Becoming Black: Ideality and Reality in Barth and Cone

ABSTRACT This article compares and contrasts James Cone’s use of “blackness” with Karl Barth’s use of “Israel”. It argues that, by contrast with Barth’s overdetermined use of “Israel” as a fixed designator for a fixed people, “black” for Cone is a deliberately mobile designator, shifting (roughly) between skin colour, ancestry and cultural heritage, and political and theological disposition. It thus has the requisite suppleness to enable Cone’s theology to speak prophetically both into the specific context of oppression for which he writes, and beyond. Barth’s theology, prophetic in principle, but lacking attentiveness to his Jewish neighbours, fails to achieve the same level of pertinence. The article continues by arguing that racial capitalist critique can be understood as a faithful outworking of Cone’s legacy, the oppressive logic of racial capitalism providing a significant context within which to understand what “becoming black” might mean today.

context, but also his conviction that our realities are ones we help to create. The slaves told subversive and life-giving stories, imagining into existence a reality that differed from the one imposed on them by their masters. In this understanding, the truth is something we bring about.
Barth's interpreters are divided over the relationship between his theology and the pressing social and political issues of his day, some reading it to be a close one, 2 others finding his theology to "[hover] above us like a cathedral resting upon a cloud", as Richard H. Roberts puts it. 3 As a test case, I will examine his doctrine of Israel as this occurs within the context of his doctrine of election in Church Dogmatics II/2. 4 We will find his treatment to exhibit a disquieting conjunction of contextual pertinence and contextual aloofness, in such a way as to bear out the above briefly drawn contrast with Cone. After expounding Barth's treatment of Israel in its pairing with the church, I will turn to Cone in order to analyse the contextual dynamics of his black theology of liberation. Specifically, I will compare the way in which Cone uses the term "black" to the way in which Barth uses the term "Israel". 5 We will find, to anticipate, that Cone's usage has a suppleness that Barth's lacks. "Black" is a deliberately mobile designator, shifting (roughly) between skin colour, ancestry and cultural heritage, and political and theological disposition. 6 By contrast, "Israel", while having several valences for Barth, is most basically a fixed designator for a fixed people. It is just this that renders Barth unable to attend to the contingencies of his context, and specifically to his Jewish neighbours in their concrete particularity. 7 Cone's non-fixed usage of the term "black" means that he can in principle be responsive to the contingencies not only of the oppressed people for whom his theology is written, but also of the "white" oppressors. It is possible, if extremely difficult and only on an exceptional basis, for them to "become black". 8 2 See, e.g., Gorringe, Karl Barth. Moseley, Nations and Nationalism in the Theology of Karl Barth, makes a strong case for such closeness, with a particular focus on his critical approach to nationhood and nationalisma preoccupation she argues runs throughout his career. In this context she treats his doctrine of Israel, the test case of the present article. 3 Roberts, A Theology on Its Way, 57. Roberts uses these words specifically to describe Barth's "dogma of the Incarnation". 4 I draw freely in what follows on two lengthier treatments I have offered: in Ticciati, "Israel and the Church", 151, used with permission from Wipf and Stock Publishers: www.wipfandstock.com; and Ticciati, "Who is Israel?", 246, used with permission from Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group: www.bakerpublishinggroup.com. 5 The comparison has a deliberately narrow focus, although its ramifications are wide. That focus is the usage of the terms as indicators of the contextual attentiveness of the theologians being compared. "Israel" and "blackness" are in other ways evidently disparate terms. "Israel", among other things, is a central scriptural term with a long theological history, while "blackness", although with its own complex and theologically loaded history, is not itself a scriptural or primarily theological term. This asymmetry is complicated if, with J. Kameron Carter, one argues that "race" is most fundamentally a theological construct, bound up with the history of Christian supersessionism. See Carter, Race: A Theological Account. A more than formal relation between the two terms is in a different way entailed in Cone's own dialectical relating of "the significance of Jesus' past Jewishness" to "the significance of his present blackness". Cone, God of the Oppressed, 134. The focus of my comparison being limited in the way described, I do not explore here these otherwise significant dynamics. 6 Cf. Lloyd, "Paradox and Tradition in Black Theology", 265, for an account of blackness in Cone's theology as paradox. At once "ontological symbol" and "visible reality" (ibid., 271), it participates in the paradoxical character of divine liberation, and thus remains a normatively privileged term. Cf. also Prevot, Thinking Prayer, Ch. 6. Prevot's book culminates in a chapter on Cone, which argues for the universal normativity of the tradition of black spirituals, resisting its theological marginalisation as merely a racially and culturally particular phenomenon. Prevot argues that blackness for Cone is a theological (and specifically doxological) rather than merely racial or cultural category (ibid., 291). 7 My critique has resonance with the analysis of Sonderegger, That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew. Sonderegger argues both that Barth too closely aligns the Jews of Pauline communities and Jews of modern Europe (ibid., 171), and that Barth is culpably ignorant of contemporary Jewish thought (ibid., 177-79). 8 Cone, God of the Oppressed, 241.
