Ghost of a flea: The Cross and the Yardarm

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March 25, 2008

The Cross and the Yardarm

"The time has come for white America to be silent and listen to black people.... All white men are responsible for white oppression.... Theologically, Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man 'the devil.'... Any advice from whites to blacks on how to deal with white oppression is automatically under suspicion as a clever device to further enslavement."
- James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (1969)

I spent a good deal of the weekend giving thought to the "black theology" of James Cone, inspiration to Jeremiah Wright and by proxy to would be president Senator Barack Obama. Specifically, Cone’s Ingersoll Lecture to the Harvard Divinity School, "Strange Fruit: The Cross and the Lynching Tree" (parsed by Stanley Kurtz at The Corner) and the more succinct "A Conversation with James Cone" with Bob Scott of the Trinity Institute.

I don't get it. Perhaps it is because I am not American. I do not belong to a polity living with the spectre of a promised 40 acres and a mule so reparations are a bit of a non-starter as far as I am concerned. But then I also do not belong to the polity which sacrificed hundreds of thousands of Union lives on the altar of liberty including and especially the liberty of the ancestors of today's reparations advocates. It seems churlish to demand payment from the descendants of abolitionists let alone those of all the men who gave their lives far from home on behalf of people they did not know. Maybe, just maybe, it is James Cone and his fellow travelers who owe the debt. When it comes to the history of race in America there are villains, no doubt. But the United States government is not one of them. The United States government has been and remains the greatest champion of liberty in human history.

As for my ancestors, and, in fact, immediate relatives, there is a centuries long Quaker history of advocating the abolition of slavery. And there is the history of the Royal Navy which did the actual abolishing of slavery by main force, a practice to which the Quakers were and remain philosophically disinclined. I need no lectures on slavery from a man who claims as his direct inspiration one Malcolm X, a Muslim whose biography includes a pilgrimage to Mecca when "Saudi" Arabia had legally abolished slavery on Arabian soil a mere two years earlier, a man who described the assassination of John F. Kennedy as "chickens coming home to roost."* This should sound eerily familiar. James Cone claims we cannot understand Christianity - that you cannot be Christian and American - without seeing the cross in the lynching tree. It seems to me the metaphor is not strained. I am more proud of a Royal Navy which actually stopped slavery than even the best intentioned pacifist who merely spoke out against it. Actions speak louder than words: It is a bit much to be schooled in the hard life by a tenured theologian whose suffering is for the most part vicarious.**

I have never owned a slave and I have never freed a slave but to James Cone this is mere detail compared to the colour of my skin. To his line of thinking, my guilt lies not in my actions but in my essence. But again I am not American and so am perhaps missing the point as I do not share even a vicarious frisson of guilt on the subject. As a Canadian I see the cross in the railroad tie, metaphorical as it might be in light of an underground railroad. I see a Christian duty in offering refuge to slaves with no thought of reparation for the act let alone a claim on my part a century after the fact.*** More than this, as an Englishman, I see the cross in the yardarm of each of His/Her Majesty's ships interdicting the Atlantic slave trade.

So to James Cone, Jeremiah Wright and especially you Barack Obama: I am not asking you to thank me and mine but you are welcome all the same.

"Black hatred is the black man's strong aversion to white society. No black man living in white America can escape it... While it is true that blacks do hate whites, black hatred is not racism. "
- James H. Cone, A Black Theology for Liberation (1970)

* Malcolm X carried out the hajj to Mecca - a central obligation of his faith - in 1964 as a Sunni Muslim. Slavery was legally abolished in Arabia in 1962.

In 1962, Saudi Arabia outlawed slavery, freeing about 10,000 slaves out of an estimated 15,000-30,000.[23] Slavery was ended by neighboring Qatar in 1952, the Yemen Arab Republic in 1962, the UAE in 1963, South Yemen in 1967, and Oman in 1970. Some of these states, such as Yemen, were British protectorates. The British left South Yemen without forcing it to give up slavery, but did pressure the UAE into giving it up. In 2005, Saudi Arabia was designated by the United States Department of State as a Tier 3 country with respect to trafficking in human beings. Tier 3 countries are "Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so."

Malcolm X' remarks on Kennedy's assassination were a bridge too far even for black nationalist Elijah Muhammad. Though not, apparently, for James Cone, Elijah Wright or Barack Obama. No, Senator Obama, I will not give you the benefit of the doubt for words you have already refused to specifically condemn. You had a choice to be taken seriously by the sane or by your conspiracy theory base. You may have sailed close enough to the wind to convince your base but you have lost everyone else who is paying the slightest attention.
** Though I am prepared to see Christ in the adjunct lecturers who do the teaching tenured radicals won't do.
*** Though Senator Obama and anyone else living in a Chicago mansion is more than welcome to hit the tip jar in the side bar. I would be delighted if Obama could rise above his suffering, living as he does in a US$1.65m home and subsisting on his senatorial salary and the $320,000 p.a. pittance his wife brought in at University of Chicago Hospitals.

Update: Thanks to Mr. Taylor in the comments. I should have pointed out today's anniversary: Parliament outlawed the Atlantic slave trade on March 25, 1807.

Update: Scotland was never known for its cotton.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at March 25, 2008 06:54 AM

Comments

This is a terrific post and timely, with its RN reference and the anniversary.

Posted by: Chris Taylor at March 25, 2008 12:27 PM

Years ago i was reading a copy of Ebony. I remember a letter to the editor about the idea of reparations. The writer said maybe the white man owed blacks something, but it was pretty obvious he wasn't going to hand it over. In short, it was time to move forward because waiting was killing the community.

Posted by: voon at March 25, 2008 02:02 PM

There are two versions of the slavery reparations campaign, one would have "white" America pay reparations to descendants of slaves, the other would have western nations pay reparations to Africa for the damage caused by the slave trade. The irony in the second version is that the descendants of slaves in the US would be contributing to reparations paid to descendants of African slave traders who helped capture slaves for export.

As a Scandinavian, my fear is that England, Scotland and France may someday demand reparations from oil-rich Norway for the damages caused by the Vikings.

Posted by: Tvedestrand at March 26, 2008 10:42 AM

The United States could always demand reparations from the successor states of the Barbary Pirates. As could England, Wales and Ireland amongst others. While they are at it, they might also sue for damages against the Saudis as guardians of the holy sites of the ideology which the Barbary Pirates used to justify their slave-taking.

Posted by: Ghost of a flea at March 26, 2008 10:46 AM