Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism

1: “We Have as Much Right . . . to Believe that God Is a Negro”: Religious Nationalism and the Rehumanization of Blackness

23 CHAPTER ONE “We Have as Much Right ... to Believe that God Is a Negro” Religious Nationalism and the Rehumanization of Blackness •• DESCRIBED AS THE “vociferous and controversial bishop” of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Henry McNeal Turner asked on February 1, 1898, “Why should not the Negro believe that he resembles God as much as other people?”1 In the late nineteenth century, Turner believed that African Americans had “as much right . . . to believe that God is a Negro” as “buckra or white people have to believe that God is a fine looking, . . . ornamented white man.”2 Severely criticizing “all the fool Negroes” who believed that God was a “white-skinned, blue-eyed, straight-haired” and “finely robed white gentlemen,” Turner thought it debilitating to the psyche of African Americans not to believe that the image of God was in fact “symbolized in themselves.”3 He was decisive in his position: “We certainly protest against God being white at all.”4 Turner argued for an implicit ontological and anthropological correspondence between the image of God and the humanity of black people. This correspondence subversively undermined Western legacies of racial cosmogony that for centuries had considered black people aberrations and negations of the divine Godhead. chapter one 24 For Turner, bridging the inherited dichotomy between black materiality and divine essence was as much about religious identification as it was about geographical location. He believed America to be a country where “white represents God, and black the devil”; thus African Americans inevitably inherited a socialized ontological deficiency and would remain “obsequious believers in their own inferiority.”5 He reasoned that as long as the Negro remained among whites in America, “the Negro will believe that the devil is black and that he (the Negro) favors the devil, and that God is white and that he (the Negro) bears no resemblance to Him.”6 As a consequence, Turner staunchly advocated voluntary emigrations to Africa, viewing the “home” continent as “the one place that offers . . . manhood and freedom” for African Americans.7 At the dawn of the twentieth century, Turner believed that African Americans harbored a collective need to “find a domain” that rejected the demonization of blackness and precluded its “contemptuous and degrading ” effects upon the black soul.8 Black liberation theologian James H. Cone supportively argues that “in a society where blacks have been enslaved and segregated for nearly four centuries by whites because of their color and where evil has been portrayed as ‘black’ and good as ‘white’ in religious and cultural values, the idea that ‘God is black’ is not only theologically defensible, but is a necessary corrective against the power of domination.”9 This sentiment would carry over into African American Yoruba theology when more than one hundred years after Turner, Baba Akinkugbe Karade would similarly declare, “We Africans must see the Creator and the angelic forces in our image just like any other culture.”10 For African Americans like Karade, Yoruba expression not only provides a reifying of blackness within the realm of the sacred but also what he calls a “deifying” of African American experience in light of its slave past.11 More than a century preceding African American Yoruba, Turner helped to lay the groundwork for a tridimensional nationalism that solidly placed religious reflection alongside the dual traditional nationalist goals of sociopolitical autonomy and sovereign nationhood. Therefore, while black-nationalist advocates like Turner were more commonly political in their agenda, scope, and orientation, they also readily employed religious and theological approaches as necessary strategies for rehumanizing pejorative impressions of blackness. Within the early nationalist context of Bishop Turner and later within the twentieth-century context of the “We Have as Much Right . . .” 25 African American Yoruba movement, religion functioned as an important stratum for confronting the historical ways that blackness figuratively presaged evil and human negation. With religious appeals to an African God, the Yoruba movement six decades after Turner similarly countered and encountered challenges of the sociopolitical invisibility of African Americans, the internalization of black inferiority, and, most acutely, the heathenization, pathologization, and demonization of blackness. Within nineteenth- and twentieth-century North America, blacknationalist discourses circuitously responded to religious debates several centuries old that equated the blackness of Africans to evil and to incarnations in Satan or the devil. Within these debates religion was almost always the source of these perverse racial ruminations. Even more striking is that this early conundrum of...