Barth's doctrine of election is part of his doctrine of God. At its centre is the election of Jesus Christ, in which God makes the eternally self-constituting decision to be in covenantal relationship with sinful humanity. In the election of Christ, God takes upon himself the rejection of humanity that follows upon its sin and elects humanity for participation in his own glory. 9 Christ is both the elect and the rejected one, his rejection being ordered to and taken up in his all-encompassing election. Only in him can others be said to be elected and rejected. And in him their rejection is for the sake of their ultimate election. 10 Between Christ and the individual elected in him, however, there stands the election of the community. Corresponding to Christ as the one who is both rejected and elected, the community has a twofold form in Israel and the church. Israel, as the passing form of the community, witnesses to the divine judgment or divine rejection, while the church, as the coming form of the community, witnesses to the divine mercy or divine election. Israel merely hears the promise, while the church believes in it. 11 Barth unfolds his account of the twofold form of the elect community in a detailed exegesis of Romans 9-11, which is the scriptural locus classicus for the traditional doctrine of predestination. Barth has already radically recast the latter by making Christ, rather than discrete groups of individuals, the object of damnation and salvation. His second, equally radical innovation is to place Israel at the heart of the doctrine of election, thus knitting together the Hebrew Scriptural understanding of election and the Protestant Reformed account, and thereby overcoming what Kendall Soulen has called the church's "Israel-forgetfulness". 12 This is the theological root of what I have called the contextual pertinence of Barth's theology. Church Dogmatics II/2 was originally published in 1942, against the backdrop of National Socialism, in which context "die Judenfrage" ("the Jewish Question") took centre stage. The centrality of Israel to Barth's doctrine of election corresponds to his naming of antisemitism as the sign of unbelief in the church. One could not get more pertinent. As I will show, however, the way in which Barth characterises Israel simultaneously hamstrings that pertinence.
Romans 9 is a central source for traditional Christian supersessionism, according to which Israel has been replaced by the church in the purposes of God. Romans 9:6b runs, "But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For not all Israel are Israel" (ESV modified). This has habitually been read to suggest that the rejection of Christ by the majority of Paul's kinspeople in the flesh, and God's consequent rejection of them, is not a sign that the word of God has failedsince God in God's electing purposes did not in fact have them in view. Rather, as the following verses spell out, God's election was never defined by mere descent, but was characterised from the start by God's freedom to include some and exclude others, choosing Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, and ultimately gathering a people "not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles' (9:24). This mixed gathering, understood as the church, is the true Israel, which replaces Israel according to the flesh as the covenant partner of God.
Barth firmly rejects this reading. While he finds two Israels here, a genealogical and a spiritual, he reads them together as the twofold form of the one community of God. 13 Election takes the form of division: between those who witness to the divine judgment (in this case Israel according the flesh) and those who witness to the divine mercy (the pre-existent church within Israel, or spiritual Israel, which ultimately flowers into the church of Jews and gentiles). As dialectically paired, witnessing to Christ as the elect and rejected one, both sides are included within the sphere of election. Thus, God's division between genealogical and spiritual Israel is not the replacement of one by the other, but a confirmation of genealogical Israel's status as the elect people. The church is never elect in its own right, but lives entirely in dependence on Israel. The election of Israel, by contrast, is eternal: it cannot be undone. 14 With this claim, Barth has fundamentally repudiated the classic supersessionist position according to which the church replaces Israel as God's chosen people. Concomitantly, whenever he uses the term "Israel" in an unqualified way, he means genealogical Israel, which he describes as "the race [Stamm] of Abraham", "Jews … by birth", distinguished by their "Jewish blood". 15 The church is only ever named Israel in a qualified wayas "spiritual" or "true" Israel.
Israel cannot forfeit its election, but it can resist it, and it in fact does so insofar as it fails obediently to confess Christ as its Messiah, and thereby fails to become the church. This is its calling, namely to become the church. As the synagogue, separated from the church, it can witness only to divine judgment. 16 But the church, for its part, is prone to an equivalent sin: insofar as it "disputes Israel's election", it commits a sin that is the "Gentile repetition" of Israel's unbelief. Church and Israel belong together as the one community of God: schism is the "unforgiveable sin" on either side. 17 Barth names this sin unbelief in the case of Israel and antisemitism in the case of the church. 18 This symmetry between Israel and the church, however, enfolds a greater asymmetry, one that unfolds in Barth's treatment of the olive tree analogy in Romans 11:16-24.
