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[BT 8.3 (2010) 307–326] ISSN (print) 1476–9948
doi: 10.1558/blth.v8i3.307 ISSN (online) 1743–1670

A BLACK THEOLOGY OF LIBERATION OR LEGITIMATION?

A POSTCOLONIAL RESPONSE TO CONE’S BLACK
THEOLOGY AND BLACK POWER AT FORTY

Elonda Clay1
Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago
Chicago, Illinois
USA
elonda.clay@gmail.com

ABSTRACT
In this essay, I posit that the original way in which the concept, heuristic, and
signifier “liberation” functioned in U.S. Black Liberation Theology has by
both form and content been un/consciously resignified into a discourse of
cultural legitimation. The signifier “liberation” has become decontextualized
(politically, economically, and culturally) in the second and third iterations of
U.S. Black Liberation Theology, causing the discourse to become perpetually
oriented towards past, not present or future, alternative dreams of social trans-
formation and sites of struggle informed by the Black Christian radical tradi-
tion. In order to accomplish such work, this article employs a postcolonial
perspective to the sources and discursive strategies within U.S. Black Libera-
tion Theology. The second section of the article examines the historical and
social processes involved in the slippage between liberation and legitimation,
probing key moments and issues of class difference that led to (1) the dis-
engagement of U.S. Black Liberation Theology with the cries of the living
poor and marginalized and (2) the development of evasive discursive strategies
within U.S. Black Theology that render Black Liberation Theology into a
middle-class theology.
Keywords: advanced marginalization; Black Power; Black Theology; class
difference; cultural legitimation; internal colonialism; liberation; post-
colonialism.

1. Elonda Clay is a doctoral student in Religion and Science at the Lutheran School of
Theology at Chicago. She is a graduate of the Summer Leadership Institute at Harvard
University and a recipient of the GreenFaith Fellowship, the United Methodist Women of
Color Scholarship, and the North American Doctoral Fellowship from The Fund for Theo-
logical Education. Her dissertation, “Seeing DNA is Believing?: Diaspora, DNA Ancestry
Tests, and the Mediated Redemption of African Descent,” focuses on the multiple modes and
uses of spiritualized, scientific, and visual rhetoric in media presentations of personalized
genomics.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010, 1 Chelsea Manor Studios, Flood Street, London SW3 5SR.
308 Black Theology: An International Journal

Introduction
This special issue of the journal celebrates forty years of the liberation sensibility
and motif in Black Theology. As Black Theology and its practical sensibilities
have created a space for scholars of color to actively think through and reflect
on their identity and experiences as a point of departure, for theological reflec-
tion, the fortieth anniversary of Black Theology and Black Power is a cause for
celebration and honor.2 In the midst of our celebration, we must also remember
of what being a faithful heir thus requires. Jacques Derrida argues that in order
for a heritage to live on, we as active heirs to such heritage, must continue to be
“faithfully unfaithful;” that is, have the courage to recast our heritage anew so
that it may continue to live.3 I stand as an heir of Black Liberation Theology.
Some aspects I have actively chosen and some portions have been interpolated
upon my subjectivity. Derrida’s deconstructive spirit of embracing yet pushing
up against his own inheritance (personal, epistemological, etc.) reflects the
active/passive natures of acquiring inheritance. He reminds us, “an heir is not
only one who receives, he or she is someone who chooses, and who takes the
risk of deciding.”4
I am honored to be an intellectual beneficiary of the Black Liberation Theo-
logical tradition, yet as a responsible heir, I write this essay to textually perform
the impossible possibility of unfaithful faithfulness. Black Theology is, in the
words of Gayraud Wilmore, “a radical response from the underside of American
religious history to the mainstream of white Christianity.”5 Yet, it has seldom
questioned the very simple, yet stock ingredient of its discursive production;
namely the ideation of the signifier “liberation;” a very taken-for-granted word
in our theological lexicon of radical religious thought. Here, I take a moment to
pause, to reflect on this simple yet powerful word that can so easily slip into
legitimation without reflexive analysis. It is with this contention that I proceed.
Black Power supplied the cultural “raw materials,” the main stock ingredient
of Cone’s initial theological reflection for a more liberative theological praxis.
However, one could question whether or not current Black Liberation Theol-
ogy’s use of the liberation motif has continued to be cognizant of its current
historical moment (read: new cultural materials)? Or, rather, if the discourse
now participates in a politics of nostalgia reflecting on a historical moment that

2. James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).
3. Jacques Derrida and Elizabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow…A Dialogue
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 2–4.
4. Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow…A Dialogue, 8.
5. Gayraud Wilmore, “A Revolution Unfulfilled, But Not Invalidated,” in A Black The-
ology of Liberation: Twentieth Anniversary Edition, ed. James H. Cone (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis
Books, 1990), 147.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

