By Ronald A. Allen
Within his treatise The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois described “double-consciousness†as the constant self-perception of the African and his community against the backdrop of white supremacy. DuBois argues that this gaze is damaging to the Black psyche, causing it to turn on itself as internalized Euro-American racism creates anxiety that eventually destroys Black confidence in African ways of knowing.
Black religious institutions and individual faith practices present themselves to be principally designed to combat double-consciousness. However, in the quad-centennial of African arrival to this new world, many of these Black Christian institutions maintained internalized white theological concepts.
They specifically do this by following Euro-American theology that institutes “submission†in the form of absolute obedience as the fundamental means for spiritual salvation. This was also the primary socialization tool to adapt enslaved Africans into a life of passionless exploitation.
After the Middle Passage, Africans in America and throughout the newly formed Diaspora re-formed the relationships required to constitute theologies reminiscent of our foremothers and forefathers. Faced with being forced to acquiesce to Euro-American self-hate, Africans resisted by encoding ancient theologies and practices into Christianity to buffer their survival chances and maintain connections to their true identity within Euro-American colonial chaos and violence. But the Black American liberation message transitioned away from African repatriation and towards American rights protections secured by the Federal Government throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
By the advent of the 20th century, contemporary religious movements within working class and impoverished Black communities advanced religious concepts through Christianity that contained significant African foundations. The shift in liberation ideology reflected a shift in Black religious psychology in describing as “Christian” what had been African generations prior. Pentecostalism, which I was born into, follows this pattern.
Founded in the first years of the 20th Century in Los Angeles, CA, Pentecostalism is one of our strongest ties back to Africa, but it also serves as one of the strongest embodiments of DuBois’ double-consciousness.
Black religious historians help us decode many of the Africanisms buried within Black Christian faith traditions. Milton Sernett and others provide us with the narratives that help us distinguish Black theological traditions from the exploitative models of Euro-American churches and missionaries. These investigations of Black Christianity throughout the Antebellum centuries detangle the duplicitous nature of God and abuse in religion today.
19th Century abolitionist Henry Bibb’s autobiographical account Conjuration and Witchcraft acquits Black people of the moral culpability white enslavers, clergymen and community leaders employed to indict the souls of Black folk throughout enslavement and Jim Crow. Bibb details the “hundreds” of Black families defrauded of adequate schools, character development and the opportunity to read and write by the white religious and political infrastructure of Baltimore, MD. He recalls “patrols” of white men actively thwarting the intentions of Miss Davis, “a poor white girl” attempting to establish a Sabbath School for Black residents. When they learned that she continued to teach despite their repression, Miss Davis’ efforts were immediately halted by the local white mob.
Bibb also recalls the ingenuity of white men developing acrimony and rivalry amid their Black imprisoned laborers. He confirms that whites manipulated confrontation and violence for Black people who associated with education and character uplift. Enslavers commonly instigated drunken fights and wrestling matches between Black people on Sundays or punished enslaved Black people with work on off-days for reading. With few other opportunities for levity or to release the aggression of their daily lives that enriched the top 5% of Antebellum America, enslaved Blacks directed their aggression at one another, or at their children. These self-destructive patterns continue to exist today.
Black people sought the religions of our ancestors for many forms of protection against these incursions. Bibb debunks the idea that Black enslaved people turned to conjure as a sinister weapon. Conjurers, also called “root doctors or hoodoo,†used natural materials such as roots, herbs, bones or graveyard dirt to cast spells to protect enslaved Blacks from attack, illness or enemy (Albert J. Raboteau’s Canaan Land, pp 51-53).
Conjuring could often retain a veil of mystery and of power. More than a medicine, conjuring blends the natural and spiritual worlds through conduits or charms that contain energies of healing, protection of harmful manipulation. Many enslaved Blacks viewed conjuring as either a compliment or alternative to their Christianity, but however they felt individually, in moments of sickness or misfortune, none others received the desperate pleas of our ancestors better than the African conjurer. Enslaved Black people conjured, according to Bibb, “for the purpose of defending themselves in some peaceful manner” from repeat floggings by whites for any number of offenses.
Enslaved Black people used a variety of materials, ways of knowing and spiritual belief practices to improve their lives and the lives of their loved ones. African witchcraft, conjuring and other Black folk beliefs are not evidence of Black sacrilege, but rather a testament to the brutality and constant threats experienced by enslaved Black people at the hands of white men, women and youth.
Although our ancestors looked to historical religious traditions to ward off violence to their bodies and spirits, double-consciousness encouraged subsequent Black generations to inculcate white physical, emotional and sexual abuse within Black religious doctrine. Black participation within a Euro-American Christian context evolved to rinse Euro-American denominations from their unprecedented sin of exploitation performed against enslaved Africans, and to paint African religious practices as demonic.
