Reverend James Henry Harris is a Distinguished Professor of Homiletics and Pastoral Theology and a research scholar in religion and humanities at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology, Virginia Union University. He also serves as chair of the theology faculty and pastor of Second Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia. He is a former president of the Academy of Homiletics and recipient of the Henry Luce Fellowship in Theology. He is the author of numerous books, including Beyond the Tyranny of the Text and Black Suffering: Silent Pain, Hidden Hope (Fortress Press, 2020). His latest book is N: My Encounter with Racism and the Forbidden Word in an American Classic, a memoir that describes and critically wonders about a graduate English class he took on Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and provides crucial insight into the CRT conundrum.
Harris and I conversed by Zoom about his book Black Suffering on September 20, 2022. We discussed his "Keep Hope Alive versus Keeping Hope Alive." Here is an edited version of that exchange.
This podcast and transcript have been edited for condensation and clarity.
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All right, here we are: Podcast 8: Understanding Black Suffering with Rev. James Henry Harris. Today, we'll be discussing "Keep Hope Alive versus Keeping Hope Alive."
Today, I thought we'd go back to Chapter 13 from Black Suffering, "Suffering and Hope." It's a powerful chapter and leads us towards solutions and hope and things we can do. Where do we start, James?
James Henry Harris: [00:05:26]
I was thinking I would start with a poem by Langston Hughes today. "Ballad of the Landlord."
.
Landlord, landlord,
My roof has sprung a leak.
Don't you 'member I told you about it
Way last week?
.
Landlord, landlord,
These steps is broken down.
When you come up yourself
It's a wonder you don't fall down.
.
Ten Bucks you say I owe you?
Ten Bucks you say is due?
Well, that's Ten Bucks more'n I'll pay you
Till you fix this house up new.
.
What? You gonna get eviction orders?
You gonna cut off my heat?
You gonna take my furniture and
Throw it in the street?
.
Um-huh! You talking high and mighty.
Talk on-till you get through.
You ain't gonna be able to say a word
If I land my fist on you.
.
Police! Police!
Come and get this man!
He's trying to ruin the government
And overturn the land!
.
Copper's whistle!
Patrol bell!
Arrest.
Precinct Station.
Iron cell.
Judge gives the Negro 90 days in county jail. That's the Langston Hughes "Ballad of the Landlord," purportedly written in 1940.
Hawkins: [00:07:58]
Excellent stuff.
Harris: [00:07:58]
I'm always excited and intrigued by Hughes. Just a great poet and writer.
Hawkins: [00:08:12]
What happens to a dream deferred? Boom!
Harris: [00:08:16]
Yeah.
Hawkins: [00:08:18]
Thank you very much. That's a good way of starting off.
I found the last chapter of your book very touching. You explaining how your Mom stood tall, if silent, against the suffering of a lifetime -- 11 kids in 24 years, a reality of avoiding welfare applications [and its humiliations], [necessary]self-reliance. At one point, you say of her that she never complained or expressed any contempt for our socioeconomic condition or for the injustices so evident throughout the land. You imply that it wasn't defeatism on her part; it was strength. Can you can you elaborate, James?
Harris: [00:09:11]
Yes. My mother was a bastion of strength. We were a family that never thought about government assistance, social welfare, and stuff like that. It was outside of our consciousness. We recognized the depth of our poverty. How poor we were. And I think that the arbiter of that had to do with schooling, and encountering theories, and other writings that suggested what poverty was. But, to some extent, the cohesiveness of our nuclear family mitigated against its suffering. It [became more] evident once my father took ill and had a heart attack. And we recognized that we were really up the creek, so to speak.
Harris: [00:11:53]
And it's almost inexplicable where the hope came from. And the fact that we were not bitter about our social condition or anything like that. And that emanates from some deep source within, and not being bitter with your surroundings, or even with yourself. I think the key here is that we were taught self-reliance to the extreme, [and] definitely not in search of any handouts or anything like that. It's a dominant perception in the culture when you say things like welfare, and and food stamps, and things like that, historically people have thought of Blacks. But we all know now, sociologically and statistically, that the largest number of people on welfare and social programs in America are not Black, but that's the narrative that is propagated.
And I think of a statement that Ronald Reagan made when he was president. A reporter asked him to talk about poverty in America. He was standing near the steps of the White House. And he looked around and said, there is no poverty in America. That is the consciousness of the powerbrokers in a very real sense.
Hawkins: [00:17:14]
I keep coming back to the John Cone question -- how can we go on in a world that God seems indifferent to? Its sufferings. Its atrocities.
Harris: [00:18:53]
No, I think you're right. I guess that early on I had bouts of disagreement with some of the renowned black theologians. James Cone being the paradigmatic Black liberation theologian in America, and probably around the world. And he's an excellent scholar. His work has been transformative and powerful and picked up and discussed around a lot of tables. His focus on liberation theology was, and continues to be, very, very important. My point is there seems to be in American education, a kind of hierarchy with academics, even in theology where practical theology historically has taken a back seat to systematic theology or philosophical theology. And, being someone who has been sort of engrossed in both areas, I would say that I am more of a practitioner than a theoretician. Or, at least, I try to combine them both, which is indeed a challenge. I mean, it's a challenge to be a pastor and a professor simultaneously. So, yes, I have historically been involved in a couple of brouhahas with the with the academic theologians. And my thinking today is, however, that they are clearly an important part of any discussion, and need to be, and often tend to generate certain areas of practice. It's a soft critique, but, at the same time, it is a critique that I do out of love, the same love I try to express toward my students and their work and so forth without hesitation.
