Soul 2 Soul: Black Women/Womanist Theologians Leading Intergroup Dialogue for Liberation

For years I have led antiracist work in predominantly white congregations, organizations, and educational institutions as a cofounder and coconsultant of Soul 2 Soul. Soul 2 Soul is a Black-women-led, faith-based racial justice organization that centers Black lives for the liberation of all. The intergroup, dialogical model used raises consciousness of Black struggle and resilience in the midst of oppression; offers language to address white supremacy and white privilege in personal, professional, political, communal, and congregational settings; and offers tools to do the work required of white people. The power of dialogue as it relates to race talk is what is referred to as intergroup dialogue.

Black women/womanist theologians are called to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor through the soul work of love. As Black women faith leaders, we, the leaders of Soul 2 Soul, speak Truth to power and create a space to engage, reflect, experience, and identify behaviors, thoughts, and norms that have plagued Black and Brown people, often resulting in death, incarceration, poverty, marginalization, and hate. Although we often face moments during which we are inclined toward reminding members of the dominant culture of their barbaric history and current inhumane culture of behavior and walk away, instead, Soul 2 Soul accepts the call to educate, reveal, and share experiences of the Black (and Brown and Indigenous) diaspora that are not told in mainstream media or by the 1 percent of dominant capitalistic thought and culture. Black women faith-based leaders, with all of their dynamic mysticism and power, take on the charge to lead white people to do the lifelong work required to dismantle the racist structures white-dominant culture has created while setting boundaries. These boundaries include avoidance of an unhealthy dependency of Black women leaders, Black women bearing the brunt of the work, and a lack of rest, respite, and recuperation. Our philosophy is that the antiracist work must be done by the very people who continue to institute racism: members of the white-dominant culture. Black women of faith, leading from the margins, offer a powerful approach to dismantling racism by meeting the dominant culture at the level of its members’ ignorance and journeying toward removing the veil of racism and oppression through emotional intelligence, spiritual prowess, and healing practices.

To set the tone for this intergroup dialogue as womanist theologians, in the first two sessions, we cleanse the space in African and Indigenous tradition with the use of sage. Inviting white people into this ritual has been described by one of our participants as “an exorcism and a blessing.” Since we are centering Black lives, we start by immersing participants in spiritual prowess. We do this not only to provide them with a learning experience but also to create a sacred space that is not always deemed as safe. The sacred setting also calls on our resilient ancestors and those who have gone before us for strength and protection while engaging in emotional, vulnerable work.

In order to establish a system of trust in which we can move from intelligence to intellect, we insert our personal narratives. We do this work in order to save and protect our beautiful Black children from systemic ills that perceive our skin color as a threat. In addition to sharing our personal narratives and experiences, we journey through the lived experiences of Black people through various mediums, including storytelling, listening to music such as “Black Rage” by Lauryn Hill, watching music videos such as “This Is America” by Childish Gambino, and reflecting on articles, blogs, and books centering Black lives and racial justice work. Soul 2 Soul’s curriculum focuses on the intersection of economic justice, reproductive justice, disparity in health care, misogyny, systemic racism in law enforcement, food deserts, voter engagement, gentrification, and how they affect healthy outcomes for sustainable, just communities.

By sessions 3 and 4, participants are ready to begin a plan of action for racial justice work. We encourage participants to dream and visualize aspirations of just communities in both individual and collective settings. In facilitating a plan of action for participants to lead racial justice work, we have now actualized our praxis. The oppressor is now doing the much-needed work, and the Black women rest. Here, Black women conspicuously lead the way while creating a cyclical, emerging movement. A system of support has been established. The participants go on to create a community of like-mindedness and face racism with a new, transforming, and liberating lens and heightened awareness of injustice. From here, the participants go forth and lead racial justice work to dismantle the individual, collective, systemic racism in their homes, jobs, communities, and selves.

Soul 2 Soul’s pre- and poststudies show that out of 160 participants,

• 95 percent report that the information learned during the study sessions helps them more deeply analyze racial justice issues concerning Black people;
• 95 percent report that since participating in the Facing Racism training sessions, they have a better picture of how we can both center Black people and Black liberation, and connect that work with the liberation of all people;
• 92 percent report confidence that they will take action toward raising awareness and educating beloveds, colleagues, and congregants about racial justice issues concerning Black people; and
• 77 percent report confidence that their congregation or religious group will take action toward raising awareness and educating congregants about racial justice issues concerning Black people.

Transformational outcomes include the following:

• Cohort attendees have created grassroots programming, racial justice curriculum, ministries, advocacy groups, plays, sermons, and interfaith and community-wide forums.
• An alumni group meets monthly as an open forum to build community and share ideas and experiences, including mistakes and areas of improvement.
• Several congregations have developed or enhanced social justice efforts in the following areas:
  • –  Preaching sermon series
  • –  Developing social justice ministries
  • –  Participating in movements such as Showing Up for Racial Justice, Black Lives Matter, and Change the Name of Stapleton (a neighborhood in Denver named after a former Ku Klux Klan politician); taking political and legislative action; and working toward individual transformation within racial/racist family dynamics.

