If God Still Breathes, Why Can't I? by Angela N. Parker

Author:Angela N. Parker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sight! (After the Gaslighting)

In her phenomenal book I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness, Austin Channing Brown describes what having a Black marketing professor meant during her formative college years. She discovers she did not have to decode White middle-class experiences for herself during this particular class. As I read Brown’s work, I realized I had to decode while reading Bible studies written by White women. I also realized I was never good at decoding White middle-class ideals.

When I was in my first marriage, I often read books on purity by Elisabeth Elliot or books about the “proper way” to be a Christian wife so that you spend less money on electricity. One of the ways I was told to save money was to let my hair air-dry instead of “wasting” the fifty cents or so blow-drying my hair. This advice works well for a White woman, but for a Black woman who at this time was trying to keep a straight (White woman’s) hairstyle, blow-drying was my only option. However, thanks to the heyday of natural hairstyles for African American women, I no longer feel pressured to stick to straight hairstyles as a sign of my deference to Eurocentric beauty standards.

Consider another example. After beginning my first teaching job in Seattle, I was selected to attend a new faculty orientation with the Association of Theological Schools, the accrediting body for theological schools and seminaries in the United States and Canada. At one of our meetings I met another new faculty person, from another institution, who proceeded to tell me that I “took his job.” The microaggression behind such a statement is the idea that because I am an African American woman, the search committee pushed my application to the front in order to boast “diversity” in their hiring. The epistemic harm that occurs when folks nonchalantly comment on why African American women get jobs fills the recipient (me) with self-doubt.

Even though for a split second I was filled with self-doubt, I have to admit that I bounced back quickly simply out of necessity and self-preservation. When the gentleman told me I took his job, I replied, “Oh, really? Tell me what you teach.” My interlocutor began to regale me with courses that are strictly historical-critical or in the vein of “White male biblical scholar.” I proceeded to ask him if he taught Womanist or feminist interpretations of the Bible, to which he responded in the negative. I also asked if, perhaps, he integrated critical social theories into his biblical interpretations. Again, he answered negatively. At that juncture I responded that I teach and engage those modalities, and therefore I did not take his job, since my institution needed those classes, that training, for its students.

For many White Christians who espouse White supremacist authoritarian stances in their biblical interpretations, personal identity while reading, they say, should mean nothing.9 A statement I heard often in various contexts was “Angela, we don’t need you to be our Black New Testament professor, we just need you just to be our New Testament professor.

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