Jews, "as ancestors and kinsmen of the one Holy One in Israel", are the natural branches of the tree, whose root is Christ. Unnaturally grafted in, the gentiles may become by grace what Jews are by nature, but they are never sanctified in the way that Jews are (and remain), even when cut off from the tree. 19 Thus, as Paul warns, when the gentile Christian become presumptuous regarding unbelieving Jews, they forfeit their borrowed holiness. "They reject [Christ] by rejecting His ancestors and kinsmen". 20 The asymmetry is becoming evident. While Jews, as a naturally elect people, cannot forfeit their election, the church, insofar as it cuts itself from Israel, "ceases to be the Church". This is a repeated refrain in Barth's summary sections. "If . . . the Church 13 For what follows, see esp. CD II/2, 214-16. Givens, We the People, in the context of a broadly affirmative appraisal of Barth's doctrine of election, critiques Barth's discovery of two Israels here, insofar as it gives rise to a false dichotomy between "old" and "new" Israel, and, by overdetermining the identity of (old) Israel, abstracts from the historically contingent outworking of God's elective purposes. 14 CD II/2, 204-5. 15 CD II/2, 214. 16 CD II/2, 207-208. 17 CD II/2, 205, cf. 208. 18 E.g., CD II/2, 204-205; 234-35. 19 CD II/2, 287. 20 CD II/2, 292. has become estranged from its Israelite origin . . . its name "Church" may well be on the point of becoming sound and fury"; 21 "A Church that becomes anti-Semitic or even only a-semitic . . . ceases to be the Church"; 22 "Without Israel . . . [the Church] cannot continue to exist as the Church for a single moment". 23 In short, Israel is fixed in a way that the church is not. On the positive side, the fluidity in Barth's characterisation of the church is just what allows him to attend critically to the contingent reality of the church in his own day. On the one hand, the church is ideal type. It is defined, analytically, as that form of the elect community which by virtue of its belief in Christ witnesses to the divine mercy. 24 On the other hand, it is an empirical reality, ominously instantiated among other places in the Deutsche Christen (the German Christians) of Barth's day. Barth's claim that, insofar as it becomes antisemitic, "the church ceases to be the church" relies on the church's identification both with empirical reality and with ideal type. The claim assumes empirical reference: that there has ceased to be the church. But the predicate is church as ideal type. The Deutsche Christen have ceased to be that form of the community that witnesses to the divine mercy. And they have done so because they have ceased to believe. And here is the twist. By allowing for a gap between empirical reality and ideal type, Barth can attend to the church's present form of unbelief. And this can feed back into his characterisation of the ideal type. Unbelief, not fully specified in advance, is defined by Barth with a view to his own context, namely as antisemitism. To be sure, he has warrant for such a definition in Romans 9-11. However, not only might another context have awakened another meaning in this passage, but Barth need not have chosen this scriptural text as the one through which to develop his doctrine of election. It is, however, the pertinent text for his day, and a reading of the kind he offers is solicited by the horrors of that day. So far so good; but the same fluidity is not evident in Barth's usage of the term "Israel". On the one hand, Barth defines Israel, analytically, as that form of the community which by virtue of its unbelief witnesses to the divine judgment. 25 Israel's unbelief is fleshed out theologically as its resistance to its election, its "refusal" to join the Church and consequent creation of schism, 26 its character as "rebellious" 27 and "hardened", 28 being epitomised by the delivering up of its Messiah to death 29in all of which it embodies the wrath of God, witnessing to the divine judgment. On the other hand, Israel is (on Barth's understanding) an empirically identifiable people: a natural, genealogical people; Jews by birth. And as this people it is fixed. Israel cannot forfeit its identity as Israel.
