A Dark Body of Goodness Created in the Image of God: Navigating Sexuality, Race, and Gender, Alone and Together

Abstract

Each year that I prepare to teach my course “Experiences of the Body and Pastoral Ministry,” I wrestle with how to contextualize the way we speak about and understand the complexities of black women’s experiences of embodiment. Some years ago, I reported the following case vignette to them: An African American mother is in family court where it will be determined whether she regains full and unsupervised custody of her four-year-old daughter. The mother is twenty-seven and a graduate student who for eight months of her life used drugs extensively. In an attempt to rescue her daughter from the jaws of a hellish drug addicted life, mother reports her drug use to the department of Children and Family Services. The court places the three-year-old in the care of the grandmother. It is a powerful wake-up call and the young mother enters substance treatment and parenting classes. Everyone is pleased, the grandmother, the social workers, and the court-appointed lawyer for the minor. During the court proceeding, the judge, a middle-aged white male, begins to talk to the little girl about living with her mother again. The little girl becomes excited, and laughing she begins to dance a dance called the butterfly. She laughs and claps her hands. Clearly she is excited—even overexcited.

This paper includes material from my ethnographic research project “African American Women’s Experience of Religion and Spirituality,” which was made possible by a grant from the Randall Mason Research Endowment, Center for Religion and Psychotherapy of Chicago.