Teaching and Learning > DISCOURSE
Interview with Anthony Reddie
Author: Natasha Pyne
Journal Title: Discourse
ISSN: 2040-3674
ISSN-L:
Volume: 8
Number: 2
Start page: 29
End page: 47
Return to vol. 8 no. 2 index page
Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed by Discourse. Could we start off with you telling us a bit more about your background, and your career to date?
I was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, in a predominantly White working class area, to parents of Jamaican background. My parents worked in textiles, they'd been invited to come from the Caribbean to do that, and we went to a Methodist church. As I was growing up, the smaller church we attended closed, and then the church I remember most clearly was the Eastbrook Hall Methodist Mission. It was very White, very middle class, very evangelical, and it was a good experience in some respects, but looking back, perhaps not as good as I had thought of it at the time.
In terms of my influences, it was a mix of Caribbean, Jamaican culture in the home, older Labour socialist politics—my father was a very active trade unionist—and then my Methodist church. I went to secondary school, and did reasonably well, mainly because I was quite a compliant child; I never challenged anything and just put my head down and did my work. I then went to the University of Birmingham to read history, in the mid eighties, and I've been in Birmingham ever since.
The development into being an academic was entirely by accident and not what I had planned at all—apart from anything else, I finished my first degree having been a very poor undergraduate student. I spent more time in the pub than I did in the library, truth be told. I really had no desire to go back and do any further study. Through a circuitous route I found myself involved in community activism. I was a community worker for a number of years, for a variety of organisations, but latterly for the Methodist church in Handsworth, predominantly an African Caribbean and Asian area, and the location of two major rebellions—I wouldn't call them riots. In that guise, as a community worker, I went to Queens College to do some extra training.
Although I'd done history, and mainly religious history, we'd not really talked about Black people, and certainly again when I got into youth and community work, there was very little about Black or Asian people, or if there was it was more from a secular communitarian perspective, rather than a religious perspective. I came to Queens to do a course in Black Religious Studies and met Robert Beckford, who had just been appointed the first tutor in Black theology, here at Queens. He taught an evening class, which I took, and I absolutely fell in love with it, it was the best thing I'd ever done. I suddenly came across books of people I'd never heard of, and I wondered why I'd never done anything like this before. I mean, I remember doing a whole term on St Augustine at university, as an undergraduate, in church history. I managed to do a 12 week course, involving reading lots of books, and no-one ever mentioned that St. Augustine was actually Black! He was actually African, and this somehow never came up in Church History, it was never looked at from a Black perspective. I'd never heard that he was African and so was Teutullian and so were many of the other Church fathers, and that discovery changed my perspective altogether.
So from that, I abandoned whatever thoughts I'd had of what I was going to do and decided to do a doctorate. I decided to do it in education and theology, rather than solely theology, because it seemed to me that part of the concern I had, particularly looking at Black theology, was why no-one had ever heard of it. In one sense it's a comparatively new discipline, from the late 60s onwards, but in another sense it's not actually that young at all, and I was concerned about the impact that its being ignored was having on ordinary, poor Black people, my Black people, because mainstream theology was not reflecting their struggles. I figured that just doing straight theology was not going to help—I wanted to do something that was also about how you communicate theology, and how you engage with the people that should be at the centre of the discourse. So I did my doctorate at the University of Birmingham, and at the completion of that I got a research fellowship, largely funded by the Methodist Church here, [Queens Theological Foundation] in Black theological studies. That was 1999, and I've been here ever since.
Thanks. I'm sure this is a question that you often get asked, but for the sake of our readers, what is Black theology?