The consequence, however, is that unlike in the case of the church, the gap between ideal type and empirical people is closed. Theological reality exactly coincides with historically contingent reality. This is captured in the claim that Israel is naturally elect ("naturally" having empirical valence, and "elect" theological valence). And it is one 21 CD II/2, 206. 22 CD II/2, 234. 23 CD II/2, 260. 24 As Barth sets out in the bold headline summary of § 34. CD II/2, 195. 25 Again, see the headline summary, CD II/2, 195. 26 CD II/2, 208. 27 CD II/2, 220. 28 CD II/2, 228. 29 CD II/2, 226.
short step (given that election is filled out theologically here as election for rejection) to the claim that the natural genealogical people is by nature disobedient, stiff-necked, and hard-hearted. This unhappy superimposition of theological onto empirical reality is what licenses Barth's pseudo-empirical description of Israel. He thus speaks of "Jewish or clerical phantasy and arrogance", 30 Israel's "sectarian self-assertion", "the spectral form of the Synagogue", "the [joyless] Jews of the Ghetto", 31 "Jewish obduracy and melancholy . . . caprice and phantasy", 32 and Israel's "carnal loyalty". 33 These alleged descriptions are merely the psychological and sociological translation of his theological portrait. They do not derive from attention to Jewish ways of life as he might have encountered them in his own day or within history. Barth has foreclosed the possibility of such attention, with the result that the reparative purchase of his theology of election is ineluctably one-sided. His attentiveness to the church of the day is not matched by attentiveness to his Jewish neighbours. His critique of antisemitism thus remains abstract. The Israel into unity with which he calls the church is a Christian theological construct. It is not flesh-and-blood Jews. 34 Contextual pertinence meets contextual aloofness. What I now seek to show, in comparison, is that Cone's supple use of "blackness" as a literal and symbolic term allows for just the contextual pertinence that eluded Barth. The central axis of Cone's theology runs between oppression and liberation from oppression. God is the God of the oppressed (as the title of his 1975 book goes). Cone speaks as a prophet. To read him (especially as a white personleaving open what that might mean for now) is to be convicted of sin and called to fight. This is a fight in which neutrality is not a possibility. Which side will one take? 35 Will one be among those who ministered to the hungry, the naked or the sick; or among those who sought Jesus in high places, failing to recognise that he became one with the despised? (Matthew 25:31ff is one of Cone's seminal texts. 36 ) Is one on the side of the oppressed or on the side of the oppressor? To do nothing is to acquiesce in the regime of the oppressor: those who are not for the oppressed are against them (cf. Matt 12:30 and par.).
Blackness gains its meaning first and foremost in this context of oppression and liberation from oppression. In the United States of America in the twentieth century it is paradigmatically in the black community that the struggle for liberation from oppression is to be found. As Cone says, "The Jesus-event in twentieth-century America is a blackevent". 37 As Cone came increasingly to realise, this claim is not to be made to the exclusion of other oppressed groups either in the United States or across the world. 38  oppression who realize that the survival of their humanity is bound up with liberation from whiteness". 39 These claims, in which blackness is aligned with oppression, have a necessarily double valence. On the one hand, Cone is pointing to a visible community in which the cries of oppression are being heard. This community is identified by way of skin colour. As Cone puts it: "First, blackness is a physiological trait. It refers to a particular black-skinned people in America, a victim of white racist brutality." 40 Already, here, we might note, skin colour is implicitly more than skin colour. It is, as a construction of "white racist brutality", a racist encoding in which some bodies are ordered to others in relations of inferiority and superiority. Further, to anticipate a additional valence of blackness to be explored below, it becomes in turn, positively, something to be reclaimed as a beautiful creature of God. However construed, skin colour is an ineliminable dimension of blackness.
On the other hand, blackness stands for oppression and liberation from oppression more generally. It stands pars pro toto for the place in which God is to be found acting on behalf of the oppressed. In Cone's words: [B]lackness is an ontological symbol for all those who participate in liberation from oppression. This is the universal note in black theology. It believes that all human beings were created for freedom, and that God always sides with the oppressed against oppressors. 41 Cone takes the Exodus event as paradigmatic of God's activity, 42 and finds the struggle for black freedom, especially as expressed in the Black Power movement, to be its contemporary manifestation. 43 Blackness, in this connection, is a political and theological disposition.
The double valenceskin colour and political/theological dispositionis present in Cone's understanding of Jesus Christ as black. He is "literally" so insofar as he becomes one with the oppressed black people in the United States, identified by Cone as "the least in America". 44 Unlike some others, Cone is not interested here in claims about the historical Jesus' ancestry and skin colour. 45 Jesus' blackness is his liberating presence with the community for whom Cone writes, a people identified by their "black" skin (scare quotes are necessary to indicate that even here "black" is not strictly literal, but a freighted term bound up with a history of racialisation).
