“Currently enthralled by the suggestion that black people operate as the opposite of a Sacrament in the white supremacist imagination.
Whereas sacraments are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, we operate basically as outward and visible signs of systemic, brutal racialization.
I’m many ways, we function as the undead from memory the majority actively suppresses."
Tweets by @BroderickGreer on 4/16/2018
I’ve spent much of the afternoon pondering a Broderick’s suggestion that Black people—and I think more specifically, Black bodies—are anti-sacramental in the white imagination. Much to the chagrin of my boss, who caught me staring off into space. It is, to use Broderick’s word, an enthralling thought. And his suggestion came just after I listened to an episode of The Liturgists Podcast that played with the idea of sacramentality beyond the 7 recognized sacraments.
I think the lengths we can run with this idea depend largely on what kind of sacramental theology we adopt. If we take a shallow (tipping my hand here, but whatever), almost Zwinglian understanding of the sacrament as something that reminds or references (essentially a semiotic sacramental theology), then I think this idea of the Black body as anti-sacrament really vibes well. If the Sacrament (and here I’m focusing on the Host, as the analog to the body) reminds us of a profoundly affirming truth / grace/ spiritual reality, then the Black body in the white imagination reminds the white man of a profoundly disturbing history / incrimination / moral bankruptcy. As much as I chafe at Zwingli’s understanding of what a sacrament is, I love what happens here when we put it in conversation with race.
But I wonder what happens when we consider this suggestion from the vantage point of a “deeper” (more catholic?) sacramental theology. If the Sacrament is not only a visible sign, but a tangible channel/vehicle of grace, what does it mean to put the Black body in contradistinction to it? The Black body doesn’t just remind the white man of his crimes, it re-members, re-enacts, re-embodies those crimes. Just as we participate (through time) in the Cross in our encounter with the Eucharist, the white man participates (through time) in the crimes of his ancestors in his encounter with embodied Blackness.
This perspective sends out a lot more vibrations in my view. Moving beyond a semiotic view of things frees us to go farther. Don’t get me wrong; I love semiotics. But when there is language of sacramentality that is far richer in weight and poetics, I don’t know why we would stop at “outward and visible sign.”
My concern in pursuing this line of thought is the way it lends itself to centering the white subject. Like it or not our sacramental theology often boils down to the experience of the Divine *by the human subject*. So I’m a bit cautious to slot the white man into the place of the human. There is a way to navigate around this, by relying on a theocentric or (even better) explicitly christocentric sacramentality. But that takes intentionality that I don’t trust ~*The Discourse*~ to abide by.