Notes Introduction 1. To be enfleshed literally means to be “in the flesh.” My usage here of enfleshment refers to the embodied subject, namely human beings. This project’s assertion of enfleshment as a paradoxical phenomenon refers to the reality of multiple ways of being within the flesh that sometimes com- plement, but more often contradict each other. It is from this apparent con- tradiction the enfleshed subject embodies that identity crisis emerges. 2. Womanist theoethicist emilie m. townes posits isness as the physical and spiritual marking of humanity. Isness refers to “concrete existence (lived life) and the impetus for a coherent and unified relationship between body, soul and creation.” For full treatment see emilie m. townes, In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), 48–49. Along these same lines, isness functions here as a referent to concrete embodiedness. 3. G. Reginald Daniel, More than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 3. 4. William Edward Burghardt DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), 3. 5. Ibid. 6. I employ this phrase, “the gaze of white supremacy,” throughout the book to refer to the Western optics of morality that normatively disavow the “idea of black equality in beauty, culture, and intellectual capacity” (West, 47). This Western aesthetics establishes a “normative gaze” that essentially determines that blacks do not measure up to the classical aesthetic norm that is based on European cultural values and produces a racialized dis- course that dehumanizes bodies defying this established white normativity. White supremacy emerges from power to “produce and prohibit, develop and delimit, forms of rationality, scientificity, and objectivity which set perimeters and draw boundaries for the intelligibility, availability, and legitimacy of certain ideas.” For full treatment of white supremacy, see Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 47–65. 174 Notes 7. Jean-Paul Sartre contends that the look of another goes in front of them to “look upon me without distance while at the same time it holds me at distance” (346–347). For full treatment on the phenomenological con- tours of Sartre’s “look,” see Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), 340–400. 8. Alexandrian Logos-Sarx Christology maintains the continuous unity of God in three stages. The Logos-Son is the eternal Son of God who took on human flesh, rose from the dead, and ascended “to his place within the Godhead” (263). It is clearly summarized in the Athanasian Christological formulation that concedes that the Word is God and the Word became flesh. Antiochene Logos-Anthropos Christology holds that Jesus Christ consisted of two distinct natures. Jesus of Nazareth was not God, Godself, but rather was indwelt by God and thus was assumed by the Word. Antioch affirms that God’s divinity and Jesus’s humanity were held together in Jesus Christ. Chapter 1, “The Politics of Incarnation: A Theological Perspective,” explores these divergent perspectives more thoroughly. For a full treatment, see Roger Haight, Jesus: Symbol of God (New York: Orbis Books, 1999), 261–270 and Richard A. Norris Jr. ed., The Christological Controversy (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980). 9. J. Kameron Carter develops his discourse concerning the Rassenfrage (the modern problem of identity and race) in relationship to what he refers to as the Judenfrage that Kant attends to in his Anthropology. Carter essentially argues that Kant reduces all nonwhite people to the Judentum and thus establishes a “binary opposition between white and nonwhite flesh qua white and Jewish flesh” (104). Kant deals with the problem of a mulattic God in Christ by severing Christianity from its Jewish roots and reimag- ining it as a moral religion par excellence of reason. For full treatment see J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 39–121. My usage of the term “mulattic God” yields to the Christological identity conceived at Chalcedon that mediates between seemingly opposed identities, human and divine, in one body and posits that this apparent brokenness produces wholeness. 10. Gary Dorrien argues that liberal Christian theology is the “idea of genuine Christianity not based on external authority.” It is the reinterpretation of traditional Christian symbols in ways that create a “progressive religious alternative” to the extremes of atheistic rationalism on the one hand, and “theologies based on external authority” on the other. Dorrien further pos- its that American liberal theology’s Unitarian beginnings pitted the “sim- ple humanity of Christ” against the high Christology of the Trinitarians’s divine, triune God. For full treatment see Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805–1900 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 1–57. 11. The black church tradition emerges from the religious, cultural, and social experiences of black people in the Americas. This tradition emerged in rebellion against black oppression and embraced ideas of the equality Notes 175 of all people and resistance against enslavement, in addition to opaque interpretations of personal salvation, conviction of sin, charismatic praise and worship, and the promise of heaven. The black church is primarily described as “those churches whose worship life and cultural sensibilities have reflected . a connection to the larger African American commu- nity” and is primarily expressed in independent black Baptist, Methodist, and Holiness-Pentecostal denominations, black congregations in pre- dominantly white congregations like Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, and Lutheran, and nondenominational Christian churches whose ministerial leadership and cultural leadership are African American. However, the black church tradition also includes communities of African descent and Christian faith that may not be connected with any specific denomina- tion. In other words, the black church tradition encompasses the breadth of the African Diaspora. I employ the term “black church” throughout this book to refer to the Christian tradition that emerges from the experience of communities of African descent in the Americas rather than any specific institution. In doing so, I fully realize that “the black church” is no single, monolithic entity to which homogenous religious, social, and cultural val- ues can be ascribed. Nevertheless, I recognize the black church tradition as one that descends from the “invisible institution” of the antebellum South and that “possesses distinctive characteristics and constitutive elements, including key questions, symbols, rituals, and beliefs.” I utilize “black church” and “black churches” interchangeably to refer to this broad tradi- tion. For further treatment, see C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Experience in Religion (New York: Anchor Press, 1974). See also C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya. Black Church in the African-American Experience (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990). See also Stacey Floyd-Thomas et al., Black Church Studies: An Introduction (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2007) and Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986). 12. Benjamin Elijah Mays was the president of Morehouse College from 1940–1967. He is fondly remembered as the “godhead” of Morehouse College and the defining influence of the moral importance of this “epicen- ter of black hope.” This statement was made by Morehouse College alumni, Reverend Nicholas S. Richards ’01, Executive Secretary of the Foreign Mission Board of the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc., and Assistant Minister for Global Outreach at The Abyssinian Baptist Chuch in the city of New York. For further treatment of Mays’s influence at Morehouse, see Edward A. Jones, A Candle in the Dark: A History of Morehouse College (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1967). 13. Several of these questions have been formulated as a direct result of emilie m. townes’s comments on my second Doctoral Comprehensive Examination entitled: “The Politics of Incarnation: Identity, Double-Consciousness, and the Feasibility of a Womanist Mediating Ethics,” December 2007. 14. A ballet barre is a portable or permanently mounted waist-high handrail that is traditionally used for the ballet warm-up. Barre exercises include 176 Notes plies, port de bra, battement tendu, rond de jambe, battement frappe, and grand battement. Through an intentionally designed warm-up, the dancer’s body is prepared at the barre to engage the work of the floor that occurs in the center of the dance studio, stage, or theater. Riggs’s uncovering paral- lels the barre exercise in two critical ways. Most readily, as the barre serves as a ballet dancer’s primary warm-up space, Riggs’s uncovering is a first step that sets the groundwork for fruitful discourse. More importantly, this act of uncovering situates black women and their work as critical for liberative discourse. That is, uncovering sets up/prepares black women’s bodies to be engaged in a larger discourse. 15. Marcia Y. Riggs, Awake, Arise, & Act: A Womanist Call for Black Liberation. (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1994), 2. 16. See Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self- Making