In Jesus God takes blackness upon himself. By the same token, Jesus' blackness is symbolic. Specifically, it is symbolic of God's liberating presence with all those who are oppressed. But the symbolic cannot be had without the literal, the universal without the particular. One cannot be in solidarity with the oppressed in general. This would 39 Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 7. It is noteworthy, however, that Cone's use of "blackness" to signify all those who are oppressed coincides with his definition of oppression in terms of whiteness. In other words, his gesturing beyond the black/white axis remains simultaneously tethered to it. 40  in fact be to ignore particular oppressed peoples. Thus, the two valences, literal and symbolic, in this case blackness as skin colour and as political/theological disposition, must be held together. However, a double valence is not enough. To stop here is to appear cleanly to separate out the descriptive from the normative. Descriptively, one says: "Black-skinned people in the United States are oppressed." Normatively, one urges: "To side with God you must take the side of the oppressed." I have already remarked how the selection of skin colour as a pertinent identity marker is normatively loaded (it is characteristic of a racial and often racist ordering of the world). Countering this negative classification of blackness, Cone generates, through further attentive description, an alternative norm. This is one rooted in what he refers to, in a shorthand that evokes so much, as "the black experience". 46 In this context, black skin colour, positively reclaimed, becomes the tip of the iceberg of historically, ancestrally and culturally informed ways of being in the world. To be black, for Cone, is to be shaped by the "slavery and colonization" of one's people in the United States, 47 by the African heritage and culture that continued to inform that people, by the resistance and resilience that enabled some at least to survive, by the "stories, tales and sayings" 48 that informed this survival, and the flourishing they enabled against the odds.
Cone begins God of the Oppressed with an account of his own formation in the black Church, with what he refers to as black preaching, the black sermon, black prayer and the black Word. Blackness, here, evokes a whole bodily and spiritual world, culturally rich and historically freighted. Nor is it confined to the church. Cone refers not only to the spirituals but to the blues, 49 to the folk tales told by slaves in subversion of the codes of their masters, and to black art. In all these expressions he finds an affirmation of blackness in defiance of "white America". 50 Cone's delineation of blackness is not just descriptive but normative, and it is so because "Truth is a question not only of what is but of what ought to be". 51 Blackness, in its struggle against oppression, calls into question the illusory "is" of the white social order, subversively bringing about what ought to be. Truth is not just something to be discovered, it is something to be made. The black struggle for liberation is, for Cone, the truth in action; it cannot be had in abstraction. Thus, black and white are competing social orders that result in alternative enactments of reality: one true, the other false. Because of this normative dimension, a black enactment of reality does not simply follow from being black. Thus, Cone can speak of "the authentic experience of blackness", and he quotes Desirée Barnwell saying: "Will the real black people please stand://Those fearless in the unconventional,//Moved towards their own blackness". 52 The converse question, whether it is possible for white people to move away from their own whiteness, is more difficult. This is not, as should have become clear, because of what is supposedly the brute fact of their skin colour. Rather, it is because the norm for the liberative struggle is one that has been forged in the fiery furnace of black experience, 46 Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 23-25. 47 Cone, God of the Oppressed, 101. 48 Ibid., 18. 49 Cf. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues. 50 Cone, God of the Oppressed, 28. 51 Ibid., 42. 52 Ibid., 30. whose contours are those of a long history and of the many cultural expressions it has awakened. A white person does not (normally) share this experience, either on the side of its pain or on the side of its richness. However, Cone leaves room for manoeuvre in his understanding of the truth as made.
A white person may not be able to acquire a black history, but she can call into question the white social order of her own formation, and participate in the struggle for liberation of black people that is definitive of the black social order. This is no easy task, nor can it be reduced to a matter of choice (as so much politics is today). Cone is concomitantly critical of well-meaning whites who presume to have taken up the black cause, but have done so without really giving up their whiteness. He nevertheless recognises "the rare possibility of conversion among white oppressors", enabling him to speak of "white people becoming black". 53 This possibility, he continues, is a gift of God in which whites "die to whiteness and are reborn anew" in the black struggle for freedom. 54 Let me pause to take stock. Blackness in Cone connotes the following. It is, first, skin colour (as oppressively encoded by whites). It is, second, a political and theological disposition of struggle for the liberation of the oppressed. It is, third (midway between "description" and "norm"), black experience as affirmatively reclaimed by the oppressed. It is, correspondingly, at once (i) an empirical denotation, (ii) a normative call to action, and (iii) a norm-generating description. These three functions cannot be divorced from one another, lest the universal come adrift from the particular, and lest (perhaps more worryingly) the particular be reduced to the parochial. 55 How does Cone compare with Barth? Blackness in its first and second iterations corresponds fairly closely to Barth's usage of Israel to refer on the one hand to an empirical people (compare blackness as empirical denotation) and on the other hand to an ideal type (compare blackness as normative call to action)even if with the difference that in Barth's case Israel is the type of a negative disposition. However, because Barth closes the gap between (i) and (ii) he leaves no room for the equivalent of Cone's third iteration of blackness: as norm-generating description. By not closing the gap, Cone does not map black people without remainder onto an abstractly conceived political disposition. This allows him to attend to the contingent reality of black people in the United States both historically and in the present in a way that Barth cannot attend to Jews either in his own time or historically. Also, by the same token, Cone is enabled to attend to white people who are historically shaped by whiteness as oppression but who have broken ranks with that whiteness. "Whiteness" has a mobility corresponding in some ways to that of "blackness".
