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>> 71 3 “Who I Am and Whose I Am” Race and Religion Existential Angst I met with Hamida one morning for breakfast. Fifty-six years old, she is a tall, slender woman with high cheek bones and a quiet attractiveness. On this morning, she wore gold-wire-rimmed glasses and was dressed in a roomy black caftan emblazoned with a golden and swirling African design. As we spoke about First Afrikan’s assertion that many Bible stories took place in Africa. Hamida explained, It’s actually one of the most appealing things I found about the church. And I say that, because throughout the time I had spent in church as a young person, not once did it ever dawn on me that there was that possibility . I just took it at face value and, with all the images that were presented , that they were white. But when I think back, I realize that there might have been some part of me that rejected some of what we were being taught back then because I had never read the Bible from cover to cover. When it was pointed out that the Bible stories are in Africa, then it became so important to me to really be able to read the Bible and make 72 > 73 contextualized by his struggle to understand himself in relationship to his African heritage. “Who am I?” led to the questions What does it mean to be a person of African descent in the United States? What does this Africanness mean in terms of my consciousness and in terms of my ethnic and racial identity? How should I perform my identity so that others will recognize and understand me as an African centered person? By declaring, “I know whose I am,” a member of First Afrikan stated both her relationship and her commitment to God. Embedded in this phrase is an understanding of the self as a “child of God,” a familiar phrase in many African American churches. As a “child of God,” one belongs to God much as a child belongs to a father. In belonging to God, the person has responsibilities to honor that kinship. Therefore, the phrase, “I know who I am and whose I am” puts forth a construction of identity that emphasizes the relationship between God and Africanness. When a member of the church said, “I know who I am and whose I am,” she was not just saying that she was of African descent and a child of God. Often, a member was also saying that as an African-descended person she had an especial responsibility to honor her relationship to God. This especial responsibility was introduced and reinforced through the reading of the Bible as an African text. Members were taught to racially, ethnically, and spiritually identify with the characters of the Bible as fellow African-descended and black peoples. This chapter examines what the leaders of First Afrikan Church taught the members about “who they were and whose they were” with particular attention to the relationship between blackness and the Bible. In addition, I examine the contradictions between racial understandings of the self through an Afrocentric reading of the Bible and racial understandings of the self when considered in secular contexts. There is a significant shift in how blackness is defined and understood among the members when considered in everyday settings as compared to biblical contexts. In the secularized definitions of blackness, the church members’ middle class status becomes particularly salient. 74 > 75 Also included in the new members’ orientation material is a history of African American religion. In one section, it is explained that black religion has two motifs: the survival tradition and the liberation tradition: They represent two different kinds of religious sensibilities in the Black community. The survival tradition arose primarily among the slaves as an antidote to their expression of their dogged refusal to resign totally their humanity in the face of dehumanization. The Africans’ use of conjuration, magic and voodoo and hoodoo, properly called vodun and obeah, was an attempt to survive the Christian brainwashing that accompanied their physical bondage. The liberation tradition grew out of the free Black community of the North. Its emphasis was on personal and social evaluation, moral behavior, and political liberty rather than sheer survival. (Lomax 2002: 39) Black liberation theology is particularly important for contextualizing the discourse within First Afrikan Presbyterian Church. Black liberation theology emerged in the late 1960s as a “Christian movement of freedom for...

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