglas, does not blame God for injustice, but rather assumes that God prefers and gives strength to everyone who opposes the injustice and protests for justice.

Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God - Chapter Three: Manifest Destiny War

I am finally on the other side of beginning the new Sunday School season. One Sunday was Homecoming Sunday, the next started Sunday School, and then the next was Ministry Fair Sunday. It has been a busy month and I did not get back to this as quick as I thought I would. Here we all are, a few weeks later, ready to discuss Chapter Three: Manifest Destiny War in Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God by the Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas.

Dr. Douglas begins the chapter by giving us a history of the term, Manifest Destiny: the combination of Anglo-Saxon as the epitome of humanity finding their place in a whole new world and setting up a societal paradise known as the United States of America. According to Manifest Destiny, the USA was a blank slate ready for the experiments of democracy as imagined by Anglo-Saxon ways and culture. God had declared Anglo-Saxons as superior and all other races were to assimilate as quickly as possible. Assuming that whiteness is superior is troublesome enough, but then requiring assimilation from every other race is a “declaration of war” (pg 107) against non-white bodies. Because God had ordained the Anglo-Saxons as superior, then the war declared against the non-whites was a religious & just war. People indigenous to the USA were killed or segregated using the ideology of Manifest Destiny. All immigrants and non-whites were expected to assimilate as fully and quickly as possible. White Space was to be defended at all costs.

Dr. Douglas then neatly traces the ideas of Manifest Destiny straight into the beginning of the Stand Your Ground Laws. If White Space is the most valuable space, then defending White Space is paramount to fulfilling Manifest Destiny and Stand Your Ground laws allow for the use of deadly violence in that protection of White Space.

The rest of the chapter explains the intersection of Stand Your Ground and White Backlash. Even before Stand Your Ground laws were enacted, non-whites could be killed with impunity simply for being in White Space. If a white person felt threatened in any way by a non-white person, and especially by a black male, that “threatening” presence could be killed or otherwise removed with no further thought. Lynchings, imprisonments, and now police shootings are the direct result of the backlash against black people for simply being in a white space. Militarized police officers and departments continue to fight the war of Manifest destiny every day.

Dr. Douglas ends the chapter by pointing out that having a Black President of the United States has triggered a whole new level of White Backlash. She ponders the idea that the only place her Black son is safe is in her own home.

I am so glad I started this book. Now that I have been introduced to these ideas of White Space and Manifest Destiny and Anglo-Saxon Superiority I cannot un-see it unfolding all around me. I admire Dr. Douglas’ methodical, logical outline of the foundations of the United States and how we got to this place that so many of us find appalling. In some ways, I wonder how we can unravel racism from the fabric of our culture, when it has been woven in so tight and methodically from the very beginning.  

Chapter Four will begin Part Two of the book, which also has three chapters. We are halfway finished reading at this point. Where are your thoughts?