 Clay A Black Theology of Liberation or Legitimation? 309

has passed (Black Power); thus rendering the signifier “liberation” stagnate and
worn? I argue that second- and third-generational iterations of “liberation”
have come to be a discursive (historical) signifer failing to adequately include
new voices of the oppressed, thereby decentering Cone’s initial theological for-
mulations of Black Power. In those later generations of Black Theology, the
sociopolitical positionality of the discourse ceased to respond to Black Power
(or similar cultural noise) or give an adequate consideration of the legitimizing
threat Black Power posed to U.S. Christians, denominations, and clergymen.
By legitimation, I refer to activities—ideologies and practices—that serve to
rationalize and justify the maintenance of authority, beliefs or behaviors, and
the (often unquestioned) acceptance of social systems and norms; regardless as
to whether they are oppressive or not. Sociologist Talcott Parsons defines
legitimation as “the appraisal of action in terms of shared or common values in
the context of the involvement of the action in the social system.” 6 In other
words, legitimation involves a process by which actions in specific, concrete
situations are “appraised” in terms of pre-given/shared values, norms and
beliefs and structures that are justified or unjustified in society.7
Legitimation and de-legitimation are not diametrically opposed, but instead,
can be understood as psycho-social processes that co-exist in often complex and
contradictory sets of power relations that are adaptive, not fixed. This means
that what may be liberation in one context or historical moment can become
legitimation in another. The important factor to remember is that the legitima-
tion of liberation struggles and protests are grounded in specific, concrete situ-
ations of action, and that action is interactively constructed out of whatever raw
materials and resources are available in the current moment.8
Liberation as political engagement has historically been identified with
activism and movements of resistance. Liberation represents various forms of
opposition to dominance, disempowerment, and violence practiced by
marginalized groups that have been invaded, conquered, colonized, dispersed
or displaced, and subordinated. Although resistance struggles often draw upon
narratives and events from the past, liberation is concerned with resistance in
the present historical moment, giving rise to social, political, cultural trans-
formations that are future oriented. Radical liberation movements have pro-
vided us with visionary sketches of possible futures, “but they have also been

6. Talcott Parsons, Structure and Process in Modern Societies (New York: Free Press, 1960),
175.
7. Morris Zelditch, Jr, “Theories of Legitimacy,” in The Psychology of Legitimacy:
Emerging Perspectives on Ideology, Justice, and Intergroup Relations, ed. John T. Jost and Brenda
Major (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 51.
8. Morris Zelditch, Jr, “Theories of Legitimacy,” 50–51.

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310 Black Theology: An International Journal

complicit with acts of violence and oppression, through either their actions or
their silence.”9
Intellectually, the notion of liberation is articulated as deferral or dream—as
the imagining of subterranean social transformations in the long term. These
dreams are approached with a sense of urgency that requires action, yet libera-
tion itself is understood to involve multiple processes of change. In his book,
Freedom Dreams, historian and activist Robin D. G. Kelley, notes that the Black
radical imagination, alternative visions of Black futures and dreams of a new
world, inspires each new generation to continue in the struggle for a world radi-
cally different than the one they have inherited.10 Black Liberation Theology, as
a religious engagement of Black radical imagination, has been instrumental in
the transformation of religious institutions, theological education, and social
structures. The role of Black churches and Black Christianity in the wider
arena of social change has manifested itself simultaneously in conservative and
progressive public modes, including organizational politics. For Blacks, libera-
tion has taken the form of freedom struggles against the establishment of Euro-
pean imperial hegemony in the form of revolts and independence movements.
It has also included resistance to White supremacy and structural racism,
political protests within structures of domination, constructed and controlled
by Whites, and support for anti-colonial movements. Black liberation in the
United States context has had the struggle for racial and economic justice as its
main emphasis.11 This struggle has included a commitment to the dismantling
of systems of racial oppression and participation in alternative political orienta-
tions such as Communism, Socialism, Maoism, Participatory Democracy, and
Black Nationalism. Black feminist and womanist interventions into Black
radicalism sought to confront gender oppression and to reject the patriarchy
embedded in the Black Nationalism and Black Freedom movements.
I posit that the original way in which the concept, heuristic, and signifier
“liberation” functioned in U.S. Black Liberation Theology, has by both form
and content, been un/consciously resignified into a discourse of cultural legiti-
mation. That is to say, while the use of “liberation” had a particular importance
for a specific historical moment (late 1960s), second- and third-generation Black
theologians have seemingly failed to rethink the heuristic of “liberation” for
changing conditions and contexts, which include postmodernity, post-Black
Power/Civil Rights politics, post-industrialization, and the network society

9. Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination ( Boston: Beacon
Press, 2001), xi.
10. Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 1–12.
11. Paul Le Blanc, ed., Black Liberation and the American Dream: The Struggle for Racial and
Economic Justice (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books [Prometheus], 2003).

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 Clay A Black Theology of Liberation or Legitimation? 311

epoch.12 In our contemporary material context, the term liberation is increas-

ingly used in ways that increase the social capital of the Black theologian, who
often deploys the word in conjunction with historically significant events, but
not active theological praxis. The latter requires the continual process of what
liberation purports to mean, do, and for whom it is invoked, in the various con-
texts across many historical conjunctures. While it is too simplistic to assign
responsibility for the transition into discourses of legitimation entirely to the
second- and third-generational iterations; of equal importance, is to interrogate
what was it about Cone’s framework that allowed for such easy slippage from
liberation to legitimation? While I am not specifically dealing with the second-
and third-generational iterations of the Conian tradition of U.S. Black Libera-
tion Theology in this essay, I am exploring the possible gaps in Cone’s frame-
work that are present in Black Theology and Black Power, which allow for such
potential slippage, in order to rethink the use of liberation in current theological
projects.
In order to accomplish such work, this article employs a postcolonial per-
spective to the sources and discursive strategies within U.S. Black Liberation
Theology. As a critical, theoretical project, postcolonialism engages the remain-
ing and lingering aspects of colonial logics and epistemological frameworks,
seeking to bring to light unequal processes of cultural representation, by chal-
lenging essentialisms, omissions, simplifications, and dichotomies. My aim in
using postcolonialism is to explore the challenges posed by notions of dif-
ference from within Black liberation discourses, especially those related to
representations of poor people. This will be undertaken in conjunction with a
discussion of the issues raised by the postcolonial conditions involving mar-
ginalized groups and processes of legitimation. Theoretically, this essay interro-
gates the relationship between and manner in which the “poor” and marginalized
are utilized in conjunction with the heuristic liberation. In other words, what
role do such signifiers of difference play in the ways in which liberation is
theologically constructed? Do these signifiers of class difference become simply
a way by which to construct a legitimating discourse on liberation; or rather, is
difference in fact, likewise being liberated within theological constructions? If it
is the latter, is such a proposal even possible in discursive intellectual projects?  