As a short answer, Black theology is a theology that grows out of the experiences of Black people, and by Black people I mean predominantly people of African descent, in the African diaspora, as they reflect on their experiences of suffering, marginalisation, oppression and hardship, and try to answer the question, 'who is God and where is God in the midst of this?'. Without wanting to be too stereotypical, because there are quite a lot of heterodox people as well, Black theologians tend to be people of Protestant Christian faith. I wouldn't want to make too much of that, but I would say that they are for the most part. Although not exclusively the case, most Black theologians are Christian. Black theology seeks to ask who God is for us in the light of our experiences, using a whole number of different sources and tools in order to locate where God is, and what God is doing, in the light of Black suffering and struggle. The Bible, the scriptures, are one source, Black culture is another, as is Black history, which of course really, in the context of the British empire, is all our histories, not just Black history, but in this context history through the lens of those who have often been marginalised and silenced. For example, when I did my first degree, we had a class looking at Africa. We did look at one African writer, when we were talking about Africa, but it was entirely from a European perspective on Africa, as if the people who lived there themselves had nothing to say about their own existence. So Black theology is a re-reading of history, using critiques such as critical race studies, and some use of Marxist analysis in terms of how systems operate. In effect, it's a way of doing theology that involves a certain consciousness of oneself in terms of history, and it's certainly a very ideological way of actually trying to reinterpret the meaning of God. From a Christian perspective certainly it regards the revelation of Jesus Christ, for the purpose of liberation and transformation of individuals and communities as key.
I think the other important thing to say, especially in a British context, is that the term 'Black' doesn't just mean people of African descent—it also means all people who come from minority ethnic groupings, and actually have more in common than in what separates them in terms of their relationship to colonialism, and to British empire. Margaret Thatcher used the term many years ago, 'the enemy within', and there's a sense in which all minorities are the enemies within, so that's one of the things about Black theology that tends to make it different from normative evangelical theologies. For example, in the whole question of the war on terrorism and the way in which there's a particular marginalisation and denigration of Islam and Muslims, I think a Black theology would also want to identify with their plight and say that as a matter of fact, although notionally there's a difference of faith and belief, the reality is how one gets treated within this postcolonial context, and this treatment really makes no differentiation between faith adherence whatsoever. In actual fact, Black people, or Caribbean people if one wants to use those terms, have more in common with marginalised Muslims than they do with White middle class people who actually share the same faith, because our faith has never given us any concessions within the British empire at any point in the past. That's part of my critique of the way in which some Black evangelicals would say, 'we have to defend Christianity'—I would ask, whose Christianity are we defending? My final comment would be a quote by a good friend Randall Bailey, an African American Hebrew scholar, who remarked, 'When I meet Black Christians who say they are conservatives, my question is, 'What are you conserving?'
A lot to think about. We have touched on the differences between Black theology in Britain and Black British theology done by Black people – would you like to expand on this? And what do you think about the association of Black theology, or theologies, with the type of liberation theologies arising out of countries such as South Africa?
The most significant difference, I think, between Black theology (in Britain) and Black British theology (done by Black people) goes back to some of the other comments I made around the sense of the understanding of religion as always having an ideological perspective to it. One of the cons, and I use that word specifically in terms of being conned, is this notion that somehow imperial mission Christianity is perceived as being without ideology—that somehow it's the reflection of the pure word of God. Clearly it is in fact ideological, as to what gets regarded as truth, and then whose truth legitimates particular forms of action, and different activities. Black theology is part of the wider branch of theologies of liberation, and liberation theologies are also clearly ideological in the sense in which they put forward as their starting point the real material issues in history, for instance 'the poor' and 'the marginalised'. So there are parallels between Black theology and other liberation theologies in terms of gender, in terms of class, in terms of sexuality, and disability as well. When one uses one's material experiences as a point of departure, and then asks, in light of our real historical struggles and existence, what then can we say about God, we immediately find ourselves in a position that takes us away from the dominant evangelical hinterland of post-Reformation mission theology. The difference therefore before between that and Black British theology is that Black British theology does not necessarily have an ideological perspective. It can do, and in a sense any theology that proposes some sense of Black agency and Black humanity is in itself doing something subversive, but that's often at a much more kind of implicit level. I'm not dismissing Black British theology as being without any agency or being without any importance, it's just that I think that part of my critique would be that most Black British theologians would still want to re-read Black experience within the frameworks that mission theology has already given us. Because of this, part of the problem therefore is the fact that when we do talk about Black agency and Black experience, some experiences become more important than others because of the existing framework of the Christianity that Black British Christian theology still wants to work with, which Black theology actually rejects.
