Abstract
Black people’s conversion to, and practice of, Christianity in America is a complex narrative of the struggle for freedom, acceptance, and legitimacy that also unfortunately contributed to inculcating feelings of shame, even revulsion, for traditional Africa, or a black anti-African posture and sentiment. The fact that black people, as a group, converted to Christianity while simultaneously suffering the effects of the transatlantic slave trade, the institution of slavery, and/or debilitating racial discrimination in America, is not simply a historical coincidence. Undoubtedly, African Americans’ Christianization is inextricably related to their racialization, or the process of rendering inferior to whites all nonwhite people and placing the darkest-skinned people at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. The two processes, Christianization and racialization, are existentially connected, and as such, in the American religious experience, black people’s acceptance of racial categories, and the American racial hierarchy, has been informed and influenced by black Christian formation. They each contribute to and support the other in a reciprocal dynamic. This is symbolically affirmed in Phyllis Wheatley’s poetic assertion, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” that Christians, Negroes, Black as Cain may be refin’d and join the Angelic train.
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Notes
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© 2012 Jawanza Eric Clark
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Clark, J.E. (2012). “I Once Was Lost, But Now I’m Found”: The Origins of Black Christian Anti-African Sentiment. In: Indigenous Black Theology. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137002839_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137002839_2
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