12. I have argued previously that technological change has impacted Black churches in
multiple ways—internally and externally—and that clergy and religious scholars need to take
seriously what the political, economic, and cultural shifts from a primarily industrial society
to a knowledge/service economy based on informational capitalism (the network society) will
mean for potential organizational cultures and religious practices within and outside of Black
Protestantism. See E. Clay, “Subtle Impact: Technology Trends and the Black Church,”
Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center 31, no. 1–2 (Fall–Spring 2003–2004): 153–
77.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

312 Black Theology: An International Journal

In the first section, I began by discussing postcolonialism, explicating com-

mon threads that connect postcolonial theology and Black Liberation Theology.
Although both prioritize poor and oppressed peoples, they employ different
methods in their respective theoretical frameworks of engagement that make
each respective discourse more or less able to accomplish their own particular
projects and ideological positionings. I will then discuss the differences
between Black Power as an anti-colonial, Marxist discourse in the book Black
Power by Stokely Carmichael, and Black Power as cultural existential discourse
in Cone’s book Black Theology and Black Power. This comparative exercise is
imperative in order to distinguish the differences of approach and limitations
between existential reflection (Black Liberation Theology), political praxis and
reflection (Black Power), and pragmatic political activity. The first is often the
more common approach in religious and theological studies in which reflection
on the poor becomes an act of intellectual and theoretical imagining, not nec-
essarily connected to an on-the-ground political activity. That is not to say that
the existential configurations do not and cannot serve various political and
social interests of justice.
The second section explores the challenge of class difference to Black middle
class intellectuals’ identification with the poor, and reflects on U.S. Black lib-
eration theology’s post-movement disengagement with the problems of the
urban and rural poor. This calls for a critical examination and rethinking of the
placement of marginalization within U.S. Black Liberation Theology; it asks,
who benefits from such constructions, the Black bourgeois or the Black poor?
How has group, personal, and cultural legitimation resulted in discursive strate-
gies that work to hide asymmetrical relationships by reasserting mechanisms of
power? I argue that current trends in Black Theology, what I call the evasive
strategies of retrospective reflection and nostalgic return, divert attention away
from the challenges of solidarity with the margins for entitled yet oppressed
middle-class and elite Blacks. In conclusion, possible futures for U.S. Black
Liberation Theology, given its accomplishments and self-limitations, are
considered.

Postcolonialism, Black Power, and Black Liberation Theology

Postcolonialism refers to theoretical projects, literary techniques, research meth-
odologies and approaches, which seek to challenge Western imperialism and
neo-colonial domination. It also seeks to interrogate and analyse different power
relationships and unequal power differentials in interpersonal, institutional, and
global intersections, while offering its own alternative theories and practices.13

13. Joanne P. Sharp, Geographies of Postcolonialism: Spaces of Power and Representation (Los
Angeles: Sage, 2009), 5–7.

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 Clay A Black Theology of Liberation or Legitimation? 313

Through the analysis and critique of Western knowledge systems and cultural
productions, postcolonialism engages in the recovery of alternative, often sub-
ordinated ways of knowing and understanding. This involves the deconstruc-
tion of colonial representations of difference, including race, gender, biological
and class hierarchical constructs, and negative stereotypes. Postcolonialism
makes space for us to consider the economic exploitation and political subjuga-
tion of colonialism as well as subsequent legacies and reconfigurations of colo-
nial logics and practices. It enables us also to investigate how the cultural
products of colonialism, like Western Christian theology and the study of
religion, have been influential in forming knowledge systems and epistemo-
logical constructs that perpetuate binary social and cultural formations of
superiority and inferiority, oppressed and oppressors.
Some challenge the use of the “post” in postcolonialsm. This arises from the
sense that the strategies and conditions created by colonialism are still with us.
Namely, that economic exploitation and dominance, racism, the unequal distri-
bution of resources, military occupation, cultural imperialism, poverty, inequal-
ity, and ecological imperialism still significantly shape the lives of formerly
colonized and colonizing peoples. In the United States, the internal colonization
of persons of African descent, and the dispossession and subjugation of Native-
American peoples, has not ended. Neo-colonial domination has reconfigured
colonial triumphalism into various new forms of exploitation and containment
that are profitable for global capitalism. These include such elements as trans-
national and virtual migrations of labor and laborers, rapid growth of privatized
prison management corporations and prison industrial profit industries, or the
warehousing of functionally illiterate students in public school systems located
in vulnerable communities.
What does postcolonialism have to do with Black Power? I argue that like
Black Power, postcolonialism is concerned with the self-determination of for-
merly colonized and neo-colonized peoples. In Black Power literature, one finds
sentiments of current postcolonial critiques of British colonial and United States
post-independence “civilizing” missionary programs as imperialist endeavors.
There is the recognition that White Christians were willing participants in the
interests of empire, where the interests of colonial Christians, post-independence
churches, commerce, and the state coincided. Black Power and postcolonialism
found inspiration in the anti-colonial resistance movements for African inde-
pendence, popularized in the works of Franz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and others.
For these political positionings, decolonization requires more than independence
from colonial rule, it also requires breaking colonial patterns of binary thinking
and dominance, as well as the rejection of cultural domination that keeps
formerly colonized people in psychological bondage. Violence was seen as part
of the revolutionary action necessary for colonized groups to attain freedom
from colonization. For Fanon, the process of decolonization could be defined

