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“Living in the Master's House”: Race and Rhetoric in the Theology of M. Shawn Copeland
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 March 2013
Abstract
M. Shawn Copeland joins a liberationist epistemology with the conceptual framework of Bernard Lonergan to offer both a stinging critique of racism and a constructive Catholic theological anthropology. This essay examines Copeland's grounding of theological anthropology in two dimensions: the historical experience of poor women of color, and eschatological solidarity in the Mystical Body of Christ. The second major concern of this essay is the rhetoric of race in black theology and its reception among white theologians. The author, from his perspective as a white, male Catholic theologian, probes questions of white conversion, black anger, and race essentialism raised by Copeland's theology. Highlighting a tension between speaking the truth about white racism “in the master's house” and maintaining the Christian vision of “one humanity” bound by grace, the author argues that, as far as possible, the race critique must flow from a contemplative and pastoral spirit.
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References
1 Merton, Thomas, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1972), 71.Google Scholar
2 Copeland, M. Shawn, “A Theology of the Human Other: Interview with M. Shawn Copeland,” by Patterson, Margot, National Catholic Reporter, 18 July 2003, p. 17.Google Scholar
3 Merton, 72.
4 Without diminishing the tragic significance of September 11, 2001, nor the sexual abuse crisis in the American Catholic Church, the history of race relations in the United States recalls the oppression, suffering, and death of tens of millions of human beings; it continues to manifest today for millions of blacks in economic, material, and spiritual devastation.
5 Copeland, M. Shawn, “Theology as Intellectually Vital Inquiry: A Black Theological Interrogation,” CTSA Proceedings 46 (1991): 49–57, at 54.Google Scholar
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8 The critique of white Christian and specifically Catholic theology has always been a strident theme of Cone's work. For a more recent example, see Cone, James H., “Looking Back, Going Forward,” in Black Faith and Public Talk, ed. Hopkins, Dwight N. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), 246–59.Google Scholar
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13 Certainly “black theology” is not a monolithic reality, and not all theology by blacks stand in the tradition to which I refer here. By black theology I mean the “black theology of liberation” which has its roots in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Cone, the birth of which closely paralleled the birth of Latin American liberation theology. For the close relationship between these two traditions, see Phelps, Jamie T., “Communion Ecclesiology and Black Liberation Theology,” Theological Studies 61 (2000): 672–99, esp. 685–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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19 My focus on race here is not meant to understate the Roman Catholic orientation of Copeland's thought, nor her longstanding participation in feminist theological discourse. Indeed, the former orientation will be evident below in the doctrinal symbols to which she appeals; the latter, in the fact that she rarely separates race, sex, and class in her consideration of theological anthropology. An early article, in which she writes about “the triple oppression of women of colour,” is typical of her work (see “The Interaction of Racism, Sexism, and Classism in Women's Exploitation,” in Women, Work, and Poverty, ed. Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler and Carr, Anne ([Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1987], 19–27).Google Scholar
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21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., 20.
23 Ibid.
24 The following summary of Lonergan's theory is limited to suit the task at hand, i.e., to facilitate the understanding of Copeland's theological anthropology. I rely here on Gregson, Vernon, ed., The Desires of the Human Heart: An Introduction to the Theology of Bernard Lonergan (New York: Paulist, 1988), 16–35Google Scholar; Lonergan, Bernard, Method in Theology (New York: Seabury, 1979)Google Scholar and Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (New York: Harper and Row, 1978; original 1958).
25 Gregson, 28.
26 Gregson notes that, for Lonergan, progress and decline are “ideal types”: i.e., “a set of ideas, which, though never found fully realized in actual experience, can be extraordinarily helpful in understanding our actual experience because of the clarity they can give to the underlying issues” (ibid.).