Intergroup dialogue and race talk is a diverse exchange between white people who subscribe to the dominant narrative and Black people or people of color who have been oppressed and marginalized by the dominant group. The dialogue is not a haphazard exchange of information and life stories. It is what scholars call counterstorytelling or counternarratives. Counternarrative stories “tell on” or bear witness to social relations that the dominant culture tends to deny or minimize. The dialogical discourse requires authority but is not authoritarian, and it requires freedom but not licentiousness (Freire, 2009). It is the personal stories that challenge the dominant narrative and bring to light the harrowing impact of racism and racist behavior, one voice in a dialogue among people who have been silenced (Collins, 2009, p. x).

Conceptual Underpinnings of Soul 2 Soul: Why Black Women?

We have pursued the shadow, they have obtained the substance; we have performed the labor, they have received the profits; we have planted the vines, they have eaten the fruits of them.

—Maria W. Stewart, address at the African Masonic Hall, 1833

Affirming the fullness of Black women of the African diaspora is salient and imperative, particularly as Black women’s voices have been silenced and Black women’s leading presence has been erased, marginalized, or moved to the background. In an American context, Black women embody the intersectionality of race, gender, and class. Forms of oppression appear in these three areas, coalescing to form the moment in which one identity is not disconnected from the others but all emerge to our disadvantage. Intersectionality illustrates “ … that many of the experiences Black women face are not subsumed within the traditional boundaries of race or gender discrimination these boundaries are currently understood, and that the intersection of racism and sexism factors into Black women’s lives in ways that cannot captured wholly by looking at the race or gender dimensions of those experiences separately” (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1244).

Black women who have been and continue to be the driving force in family, community, politics, religious institutions, and corporations are emerging from hidden intellectualism, excavating Black women’s intellectual history, history-in-the-making movements, and epistemic erasure (Cooper, 2017). Discussions of scholarly work have consisted of predominantly male discourse, with Black women informing the discussion but not telling our own stories (Cooper, 2017, p. 130). This chapter, and the praxis it features, aligns with the call for Black women to rise up to tell our own stories, document these stories as intellectual and scholarly property, and rise as leaders at the forefront of movements. This country has thrived on the backs, blood, sweat, tears, and lives of Black women since its inception. Through resilience, strength, communal prowess, emotional capacity, intellectual proficiency, and power born of the intersectionality of race, gender, and class, Black women are inserting ourselves into a narrative that has ignored, erased, silence, co-opted, used, abused, marginalized, and oppressed Black women in mind, body, and spirit. This emergence is nothing new, nor is it something that we just discovered. It is Black women who have understood and continue to understand the double consciousness and often triple consciousness (Townes, 2011, p. 38) of survival; hence, we must be the disruption of heteropatriarchy, misogyny, and bigotry while caring for ourselves and empowering others—the oppressors, colonizers, and dominant culture—to do the necessary work of transformation and liberation.

It is important to note the avoidance of meritocracy, especially with Black women having a leading position in liberation. It is a white, capitalistic tendency to measure leadership based solely on merit: education, access, opportunity, and economic wealth. Black women must place the Black experience at the center of the narrative with our existence as mere resistance; with our cultural prowess, which builds community from individualism; with the power to make something out of nothing. “Educated elites typically claim that only they are qualified.…” It is this belief that upholds their own privilege and dominant culture. (Collins, 2009, p. viii). “However, care must be taken to neither idealize nor romanticize African American women” (Townes, 2011, p. 39). It is very easy to become enamored with Black women’s mysticism and power. White fragility may cause one to depend on leadership and guidance from Black women. White guilt may lead one to rely continuously on Black women for leadership and for absolution of one’s own guilt.

It is imperative for Black women to define and drive the narrative of liberation. It is not our responsibility to do the physical, emotional, and spiritual labor required to liberate white people from oppressive behaviors. Rather, this work is about our survival, the survival of Black women, Black men, Black children, Black communities, Black educational institutions, Black churches, and Black life. Black women should not kill ourselves for the sake of the movement, nor will we be crunched into a paradigm that continues to nurse this country economically, spiritually, and physically. Black women are galvanizing, redefining leadership roles, commanding intellectual property, and defining how we show up in this country for our survival with community in mind.

Why Black women? Black women are in crisis. A crisis may be defined as a dangerous opportunity. We are at the crucible of change, shaping a movement born of strength in the midst of misogyny, racism, bigotry, and classism, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Me Too movement created and organized by Black women. We are cocreating opportunities to offer a space of possibility and place in which to cathect our best thinking about how to get free (Cooper, 2017, p. 142). It is time to take seriously the work of Black women thinkers, doers, creators, believers, sustainers, maintainers, nurturers, and leaders and demonstrate Black women’s long history of knowledge and powerful transformational and liberative prowess (Cooper, 2017). “[N]ot all Black women are womanist, but the womanist potential is embedded in all Black women’s experiences” (Gilkes, 2011, p. 87). Womanist theology is intersectional and religious and centers Black women (Townes, 2003). Black feminism, which must be acknowledged and named, as previously mentioned, doesn’t offer the salient centering of Black women as an independent methodology and thought.

