Willie James Jennings - The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many colleagues heard, read, and provided helpful comments on portions of this book. The first group to do so were the scholars of the Afro-Scholars consultation, Alexis Abernethy, Henry Allen, Rhae-Ann Brooker, Venessa Brown, Denise Isom, Randal Jelks, Brenda King, Michelle Loyd-Paige, A. G. Miller, Edward Miller, Isaac M. T. Mwase, Barbara Omolade, William Pannell, Yolanda Pierce, Charsie Sawyer, and Donn Charles Thomas. I am also thankful for encouraging advice from the late Dr. Kwame Bediako and Dr. Gillian Bediako. At Duke University Divinity School, I enjoy the support of a beautiful faculty. I want to thank Esther Acolaste, Emmanuel Katongole, Richard Payne, W. C. Turner, Tonya Armstrong, and Tammy Williams for the wonderful conversations that fueled the fire of this book. I am also thankful to Richard Lischer, Amy Laura Hall, Richard Payne, and Greg Jones for taking the time to read the whole manuscript, which was originally well over five hundred pages! I want to offer special thanks to the Rev. Dr. J. Kameron Carter, who continues to be a wonderful conversation partner for me as I have been working out the ideas presented here. I also want to thank the members of the De-colonial Cosmopolitanism workshop organized by the esteemed Walter Mignolo. They are Costas Douzinas, Emma Perez, Bruce Lawrence, Siba N. Grovogui, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Richard Rosa, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Eunice Sahle, Erdem Denk, Ramon Grosfguel, William D. Hart, and Ebrahim Moosa. They offered helpful responses to my presentation of some of the ideas in this book. A very special word of appreciation goes to three individuals whose editorial work made this text far better than it would have been otherwise and reminded me of the deepest lesson of writing: clarity is sister to profundity. Anne Weston, formerly the editorial assistant at Duke University Divinity School, worked closely with me to meet every deadline and was an unwavering supporter of the project. I will forever sing her praises and call her blessed. Working with her and offering wonderful help were my research assistants, Sameer Yadav and Tommy Givens. I thank them for their good work. Jennifer Banks of Yale University Press is simply brilliant, capturing in almost every editorial comment exactly what I was attempting to say. Working with Jennifer has been pure joy. I am also very appreciative of the work of Lawrence Kenney, senior manuscript editor at Yale University Press. His comments on the text were always helpful.

I am extremely thankful for my family, who supported me in ways extravagant, humbling, and completely undeserved. I am deeply appreciative of my life partner, Joanne Browne Jennings, my marvelous daughters, Njeri Ariel and Safiya Eliana Simone, and my mother-in-love, Elise Browne. They are magnificent. I take great honor in being known first as Joannes husband and the father of Njeri and Safiya. Their unwavering support, probing questions, and considerable humor kept my intellectual feet from slipping and my heart from sinking. They reminded me for whom I write and aspire to be a helpful theological voice. This book is dedicated not only to them but finally to my parents, Mary and Ivory Jennings Sr., who taught me to see the world with Christian eyes.

I NTRODUCTION

Mary, my mother, taught me to respect the dirt. Like many black women from the South, she knew the earth like she knew her own soul. I came along late. I was the last of her eleven children, born not of the South but of the North, the fruit of the great migration when black folks wearied of the Jim Crow South and, in search of work, pointed their hopes toward northern cities and replanted their lives in colder air. So I was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and found myself each spring with my mother, Mary, in her garden in the backyard.

There near the soil Mary deepened my understanding of her life, her history, and her hopes. My mother and my father, Ivory Jennings, were both magnificent storytellers. They told stories the way water cascades over Niagara Falls or runs down the Mississippi, stories that encompassed larger or smaller fragments of people, places, jokes, incidents, sayings, sermons, arguments, clothing, foods, meals, body parts, and prayers. I could never take in all those stories. I had to simply let them wash over me, again and again, until I was able to locate myself in the stream of their historical consciousness. Yet running through their amazing stories were several themes. Like large, immovable rocks that shaped the contours of the waters flow, these themes carried the keys for understanding every story.

Foremost was Jesus. Ivory and Mary loved Jesus. To say they were devout Christians is simply too pale a descriptor. A far more accurate characterization would be, There were Ivory, Mary, and Jesus. Woven into the fabric of their lives was the God-man Jesus, who, rather than simply serving as an indicator of their orthodoxy, became the very shape of their stories. The stories of Jesus and Israel were so tightly woven into the stories my parents told of themselves, their lives in the South and in the North and then with their youngest children in the North, that it took me years to separate the biblical figures from extended family members, biblical sinners from the sinners all around us, and biblical places of pain from their places of pain. I was never able to separate biblical hopes from their real hopes. They knew the Bible, but, far more important, they knew the world through the Bible.