I am just discovering the full depths of duplicity perpetuated against me in the name of religion. Although strong African worship rituals were retained by my community, much of the intellectual and spiritual property that spawned them was shrouded in codes and ways of living that must now be deciphered again by us in order to regain the regenerative power of Black spirituality.
African cosmology provided both the moral foundation for life and the psychological image of self throughout the continent of Africa during the life of a young Igbo enslaved man named Olaudah Equiano, who wrote about his arrival in the New World in the 1750’s. Equiano defines the Bible as a book of African cosmology, revealing his astonishment to see “the laws and rules of my own country written almost exactly†in the Bible upon discovering the religion. He reveals foundational concepts shared within his native Igbo religion, stating that the first rule of his homeland is that “there is one Creator of all things, and that he lives in the sun and is girded round with a belt…â€
Enslaved life amongst the first African Americans mirrored many of the practices of Equiano’s people. The fabled “guided by the North Star†path to freedom can be read today as a shorthand for understanding that our African ancestors could read the map of the stars, more than a continent away from their Homeland that most would never see again. Agricultural and herbal manipulation, along with conjuring, manifesting and praying, were the tools by which the first Blacks in America invoked protection, identity and survival.
Our Black denominational traditions today lend continued credibility that strong Africanisms were embedded into the lore of Western religion by our African ancestors to hide the truth from European captors and enslavers. Such embedded euphemisms throughout many African American Christian denominations are best understood through the lens of African cosmology. Equiano’s description of his mother combining libations with traditional grief practices at her mother’s grave site resembles many of the mannerisms of my mother engaged within Pentecostal worship. Specifically, his description of his mother’s release at his grandmother’s gravesite mirror the tarry service or “altar call†throughout Black congregations.
The instinctual religious forms that I once saw in my childhood as “backwoods,†old-timey and irrelevant to this time are the actual connections to the African identity I most desired. Identification with the term African-American was so difficult in my youth because I saw virtually no connection to Africa in my own life. Discovery of my own Africanisms within many Black denominations in my adulthood is the greatest testament to the unity and identification our ancestors made with each other.
Double-consciousness remains the chief reason why the agency of our ancestors remains hidden. Growing up watching television, the only forms of resistance visible to me was the Rambo styled resistance. But what are we left with once everything is blown up? I am learning to see the true beauty in every African-American I encounter. I now have developed the language to appeal to any Black person for times of joy or times of sorrow. This seems to be the true purpose of being a faith leader. Â
The subtleties of my ancestors laying breadcrumbs of identity for me to follow never crossed my mind before. This unity and consciousness amid Black religious denominations is more than conjecture, it is our best hope for ending the legacy of generational trauma in our communities.
Our faith traditions are the strongest and most direct methods for appealing to our ancestors for identity, direction and purpose these next four hundred years. Denial of the Black experience remains the strongest psychological torment plaguing Euro-American nations with legacies of enslavement. The generational trauma experienced by innumerable Black people is difficult to see when Black religious and community leaders view ourselves through the gaze of white America.
But the more Black Americans embrace the traditions of ancient Africa, the more the abuse implanted by our colonial oppressors is replaced with the identity, compassion and the true Spirit of God present in our ancestors. Black churches and homes have experienced enough abuse and the remedy is never external. We must reach into ourselves and uproot every vestige of colonization disguised as religion, culture or education. We must reach back and reclaim our liberation. Sankofa.
Suggested Readings:
Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism, 1998
Milton Sernett, African American Religious History: A Documentary Witness, 2000
Samuel DeWitt Proctor, The Substance of Things Hoped For, 1999
Albert J. Raboteau, Canaan Land, 2001
Ronald A. Allen is an honors graduate of the Howard University Graduate School in 2006. In 2007, Allen began a career of non-profit education in Washington D.C., creating and instructing African-American history speech and debate workshops. In 2012, Allen’s Promoting Our Perspectives (POP) Debate was selected to be the District of Columbia Public Schools’ out-of-school time enrichment provider. In 2015, Allen returned to Atlanta and began labor and community organizing for multiple AFL-CIO labor unions. Allen liaised multiple social justice coordinated campaigns including Take Down the Confederate Flag (Canton, MS) and Fight for $15 (Jackson, MS) in his time as a labor organizer. Since 2016, Allen has worked as a political organizer on the Democratic Party’s coordinated campaigns to elect both Stacey Abrams for governor or Georgia and Hillary Clinton for President of the United States. Allen is now a full-time seminary student attending the Charles H. Mason Theological Seminary on the campus of Interdenominational Theological Center in downtown Atlanta. Allen is a native Atlantan, and continues the fight for the recognition and liberation of all peoples of African descent. Â
