Terrence L. Johnson’s capacious book We Testify with Our Lives takes its name from a speech given by Audre Lorde in which she insists “change, personal and political, does not come about in a day, nor a year. But it is our day-to-day decisions, the way in which we testify with our lives to those things in which we say we believe, that empower us” (quoted on p. 17). In it, he convincingly makes the case for “Black religion’s wide-ranging role in sustaining Black politics and political thought” and further that “Black religious radicalism sets the conditions for the emergence of organizations” and ideas that “serve as a site through which African Americans reimagine their freedom” (p. 17). Religion, for Johnson, is not limited to “Afro Christianity” or the Black church, but instead refers to the “sacred subjectivity” that has served as an ethical and political resource for Black peoples to understand, interpolate, conjure, and act toward a world beyond what Lewis Gordon has dubbed the “bad faith” of white supremacist modernity in which racial oppression (and race-making logics that justify and reproduce it) is a fundamental ingredient of dominant conceptual frameworks, social practices, and political institutions.
Johnson explores these ideas by looking at a broad spectrum of sources, from a fascinating examination of Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters to archival letters and meeting minutes of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Utilizing these accounts, Johnson develops an argument about what he terms the “ethical turn” in Black political thought that marked a rupture from the movement liberalism of the early civil rights period and propelled the change to Black Power as the framework for liberatory politics in the late 1960s and beyond. Johnson defines this ethical turn as “the ongoing recentering of Black subjectivity as central, necessary, and foundational in any humanistic endeavor to imagine, interpret, and invent existential and epistemic legitimacy” (p. 144). He contends that the genesis of this ethical turn can be found in Black women’s political thought, particularly that of Lorde, who challenged and still challenges her interlocutors to “revolt against perfunctory social integration and appropriation of liberal political ideals of equality and inclusion and capitalist values that promoted vast wealth inequality and stark individualism” in favor of “the strenuous work of imagining, cultivating, and building their own, intellectual and cultural traditions” … “building a political and social vision from difference” and developing “a way toward political freedom and human fulfillment” (pp. 4-5).
This “ethical turn” away from liberalism and toward something that exceeds its possibilities is, for Johnson, symbolized by Stokely Carmichael’s spontaneous cry of “Black power” as a part of his refusal to be arrested (for the second time in a single day) as he peacefully protested for voting rights. This change in perspective was necessitated by the realization, which began to dawn in the early 1960s, that even though the civil rights movement was making incredible gains in terms of formal legal rights—that is, on the only terms political liberalism acknowledges as necessary and legitimate—there was a violent backlash and social retrenchment sweeping white America that made it apparent that newly won gains were tenuous and that to keep them the nation would demand a seemingly endless blood sacrifice. Throughout the sixties voting rights activists were murdered; Black movement leaders were surveilled, terrorized, and slain; and white people open to some action toward racial justice, including the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy and his Attorney General brother Robert, were assassinated. In the 1960s, as in the period of Reconstruction a century before as well as the half century since the civil rights movement, America has always treated small advances toward the equality described in the rhetoric of the founding with ferocious and lethal retaliation. The romanticized version of the civil rights movement now told in sweet stories of folks holding hands while marching down picturesque avenues glosses over the immense, deadly, and entirely historically consistent white rage in response to mild, lawful, liberal demands for equality in and before the law. In the wake of a movement cycle in which Black people, women, youth, LGBTQ folk, and workers have been making demands to push beyond the color-blind American Dream based inclusion and toward freedom and flourishing, we see this rage reprised as patriarchal white Christian nationalism becomes resurgent.
Johnson writes frankly about sentiments that many people share as the third decade of the twenty-first century commences amidst plague, environmental catastrophe, and an exhausting repeat of the brutal struggles for basic rights that characterized the last century: “To be frank, I do not have any hope in our institutions. I do not trust our leaders. And sadly, my faith is waning.” However, he writes that “our ancestors beckon me—beckon us, to return to our history, what we have cultivated as sacred, to find our strength, power, and human dignity” (p. 48).
This exploration of the source of strength and creativity that allows Black political thinkers, activists, and organizers to return to the epoch-defining breech of “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” as bell hooks termed it, is not faith in liberal ideals but instead, he argues, a spiritual commitment to a “politics of healing.” This politics originates in Black feminist thought and is, according to Johnson, manifested in the development of Black Power philosophy (as exemplified by Stokely Carmichael) and organizing, which attempts to “give flesh to freedom” by making it clear that any justice worth the name must have a global, material, embodied, and experiential set of definitions not merely conceptual, procedural, or legal ones.
With these observations, Johnson joins a growing chorus of political theorists, scholars of Black politics, democracy and social movements that are urging consideration of alternatives to liberalism as the sine qua non of theories of justice. Importantly, Johnson, like myself and others writing to urge this reevaluation are not seeking to redraw the old oppositions between an inadequate liberalism and a socialism that is equally anchored in (and limited by) the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead, Johnson emphasizes the importance and usefulness of the material analysis and action precipitated by socialist critique, while also pointing toward the long tradition of visionary labor in Black political thought that does not subscribe to any political orthodoxy but instead insists on “discover[ing] new means by which to expand our knowledge of human strivings” (p. 234).
Johnson argues that religion has been central to this process in ways that have been too little discussed. This is because Johnson is not focused on the Black church as an institutional asset but instead wishes to point our attention to Black religious traditions as plural, fluid, and critical spaces of ethical and political imagination. He writes that “religion was fluid, not a fixed doctrine but a set of guiding principles to be applied to varying context and social problems” (p. 46). This religious register, he argues, is central to Black political thought and politics because it provides an “epistemological freedom” that allows Black peoples to conceive and enact a politics that exceeds the “grammar of Black suffering” (p. 94).
On these important points, Johnson is compelling. As a reader, I would have liked to see more examples from the archives of how Stokely Carmichael and others who developed into the Black Power wing of the civil rights movement wrote and talked about their move away from rights-based claims-making and toward an internationalist, Black, materialist, and humanist politics. Without a wider window into this process, it is not clear how the Black feminism and Black power aspects of that era’s political thought sit together to catalyze the ethical turn that Johnson observes. Indeed, Johnson does not deal seriously with either the gender politics of the Black Power movement or the gender tensions that existed between organizers in the movement. The voices of women in the (BPP) are introduced only to excuse Carmichael’s famous off-color “joke” about the proper place of women in the movement being prone. We do not hear the perspective of Elaine Brown, for example, the only woman leader in the Black Panther Party, and one who has written extensively about her experience. This perspective, or one like it, might tell us something more about how and to what extent the liberatory materialism of the BPP overlapped with or was informed by Black Feminist thought and practice. As the book reads currently, I instead get the feeling that Johnson is writing from the conviction that both these traditions are critically important—a notion I agree with wholeheartedly—but not how they are connected and whether and where they diverge.
In addition, I sometimes struggled to understand what makes Johnson’s account of the ethical core of radical Black politics religious or “theological,” rather than simply spiritual. However, it may be that the later ambiguity is a part of the flexibility that is characteristic of the practical yet prophetic thought that animates the tradition of radical Black politics. As one of my good friends, a fellow Black feminist scholar, once said to me: “Oh, I’m not religious, but I stay praying.” The steadiness of that belief in, commitment to, and action toward, practices of living and arrangements of governance that exceed the incomplete freedoms that liberalism (and socialism) were able to deliver in the twentieth century is surely an essential asset today, if we are to face the monumental tasks before us and build a flourishing world.