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314 Black Theology: An International Journal

as “The last shall be first.”14 The humanity of the colonized, distorted and
deformed by colonization, was restored through liberation. Fanon understood
decolonization as a historical process that continually challenged the Mani-
chaeanism of the colonial world.
Articulations of Black liberation have been and remain sites of contestation
over what strategies for Black self-determination would be more practical and
effective in bringing about meaningful social change. A prime U.S. example of
this contestation is the DuBois/Washington debates over solutions to “The
Negro Problem” in the aftermath of colonialism and imperialism, slavery,
settler societies, and post-colonial U.S. reconfigurations of institutionalized
racism. Another example is the Black Freedom Movement/Black Power Move-
ments, which involved integrationist and nationalist debates over solutions to
public and legal segregation, racial terrorism, institutional racism, and the dis-
enfrancisement, economic exploitation, and cultural imperialism of people of
color.
One of the common threads between postcolonial theory and the theoretical
underpinning of Black Power is the theory of internal colonization. As a
leading proponent of Black Power, Stokely Carmichael defined colonialism as
institutional racism in the book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America.
He argued that
Institutional racism relies on the active and pervasive operation of anti-black
attitudes and practices. A sense of superiority group position prevails: whites
are better than blacks; therefore blacks should be subordinated to whites...
black people in this country form a colony, and it is not in the interests of the
colonial power to liberate them. Black people are legal citizens of the United
States with for the most part the same legal rights as other citizens. Yet they
stand as colonial subjects in relation to the white society. Thus institutional
racism has another name: colonialism.15

Carmichael’s articulation of internal colonialism as a result of the colonial/

postcolonial/neo-colonial history of the United States serves as a point of refer-
ence for the same assessment by later postcolonial authors, such as Gayatri C.
Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha, regarding the conditions of economic, social,
cultural, and racial oppression enforced upon African Americans within the
United States. Carmichael promoted community-oriented and political defini-
tions of Black Power as Black self-determination, Black self-identity, and politi-
cal organizing for “full participation in the decision-making process affecting

14. Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961); translated from the French by Richard
Philcox; introductions by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Grove Press,
2004), 3.
15. Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in
America (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1967), 5.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

 Clay A Black Theology of Liberation or Legitimation? 315

the lives of black people, and recognition of the virtues in themselves as black
people.”16
Carmichael’s Black Power had a clear anti-imperialist agenda that saw simi-
larities between the oppressive Black/White racial oppression in the United
States and South Africa, as internal forms of colonialism. He viewed liberation
not only as the fight against racism and White supremacy, but also as the strug-
gle for freedom from colonialism. Carmichael passionately explained, “Black
Power to us means that black people see themselves as part of a new force,
sometimes called the Third World: that we see our struggle as closely related to
liberation struggles around the world. We must hook up with these struggles.”17
Carmichael also sketches Black Power as a democratizing activity, one in which
the oppressed are involved in political and empowerment processes, although
certainly Black Power, like the Black Freedom Movement and Black Liberation
Theology, was willing to perpetuate gender oppression against Black women
and heterosexist oppression against Black queers. Class difference, within its
organizational structure as a social movement, was also not fully addressed.
Carmichael, like many leaders within the Black Power movement, including
Malcolm X, H. Rap Brown, Huey Newton, James Foreman, and Eldridge
Cleaver, aggressively expressed a hermeneutic of suspicion towards U.S. Chris-
tianity as a culturally legitimized religious system that was a demonic force
against Black flourishing and self-determination.18 As a White man’s religion,
Christianity was seen as just another form of cultural imperialism and as justi-
fication for “civilizing” missions of economic and political imperialism to be
rejected. Cone admits that it was the critique of Christianity rising from voices
within the Black Power movement that disrupted Black Christians’ unexamined
acceptance of integrationist views:
The rise of black power created a decisive turning point in black religious
thought. Black power forced black clergy to raise the theological question
about the relation between black faith and white religion. Although blacks
have always recognized the ethical heresy of white Christians, they have not
always extended it to Euro-American theology. With its accent on the cultural
heritage of Africa and political liberation “by any means necessary,” black
power shook black clergy out of their theological complacency.19

16. Carmichael and Hamilton, Black Power, 47.

17. Carmichael and Hamilton, Black Power, xi. See also Stokely Carmichael, Stokely
Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism (New York, 1971), 35, 97.
18. George M. Frederickson, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in
the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 304.
19. James H. Cone, “Black Theology in American Religion,” Journal of the American
Academy of Religion 53, no. 4 D (1985): 768.