This attentiveness on the part of Cone in turn makes a difference to the resultant norms he proffers. As we have seen, Barth attends selectively to his context, and this attention is sensitive enough to allow him to identify antisemitism as the hallmark sin of the church of his day. Due to the fact that his attention does not extend to fleshand-blood Jews, there is, beyond his denunciation of antisemitism, no textured content to his affirmation of Israel's election. Cone, by contrast, can fill out what liberative practices might look like by attending to black experience in its multifariousnessas 53 Ibid., 241. 54 Ibid., 242. 55 Cf. Prevot's suggestion (drawing on David Tracy) that the black spiritual tradition be described as "an intensely particular disclosure of the universal". Prevot, Thinking Prayer, 324.
subversive, as creative, as playful, as brave, as sacrificial, and so on. The Gospel and black experience, each vague on its own, help mutually define one another in the service of God's liberation of the oppressed. Moreover, Cone's attentiveness to black experience is indicative of a more general openness to the stories of others, in recognition that the truth to which we are graced to contribute is not a truth that we possess. 56 Whiteness, for Cone, is another name for being closed to the stories of others. As he forcefully puts it, "White people's decimation of red people and enslavement of black people in North America is an example of an attempt to deprive people of their stories, in order to establish the white story as the only truth in history". 57 Cone's black theology, by contrast, is consciously fallibilist: "We are creatures of history … I cannot claim infinite knowledge. What I can do is to bear witness to my story, to tell it and live it." 58 The consequence is an openness to learn from the stories of others. The Gospel, in short, is not a timeless message. It cannot be determined in advance of God's speech to me and to us in each new present. Barth was right about this; but Cone sees this truth through to its fully enfleshed conclusion.
How might we discern, in the light of Cone's prophetic word in the United States of the 60s and 70s, the demands the God of the oppressed makes on us today, not only in the United States but here in the United Kingdom (from where I write)? I suggest that Cone's work, by exposing the oppression from which the God of Jesus Christ liberates, makes way for attentiveness to the invisible structures that arguably perpetuate that oppression, dividing "the oppressors" from "the oppressed" (and, as we will see, dividing differently oppressed groups from one another). "Racial capitalism", a concept coined by Cedric J. Robinson in his 1983 book, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, captures the way in which capitalism relies for its economic productivity on racial demarcation and exploitation. 59 In the words of Gargi Bhattacharyya, "contemporary capitalism continues to operate through and alongside processes of racialised expropriation … in which economic exploitation and racist othering reinforce and sometimes amplify one another". 60 Jodi Melamed offers the following elaboration: [Capital] can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups … These antinomies of accumulation require loss, disposability, and the unequal differentiation of human value, and racism enshrines the inequalities that capitalism requires. Most obviously, it does this by displacing the uneven life chances that are inescapably part of capitalist social relations onto fictions of differing human capacities, historically race. 61 My contention is that without attention to the capitalist dynamics that undergird and fuel contemporary racism, not only will racial oppression persist, but the efforts to combat it will only serve to reinforce the racialising logic by which it is sustained, those efforts being caught up in the very capitalist machinery by which a racialising logic is invoked. I rely neither on the assumption that racism is inherent to capitalism (that all 56 Cone, God of the Oppressed, 104. 57 Ibid., 103. 58 Ibid., 102. 59 Robinson, Black Marxism. 60 Bhattacharyya, Rethinking Racial Capitalism, 102. 61 Melamed, "Racial Calitalism", 77. capitalism must be "racial"), nor on the converse assumption that racism is exclusively a symptom of capitalism (that all racism is capitalist). 62 I claim only that an effective confrontation with contemporary racism (my focus will be in the UK) requires a critical exposure of the way in which it is bound up with contemporary capitalism. Being attentive to this contemporary entanglement is one important way of living out Cone's legacy in the twenty-first century.
