What Is Black Tradition?

Abstract

Tradition is a central theological category, and it has also been a central category in black studies as scholars recover, for example, the “black radical tradition.” Yet tradition is particularly fraught in the context of black experience since a constitutive feature of black experience is the involuntary severing of tradition. Paradigmatically, the Middle Passage detached blacks from their families, culture, and language, leaving them orphaned in the New World. Colonialism and mass incarceration also have functioned to sever blacks from their past. In such a context, to speak of black tradition is necessarily theological, and this chapter tracks how theological ideas and images have repeatedly been so employed. The prophetic and the messianic, in particular, are theological means of conjuring impossible tradition. But this chapter also shows how the desire to imagine black tradition too often falls back on a patriarchal desire to create a right relationship with fathers and sons, a worry that is really about black secularism contaminating black theology.