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316 Black Theology: An International Journal

Black Theology and Black Power interacts directly with Carmichael and
Hamilton’s book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. Cone engages
Carmichael in several ways: as a resource for defining Black Power, as a means
to respond to the question of integration, but also as a signifier for radical leader-
ship. Carmichael’s work also enables Cone to describe the political implications
of Black Power and to reconfigure revolutionary violence with reconciliation.
Cone defines Black Power as “complete emancipation from white oppression
by whatever means black people deem necessary,”20 “a humanizing force,” “an
affirmation of the humanity of blacks in spite of white racism”21 and “an
expression of hope.”22
In many ways, Black Power, not the Black Freedom (Civil Rights) move-
ment, planted seeds for the emergence of postcolonial approaches to the study
of religion and biblical studies from U.S. religious scholars through the recog-
nition of the influence of colonial Christianity and Western imperialism on
both Black and White U.S. forms of Christianity. Black Power directly rejected
the claim that churches were effective advocates against injustice for poor people
and asserted instead that they were only religious organizations that acted in
their own self-interests.23 This self-interest predicated itself on race privilege
and economics for the Whites and with a corresponding model based on class
privilege and access to social capital for the middle-class Blacks. This challenged
the legitimacy of Black and White U.S. Protestant churches, especially con-
cerning their commitment to solidarity with poor and working-class people.
Conversely, the practice of postcolonial critique of theological and religious
studies builds on the institutional gains made possible because of the Black
Freedom movement and the groundbreaking and paradigm-shifting revolt of
U.S. Black Liberation Theology. It was Black Liberation Theology that dared to
speak of Black poor people as being at the center of God’s liberating activity in
the world. It was Black Liberation Theology that spoke of Black Power as
compatible with Christianity, and the importance of perceiving the divine as
Black. The successes of the Black Freedom movement granted people of many
races and ethnicities access to innumerable rights and geographies that had
been denied them under state-sanctioned political and social segregation. These
included voting rights and the racial integration of public institutions and
spaces like academia.

20. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 6.

21. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 16.
22. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 28.
23. Herbert C. Kelman, “Reflections on Social and Psychological Processes of Legiti-
mization and Delegitimization,” in The Psychology of Legitimacy: Emerging Perspectives On
Ideology, Justice, and Intergroup Relations, ed. John T. Jost and Brenda Major (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2001), 61.

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 Clay A Black Theology of Liberation or Legitimation? 317

The next section will explore how U.S. Black Liberation Theology began to
disengage with the cries from the poor, and failed to move with shifts in his-
torical moments, thus turning U.S. Black Liberation Theology into a discourse
that has been unable to situate itself in the present.

Were the Poor Lost in Transition? Post-Movement Legitimacy

and the Trend of Evasive Discursive Strategies
If the signifier liberation is not updated throughout changing conditions and
contexts across various historical moments, does this not make the concept
vulnerable to mutating into mere legitimation? I am suggesting that such a
mutation has already happened, in part because Black Liberation Theology has
not responded consistently to changing patterns and cartographical shifts in
marginalization. In making this assertion, I propose that many of U.S. Black
Liberation theological discourses represent historical reflections on the experi-
ences of Black Power and the “voiceless” Black underclass rather than contem-
porary reflexive theologies of liberation.
While we know that discursive constructions at best can only signify placing
the experiences of the poor as their primary concern, theologians must continue
to reflect critically on changing complexities of class difference, upward social
mobility, marginalization, and material solidarity. Furthermore, in the period
since the Black Freedom and Black Power movements, Black scholarship more
broadly has seen a retreat from rather than continued engagement with the
problems of the urban and rural poor. This retreat, I argue, has also occurred in
U.S. Black Liberation Theology as part of the processes of personal, group, and
cultural legitimation. This can be evidenced through its discursive content,
where Black Theology’s disengagement with the problems of the poor can be
described as retreating rather than identifying with marginalized Blacks and
people of color. Such a lack of sustained engagement resignifies liberation from
praxis for social transformation to celebrating and reliving past achievements.
Social class or stratification are hierarchical social arrangements that desen-
sitize us to class difference. Material solidarity, not just charity, with marginal-
ized people is a difficult and misunderstood activity even among the most well
meaning advocates and activists because it “pushes us to confront our embed-
dedness in structures of oppression. It forces us to increase our strength to
identify, analyze, and resist them, and to find collective ways to push the
envelope.”24 The understanding of solidarity I espouse here can be understood
as intellectual and political struggle informed by the practices of respect, mutual
interests, reciprocity, and partnership. Speaking on solidarity and difference,

24. Jane D. Schaberg, “Response. Roundtable Discussion: Intellectual Struggle and

Material Solidarity,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 20, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 152.

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318 Black Theology: An International Journal

Womanist ethicist Emilie M. Townes notes that, “just because folk espouse
solidarity does not mean they either know it or mean it.”25 Townes reminds us
that solidarity and difference are more of a continuum than polarized opposites.
Social negotiations of upward social mobility and privilege that perform
“respectability” and moments of active solidarity with marginalized groups are
various, often contradictory, and at times very ambiguous.
The neglect of class differences within Black theological discourse has a
universalizing effect that ignores embedded class assumptions, intersectionality,
and differential experiences of oppressions. Such silences ignore the
complicated placement and process of marginalization. It fails to notice how a
person may be oppressed and yet, simultaneously, have access to other entitle-
ments based on class, gender, education level, nationality, heterosexuality, and
physical appearance. Although social analysis as a methodology calls attention
to staggering statistics on race, gender, and class disparities and inequities
within oppressive systems, it does not critically examine the patterns of
advanced marginalization and secondary marginalization (marked by internal
stratification as experienced from within a marginal group) that affect the most
vulnerable groups within communities of color. Advanced marginalization,
political scientist Cathy Cohen explains, “focuses on heightened stratification
of marginal communities.”26 She argues that advanced marginalization entails
the expectation of social inclusion and the adherence by marginal group
members to dominant norms of love, work, and social interaction. Secondary
marginalization involves the formation of an “indigenous process of marginal-
ization targeting the most vulnerable in the group” that are deemed as deviant
or other, projected as having a stigmatized Black identity.27
Kelman defines legitimization and de-legitimization as socially sanctioned
processes of categorizing and re-categorizing individuals, groups, actions, and
systems in such a way that they fall either inside or outside of the domain of
moral acceptability and obligation.28 In postcolonial and liberation analysis of
colonial and Western Christianity, structural racism and cultural imperialism
have been both legitimized and delegitimized through Christian religious
practices and theological constructions. In his discussion of legitimacy and the
role of churches in social change, Kelman argues that the liberation theologies