27 Ibid., 29.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., 31.
30 Gil Bailie borrows this phrase from René Girard to describe the crucifixion of Jesus, and, more generally, the “logic” beneath cleansing acts of mob or state violence— e.g., the beating of Rodney King by a group of Los Angeles police officers on March 3, 1991. See Bailie, Gil, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads (New York: Crossroad, 1995), 50.Google Scholar
31 Gregson, 32.
32 Ibid.
33 Copeland, , “Racism and the Vocation,” 18.Google Scholar
34 Lonergan, , Method in Theology, 292.Google Scholar
35 Copeland, , “Racism, Sexism, and Classism,” 20.Google Scholar
36 Cited in Copeland, , “Racism and the Vocation,” 16.Google Scholar
37 By existential I mean the concrete, historical, and experiential dimension of “human being,” as distinct from the metaphysical and eschatological view of human being, which Copeland develops under the symbol of the Mystical Body of Christ. The point is that Copeland's epistemological realism keeps the latter from drifting very far from the former.
38 The analogy between bias and original sin may break down here, depending on one's theology of original sin. In other words, beneath both the transcendentals and the biases Lonergan emphasizes the freedom of the responsible human being. Racism is not a given such that it cannot be undone.
39 Copeland, , “Racism and the Vocation,” 17Google Scholar, citing Omi, Michael and Winant, Howard, Racial Formation in the United States, From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994), 55–56.Google Scholar
40 Not that this is a new phenomenon. One could say that the locus of racist imperialism has shifted from Europe to its well-formed adolescent progeny, the United States. Among other examples, Copeland references an interview of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: “When asked what she felt about the fact that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of U.S. economic sanctions, Secretary Albright replied that it was a ‘very hard choice, but that all things considered, we think the price is worth it'” (“Racism and the Vocation,” 20).
41 Copeland, , “New Subject,” 37.Google Scholar Copeland employs the fictitious name “Fatima Yusif” to protect the woman's real identity; she is also careful to note “the danger that my analysis, however well intentioned, might foster negative stereotypes and reproduce the injury” the woman has suffered.
42 Ibid., 38.
43 Ibid., 39.
44 Isasi-Diaz, Ada Maria, Mujerista Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996)Google Scholar, cited in Copeland, “New Subject,” 39.
45 Copeland, , “Racism, Sexism, Classism,” 22.Google Scholar
46 Copeland, , “New Subject,” 39Google Scholar: emphasis added.
47 Copeland, , “Racism and the Vocation,” 18.Google Scholar Emphasis original.
48 Ibid., 20. Certainly racial formation bears out not only between different races but within the same race. Much African American literature attests to “colorism,” the comparing and ranking of shades of blackness in the community.
49 Ibid., 18. Copeland recalls the “racial lumping” that took place after September 11, 2001, when anyone looking vaguely “like a Muslim” or an Arab were subject to assault, harassment, and even murder.
50 Copeland, , “New Subject,” 40.Google Scholar
51 Ibid., 38.
52 Ibid.
53 I will never forget this statement made to me in Jerusalem in the summer of 1998 by Daniel Rossing, a negotiator frequently called upon by both Israelis and Palestinians to mediate local conflicts. This was a period of relative calm before the storm of the recent years of intifada.
54 From “Wasting Time on Hate,” editorial, America, 2 April 1994, p. 3.
55 Martin Luther King, Jr., e.g., recounts the shadow passing over his daughter Yolanda's spirit when he had to tell her why she could not go to the local amusement park. It was the first time she became aware of the meaning of her blackness in a segregated world (see A Testament of Hope, ed. Washington, James M. [San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1986], 342Google Scholar).
56 Copeland, , “New Subject,” 31–32.Google Scholar “The word ressentiment is borrowed from the French and was introduced into philosophy by Nietzsche.”
57 Ibid., 39.
58 At the height of the Cold War, British pop musician Sting penned the song “Russians,” which states, “We share the same biology / regardless of ideology / Believe me when I say to you / I hope the Russians love their children too.”
59 Copeland, , “Racism and the Vocation,” 21.Google Scholar To the degree race is mentioned at all from the pulpit of white Christian churches, one suspects it most often accompanies pious rhetoric about Martin Luther King, Jr.'s “dream” on the occasion of his birthday. While this is not in itself a bad thing, it surely cannot be mistaken for meaningful solidarity. While the Catholic bishops in the United States have issued a number of documents on racism, these have been criticized for appealing not to structural change in society but for moral conversion in individuals and groups. See Massingale, Bryan, “James Cone and Recent Catholic Episcopal Teaching on Racism,” Theological Studies 61/4 (2000): 700–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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65 Ibid.