I'll give you some examples. I've yet to meet any Black British person of Caribbean roots who would countenance the idea that slavery was a good thing, even though the scriptures, from a non-humanist perspective, will never explicitly tell you that slavery is wrong. So even Black contemporary evangelicals can find ways to try to read round the text where it seems to condone slavery, and say, well of course you have to understand it's about politics, context and so on. So therefore at that point all of us can be implicitly subversive in terms of trying to read against and challenge the text. However, when you then take gender equality as another example, such as where in parallel passages in Ephesians Paul talks about slaves being obedient to their masters, and how they are obedient then to God, and then talks about how wives should be submissive to their husbands, and women to men, it's interesting that even though conservative Black Christians can create a kind of critical analysis by reading against the text regarding slavery, and say, well you have to take Paul in his context, you can't take him literally, when it comes to gender equality, suddenly we have to take Paul literally, because Paul says women should be submissive to men, and male leadership is the only acceptable form of leadership in the Bible. For me, and I guess this is even more contentious, when we look at the similar issues around sexuality, again, if you're a gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender person, the hermeneutics of reading the text in order to affirm your own selfhood would be exactly the same that enslaved Africans used, and yet, again, there is a sense in which Black British theology at its more conservative end would still want to make that qualitative difference between the two perspectives. The point is, if you're actually working from the point of view of a theology of liberation, you'd say that all humanity is created in God's image, irrespective of the frameworks that imperial Christianity has given us which make qualitative differences between some people being of God and some people being not of God at all. So therefore when one talks about liberation, it's about liberation of all people, and so all people should be free. It means that we have to condemn and challenge and critique those scriptures that seek to speak against that sense of agency that individual people or groups of people should have. So I think essentially the difference between the two comes down to theological method—I think Black theology as an example of a theology of liberation would take human experience as being important, and we would say that God resides not only within scriptures, which are themselves largely only cultural, social and political constructions of the people of power trying to talk about God. Scriptures only talk about God, rather than being divine nuggets that fell down from the heavens, that God wrote. But that sense in which God resides in equal measure within human experience, as well as within codified authorised forms of scriptures, is an essential difference between Black theology and Black British theology.
If we could move on to your current work in relation to teaching, having read a couple of your books and heard you speak, it's evident that you use diverse teaching tools and resources, ranging from using autobiography, to historical narrative, to drama and music. Could you say a bit about why you use these resources, and the students' reaction to them?
I use those for two reasons. One, just from a purely selfish perspective, is that I enjoy using them. My ambition was never to be a theological scholar—my interest was very much in creative writing, and one of the things I would have done had history been different would have been to write stories and plays, and there's a sense in which that's never left me. Part of what I try to do is to incorporate my previous desires and ambitions into my present work, so at one level it's nothing more than very self-indulgent—I like it so let's see if other people will go with it as well. But there's a slightly more strategic side to it, seriously—I think it's about understanding that we have a variety of ways of learning. Part of the problem with traditional theology is that it is assumed that it is the rational mind only that will help us to make sense of who God is and where God is, and of course that has never been true. If we look at the role of the Church, for example, the Church has been a major sponsor of art, music and drama, because we have to use the whole of our senses in order to engage with the divine, to understand the work of the spirit, to understand spirituality in our embodied sense, and to get the sense of what it is to be a human being. I try to bring that into my teaching, my work, my theology, because I recognise that we all have different ways of tapping into our understanding of ourselves. It is about our engagement with the other, and our engagement with the ultimate reality of the Creator. So part of it is trying to tap into different ways of knowing.
I think all good theology requires some appreciation of the imagination; that in the final analysis we need metaphor and analogies to help us to talk about God. As important as it is to engage in critical, rational thought, the critical rational thought that depends on words can only get us so far, and therefore I think one also needs other modes of being able to engage with the self and questions of ultimate significance. For me there's a sense in which the use of drama, role play, music, anecdotes and stories are just different ways of people trying to grasp what it is that you're trying to communicate.