Jonathan Tran, in Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism, on the basis of detailed case studies of two Asian American communities (one in the Mississippi Delta in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the other in the Bay View/Hunters Point section of San Francisco up to the present), argues that an analysis in terms solely of race misses the fundamental role the political economy plays in the dynamics of racialisation. More strongly, he argues that race is an economically driven construct, "racial identity [being] invented for the sake of exercising the social control necessary for sustained domination and exploitation". 63 Race is retrospectively used to justify the dehumanisation of those so exploited. Thus, an antiracist approach that affirms (nonwhite) racial identities, naming whiteness the root problem, will in fact cement those racial categories that have been constructed to set one group over against another, playing back into the very divisions (not only between, e.g. the landed "whites" and the dispossessed "blacks", but between differently exploited groups such "Asian Americans" and "African Americans") that are the engine of racial capitalism. He names this approach "identitarian antiracism" and contrasts it with the political economic approach to race and racism that he pursues. 64 He sums up: "Embracing racial identities that come downstream from racialization amounts to an intimate embrace of the political economy that produced them". 65 Tran's study invites analogous studies in other parts of the world. In the present article I will not endeavour to substantiate a similar entanglement between racialisation and capitalism in the UK. This would require similarly fine-grained case studies. Instead, hypothesising that some such entanglement exists, I will draw on Sara Ahmed's On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life to show how the standard institutional response to the problem of institutional racism, namely policies of "equality, diversity and inclusion", is at best unable to escape the capitalist logic that sustains racism, and at worst is a capitalist stooge. 66 In order to outline the shape of an alternative response, I will turn in conclusion to Keri Day's Azusa Reimagined: A Radical Vision of Religious and Democratic Belonging, 67 and to Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree. 68 Ahmed's On Being Included is an ethnographic study of diversity work and workers in Australian and UK universities. While sympathetic to the work and all the more to its workers, Ahmed's study serves to expose the institutional, procedural and political dynamics by which that work is rendered ultimately impotent to achieve what it purportedly sets out to achieve. She does not name capitalism as the root problem, but aspects of her analysis could invite this conclusion.
A key finding that frames the study is the way in which the policy of diversity becomes a substitute for action. 69 The appointment of a diversity officer not only signals the absence of wider institutional support for diversity, 70 but keeps that work at the margins. The officer is positioned as the guest, with "whiteness" as the host, "allow [ing] an act of inclusion to maintain the form of exclusion". In this way, "institutional whiteness can be reproduced through the logic of diversity". 71 Another layer of Ahmed's analysis displays the way in which the language of diversity, by contrast with the now dated term "equity", participates in the dynamics of the university as a business, in which diversity functions as a form of capital. 72 Diversity practitioners are thus forced to switch between the contradictory logics of the social justice model and the business model. 73 Insofar as diversity is to be consumed, "digestible diversity" has an implicit shadow side in "indigestible diversity". 74 The inclusion of those who are deemed acceptable is parasitic on the marginalisation of other others. Worse, insofar as diversity is associated with "being global", it becomes an "elite technology" wielded by "educated economic migrants … rather than refugees, political exiles or the poor". 75 Diversity ends up being about excellence in a global capitalist market, 76 and by extension, bodies of colour become capital.
In this context, it is not too much of a stretch to say, with Tran, that "racial identity and commodification go hand in hand". 77 Diversity work, as a form of antiracist identitarianism, reduces people to their racial identities (ranged alongside those other identities that can be used as capital), thus further "solidifying … the reality of race". 78 According to Melamed, who is extrapolating from Marx, the hallmark of racial capitalism is its "manufacturing of densely connected social separateness". To achieve this it must strip out all other forms of relation than capitalrelation to community, to land, to activity, and (we might add) traditioncapital remaining as all that binds people and groups of people across its basic partition of them into the "worthy" and the "unworthy". 79 In response to capitalism's tactical work of division, Melamed, Bhattacharyya and Tran all variously call for the nurturing of noncapitalist forms of relationality and solidarity. 80 Racial and other "identities", as capitalist constructs, cannot serve here. As commodities, they are by definition stripped of relationality, uprooted from their histories and habitats. The result is that the people so commodified are interchangeable with one another. The logic is one of substitutability. Any person of colour will do! Part of the power of Cone's work was to offer a radically dichotomous picture: black oppressed people over against white oppressors. The God of Israel takes sides, inviting oppressors to enter into solidarity with the oppressed, taking on their suffering and taking up their cause in the fight for liberation. To name racial capitalism the invisible oppressor is not necessarily to supersede Cone's dichotomous vision, but it is potentially to alter its terms. Racial capitalism is the overarching context of oppressed people of colour and white oppressors. It commodifies and commercialises not only the racialised bodies on whose labour the system depends, but also the atomised white bodies that are harnessed to the service of growth and profit. To recognise common oppression is not to deny the radical asymmetry in which suffering falls disproportionately on some to the (apparent) benefit of others; as we have seen, capitalism is inherently divisive. Nor is it to deny that it is possible to distinguished between oppressors and those oppressed. It is, however, to complicate an absolute opposition between them. Not only does it render "oppression" a relative term: as racialised groups are differentiated hierarchically, one group might be oppressed in relation to this group and oppressor in relation to that. 81 But it also sees the oppressors (precisely as oppressors) as subject to the same invisible forces of oppression. In this limited sense, the oppressors are (if unknowingly) already in solidarity with the disproportionately oppressed. To take up the fight for liberation means for the oppressors to join cause with the oppressed in confronting a common enemy, rather than simply vicariously entering into solidarity with others who suffer supposedly at a distance from them. Without repentance of the oppression to which they have also unwittingly submitted themselves, vicarious suffering can only be paternalistic. It is just this, I think, of which Cone is suspicious.