66 Ibid., 30.
67 Ibid., 42.
68 Ibid., 44.
69 “[O]ur theology cannot admit simplistic appeals to the Reign of God,” Copeland writes. “To quote Ellacuria … ‘It is necessary to determine the place in which the truth of the Reign of God is most accessible.’ Inasmuch as that determination is to be made before the cross of Christ, our theology must stand with society's most abject, despised, and oppressed” (“Racism and the Vocation,” 22).
70 Copeland, , “New Subject,” 41.Google Scholar
71 Ibid., 30.
72 Ibid., 32.
73 Gutierrez, Gustavo, A Theology of Liberation, rev. ed., trans. and ed. Sr.Inda, Caridad and Eagleson, John (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988), xxvii.Google Scholar
74 Bartolomé de las Casas, quoted in ibid.
75 Copeland, , “New Subject,” 35.Google Scholar
76 Ibid., 34.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid., n. 31.
79 In Christian terms what is described here is not an either/or dialectic but the both/and of agapac love, freedom and grace, the interplay of solidarity with contemplative or “sapiential” openness to the other.
80 Copeland, , “New Subject,” 31–32.Google Scholar
81 Copeland, , “Theology of Solidarity,” 29.Google Scholar
82 Copeland, , “New Subject,” 46.Google Scholar
83 Copeland, , “Theology of Solidarity,” 29.Google Scholar For Copeland, the communal dimension of solidarity finds its apex in the Eucharist. Without the praxis of solidarity, the Eucharist is an empty gesture (see ibid., 30–31).
84 Copeland, , “New Subject,” 43.Google Scholar
85 Ibid., 44. Both Copeland and Phelps emphasize the importance of Catholic social teaching and its application to a critique of white racist supremacy. See Copeland, “Racism and the Vocation,” 25; Phelps, 674–76. The U.S. Catholic Bishops have likewise combined the race critique with Catholic social teaching in many documents. For a rich collection of homilies, essays, and statements, see Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself: U.S. Catholic Bishops Speak Against Racism (Washington, DC: USCC, 2001).
86 Copeland, , “Theology of Solidarity,” 15.Google Scholar
87 Ibid. Copeland points to “the splintering of the notion of sisterhood” to illustrate the profound differences (e.g., social location) that obtain within groups. A black female university professor from the United States, e.g., has much more in common with her white female colleague than with a poor black cleaning woman from the Bahamas (see ibid., 12–15).
88 Ibid., 14–15.
89 Ibid., 29.
90 Ibid.
91 Copeland, , “New Subject,” 42.Google Scholar One has only to point to the Civil Rights Movement for evidence of this oneness in solidarity, surely experienced in a surprising way (materially and formally) by people from all walks of life.
92 See ibid., 44–47.
93 Ibid., 44.
94 Ibid., 46.
95 Ibid.
96 Ibid., 46.
97 Ibid., 47; emphasis added.
98 Ibid., citing Lonergan; emphasis added.
99 Cited in Shipler, 3.
100 Cone, , “Looking Back,” 252.Google Scholar
101 Copeland, , “Racism and the Vocation,” 22.Google Scholar
102 Ibid.
103 Copeland, , “Theology of Solidarity,” 18.Google Scholar
104 Historian Cyprian Davis, e.g., writes: “Slavery is the anvil on which the African American Catholic community was forged. Contrary to what many Catholics think, the Catholic Church in the South was implicated in slavery as an institution among the laity, the religious orders, and all ranks of the clergy. Black Catholic slaves supplied the labor and the skilled workmanship that built the antebellum Catholic Church” (“African American Catholic Experience,” Chicago Studies 42 [2003]: 117–26, at 124).
105 See Metz, Johann Baptist, A Passion for God, trans. Ashley, J. Matthew (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1998), 40.Google Scholar In a passage that could easily apply to Copeland, Metz writes: “It is precisely because Christians believe in an eschatological meaning for history that they can risk historical consciousness: looking into the abyss. Precisely because of this, they can risk a memory that recalls not only the successful but the ruined. … This theology continually introduces into public consciousness the struggle for memories, for subject-related memorative wisdom.”