25. Emilie M. Townes, “Women’s Wisdom on Solidarity and Differences,” Union

Seminary Quarterly Review 53, nos. 3–4 (1999): 162.
26. Cathy Cohen, Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999), 63–64.
27. Cohen, Boundaries of Blackness, 63–64.
28. Herbert C. Kelman, “Reflections on Social and Psychological Processes of Legiti-
mization and Delegitimization,” in The Psychology of Legitimacy: Emerging Perspectives on Ideology,
Justice, and Intergroup Relations, ed. John T. Jost and Brenda Major (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 57–59.

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 Clay A Black Theology of Liberation or Legitimation? 319

of the 1960s fostered a distinctive group identity that empowered poor and
oppressed people to declare oppressive racial and class stratification systems and
practices illegitimate on the grounds that they excluded and exploited the poor.
This helped poor people to see themselves as active agents with a role in
transforming the world, and legitimized their humanity.29 So we might ask, has
U.S. Black Theology continued to be effective in this function of legitimating
the humanity of poor and oppressed people?
Legitimacy, as I have previously stated, is already and at once complicit with
any project of liberation. In other words, these processes are not as separate and
plastic in nature, rather, they are in some ways co-constitutive and necessitate
perpetual reflection on changing historical contexts. Here, I suggest that at
times the concept of liberation became vulnerable to legitimation within the
institutionalization of Black Liberation Theology. There are three sources of
legitimation related to Black Theology that I will mention here. One source of
group legitimacy for Black Liberation Theology is the extent to which its
readers perceive the discourse as reflecting their ethnic-religious identity and
meeting their interests and needs. Another source of legitimacy has been the
Western academy and theological markets, and the extent to which Black
Theology discourses have been incorporated into academic canons, curricu-
lum, syllabi, and trade publications. Finally, legitimacy for Black “public intel-
lectuals” also including religious scholars, is determined by academic, media,
and Black institutional recognition.
While in the past, Black public intellectuals saw their scholarship as contri-
buting to the struggle for racial and economic justice, this has increasingly
changed since legal institutional racism has been lifted. “Despite the increase in
numbers, prestige, and financial security,” notes Yale law researcher and former
Black Panther Party member Kathleen Neal Cleaver, “the new black intellec-
tual appears to exert far less influence on public life than the old.”30 She goes
on to say, “Where are our (present day) Adam Clayton Powells, Martin Luther
Kings, and Ida B. Wellses?” African-American studies scholar Manning Marable
concurs with Cleaver, adding:
Ironically, during the past quarter century, as legal barriers and restrictions on
racial advancement have in many respects come down, the overall character of
black studies scholarship has largely disengaged with the problems of the

29. Kelman, “Reflections on Social and Psychological Processes of Legitimization and

Delegitimization,” 62.
30. Kathleen Neal Cleaver, “And the Beat Goes On: Challenges Facing Black Intel-
lectuals,” in The New Black Renaissance: The Souls Anthology of African American Studies, ed.
Manning Marable, Khary Jones, Patricia G. Lespinasse, and Adina Popescu (Boulder:
Paradigm Publishers, 2005), 288.

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320 Black Theology: An International Journal

urban poor. Today’s discourse of liberal multiculturalism speaks this elite

language of symbolic representation, but rarely of resistance.31

While Marable is discussing Black studies scholarship more broadly, the

problems of the poor have also been largely disengaged within Black theologi-
cal scholarship as well. Disengagement is defined here as omission or silence, a
failure of scholarship to critically engage or discuss the kinds of fierce exploita-
tion and disempowerment that marginalized and poor people experience. The
experiences one can call to mind include issues such as the prison industrial
complex, the criminalization of women and youth of color, homelessness, or
the economic exploitation of transnational Black immigrants.32 Disengagement
also reflects Black intellectuals increasing distance from community solidarity
and commitment to social change. The allegation of U.S. Black Theology’s
disengagement with the plight of poor people is not new. Gayraud Wilmore has
argued that the institutionalization of Black Theology led to its retreat into a
largely academic dialogue among scholars in predominately White institutions
who were pursuing tenure.33
The disengagement of Black theological discourses from the problems of
poor people can be described as proceeding in three phases. Again, this critique
is based on my initial advancement that Black Liberation Theology has failed to
adequately reflect on the changing times from which the theologian speaks.
The initial disengagement happened near the beginning of Black Liberation
Theology and took the form of turning from the cries of the urban poor and
towards the institutionalization of Black Christian theological discourse and the
professionalization of Black religious scholars. The second phase of disengage-
ment is represented by the search for a usable past. This phase is characterized
by an increased use and expansion of cultural sources for Black Theology that
again excludes the living texts of oppressed people, which gives rise to over-
developed theological formulations juxtaposed with underdeveloped liberation
praxis. The final phase of disengagement with the poor is represented by eva-
sive writing strategies that orientate black radical religious imagination not
towards the present or the future, but repeatedly towards the past. An added
dimension of disengagement to be considered in future writings is the spatial

31. Manning Marable, “Living Black History: Resurrecting the African American
Intellectual Tradition,” in The New Black Renaissance: The Souls Anthology of African American
Studies, ed. Manning Marable, Khary Jones, Patricia G. Lespinasse, and Adina Popescu
(Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), 9.
32. Delroy Reid-Salmon, “A Sin of Black Theology: The Omission of the Caribbean
Diasporan Experience from Black Theological Discourse,” Black Theology: An International
Journal 6, no. 2 (2008): 154–73.
33. Gayraud S. Wilmore, “Black Theology: Review and Assessment,” Voices from the
Third World 5, no. 2 (1982): 9–10.