In terms of how that works with students, I've found from my experience that it works really well; I've found that people really appreciate it, for a number of reasons. Partly, I think it helps us to get past that kind of dense deductive reasoning, which certainly has its place, but in actual fact only really suits some kinds of students. Some students can sit in a classroom and have a long abstract intellectual conversation about being and knowing and it seems to me that although there's merit in that, if we can then create a narrative or create a story or an exercise that can maybe embody some of the central ideas of the deep philosophical questions about being and knowing, but in a way that helps people who are perhaps more analogous in their thinking, that's helpful. I think that a lot of us, certainly myself, grew up within a very oral culture, with lots of storytelling, whereby if you want to communicate something you find a story or an analogy to present it, and whilst that doesn't work for everyone, I've found it works for quite a lot of people.
Particularly speaking as a Black liberation theologian, I find it works very much for people who come from poorer and more marginalised backgrounds. I think that one of the things that secondary and tertiary education does for you is that it socialises you into a particular way of engaging with knowledge. Now I've learnt to do that, clearly by definition—I'm on the staff of an academic institution—but I think that this issue is one of the critical failings of Black and liberation theologies— the lack of engagement with other forms of media in order to engage with the very marginalised subjects themselves, who don't have the benefit of going to tertiary education and therefore being trained in the way in which academics have been trained. Because of this, what tends to happen at worst is that we write for each other, because we all know the codes and the keys to engage with it, and the people for whom we are supposedly working are the ones that remain totally oblivious to our stuff because they look at it and think, that just passes me by.
One of the things that impressed me a lot in my initial work was the way that some of the first generation of liberation theologians in South America, Latin America, used poetry. Alongside very acute and very critical philosophical analysis around the theology of liberation and the norms and sources and critical methods, was the sense in which liturgy, storytelling, and poetry were also other ways in which you could engage with ordinary people, perhaps in a much more successful fashion. So I kind of use that, not just because it's my own predilection, but it's also a way of being able to get beyond the kind of barriers of intellectualism that many of us have been schooled to take part in. I think for the most part, it has been successful, but sometimes perhaps in more informal settings than formal settings, although I tend not to discriminate—if I'm doing a lecture with post-graduate students or I'm doing a workshop in Black communities, I tend to use the same methods to teach in both, I don't differentiate really.
What are the key challenges that one confronts when teaching Black theology in British universities?
There are lots of challenges. The first one is just about trying to establish the relevance of your discipline. One still meets, even in 2009, the attitude 'there's no such thing as Black theology, surely theology's just theology'. There's a well known academic, I won't say his name, who said, 'use of the term Black theology implies that there's a White theology, but there isn't any White theology', to which my response was, when I'd counted to 10, 'White theology is everything that we've been taught as the norm, it just never names itself as such'. So partly it's a basic epistemological problem, really, trying to defend the right to talk about something that we can legitimately call Black theology. That's the first problem, just to establish its basis as a discipline, given that for the most part, British universities completely ignore it. You can count on one hand the number of places that even acknowledge its existence, let alone try to teach it.
Then you have a second problem, which is, when you're asked to teach it, it's usually as a very late addendum to a traditional normative curriculum, which of course is anything but objective and neutral. It's not uncommon, and certainly I've come across this in the past, that I've been asked to come and teach a session on Black churches, in Church History, in an hour and 15 minutes. When I ask how long they have been doing Church History, I'm told there's a whole curriculum of Church History that their scholars and academics have been teaching, so of course they've ignored the presence of Black people, and then suddenly introduced it as a last minute thing. The most cynical ones will make it optional, and put it right at the end of the course. I remember teaching in one place where I turned up to do something on Black church history, and out of a class of 26 only 5 turned up. The tutor had actually given them a nod and a wink to say well, you don't really have to turn up next week, if you don't want to, and quite clearly if you put it right at the end of the course, and then you say if you've got outstanding essays or work to do you might want to get on with that, but if not you might want to come and hear Dr Reddie, you make it optional. How many people do you think would then turn up to hear you speak, on Black Church history, in the context of an hour? So secondly I think it's the way in which it's positioned as being an adjunct of the normative important stuff, and if it's important, it's important maybe only to other Black folk. The perception is that it doesn't have anything to say to theology per se, it's not generic in the way in which White British scholars and their work is automatically universal and generic, it's just a contextual theology—but of course all theology's contextual. So part of the difficulty, therefore, is, do you then not take those opportunities to teach that seem tokenistic, in which case, we don't get anything at all, or do you agree to do it on the basis that something's better than nothing, but then again, are you then guilty of colluding with that kind of tokenism? That's a really hard question.
