Second, that Carter’s vision is more radical than Cone’s is seen in the paternalisms that plague Cone’s work. Cone regularly speaks as if he were an outside observer categorizing those he desires to see liberated. For instance, while Cone confesses that he has been justifiably criticized for not satisfactorily listening to female voices in his work, when he does listen male paternalism sometimes creeps into even his most favorable assessments. In presenting Ida B. Wells’ campaign against lynching as a prime example of theological integrity, Cone claims that “black women activists . . . did not need theological imagination to show [lynching to be wrong].”218 Yet he has already labored to show that the lived experience of resistance produces theological imaginations that are profound in ways that more formal and detached reflections are not. Cone’s implication that the experiential insights of women engaged in the struggle for freedom were less sophisticated theologically suggests that he maintains male subjectivity as the normalizing pole of the equation. Likewise, when referring to black ministers with “little or no formal training in academic theology,” Cone claims that “they spoke from their hearts, appealing to their life experience . . . and the Spirit of God” while proclaiming “what they felt in song and sermon.”219 Yet again, why should “little or no formal training in academic theology” render someone unable to speak from the mind, as well as from the heart? Can those who have not been assimilated into white, Western theology not love God with all their minds? Is not Cone’s appeal to “untutored” African American preachers’ reliance upon their hearts and the Spirit very similar to those white authors like Piper who picture “the black experience” as adding a bit of soul or spirit to the Western tradition?220 What does this have to say about Cone’s views of what constitutes rationality and the “human”? As can be seen through these two examples, Cone’s ontological blackness far too frequently produces objectifying classifications.
Finally, Cone’s racialized ontology causes him to inadequately theorize Jewish identity. Whereas the early Cone suggested the particularity of the Jewish flesh of Jesus as the antidote to abstracting, white theology, in The Cross and the Lynching Tree Cone several times equates Jewishness and whiteness. For example, he calls Julius Bloch both a “white artist” and a “Jew from Germany.”221 He paradoxically names Abel Meeropol, author of Strange Fruit, a “white Jewish school teacher” while attributing his sensitivity about racial injustice to being part of a “marginalized community who had a long history of suffering at the hands of white Christians.”222 While Jewishness and whiteness may be used interchangeably within modern, racialized identity reflections, Jennings contends that the colonial genesis of racialization was born out of a desire to extricate the Jewish contagion from European lands. This demonstrates that Cone does not conceive of whiteness as primarily a sociopolitical order but a skin color, which cannot but slip into essentialized conceptions of race. Carter maintains that Jewish flesh is covenantal, not racial flesh. We will see in the next chapter that race, in the modern era, was activated by distancing whiteness from Jewish flesh.
Although Cone has moved in the direction of Carter, his framework of ontological blackness complicates his many positive strides. Although Carter incorporates many aspects of the theological foundation laid by Cone, his relationship to Cone must be assessed as one of greater divergence than his relationship with Raboteau. We will now move to explicating Carter’s relationship to the scholar from whose trajectory he most clearly distances himself.
Charles H. Long: Signifying Race
Long and the Religious Primordium
Charles Long is a celebrated historian of religions who retired from the Religious Studies Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara after teaching at both the University of North Carolina and the University of Chicago, where he earned his doctorate and worked closely with Mircea Eliade in establishing many of the parameters of their discipline. His work is representative of the manner in which modern religious studies tends to consider race. In this section I will show how Carter reads Long as more precisely recognizing the racial problematic than either Raboteau or Cone, yet more problematically imbibing the philosophical structure of Enlightenment than either scholar. Long’s areas of expertise include creation myths, cultural contact in modernity (including cargo cults), and African American religious history.223 His signature text is Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion, which is a collection of essays that probe the nature of “religion,” cultural encounters, and the “symbols” of “Afro-American Religion.”224 In his treatment of the black religious academy, Carter substantively interacts with Long to demonstrate trends about which he has serious reservations. I will read Carter in contrast to Long in order to further explicate Carter’s theology of race and to demonstrate the contributions Carter makes toward overcoming the modern problem of whiteness.
As he analyzes the problem of race in America, Long explores the meaning of the term “signifying” for African American communities. Signification is a way in which oppressed communities offer resistance against being signified by the oppressor; Long interprets African American religious history as little more than a complex system of signification. “Signifying,” or “verbal misdirection,” is a “very clever language game,” not subject to “the rules of the discourse”225 (rules that Carter identifies as being tied into whiteness). For Long, the significations of oppressed peoples must be analyzed so as to discern the “reality” underlying the mythology; he claims that this process is often “frustrating.” Long explains that signifying creates, in the words of Saussure, an “arbitrary” bond between the “signifier and the signified,”226 a relationship which is used to subversive effect by the community on the underside of the power structures.227 Thankfully for Long, “all is not signification.”228 To the contrary, there is a “long tradition in the interpretation of symbol” that reveals an “intrinsic relationship between the symbol and that which is symbolized.” It is this “long tradition,” embodied in religious studies, that Long purposes to inhabit. Rather than “reduc[ing]” all hermeneutical decisions to the “problem of the sociology of knowledge,”229 this tradition is able to offer an “archaic critique” sufficient to engage in “crawling back through . . . history” so that “the languages and experiences of signification can be seen for what they are and were.”230 “The religious experience” is the interpretive lens that is able to achieve this objectivity. For Long, the discipline of religious studies is able to get to the heart of the matter in ways theological studies is not. This claim on the part of Long is similar to Cone’s project in describing “what is really happening” in African American worship. Carter reads both as being tied into the modern descriptive project and reinforcing the white gaze.
Long’s trajectory displays key hermeneutical distinctions between his methodology and that of Carter. For Long, while the Enlightenment