Abstract
In 2008, the American financial system teetered precariously on the brink of a total collapse. This financial crisis signified the monumental failure of a hegemonic configuration in economic, political, and sociocultural relations that coalesced in the second half of the twentieth century. The time period between the late 1960s and mid-1980s witnessed a radical shift characterized by the emergence of a new social formation, delineated in this study as the neoliberal age. Unbeknownst to many, this pernicious neoliberal ideology, which has now been exported globally, was given its initial “test drive” domestically on the backs of countless black Americans. While attention has been given to the traumatic impact of chattel slavery and the Jim Crow era on African Americans,1 insufficient consideration has been given to the traumas black Americans incurred subsequent to the emergence of the neoliberal age in the aftermath of the modern Civil Rights and Black Power movements.2 This chapter introduces the core components of this study. American neoliberalism is identified as an essential interpretive lens for practitioners of pastoral theology, counseling, and care.
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Notes
See Ron Eyerman, “Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity , ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004);
Joy Leary, Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome (Milwaukie, OR: Uptone Press, 2005);
Omar Reid, Sekou Mims, and Larry Higginbottom, Post Traumatic Slavery Disorder (Charlotte, NC: Conquering Books, 2005);
Na’im Akbar, Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery (Tallahassee, FL: Mind Productions, 1996).
Two important exceptions include Manning Marable’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy and Society , updated edn (London: Pluto Press, 2000); Archie Smith, Jr.’s The Relational Self: Ethics and Therapy from a Black Church Perspective (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1982). Though both texts predate the academic codification of the term “neoliberalism,” both are concerned with the impact of an exploitative capitalist system on African American functioning. Like Marable, I argue that neoliberalism (what Marable characterizes as “Reaganism”) created an environment in which US corporations “culturally manipulated” and then abandoned much of Black America. This study, however, attempts to attend to some of the “conceptual flaws” Marable identified in his own text. He notes, “The most significant conceptual flaw in the work is its central organizational premise—that the totality of African American history has been polarized and structured around the class division between the Black ‘haves’ and the Black ‘have nots.’ The real contours of Black American social history were always much more complicated, more textured, than this analysis suggests… The real problem, however, isn’t the contradictory and accommodationist behavior of the Black middle class, but the exploitative policies and practices of the capitalist ruling class” (xxxi). I agree with Marable’s observations and attempt to put forth a textured analysis that foregrounds the exploitative neoliberal policies and practices of the capitalist ruling class and their implications for African American soul care. Archie Smith Jr.’s The Relational Self likewise posits a multi-system’s approach to African American pastoral care that foregrounds the problematic impact of capitalism. Smith rightfully notes that conservative shifts in politics and religion occurring in the US during the 1970s “helped to strengthen an uncritical commitment to the structural arrangements and social relations that underlie an expanding and exploitative economic system, namely profit-centered capitalism” (167). This project extends the analyses posited by Smith during the dawning of the neoliberal age.
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford, 2005), 3.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), 20.
David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), viii.
Joe Soss, Richard C. Fording and Sanford F. Schram, Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 1.
Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Race Critical Theories , edited by Essed, Philomena and Goldberg, David T. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 38–68.
Cornel West, “Race and Social Theory,” in The Cornel West Reader , ed. Cornel West (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 256–257.
Suki Desai, “From Pathology to Postmodernism: A Debate on ‘Race’ and Mental Health,” Journal of Social Work Practice 17, no. 1 (2003): 97–98.
Samuel A. Cartwright, “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” in Health, Disease, and Illness: Concepts in Medicine, Arthur L. Caplan, James J. McCartney, and Dominic A. Sisti, eds. (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004), 28–39.
Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984 , ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 181.
Kathleen Nader, Nancy Dubrow, and B. Hudnall Stamm, eds. Honoring Differences: Cultural Issues in the Treatment of Trauma and Loss (Philadelphia, PA: Brunner/Mazel, 1999), xviii.
See Celia Brickman’s discussion in Aboriginal Populations in the Mind: Race and Primitivity in Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 158.
See Christie Cozad Neuger, “Power and Difference in Pastoral Theology,” in Pastoral Care and Counseling: Redefining the Paradigms , ed. Nancy J. Ramsey (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2004), 65–85.