It's only Queens, where I teach, here, and maybe a couple of other places, that provide a whole module in Black theology. I've found the importance of having a whole module is that it allows you to recognise the fact that Black theology is also heterodox. If you read James Cone or you read Robert Beckford or you read myself or J. Deotis- Roberts or Jacqueline Grant or Delores Williams, etc., you'll find many common themes within their work. Clearly, all theological movements have parameters that help define what particular form of theological insight is consistent with the overall tradition, but there's a certain point where, within those very broad parameters, there are significant differences. The point of view of Delores Williams, a Baptist, is not the same as Robert Beckford, who's a Pentecostal, which is not the same as myself who is Methodist and trained as a Christian educator, therefore interested in pedagogy and different forms of teaching methods within Black theology. The point is, if you then invite one guest lecturer to come in and do one session, you end up collapsing what is a broad movement into something that becomes very stereotypical. I'll give an example: all Black theology is not Christian. Anthony Pinn is a well known Black theologian who is a humanist, so Pinn would say that you should not even presume the presence of a theistic other as a way of talking about Black theology. And of course Pinn's right. The fact that my work falls within a Christian context is largely circumscribed by the fact that I work within a confessional Christian theological college and I guess as a practical theologian I'm working with the assumed belief structures of people where they are, rather than where perhaps I might want them to be. That doesn't mean, however, that I shouldn't have my own approach, but it's not normative, it is an approach, amongst many possible approaches. So I think part of the difficulty therefore of having that guest lecturer syndrome is that it collapses differences and diversity into something that makes it appear much more homogenous than it actually is. Part of the challenge, therefore, is to find a way to create space that gives the opportunity for a much broader form of teaching.
In terms of my own work, there's only really been one place, a Methodist theological college in Bristol, Wesley College, that has an association with the University of Bristol, where I've actually taught a 10 week course in Black theology where I was able to actually go into the differences. So then, even if you do a session on Womanist theology, you can show that there are different approaches to Womanist theology: there is a big difference between Delores Williams, who does not believe that the cross is redemptive, and basically would say that it's much more realistic to talk about survival rather than liberation, and Jackie Grant. There are differences between her and Emilie Towns and Kate Cannon who are more ethicists than theologians, and Renita Weems who's a biblical scholar, and so on. Now, outside of Queens I can't tell you another place where you can give that kind of space to say you know something, this is not just an addendum.
The third challenge is the way in which you begin to integrate the effects of Black theology into what is seen to be the normative curriculum. So again, I stand to be corrected, but I think it's only Queens and possibly the University of Birmingham, for example, where if you were looking at Biblical scholarship, you really have to look at the works of Cain Hope Fedler and Clarice Martin and Randall Bailey alongside the so called generic icons like Bultmann or Schweitzer or whatever. Because that's a fact, Black people have something critical to say about every aspect of the curriculum, not just as a discrete discipline in and of itself, but also as a way of critiquing and challenging the normative perspectives as I'm talking about God. Again, people are looking at Christology with big gaps. How you can look at Christology and not look at Cone, for example? The challenges are innumerable, really, to be honest with you.
So as you've said, Black theology in the UK in HE is still a peripheral minority interest, taught in very few departments. Do you envisage any change?
I believe so, but I think it will be an incremental drift leading to incremental change rather than a revolution. Partly I think, hopefully, this will come through a critical mass of both Black and White people who will be interested in, or perhaps demand, a greater level of recognition from the curriculum. I think the way in which HE is now to some extent driven by economics, and driven by market demand, is one of the critical ways therefore in which Black theology will come over into the mainstream curriculum—through the greater engagement of Black and White young people, hopefully, coming from people wanting to do Religious Studies at A-level.
