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Exorcising Democracy: The Theopolitical Challenge of Black Power
- Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics
- The Society of Christian Ethics
- Volume 38, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2018
- pp. 3-24
- 10.1353/sce.2018.0001
- Article
- Additional Information
Abstract:
The first part of this article analyzes the Black Power movement within the context of wider debates about how black nationalism conceptualized the need to form a people as a response to white supremacy. The second part examines how white supremacy conditions the nature and form of democratic citizenship in the United States and how the formation of a "nation within a nation" is a vital adjunct to dismantling white supremacy as a political system. Part three situates Black Power within a theological conception of poverty understood as powerlessness. Building on James Cone and Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, it closes by suggesting that forming a people as a response to powerlessness constitutes a double movement of healing and exorcism.