Christie Cozad Neuger, Counseling Women: A Narrative, Pastoral Approach (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2001), 103.
While an “integrative approach” is new to the practice of pastoral care, it was introduced to the field of family therapy by William C. Nichols. See Treating People in Families: An Integrative Framework (New York: Guilford Press, 1996).
William C. Nichols, “Integrative Family Therapy,” in Family Counseling and Therapy , ed. Arthur M. Horne (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2000), 540.
Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, “Feminist Theory in Pastoral Theology,” in Feminist &; Womanist Pastoral Theology , ed. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore and Brita L. Gill-Austern (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1999), 86.
Homer U. Ashby, Our Home Is Over Jordon: A Black Pastoral Theology (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2003), 51.
Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 26.
Cornel West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” in The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 128.
Cornel West, Prophetic Fragments: Illuminations of the Crisis in American Religion and Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1988), 74–75.
Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 390.
Marimba Ani, Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora (New York: Nkonimfo Publications, 1980), 12; Yurugu: An Afrikan-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior (Washington, DC: Nkonimfo Publications, 1994), xxi.
Monica Dennis, ed. Maafa Commemoration 10th Anniversary Newspaper (Brooklyn, NY: St. Paul Community Baptist Church, 2004), 4.
Here, I differ with two important interlocutors: Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall. Fanon discounts the ability of indigenous religious forms to generate emancipatory practices. He does not detect the revolutionary potency of the counter-narratives embedded in indigenous traditions and customs. For Fanon, the dynamism inherent in African religious practices, what he terms the “phantasmic plane,” is not capable of facilitating revolutionary anti-imperial actions. Hall also dismisses religion as a space capable of organizing an alternative politics, or an alternative cultural or economic life. Harnessed to a secularist ideal, he admits, “we forgot about” religion. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth , trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 55–58;
Colin MacCabe, “An Interview with Stuart Hall, December 2007,” Critical Quarterly 50, nos. 1–2 (2008): 38.
Marimba Ani, Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora (New York: Nkonimfo Publications, 1980), 52.
Ithiel C. Clemmons, Bishop C.H. Mason and the Roots of the Church of God in Christ (Bakersfield, CA: Pneuma Life Publishing, 1996), 4.
C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 15.
Ogbu U. Kalu, “Preserving a Worldview: Pentecostalism in the African Maps of the Universe,” Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 24, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 130.
Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., “Bishop C.H. Mason and the Church of God in Christ during World War I: The Perils of Conscientious Objection,” Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South , 26 (Winter 1987): 279.
Robert Beckford, Dread and Pentecostal (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2000), 115.
Ennis B. Edmonds, Rastafarianism: From Outcasts to Culture Bearers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 50.
See Daniel Boyarin’s discussion of “cultural poetics” in Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 17.
Richard Robert Osmer builds upon the discussion of “practices” initiated largely by Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, and others. Osmer appropriates the concept of religious practices and reframes it in light of Christian theology. See The Teaching Ministry of Congregations (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 95. Also see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981);
Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).
Richard R. Osmer, The Teaching Ministry of Congregations (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 63.
African American scholars have heretofore not drawn, in any exten- sive manner, from postcolonial perspectives. This may be related to the fact that postcolonialism has tended to overemphasize theoretical concepts that do not attend sufficiently to the traumatic violence of the African American experience. One exception is Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), which is arguably the most significant attempt to date to correlate postcolonialism and African American studies. Postcolonialism has otherwise marginalized the horrific lived reality of the dominated and muted the relevance of a revolutionary praxis of resistance. African American scholars know all too well that the “subaltern” does speak. bell hooks’ critique of postmodernism might therefore be directed at post-colonialism as well. She observes, the discourse “still directs its critical voice primarily to a specialized audience that shares a common language rooted in the very master narratives it claims to challenge.”
See bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness,” in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics , ed. Gloria Watkins (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990), 25.
Chris Rojek, Stuart Hall (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 5.
See Robert Schreiter, Constructing Local Theologies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1985), 12–16.
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© 2016 Cedric C. Johnson
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Johnson, C.C. (2016). Bearing Witness. In: Race, Religion, and Resilience in the Neoliberal Age. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137526144_1
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