106 Copeland, , “Racism and the Vocation,” 16.Google Scholar
107 While black theology neither needs nor seeks white approval, there can be no doubt that its critique of racism seeks and finds a reception among white theologians. This is especially so of Copeland, whose audience is largely comprised of (though certainly not limited to) white Catholic intellectuals. Theological Studies devoted its December 2000 issue to the question of “The Reception of Black Theology”; see also Nilson's, Jon address to the CTSA, “Confessions of a White Catholic Racist Theologian,” Origins 33/9 (17 July 2003): 130–38.Google Scholar
108 Copeland, , “Theology of Solidarity,” 25.Google Scholar
109 Copeland, , “New Subject,” 33.Google Scholar
110 Merton, 72–73.
111 E.g., Emilie M. Townes, “Searching for Paradise in a World of Theme Parks,” in Hopkins, 105–25, at 116.
112 Anderson, Victor, Beyond Ontological Blackness (New York: Continuum, 1995), 111, 116.Google Scholar
113 Copeland, , “Theology of Solidarity,” 29.Google Scholar
114 Copeland, , “Racism and the Vocation,” 17.Google Scholar
115 Copeland, , “Theology of Solidarity,” 29.Google Scholar
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117 I borrow the term “inscape” from Merton, who took it in turn from Gerard Manley Hopkins. See esp. Merton's, “Things in Their Identity,” in New Seeds of Contemplation, 29–36.Google Scholar
118 Copeland, , “Racism, Sexism, and Classism,” 25.Google Scholar
119 The nearest Copeland comes to offering a positive transcendental inscape or counter-narrative may be her essay, “Wading Through Many Sorrows” (n. 16 above), an unflinching meditation on black women's experiences of brutalization, and “resources of womanist resistance” in response to that suffering, including the spirituals, memory, and sass. “[From] the anguish of our people rose distinctive religious expression, exquisite music and song, powerful rhetoric and literature, practical invention and creative art. If slavery was the greatest evil, freedom was the greatest good and women and men struggled, suffered, sacrificed, and endured much to attain it” (110).
120 I hope the evaluation here conveys my sincere attempt to be intelligent, reasonable, and responsible. The critique is an immanent one, highlighting a tension to which Copeland herself gestures between memory as a liberating power (Metz's dangerous memory) and the “self-poisoning” dynamic of ressentiment. In the latter, memory functions “dangerously” (i.e., pathologically, as in neurotic bias) by imprisoning persons or groups in a broken past and crippling their capacity to imagine a more open future (e.g., Mystical Body; Reign of God; Beloved Community).
121 Copeland, , “Racism and the Vocation,” 19.Google Scholar
122 Cone, , “Looking Back,” 249.Google Scholar
123 Copeland, , “Racism and the Vocation,” 20Google Scholar; referencing Lorde, Audre, “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1984), 114–23.Google Scholar
124 While Copeland acknowledges that absolutizing difference often produces a regrettable silence in whites, she seems less inclined to grant that whites may feel “swallowed up,” “erased,” and “racially lumped” by black speech (“Theology of Solidarity,” 18, 25).
125 Not unlike the essay on South Africa cited above, Copeland's meditative riff on “the master” comes dangerously close to positing the ontological dilemma in reverse: “white/male/heterosexual” bears ontological status and, more to the point, ontologically evil status. It is not that such language is new—witness Malcolm X's “white devil” and James Cone's “whitey”—nor whether it delivers a striking political statement (it does). The question is whether such language does not finally cripple Copeland's appeal to solidarity in the Mystical Body of Christ. In a word, theology should be wary of adopting rhetoric that offers little allowance for the possibility (and reality) of conversion in particular persons, groups, or structures.
126 Sobrino, Jon, Spirituality of Liberation: Toward Political Holiness, trans. Barr, Robert (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988), 31.Google Scholar
127 Springsteen, Bruce, “Mansion on the Hill,” Nebraska, Columbia, 1982.Google Scholar
128 Cornel West, “Black Theology and Human Identity,” in Hopkins, 18. To be clear, West uses the phrase as an indicator of solidarity and insists it “has nothing to do solely with skin pigmentation.”
