I've been having this thought for quite a while and the more there is talk about intersectionality, the more the idea keeps coming up.
God is a Black woman.
If you believe in a personified God. And I'm not saying that I do, but how does that theology strike you?
While you are envisioning that, let me tell you something about my development of personal theology. It's really a bunch of nots.
God is not white; God is not black
God is not a man; God is not male; God has no gender;
God does not have a long white beard or long white hair.
God is ageless.
God does not have sex; God creates
God is energy, quite possibly energy that has never been created and can never be destroyed.
God is in me and God is in you.
God has no eyes:
God has no cares; God is apathetic, indifferent,
God is everything and nothing
God is the energy of life that sustains me and wakes me regardless of how I feel, think, or act.
God could be Love
Love is an energy that sustains life;
Love is
God is
Maybe God & Love are one
life sustaining energy..
go, go , go
where you grow
because that is where God is; that is where love is
perhaps before we are mishappen that is all there is
Pray
In 1989 Kimberlee Crenshaw, legal scholar coined the term or the theory intersectionality. I was in graduate school at UT in 1993 and no one had even mentioned this term to me. It would have been helpful since all I wrote about was race,sex/gender, and class issues. Every time I wrote a paper it was all race, sex/gender, class this, race, sex/gender, class that. I quoted Patricia Hill Collins discussing Black feminist thought and bell hooks and so many more. I had also read Merlin Stone, When God was a woman, Karl Marx, Fredrich Engels, black Afrocentric thinkers like Cheik Anta Diop, Ivan Van Sertima- They Came before Columbus. . .
I read and I wrote pages and pages and pages and I never heard the word
intersectionality.
I don't think anyone I studied with knew this word either. And they were either fascinated by the intersection of what I was writing or repelled... depending on who they were, their experiences, their social and political agendas.....
Either way, all the writing and reading was far less practical than having skills that would allow me to fix my car. I bought a 1989 Pontiac Lemans in 1993. I lived near Ottawa park and my car was either getting its window smashed or the brakes weren't working or it wouldn't start.
My father had taught me about the carburator and how to lift off the filter, flip the cap of the carburator so I could get air in it when I had flooded the engine. Of course, when I did that, the old guy in one of the apartments, would yell out the window, hey dere, you know what you are doing?
Sigh!!!
And so this is when and where I entered life-practical...on my own...
God is a black woman
After I graduated the University of Toledo, I chose not to follow my intuition and go the route to Divinity school . . .even though the bread crumbs of ideas I was picking up from articles were leading me to black women scholars working out womanist theologies.
Instead, I had decided to embody something I read in the Paula Giddings book When and Where I Enter. a history book about American Black women... Anna Julia Cooper was the person who said that. . . with a black woman the whole world enters with me.
I thought about the Black women I read about... the organizers like Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Jo Ann Robinson. I thought about the educators like Septima Clark, Mary McLeod Bethune. . I thought about the club women . . . like Mary Church Terrell and the anti-lynching journalist, Ida B. Wells. I wanted to live like them. . to stand for something meaningful ... to work for something meaningful.
Something meaningful, at a time, looked like working three or four different jobs- library...community development & community organizing---fabric store- adjunct teaching.
A little frustrated and perhaps wandering for a cause, it was not long before that I started attending the church on Collingwood. I was usually in a pew crying- hoping no one noticed. I saw my mom cry a lot in church, so I thought that was normal. It was a normal reaction to parental divorce, alienation, disconnection and financial woes.
I took the class, called building your own theology at First Unitarian Church of Toledo in the basement of the building on Collingwood. And I don't remember what I said, but I do remember feeling whatever God is... God was more than anything human beings could describe...
I think that it is conventional for people to see "God" as some reflection of the first powerful beings in their life.... you know parents. That's not everybody, though.
So what kind of power would a Black woman as God have? And would the whole of humanity really enter with Her?
It's a little sentimental and hopeful. Power is power. Anyone could use power beyond the scope of what sustains life. While it could seem that with a black woman, the whole of humanity enters, I think that words really get in the way.
I mean, geesh, people made these stupid boundaries in the first place, Ain't I a human . . . (that's a little joke related to Sojourner Truth...you're gonna have to look that one up for yourself.)
Intersectionality means that the systems of oppression have differing results or effects on different people. It is like a grid that is pressed down on a person and the way the grid squeezes you in it is particular to the grids boundaries. Those boundaries on race, sexuality, gender, class, phenotypes like skin color, hair texture, and on and on.
If people are to truly be free of the boundaries, people must envision creation that looks bigger and way more interconnected.
God is not white; God is not black
God is not a man; God is not male; God has no gender;
God does not have a long white beard or long white hair.
God is ageless.
God does not have sex; God creates
God is energy, quite possibly energy that has never been created and can never be destroyed.
God is in me and God is in you.
God has no eyes:
God has no cares; God is apathetic, indifferent,
God is everything and nothing
God is the energy of life that sustains me and wakes me regardless of how I feel, think, or act.
God could be Love
Love is an energy that sustains life;
Love is
God is
Maybe God & Love are one
life sustaining energy... and
no
thing
at
all.
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