In ‘Truth’s Table’ Book, Women Podcasters Cast Vision for Future of Black Church

Ekemini Uwan: It was important for us to be able to rightly identify the ways Black women have often felt like they just simply were not enough, or maybe too much, in various church contexts. And so we wanted to be clear about that and name that, from the outset, to let Black women know we see you, we know you, and we love you.

Christina Edmondson: Even before we get to the part about those who consider leaving the church, we pay homage to grandmothers and aunties and mothers and spiritual mothers. I think we see ourselves as standing in a very, very long tradition. We are not a new phenomenon. We also wanted to reinforce that idea that we see ourselves as an echo.

EU: It’s a dynamic that occurs intraracially, although it can happen externally too, whereby dark-skinned people are discriminated against and where light-skinned people are preferenced over against dark-skinned people. And that impacts income level, employment status, our interaction with the criminal justice system, marriageability options and dating. It also impacts those various facets of our lives for dark-skinned people. What I would love to hear from the pulpit is just even a recognition that this is a very real, lived reality for many people within the church context. It would be great to hear some sort of an acknowledgment of that and also a refutation of colorism and a condemnation of it.

CE: I made up that word, angry-Black-womaned, but I thought that Black women would resonate with that lived experience. I’ve certainly been angry-Black-womaned. And I think the main reason is because if I’m speaking to something in my work around anti-racism, people get in their feelings very quickly on that topic. I think it makes it very easy for them to go to the trope of the angry Black woman versus listening to the facts, the data, the history, and so certainly in my teaching capacity that has happened. That’s happened in really flippant ways in social media. In the book, I give an example of stating something fairly matter-of-factly and someone being like, well, you know, “Christina’s just angry.” And I was like, “I’m actually feeling pretty good today.” We shouldn’t fall for the trope.

EU: One of the interventions that I propose is much more of a Pan-African response. I do believe the Black church has got to come together collectively. I’m talking about the African church, traditional Black church, Caribbean church. We all got to come together and have a family meeting and really put our minds together about how we can begin to support the single Black women in our congregation. And what would it look like for the Black women who desire to be married to a Black man, what would it look like for those congregations to cross-pollinate?

CE: There are so many ways in which the Black family represents the reunification of the emancipation promise. The first thing many emancipated, formerly enslaved Africans did in the United States in the late 1860s, is they worked hard and they scraped together pennies so they could put out articles to say: I’m looking for my mother. I’m looking for my husband. I’m looking for my daughter. Black people have been trying to get back to their families since the Africans from Angola were brought to Virginia.

Seeing Black men and Black women just being together is enlivening for people, because I think it is satiating a core trauma. And so to stand in that, to choose each other over and over again, is a resistance to white supremacy.

CE: The family reunion, the image of that Black American tradition all over the States, but especially in the South, of this return to our matching T-shirts, and we are united around these tables again with Big Momma and cousins and everybody’s got a place. Everybody’s got a chair. And even our conflict and tension can’t make it into the door. The family has been reunited.

CE: There are appetizers of the buffet that come into now. I think God’s goodness is not just reserved for the sweet by and by.

EU: This Pan-African reunification of seeing and being reconnected with loved ones, distant relatives, ancestors that were snatched during the trans-Atlantic slave trade and seeing Africans and African Americans and Caribbean siblings being reunited and experiencing restoration together, the reclamation of their ethnic identity. Knowing I am Nigerian American, but I won’t be Nigerian in glory. I will be Ibibio, my ethnic identity. I paint that picture at the end of the book, about this glorious reunification I believe we will see in glory. And I do believe it breaks forth into now. But I do believe that we will see that and we will experience that in glory.

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