Still I Rise: Baptism, Liberation, and White Supremacy

Abstract

Abstract There is no life without water. Covering three-fourths of the earth, water is necessary for sustaining life and represents the purification of all creation. Water motifs, likewise, figure prominently throughout the biblical narrative in which God cataclysmically intervenes through water into history and the human affairs of marginalized and oppressed peoples. God utilizes and reveals the transformative power of water as a symbol of freedom, liberation, emancipation, renewal, refreshing, righteousness, new birth, and new life. This symbolism is experienced through water baptism, the “sacrament of initiation” for all Christians. However, within the black Christian Church tradition, “the ritual of baptism is a crucial means of nurturing an embodied awareness of a self-identity that God values and affirms.” While white supremacists have sought to eradicate black bodies’ self-identity in God by legally mutating the meaning and efficacy of baptism, through their “dogged strength,” the black Christian Church tradition must reclaim the waters of liberation as a fundamental basis for locating their story, identity, and solidarity in God’s story.