We have a problem in that I remember reading a report about two years ago, in which they found that at school, the first group of people to pull out from RE were Black youths, males, and this is before they've hit GCSE level, so if we haven't got it right even at this basic level, what hope is there?
Yes, that's a really hard challenge. I think part of it is in terms of how we've always presented the teaching of religion. The reason why, for example, areas like sociology and cultural studies have all been much further advanced, really, than religion in general, and theology in particular, among the Black community, is because they've always had much more immediacy, in terms of relevance, and basically when you're able to teach in a way that shows its recognition of social reality, then people find it interesting. I think what's happened is so often, we present religion as a very esoteric conversation around ancient texts, and around truth claims, some people believe this and some people believe that, and of course I'm not denying the importance of that, but if you look more critically in terms of how religion functions in Black communities, its importance has not been around the relative merits of truth claims: proposition A versus proposition B. It has been at its best when it engages with people and gives them an interpretative framework for dealing with reality, by saying that a certain belief in God will help you then to make sense of this experience or give you a particular way of engaging with school or with the police etc. It seems to me that when teaching starts from the praxis of religion, that then immediately makes it much more relevant and much more transformative with the people whom one's teaching, and it seems to me that therefore presenting it in that way, even at an early point, within Religious Studies, would have a knock on effect on people who would then do it for examination at A-level or AS level, so other people would then come and study theology at university.
There's a wealth of knowledge and critical analysis behind that.
Yes, and then you would get that critical mass of people who will then say, we're actually interested in studying this, and why don't you have a Black theologian, why don't you have a Womanist theologian, why don't you have courses looking at how Black and Asian people re-read the Bible, historically, why don't you have courses in Black ethics or Black ecclesiology? For example if one looks at the relationship between, let's say, theology and Christian practice, why is it that in all the major denominations, whether historic mainline denominations or Pentecostal Black-led independent churches, the fastest growing wing of Christian faith in Britain is Black Christian faith expression, yet when one takes that and says how then is that experience or that phenomenon matched in terms of what is taught in theology, there's no relationship between the two whatsoever?
So I think that partly it needs to be a top down and a bottom up change, I've more faith in the bottom up change, obviously, as a liberationist, which is about that critical mass of people who will come to study, and not just Black people. That is one of the critical things that's happened in our kind of post-modern generation, which I think is an entirely good thing, that people from different communities now know much more about each other than was the case 20, 30 years ago. White young people are very interested in Black popular culture, Black aesthetics, have Black and Asian friends, and friends across a whole spectrum of cultures and communities, and hopefully it would catch that sense of commitment to things like environmental politics, antiglobalisation, poverty reduction, all the things that Black theology has been addressing, perhaps not as well as it should have done, but it's certainly been addressing them for many years. I think that in marketing terms there should be, and I'm sure there will be, a significant take up for that. We need to be able to find a way of marketing it in such a way that people will be interested in doing it, and you then have a commitment at a certain point to teach it.
You've spoken about Black theology being transformative, before, and I wonder if you could outline what you see as being the implications for students, of teaching a subject which is intended to be transformative? How does such transformation manifest itself in the classroom, and how can it be managed, that is if you want to manage it?
The most important thing one has to acknowledge is the fact that such teaching is meant to have an impact on people, and that impact must be cognitive, but won't be effective unless it also impacts on people's emotions as well. A lot of times there's a certain type of teaching, certainly within theology and religious studies, that tends to be more conservative than the kind of stuff that you would see in sociology and cultural studies, where in actual fact the engagement and the acceptance of the place of the emotions is seen as perfectly right and proper. I think part of the managing of it, and I'm not quite sure how to phrase this, is that we need to think in terms of creating spiritual experiences in the classroom that affirm and challenge, but don't abuse students, that don't work in a pejorative manner, that don't have sort of winners and losers, and that kind of oppressive use of power. To work in a transformative fashion means that you have to take account of the fact that this teaching will have an impact on people, it will challenge people individually and force them to re-think questions of individual identity, and questions regarding our collective identities, and questions of narrative, just to give an example.