129 Copeland, , “Theology of Solidarity,” 17.Google Scholar This is the chief complaint against the rhetoric employed by James Cone: “The difficulty with Cone's position is that it leaves ‘whitey’ very little room in which to make gestures of friendship and solidarity with black Americans. One is, so to speak, condemned for doing nothing or condemned for doing something” (Elshtain, Jean Bethke and Beem, Christopher, “Race and Civil Society: A Democratic Conversation,” in Hopkins, , 213Google Scholar).
130 Shipler, pp. 23–226; Elshtain and Beem, 211–16.
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132 Phelps, 672–79.
133 I realize that to speak too facilely of the “integration of churches” could be dismissed (by both blacks and whites) as liberal naiveté or racist hegemony. On the other hand, the United Church of Christ has made it integral to its mission to transcend the color line. As Leonard Pitts, a nationally syndicated African American columnist for the Miami Herald, puts it (5 December 2004), “[The UCC] was the first church I'd ever seen that seemed to take seriously the idea that inclusion is a Christian value.” Would that more Christian churches would take the UCC as a model for imitation. So also I think the task of the theologian is not only to proclaim what is, but to put before the Christian communal imagination what is possible in the light of grace.
It should be noted in the Catholic context that the once-normative model of national or ethnically homogenous parishes is dying, and would appear unsustainable. Many urban parishes have been forced to “integrate” or assimilate with other parishes; some have adjusted quite successfully, others less so. This breaking open of assumed horizons of “being Catholic” may very well be a Kairos or liminal moment, though painful, a path to grace. Too often white flight from the city renders the issue moot, an opportunity lost.
134 Cited in Hayes, Diana, And Still We Rise: An Introduction to Black Liberation Theology (New York: Paulist, 1996), 122.Google Scholar
135 Gutierrez, 82.
136 I speak here from my experience as a high school and college teacher in predominantly white schools. To the degree this analysis rings true for many (certainly not all) whites, surely it applies to many non-whites also, since everyone living in the United States (i.e., “the master's house”) is subject to the same dehumanizing ideologies, albeit, to be sure, in radically different ways.
137 Thus Schleiermacher, Friedrich writes, “Any man who is capable of being satisfied with himself as he is will always manage to find a way out of the argument” (The Christian Faith [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989], 69).Google Scholar
138 On the paschal dimension of solidarity, see Gutierrez, 118; also Nickeloff, James B., “Church of the Poor: The Ecclesiology of Gustavo Gutierrez,” Theological Studies 54 (1993): 512–35, at 528–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On solidarity as a “personalization of grace,” see O'Meara, Thomas F., “Toward a Subjective Theology of Revelation,” Theological Studies 36 (1975): 419CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also Gutierrez, xxvii.
139 See Pramuk, Christopher, “O Happy Day: Imagining a Church Beyond the Color Line,” America 189/4 (18 August 2003): 8–10.Google Scholar
140 Unless, of course, I am a white politician who just comes to visit “'round election time,” as Stevie Wonder put it so trenchantly in his song, “Big Brother,” Talking Book, Motown, 1972.
141 Merton used the term “sapiential” or “sophianic” to refer to a deeply christocentric, incarnational way of seeing, “a kind of knowledge by identification, an intersubjective knowledge … a wisdom based on love” (The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, ed. Hart, Patrick [New York: New Directions, 1981], 108).Google Scholar
142 Merton, , New Seeds of Contemplation, 72.Google Scholar
143 While I have focused here on personal conversion in overcoming the evil of white racism, this is not meant to diminish the need for power analyses of inequities at every level of society, nor the need for people of every social location to organize politically to deal with systemic injustice. Jonathan Kozol, e.g., documents the bleaker side of survival in America's urban landscape with special attention to public education, housing, and healthcare, especially through the eyes of children. See Kozol, Jonathan, Amazing Grace: the Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation (New York: Crown, 1995)Google Scholar; Savage Inequalities (New York: Crown, 1991); Death at an Early Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967).
144 Copeland, , “Racism and the Vocation,” 26.Google Scholar
145 Merton, Thomas, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), 156.Google Scholar
146 Ibid., 156–57; emphasis added.
147 See above 109. I would like to thank a particular colleague at the University of Notre Dame, whose critical feedback and willingness to engage in frank conversation with me regarding race issues was invaluable in preparing the final draft of this article.