I would like to thank Deva Woodly for a generous and thought-provoking response to my book, We Testify with Our Lives. Her stimulating insight, which challenged my own framing of Black feminist thought and political theory, will inform my ongoing work in Black religion’s significant role in radical politics and political formation. I will attempt to address the themes Woodly raises and link them to the fundamental concerns I addressed in my book.
First, the problem of sufficient archival evidence to support my claim that the Black Power movement rejected political liberalism, specifically a voting-rights political strategy, is a warranted criticism. Had I done a better job of linking Stokely Carmichael’s writings to SNCC’s newsletters as well as its unpublished writings, I may have avoided such criticisms. I failed to link the debate between John Lewis and Carmichael regarding the future of SNCC as an example of the organization’s growing frustration with the traditional political strategies bandied about by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and traditional (male) civil rights leaders.
This leads me to Woodly’s second point: the problem of gender and misogyny within Black politics. Woodly invokes a Black feminist analysis that begs for a deeper gender analysis in my efforts to re-narrate patriarchal and heteronormative (Black) social movements. I attempted to disrupt traditionally male-oriented historical accounts of Black radical politics in three ways: first, I opened the book with Audre Lorde to disorient the reader, a way of construing through a Black feminist lens a political terrain embedded with new conceptual schemes such as a politics of healing and theory of difference to substantiate my account of the ethical turn in Black radical politics. Second, I turn to Ethel Minor, Carmichael’s chief editor and political strategist, to signal the role of Black women’s radical thought within the developing radical wing within SNCC and Carmichael’s ideological worldview. I also point to Minor’s important role in introducing and advancing a human rights and transnational political agenda within SNCC. Third, by introducing Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters into debates on Black politics and political theory, I was attempting to lend credibility to “new” epistemic resources for evaluating the content of politics and political formation. To this end, introducing healing as a necessary discursive category that Bambara invokes within her novel to disrupt debates on justice and freedom exposed my effort to expand the “vocabularies” and concepts political theorists rely on to conceptualize ideal theory and political norms. Woodly, however, seems to suggest that the descriptive work within my book is insufficient, and I would tend to agree with her. Linking this descriptive account in a more robust way to the ethical turn, I believe, would address some of Woodly’s concerns.
Lasty, the problem of religion, and particularly theology within Black politics remains a bit foggy for Woodly, and she questions if the source of the ethical turn should be called “spiritual” or a denotation of spirituality. I implicitly address this concern when I turn to the category of Black vernacular reasoning as a resource for understanding the complicated and sometimes contradictory role of religion in Black politics. As I argue in my book, Black vernacular reasoning retrieves traditions like conjure and ancestral tributes as interwoven within the political imaginary behind W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of the “veil,” where religion and politics overlap to inform responses to oppression and discrimination. For instance, the idea of invoking the ancestors at rallies for Black Lives Matter might be disconcerting to some, but for many Black activists the concept of ancestors serves as a political resource for rethinking ideals of individuality and individual political agency as well as a historical benchmark for understanding both the limits and possibilities of social movements. With this background, Woodly’s overall insight is a reminder of the need for theorists to return to archival research as a resource for discovering buried and new sources, such as religion and Black women, for theorizing politics and the formation of political thought.