It is Black women who must mobilize for collective power to oppose the power vested in existing male-dominant, white supremacist cultures (Townes, 1993). Presently, and historically, Black women are at the bottom of the economic ladder when ranked with white men, white women, and Black men; Black women compose nearly 75 percent of the traditional Black church, and this is not reflected in its leadership (Townes, 1993). Since the mid-1800s, before the abolishment of slavery, Black women have served as leaders in the oppressor’s home; have served as leaders for social justice, abolitionist, women’s rights activism (Horsford, 2012); and have been, oftentimes, the engine behind major organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (Barnett, 1993) and the Black Panther Party (Seifert, 2009). It is absolutely essential that Black women who have been oppressed, marginalized, sexualized, and dehumanized participate in the revolutionary process with a critical awareness of their role as subjects of the transformation toward liberation for all (Freire, 2009).

Conceptual Underpinnings of Soul 2 Soul: Why Womanist Ontology?

A womanist ontology of wholeness is, finally, radically relational.

—Townes (2011)

In its simplest form, theology is the study of the nature, existence, manifestation, and being of G-d. Theology is not necessarily associated with a particular religious sect and leans toward a universalist thought about G-d. “Theology can never be neutral or fail to take sides on issues related to the plight of the oppressed. For this reason, it can never engage in conversation about the nature of G-d without confronting those elements of human existence which threaten anyone’s existence as a person. Whatever theology says about G-d and the world must arise out of its sole reason for existence as a discipline: to assist the oppressed in their liberation. Its language is always language about human liberation, proclaiming the end of bondage and interpreting the religious dimensions of revolutionary struggle” (Cone, 1990, p. 4).

Womanist theology is a lens, study, reflection, stance, and affirmation that places Black women and the perspectives of Black women at the center while identifying racism, classism, and sexism as theological issues (Townes, 2003). A womanist theologian is one who engages in the study of G-d at a level of contextual analysis and scholarly research while centering Black women. Womanist theology moves Black women beyond traditional parameters of formal education, refutes patriarchy and dominant cultural values, exemplifies intersectionality while creating spaces for dynamic consciousness in anti-Black-racism work, and encourages others to look to the margins for liberative justice work (Williams, 2013). Womanist ontology brings Black women, Black people of the diaspora, from the margins to the center of liberative justice work. Through intergroup dialogue, womanist ontology creates a space for Black women to be, give voice, and use their agency to speak Truth that is antithetical to the oppressive audiences we engage. This is rooted in a concern for being centered in wholeness and liberation, not white-dominant culture, white supremacy, or dehumanizing racist structures (Townes, 1993). At the heart of a womanist ontology is the self-other relation grounded in concrete existence and succor in the flawed transcendent powers of our spirituality (Townes, 1993, p. 113) while being mindful of the miasma of a white supremacy that will call for Black women to do the work for the dominant culture. Black women leading racial justice activism works because it is antithetical to the dominant structures, which were not created for the Black diaspora to begin with. We have an opportunity to create a model of justice that brings those on the margins to the center of the narrative that illuminates, questions, challenges, and begins the eradication of radical oppression (Townes, 1993).

It is important to note the developed paradigm of Black women leading this work without doing all of the work physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Black women/womanist theologians are liberators whose stories and lived experiences of resilience are examples for all to embody. It is absolutely essential to the revolutionary process to develop an increasingly critical awareness of their role as subjects of the transformation (Freire, 2009, p. 127). It is a revolutionary praxis for all to emulate and inculcate. The revolutionary praxis for liberation must include dialogue—specifically, intergroup dialogue that charges, implores, and invokes transformation by dismantling white supremacist culture through the very people who created it.

Conclusion

Black women know what it is to live, survive, thrive, suffer, get free, and live free in the system of oppression and beyond the system. Given Black women’s expertise in flourishing in the United States, the centering of Black women’s leadership is essential when engaging in Black-centered racial justice work. It is important to note that this mode of racial justice centers Black lives and Black experiences, honors the Black woman, creates a space of rest and respite for Black women and the Black diaspora, and creates a model for Brown and Indigenous people to center their experiences in order to bring about liberation for all. This model increases awareness of white privilege and white supremacy; invokes compassion and empathy toward the oppressed; invites critical feeling that is attentive to emotional intelligence versus intellectual prowess; creates a sacred space for confession, repentance, forgiveness, and atonement; and builds a community of justice seekers that includes those liberated from oppression as the oppressed and the oppressor.

NOTES

1. I will use the terms Black and Black women to refer to a sociopolitical, revolutionary identity centering the Afro-diasporic race and culture of women exclusive of the dominant culture and narrative. African American, for the purpose of this chapter, centers America as white and African as a part of a white culture we are actively and intentionally dismantling.

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