Can I just clarify something, we are talking here about both White and Black students?
Absolutely, we're talking about students full stop. I teach very mixed classes for the most part. For example one source I use in my teaching is a very good BBC series, which has never been repeated, which I think is interesting, called The History of Racism. It was broadcast in 2007, in three parts, on three successive evenings, on BBC 4. It was shown in commemoration of the Bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire and has never been shown again. Basically it looks at the relationship between history and racism and power, from classical antiquity going right up to Stephen Lawrence's death.
Now, there are parts of that DVD that portray absolutely, jawdroppingly evil things—basically, it's the kind of stuff that just makes all of us think, how can human beings be so vicious, and so despicable in their actions one to another? Now, I defy anyone to sit through that, any more than you could sit through a programme on the Holocaust, and not be moved by it. Clearly there are major theological questions that are posed, in terms of what on earth was God doing when all this was happening? So on the one hand there are the questions of theology, and on the other hand there are the more emotional questions, like, how do I handle this? If you're a Black person, how do you handle the sense of anger? Watching, for example, a whole section about the Belgian Congo, and the way in which the henchmen of King Leopold would remove the right hand of African children within the Congo as a motivating technique to ensure that their parents would collect the requisite quota of rubber—when you watch the re-creation of that scene, for Black people, there's a sense of real anger. On one occasion I was aware of at least two people who came from the Congo, in a class I was teaching at the time, alongside a sense of guilt and shame for the White religious people who say, this happened and our countries did nothing, the Europeans did nothing about it. Now, as an educator, as someone interested in pedagogy, I think it's right and proper for people to feel moved by that, but the important thing then, because often people get trapped in their emotions, is to say, well, how then do we deconstruct what we're feeling, and what we've experienced? This is the crucial thing: in terms of praxis—what then do we do in response to that? So I think part of it for me in terms of the transformation is what happens outside the classroom, when people then go on with their lives. For me it's more than just giving people information, it's more than just a form of data transfer, you know, it's actually about thinking, ok, well, how then do we create a critical mass of people who feel sufficiently righteously moved to say, 'you know something, as individuals we can make a difference'?
I heard a comment from a White leader in the Methodist church a number of years ago, who said, 'If you think you're too small to make a difference, then you've never been in bed with a mosquito'. I've often used that as a kind of motto in the classroom, to say, I do believe individuals can make a difference. What's required is individuals acting together in concert, so it's not some kind of isolated individual action. How then do we act together, with the knowledge that we have not just gained, but the knowledge that we've helped to construct ourselves? Part of the use of experiential exercises is that I don't want you to accept the notion of a Black God because I'm telling you to, it's basically that you come to a knowledge of truth yourself through the interactions with each other, so that you are formed and socialised by what you have learned. You don't write an essay because Anthony Reddie said you should. Well, ok, if I'm your tutor you should do it on that basis, but much more importantly, you should do it not because I said so, but because you feel moved and transformed that you yourself can make a difference. The way in which the status quo has been propagated on us has been through the sense that there was no alternative—that somehow this is so self-evidently true there is no other narrative—and of course there always are other narratives, there always are other forms of truth, there always are other discourses that we need to engage in.
I think that's part of the challenge, but also part of the excitement of teaching—that every class and every group of people you work with is different, and within that, there are obviously different dynamics for knowledge. On several occasions I've heard people say something that makes me think, 'I've been writing this stuff for years, and I've never thought of it like that. I've been set on this, but you know, you've just said something that I've got to go away and process, and come back, because you've actually floored me.' Part of it, therefore, in the best kind of teaching, is that collapsing of power and authority. When I teach, what I try to do is to model a form of dialogue that says that if we start from experience, if we start from the way in which experience helps to shape knowledge, and helps to shape truth, how then do I create a framework and a space within this teaching moment that says that you have all got something critically to contribute? Because all of us come from experience, all of us do not come as blank tablets on which someone from authority then writes, but it's the sense that you have something critically to contribute, and we can teach each other, that is often hard to really carry through. I think one of the things about going through the process of the Academy, in order to become an expert, is that we all then want to stand on our authority. The whole point of me getting a PhD and writing all these books is that I can turn them into a kind of magic wand and impress you with how clever I am because you and I are not on the same level, by the definition of my grade of learning. I think true liberatory teaching has to be one that says, we have to get past that kind of hierarchy. Ok, I'm not going to say that my years of learning have not given me some form of knowledge that gives me certain responsibilities in the context of the classroom, but I'm more interested in the truth that does not reside just in me because I've read a few books.
