By Aaron Stauffer

Naming our current economic and racial order in terms of “racial capitalism” is to align our words with our reality. Social movements seem to have outrun our dominant moral, political, economic, and even religious imaginations that purport to inspire visions of freedom. To speak of “racial capitalism” here is to honor part of the original insight of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. I say “part” because his argument includes much more than what this forums addresses. To assert racial capitalism as a hermeneutic is to say that race and class are crucial tools in building liberation movements. Only by thinking with an intersectional lens do we begin honor the multidimensional, overlapping, and interlocking nature of the constructed yet very real and embodied realities of race and class.

To think in terms of racial capitalism is also to think about the role of social movements and their deployment of art, poetry, song, dance, and the work of organizing itself as crucial activating forces that can “conjure” a new world. This is because neoliberal capitalism is much more than an economic system: its survival depends upon racial and cultural formations that starve our imaginations. The best and most powerful social movements in this country’s history know the power that culture and history of working people play in inspiring people-led movements for liberation.

Vincent Lloyd has written some about this—and that’s why I wanted to interview him for this series. He has dropped a sentence or two in recent articles, but the idea never takes center stage, so far as I can tell. He does this in a recent piece, Human Dignity is Black Dignity:

As we struggle, therefore, we conjure (in song, poetry, and images, not prose) a world wholly other than the present, where the humanity of each is recognized as God recognizes our humanity today.

Or, consider a few lines from another recent piece titled, “The End of the World: Reflections from Black Activism,”

The world is never fully captured by domination. There is always a remainder. Because domination has infected our language and our perception, we cannot point to that remainder and name it. But in song, poetry, dance, protest, and prayer we can conjure it now, and we can project it into the future, visioning a world without domination, after the world’s end. New life awaits after the end of the world.

Religion and religious practices are worked out—produced—in organizing spaces. Organizing is hard work, and the labor of mobilizing, educating, agitating, and organizing people can generate religious sensibilities. The broad question of how social and cultural movements “conjure” a new world is inherently a religious question.

For example, consider the role of art in the Coalition of Immokalee workers annual Year of the Worker Party. When I attended this action several years ago, I encountered a musical stage positioned by the Florida coastline, where the CIW colors of bright yellow and red waved through the blue sky in long banners, shouting “Freedom!” “Dignity!” “Respect!” Painted cardboard puppets caricatured the CIW target companies of Wendy’s and Publix. Images of tomatoes and farm workers were carried throughout the more than 1,500 person crowd as they pressed near the stage led by a range of musical artists. There was more than a sense of collective effervescence. Here art, song, and dance were used to concretize and conjure—in however general or oblique a manner—their ideals.

Or, consider the simple example of the relational meeting. The bread-and-butter of organizing, the relational meeting is a chance for organizers and leaders to probe into the sacred values that ground one’s commitment to a movement. People join organizing movements to fight for and protect those things they hold to be sacred. We are moved to action when acts of horrendous violence occur that violate, destroy, or threaten those things or people we hold most dear. In the relational meeting organizers and leaders witness and honor people’s stories that testify to the things and people we hold sacred.

Such stories are not always spectacular. Horrendous violence often works surreptitiously and slowly. Workers are denied human dignity and health care protection. Lawmakers call special sessions to go after civil liberties and civil rights of freedom of speech or protest. We can sometimes only capture the full depth of the violence and horror through story and narrative. This is why the space of the relational meeting can turn deeply religious by a simple question: why do you care about this fight? What are you willing to do about it? This is the space where what matters most is narrated and figured in our lives—it is where we learn to be better humans and where we learn what matters most to us, which is often not money or things, but values and persons we hold sacred. This is the stuff of religion.

But such practices are always caught in the eschatological “not yet.” The working of these religious and political practices is not to foreclose our definitions of justice, or even to too neatly define the Kingdom of God come to earth. The creation and use of art generates our religious imaginations. The formation of relational bonds through the stories of what we hold sacred is holy work. Conjuring a new world is very practical and mundane work, it seems to me, mixed up with paint and fabric, coffee and conversation.

To admit this is only to start to explore how religious practices and protest practices are lived out in our social movements amidst such horrendous formations as racial capitalism.

Altagracia Pérez-Bullard on the Role of the Church in fighting for working people

Francisco Garcia Jr., Graduate Student Fellow, talks with the Rev. Canon Altagracia Pérez-Bullard, Ph.D., the Director of Contextual Ministry and Assistant Professor of Practical Theology at Virginia Theological Seminary. Recorded on July 20, 2020.

Angela Cowser on Anti-Black Animus, Reparations, and Organizing as a continual Struggle for Freedom

Dr. Joerg Rieger interviews Dr. Angela Cowser, Associate Dean of Black Church Studies and Doctor of Ministry programs at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Recorded on July 1, 2020.