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 Clay A Black Theology of Liberation or Legitimation? 321

boundaries constructed in academic, religious, and community spaces that

exclude marginalized people and groups that experience secondary marginali-
zation.
The discursive shift within Black Liberation Theology from the search for a
usable past to evasive writing strategies, what I describe as the dual discursive
strategies of retrospective reflection and nostalgic return, reflects the trend to
rely on an idealized past of revolutionary resistance. This can be witnessed in
the Abolitionist, Anti-Lynching, Black Freedom and Black Power movements,
where such discourses are filled with historic heroic figures,34 rather than face
the current historical moment or reflect upon the current liberation struggles
of marginalized people. Evasive writing strategies inject and perform the lan-
guage of liberation, but avoid reimagining liberation, and ignore accompanying
transformations of Black religion, culture, and society altogether.
I assert that these discursive legitimation strategies help theologians to avoid
facing the post-1960s movements’ legitimation crisis of Black churches and
Black Protestantism, caused by reactive not proactive responses to rapid social
change, the challenges of prosperity gospel and megachurches, and institutional
de-legitimation due to unchecked ecclesiastical and clergy abuses of power.
Challenges to the legitimacy of Black Protestantism include local and national
demographic and population shifts in former predominately African-American
neighborhoods, and tensions in Black congregation–Black neighborhood
relationships, as many Black churches are now commuter churches that do not
identify with their immediate environment.35
Black theologians have become, for the most part, historiographers and
biographers engaged in the historical revision and interpretation of the Black
Christian experience in the U.S. There is no longer any urgency or outrage
over the conditions of poverty and economic exploitation. If Black Liberation
Theology continues on its current trajectory that primarily relies on essential-
ism and nativism as its discursive strategies (which is not completely without
merit) it will remain fossilized in a fixed space and time, consigned to become a
theology of legitimation. As bell hooks has noted, for example, essentialism is a
survival strategy that has powerful situational significance.36 The dual strategies
of retrospective reflection and nostalgic return, however, may be a narrow and
increasingly ineffective way to make U.S. Black Liberation Theology more

34. Victor Anderson has also brought attention to the preoccupation with “heroic
genius” within U.S. Black Liberation Theology in his book, Beyond Ontological Blackness (New
York: Continuum, 1999).
35. Omar McRoberts, Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighbor-
hood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
36. bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York:
Routledge, 1994), 83.

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322 Black Theology: An International Journal

relevant, in part because these strategies fail to re-contextualize Black radical

religious imagination and socio-political praxis for the present historical moment
within transnational informational capitalism and neo-liberal imperialism.
Evasive strategies have led to a “Rip Van Winkle” effect within U.S. Black
Liberation Theology that is manifested in its theoretical and methodological
arrested development.37 Evasive strategies and retrospective reflection neatly
conceal middle-class ambivalence towards poor people and maintain Black in-
group class hierarchy and bias. Living in the past helps us to “forget” that resis-
tance and protest must be created in new forms for new times. It is this lack of
adaptation and innovation, traded for a perpetual revisionist history reflecting
upon Black power and civil rights, that has, in my opinion, turned Black
Theology of liberation into a project of legitimation, to all intents and purposes.
Evasive strategies can enable and mask a type of Country Club Christian
identity where group belonging is reduced to “our kind of people” gatekeeping
that vocalizes liberation but practices regulation, policing, banking-styled edu-
cation, symbolic violence against already stigmatized people, and silence about
institutionalized injustices. Liberation rhetoric that is alienated from present
struggles, which continually glances back into an idealized past, has been
described by Princeton Professor of Religion and African American studies
chair Eddie Glaude as the routinization of black prophetic witness. Glaude further
explains:
Too often the prophetic energies of black churches are represented as
something inherent to the institution, and we need only point to past deeds
for evidence of this fact. Sentences like, “The black church has always stood
for...” “The black church was our rock...” “Without the black church, we
would have not...” In each instance, a backward glance defines the content of
the church’s stance in the present—justifying its continued relevance and
authorizing its voice. Its task, because it has become alienated from the
moment in which it lives, is to make us venerate and conform to it.38

One effort to re-contextualize liberation in a practical way comes from Black

British theologian Anthony Reddie. Reddie has been very outspoken on two
faults of Black theologians, who work “on behalf of” the voiceless: (1) they
have been unable to inhabit the “world” of “voiceless” individuals and commu-
nities and (2) they have “yet to develop a praxis to match the potency of their

37. Similarly, Latin American liberation theologian Ivan Petrella has examined other
evasive strategies within Black and Latin liberation theologies in his book, Beyond Liberation
Theology: A Polemic (London: SCM Press, 2008). The two “debilitating conditions” he most
associated with U.S. Black theologies are monochromatism and naivete.
38. Eddie Glaude, Jr,“The Black Church is Dead,” Huffington Post February 24, 2010.
Accessed February 25, 2010. Available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eddie-glaude-jr-
phd/the-black-church-is-dead_b_473815.html.

