Read Matthew Rasure’s review of Divinity, Diversity, Dialougue…Listening and Learning Our Way To the Beloved Community.
No book stands alone, and this is particularly true of these two new volumes by Cheryl Harris, which have emerged at a time of great creativity in the genre that may be characterized in broadest strokes under the category of anti-racist literature. As such, Harris’s prescriptive “how to” work stands alongside such notable recent titles as: Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies published in 2017; Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s Revolution of Values: Reclaiming Public Faith for the Common Good published in 2019; Tiffany Jewell’s This Book is Anti-Racist: 20 Lessons on How to Wake Up, Take Action, and Do the Work published in 2020; and Zach Norris’s We Keep Us Safe: Building Secure, Just, and Inclusive Communities also published in 2020.
Divinity Diversity Dialogue: Listening and Learning our Way to the Beloved Community is part of a larger intellectual, social, and moral movement presenting both sensitive analysis for understanding where we are as a society as well as actionable steps for progressing beyond where we are toward our collective liberation. Harris has identified four objectives in the work: 1. To raise awareness of racist systems operative in our lives (or as she more elegantly puts it “to unblind eyes that no longer see.”) 2. To debunk the myth that an eracist future is not possible in our lifetimes. 3. To inspire those who deny that racism exists to search their hearts. And 4. To learn to love one another and to love learning about one another. Harris’s work is part of a larger vibrant genre, but the work is far from generic. Harris consciously and unapologetically breaks from these aforementioned peers and many others by refusing to adopt the nomenclature of “antiracist.” Divinity Diversity Dialogue sits, then, at a self-reflective vanguard of the broader antiracist camp and its literature, redefining the contours of progress and offering an intentionally broad and inclusive path forward. As this is an outlier work offered by a nimble and seasoned mind, it is constructive to bring Harris’s work into conversation with the work of another capable conscientious objector to antiracist orthodoxy, John McWhorter. For the purposes of this brief review, I would like to bring one McWhorter’s ideas into conversation with Harris’s.
In a seminal 2015 article titled “Antiracism, our Flawed New Religion,” and in several works since, McWhorter has laid out an argument for and raised alarm about the decidedly religious character of the movement to dismantle institutional racism in the United States. McWhorter writes wryly: The call for people to soberly “acknowledge” their White Privilege as a self-standing, totemic act is based on the same justification as acknowledging one’s fundamental sinfulness is as a Christian. One is born marked by original sin; to be white is to be born with the stain of unearned privilege.
The proper response to original sin is to embrace the teachings of Jesus, although one will remain always a sinner nevertheless. The proper response to White Privilege is to embrace the teachings of—[Ta-Nehesi Coates] or substitute others—with the understanding that you will always harbor the Privilege
nevertheless. McWhorter further writes: Antiracism parallels religion also in a proselytizing impulse. Key to being an Antiracist is a sense that there is always a flock of unconverted heathen “out there,” … One is blessed with, as it were, the Good News in being someone who “gets it,” complete with the Acknowledging. And continuing on: Finally, Antiracism is all about a Judgment Day, in a sense equally mesmerizing and mythical. Antiracist scripture includes a ritual reference to, as it were, the Great Day when America “owns up to” or “comes to terms with” structural racism—note that “acknowledge” is a term just as appropriate—and finally, well, fixes it somehow.
The purpose of these brief and out-of-context quotations is to illustrate WcWhorter’s profound discomfort at the easy answers both of religion and of the antiracism movement as it taps into religious elements and sentimentalities. There is no enduring “admit, believe, confess” solution, either in religion or in dismantling racist systems. To this, Cheryl Harris figuratively shouts: Hallelujah! To address the disease of racism facing our society we want medicine, we want a surgeon, we want a vaccine, but these procedural solutions do not exist. Divinity Diversity Dialogue shines light on the folly of looking for mechanical or medical interventions to be our hope.
Rather, this work begins with a commitment to lead a disciplined life in open dialogue with others. The broader movement and society at-large craves medical-esque or philosophical interventions to save us from ourselves, but Harris’s prophetic voice offers a dose of that age-old prescription none of us ever wants to hear from our doctors: exercise, diet, and discipline. The exercise of listening more than we speak, the diet of taking into ourselves the best spirits of our interlocutors, and the discipline of suspending assumptions, these are the hard tasks modeled in Divinity Diversity Dialogue. Conversion, confession, and self-flagellation are cheap religious tricks, but the exercise, diet, and discipline of the dialogue which Harris models are the building blocks
of our collective liberation.
On this, mutatis mutandis, McWhorter and Harris would likely agree. However, the perspectives of these two conscientious objectors to the antiracism movement certainly diverge on the role of religious faith broadly, and particularly the Christian faith, in the building up of a better and more inclusive future.
To this point I have situated Divinity Diversity Dialogue among its contemporaries and peers in its broader genre and established its position of conscientious objection to the trappings of the antiracist genre. I have brought Harris’s work into dialogue with McWhorter, with illuminating contrasts and surprising points of commonality. And I close now with a brief critique of what I perceive to be the most underexplored or underdeveloped aspect of Harris’s work, namely, the “Beloved Community.” I know … it’s a cheap shot to take a swipe at the title! The essence of my critique is that the “Beloved Community” remains throughout the work largely undefined. Harris offers the following explication of the concept on p. 6: “The beloved community contains no others, simply all of us, living with and among one another. Our ability to listen, consider, and respond as the vast potential to close the racial divide between people and foster the beloved community.” The eloquence and poetry of this description notwithstanding, this is, at least in my reading of Harris’s work, the extent to which the idea is developed explicitly. The concept of the “beloved community” was, of course, developed by Josiah Royce in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and it took on layers of meaning in various works of Dr. King, often used as a gently coded cipher for the absence of poverty, hunger, and hate. My own limited mind is left agog staring at the gaping chasm between the dialogue to which Harris invites her readers and the
manifesting of this lofty vision of society. Furthermore, my more cynical side wonders whether the broader notion of “Beloved Community” envision an ethical and ideological homogeneity our multicultural, multi-ethnic world driven by a globalized economy will ever be able to realize.
This small idiosyncratic critique is but a drop of water in vat of richest wine. Buy a copy of Divinity Diversity Dialogue. Read, mark, and inwardly digest it. And begin your disciplined journey into dialogue, joining Harris in this work of incomparable importance.
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