So, looking towards the future, as an educator, what advice would you give to a theology or religious studies tutor who is considering including Black theology in their courses?
Probably a couple of things. First is this very critical question about why they want to do it. Is it because you genuinely think that Black theology has something to contribute towards the sum of our knowledge in terms of the discipline of theology and religious studies and the various subsets of it? Or is it some cynical attempt to say that there'll be a QAA inspection coming at some point, and wouldn't it be good to be able to show some form of diversity, therefore let's ring up someone and get them to put on something? So first, I think, it's about integrity.
Of course I would say Black theology has an immense amount to offer, so called marginalised studies all do, so part of it is about how they are going to manage its integration within the curriculum in a way that takes us beyond tokenism. There needs to be an acknowledgment that this has both a specific set of identities and a specific set of issues, but they are also universal. Black theology is not just of interest to Black students, it's of interest to all people. Clearly, if we want to take seriously some of the universal claims that different religious traditions make about God, then that God is revealed then not just through experiences of power, and the status quo, but is also revealed through so called marginalised experiences of people whose voices are often not being heard. So I think the question is, how do you manage it so that it still maintains a kind of specificity?
For example, part of the challenge I often make is that we have to take Womanist theology as a specific discipline, not just as a subset of Black theology, it is a specific discipline in itself, and yet, taking that as a case study, specific disciplines also have something to say to every other area. So there are Womanist perspectives on ethics, Womanist perspectives on church and society, Womanist perspectives on Church history, in terms of who gets to define the traditions. There's lots of stuff out there, but it actually requires a working commitment.
The third thing that I would say is that you then need to be in conversations with the people who help to shape it. Not that they own it—I wouldn't want to make the claim that Black people own Black theology, any more than I own Black theology, we don't, and it's essential that the knowledge and learning that comes out of that always transcends the group that creates it itself—but at the same point, I think there's always a danger of a sort of neo-colonialism in these kinds of situations. A particular discourse has been developed, and suddenly institutions have a new hobby horse, it's thought to be important to engage with it, and they then pick it up and run with it, without any recourse to the people who helped to create it, often with no support, no institutional encouragement and no financial backing at all. Again, I'd like to use feminist theology as an analogy. Suddenly it becomes the flavour of the month, and all of a sudden an authority decided by men dictates that this is really popular and so we're going to teach it. Quite rightly, women who've been working at the coal face trying to develop this with scant regard are going to say, hang on a minute, how come now suddenly you're coming in and running with this and excluding us, when it's about us? Now that doesn't mean that men cannot engage with feminist theology, that's not the point I'm making, but in its development, and in its creation, within any institution, there has to be a dialogue with the people who have some kind of experiential basis with it. Not that their experience trumps anyone else's experience, but there has to be a kind of mutuality that takes seriously the fact that all bodies of knowledge come out of the people that are experiencing them, and therefore to honour the experience itself is important, when you're going to engage with that particular subject matter. So I think, using that as an analogy, that then says, yes, I would love lots of institutions to start teaching Black theology, and I certainly would not necessarily believe that it's my job or anyone else's job to police how they should do that—each institution has to find its own way—but a way of doing it with integrity is to have dialogue with those people who've helped to shape it, and that's the critical question. How then do we manage this in a way that then gets us beyond tokenism?
It's been a fantastic interview and I would like to say, on behalf of our Discourse readers, thank you very much Dr Anthony Reddie.
It's a pleasure.
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This page was originally on the website of The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies. It was transfered here following the closure of the Subject Centre at the end of 2011.