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 Clay A Black Theology of Liberation or Legitimation? 323

ideas and theological formulations.”39 As a response, he develops a practical/

participative approach to Black Theology in his books, Acting in Solidarity40 and
Dramatizing Theologies: A Participative Approach to Black God-Talk. His participa-
tive approach employs the medium of drama, self-critique, participant observa-
tion, ethnography, praxis (action/reflection), and critical pedagogy.
Clearly, Reddie has taken the commitment to participate in a theology from
the poor very seriously. Reddie’s primary goal is to work in solidarity with
those who are “voiceless”—marginalized and oppressed peoples.41 He develops
an interactive model of praxis where theologians are both actors and
participants within the reflective process by using the methodology of action
research within the church setting. Reddie asserts, “integral to the methodology
of action research is collaborative action, coupled with mutual reflection.”42 His
participatory approach has the dual goals of participating in collaborative efforts
to change the practice of being church as well as enabling marginalized and
oppressed people to become central players in doing theology through an
engagement of drama and dialogue. One reservation I have with Reddie’s
model is that I am not sure how it can assist in strengthening collaborative
partnerships between the academy, churches, and grassroots communities or
how his participatory approach is able to engage people and groups that experi-
ence secondary marginalization (are marginalized within marginal groups like
the Black British). Still, for its creativity, critical pedagogy, and efforts to be in
solidarity with poor, marginalized, and disenfranchised people, Reddie’s work
is to be commended.

Conclusion: Possibilities and Paradoxes for U.S. Black

Liberation Theology
In conclusion, I wonder what will become of Black Liberation Theology at the
height of its legitimation and canonization after forty years of producing
theological discourses? Will we, as liberation theologians, produce more books
on theology with less doing of liberation in a market economy of privatized

39. Anthony G. Reddie, Dramatizing Theologies: A Participative Approach to Black God-Talk

(London: Equinox, 2006), 103, 129.
40. Anthony G. Reddie, Acting in Solidarity: Reflections in Critical Christianity (London:
DLT, 2005).
41. Reddie, Dramatizing Theologies, 6–30.
42. Reddie, Dramatizing Theologies, 131.

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324 Black Theology: An International Journal

salvation?43 Scholars such as Eddie Glaude and Cornel West have already sug-
gested that the trajectory of Black Theology is to become a historical theology,
mainly because it does not address the pragmatism necessary for its relevancy in
the present. I think this is but one of many possible futures for Black Theology.
Fortunately, the future of liberation is still unwritten. I see the evasive strategies
of retrospective reflection and nostalgic return that are so popular in U.S. Black
Liberation Theology as symptomatic of a much larger issue: mainly that U.S.
Black Liberation Theology itself has its ladders on the wrong walls. Methodo-
logical, epistemological, praxiological, and theoretical shifts within U.S Black
Liberation Theology are required to produce more effective liberation advo-
cates, churches, and practitioners.
What is liberation? Whose liberation are we talking about and who gets to
decide what it is and gets to implement their visions of social transformation in
the first place? What are young activists dreaming about today? What grassroots
movements are stirring? Pragmatist philosopher Cornel West has previously
noted in Prophesy Deliverance that although the notion and process of liberation
are often mentioned by Black theologians, sketches of what that might look like
are hard to find.44 Are ideas and solutions related to social justice the same for
marginalized people in the present epoch, as they are for the academic, the
community activist, the city planner, or the pastor? How can these groups with
differing self-interests and competing paradigms of liberation45 work together for
social change?
In this essay, I have sought to interrogate the taken-for-granted concept of
liberation within Black Liberation Theology. I asserted that the signifier “libera-
tion” has become decontextualized (politically, economically, and culturally), in
the second and third iterations of U.S. Black Liberation Theology, causing the
discourse to become continually oriented towards the past, not present or
future imaginings of Black Christian radical imagination. Using postcolonial
theory, commonalities between postcolonialism, Black Power, and Black Lib-
eration Theology were discussed. The second section of the article went into
greater depth concerning the historical and social processes involved in the
slippage between liberation and legitimation, probing key moments and issues
of class difference that led to the disengagement of Black Liberation Theology
with the living poor in contemporary contexts.

43. Marcella Althaus-Reid, From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology (London: SCM
Press, 2004), 133–34.
44. Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity,
Anniversary Edition (Louisville: Westminister John Knox Press, 2002), 111.
45. Marion Iris Young, Justice and The Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1990), 158–63.

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 Clay A Black Theology of Liberation or Legitimation? 325

In the end, I do not stand beyond the critique and complexity that I write
about here. Dr Cone, I did not experience first-hand what liberation struggles
entailed and cost your generation during the 1960s. In 1969, while you were
consumed with anger at the arrogance and hatred of Whites towards Blacks in
the hallways of Adrian College (Michigan) after the assassination of Martin
Luther King, Jr, my fifteen-year old mother Rhonda, caught in the inner-city
riots that followed, was frantically running with me (her six-month old daugh-
ter) in her arms trying to return to a ghetto apartment as National Guard tanks
took over the streets. My generation has yet to fully come from behind the
shadows of the Black Freedom (Civil Rights) and Black Power movements to
redefine liberation, praxis, and coalition-building for social change across the
margins, for today. I can only express my gratitude for the passion with which
you wrote Black Theology and Black Power. I salute you for your dedication to
advancing theological scholarship, and re-imagining liberation in your historical
moment, and for the many scholars and practitioners that continue to imagine
and participate in the possibility, processes, and practices of liberation, through
resistance to oppression and neo-imperialism in the present historical moment.

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