Cone's language of "becoming black" sets him apart from antiracist identitarians. Indeed, the category of race is, as far as I know, not one that Cone utilises. "Blackness", by contrast with "race", is a capacious and supple term that can outlast the racial capitalist critique of racialisation, retaining the normative character it is given by Cone, and for which Lloyd and Prevot argue in their readings of Cone. 82 In this way, however, racial capitalist critique might be a more faithful outworking of Cone's legacy than the "identitarianism" or "contextualism" that presents itself as his successor. 83 To become black, on a racial capitalist reading, is to enter into solidarity with all those who are oppressed by racial capitalism, taking up the fight for liberation against its invisible hand. 84 Whiteness is nothing but its residual illusory mask. To participate in whiteness is to reap its apparent benefits while remaining blind to its oppressive force. 81 Cf. Tran, Asian Americans, 141-47. 82 Lloyd, "Paradox and Tradition"; Prevot, Thinking Prayer, Ch. 6. 83 Lloyd makes an analogous claim when he argues against the increasing orientation of black theology towards "contextualism". He suggests, further, that Cone himself embraced this direction in his later work. Lloyd argues, in keeping with the earlier Cone, that "paradox rather than cultural context [should be] at the heart of Black theology", Cone's appeal to blackness being allowed to retain its universal theological normativity. "Contextualism", he concludes, "is another name for secularism". Lloyd, "Paradox and Tradition", 282-83. Similarly, Prevot argues against the reduction of black theology to "a circumscribed, and thus not universally relevant, type of contextual theology". Prevot, Thinking Prayer, 281. 84 Cf. Prevot's discussion of Cone's idea of "becoming black" in Thinking Prayer, 321-23. My reading arguably widens its remit, but remains, I believe, in continuity with Prevot's account.
(which erases the unsubstitutable particularity of the one being lynched) with the substitutionary logic of the cross, in which Jesus dies on behalf of you and me and many other particular others. Cone interprets Jesus' death in terms of a dynamic of vicarious suffering that he has already identified in his earlier work: Israel suffers for the nations, and Jesus, in turn, suffers on behalf, and in the place, of Israel. 94 Such suffering, as suffering in the cause of justice, is to be distinguished from the suffering inflicted on the oppressed by their oppressors, as well as from the suffering of the oppressors under their own sinful oppression. What is enacted in this vicarious suffering on behalf of others, I suggest, is a substitutionary selfhood, which is to be distinguished from the substitutable identities of racial capitalism. Under racial capitalism we are bound together in relations of competitive exploitation, in which the good has been reduced to a limited commodity. In a world of substitutionary selfhood, we are bound together by the truth that my healing is not complete without yours; by the truth according to which your suffering is, more fundamentally, also mine. In such a world the good is a genuinely common good. In the context of a university, such a good is not reducible to academic excellence, let alone profit, but is coterminous with the truth that teacher and student together seek. The common life that is generated in this common search will ultimately make short shrift of commodified forms of "excellence", nurturing solidarities across difference in which people come into view as more than commodified bodies.
Substitutability is to be contrasted with substitution. To treat others as substitutable is to erase their unique and particular significance, exploiting them for the sake of a competitively construed good. To substitute for others is to act on their behalf precisely in their uniqueness, with a view to the good that is shared in common by all. Barth, I think, might have been persuaded by this logic. But he is hampered by what I have called his contextual aloofness. Cone's substitutionary vision goes hand in hand with his attentiveness to the cries of the oppressed. It is to this attentiveness that we are also called.

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