The Black church, I would argue, is as conservative as the white evangelical church. And this, I think, is a product of Franz Fanon's notion that Black people love white people. So in some sense there's a certain parallelism that exists between the white church and the Black church in America. I know I talk about what's going on in the white church. What are the preachers saying and what are people hearing? And I think more and more that, you know, while the evangelicals would say that politics has no place in the pulpit, that issues of liberation and transformation and so forth, that these things are at most quasi-biblical, I make the exact opposite observation, and I think that the thing that goes on in the white church is absolutely the embodiment of the political, because it's a complete obfuscation and abandonment of any concepts that may have to do with what is liberationist-oriented or transformation-oriented.
And so it's like turning the argument on its head, in a sense. Those who argue that the church should not be political, that the pastor should be this and that and so forth -- I mean, in Black church, in most local areas as well in some national areas, a lot of the politicos or politicians are ministers. Senator Warnock from Georgia is a minister. Jesse Jackson was a minister. Al Sharpton, a minister. These ministers in the Black church and in Black religion [would be regarded as] social activists in the white church. For them, the minister is more of a priest, historically, shunning and staying away from those things that the white congregation, or the white church, consider to be political and liberation . You know, I think it's a way of interpreting life and interpreting the condition of existence. [Still], even in the Black church, those ministers who address these dominant social and political issues are few and far between. I think the majority of ministers, even in the Black church, are pretty traditional and conservative evangelicals.
Hawkins: [00:29:26]
I think what you're doing is great. You know, the ministerial aspect of it all at least brings a sense of practicality to our lives that's missing. And it's complicated. You know, I can see how a Black church would be conservative, because I guess you could say it goes back to plantation congregations where the huddled masses came together to protect each other.
Harris: [00:31:03]
Yeah, every day we are tasked with trying to help people get through the day. I think as a pastor, that that's paramount. As a pastor, you are really front and center, face to face with Black suffering regularly -- feeding people, helping to get people out of prison, visiting people in hospitals. All kinds of reality. That. I mean, clearly, there's a distanciation that exists between academic theology and the practice of ministry and theological concepts. It's one thing to have a doctor of medicine degree, but never had a residency in surgery. But if you want somebody to come into the O.R. and help you with a serious heart condition, it has to be somebody who has practiced this kind of thing for a while. You cannot call the professor of medicine.
Hawkins: [00:35:43]
"We" kill Nat Turner. We kill Malcolm X. We kill MLK.. We kill Black leaders who could bring us to the Promised Land of equal opportunity, where skin color does not exist and one's character and talents come to the fore. We are forced to settle for slogans that play on our needs and desperations. We get "Keep Hope Alive" versus keeping hope alive. That about right?
Harris: [00:36:18]
I think so. The murder of the people that you talked about particularly is an effort to deny and to bring about the demise of hope. Certainly, the murder of Martin and Malcolm we're very devastating, very devastating to Blacks. They were devastating to me. I was a young in 1968 when King was murdered and Malcolm murdered. And even Bobby Kennedy's murder [was devastating] because Black people had a certain love for Bobby Kennedy and for the Kennedys, even though they were a part of the monarchy in America as well and were the furthest removed from Black society and Black culture, in terms of their own materialism and money.
Harris: [00:38:40]
But that's the whole purpose of the preacher -- to try to interpret, and to try to bridge that gap of distance, to try to narrow the distance between past and present. And that's the nature of hermeneutics. But I think that a lot of us clearly recognize the value of Turner and the role that he played. It's so interesting. I was talking last night to my youngest son, who's a filmmaker, and a professor. Talking about something out of the blue. He said, "Well, Dad, I hope you know that you are really more like Malcolm, then you are like Martin." I didn't say very much about it. I just said that something about both of them. But he was saying that when he reads Black Suffering, and some of the other stuff that I've written, that it has a Malcolm X tone to it. But my own thinking is that, yes, there are elements that have the Malcolm X tone and then there's elements that have more the Martin Luther King tone.
Hawkins: [00:40:35]
Yeah. The way we ended our last meeting, you weren't talking revolution, but we sort of ended with the 2008 bank collapse and all of the nonsense that preceded it that made it inevitable. We came to the conclusion that they probably did it on purpose. The elites probably set it up personally. I think they set it up so that they intentionally undermined Obama's presidency from the beginning, and they actually wanted him to be the person in office for the collapse. I think the collapse was almost certainly planned. They knew that the bubble was going to bust sometime and they brought in Obama [to bail them out]. They helped Obama get elected by paying a lot of money into his campaigns, and, after he gets elected, they decided to totally torpedo his infrastructure and social spending plan. And so they get him to bail out the bankers. And I think we agreed that probably it would have been best if we had just allowed them to collapse, rather than listen to their stupid story about Too Big to Fail. We should have let them fail and had our revolution and got the whole goddamn thing over with. But you definitely sounded a little bit more like Malcolm in the way we ended last week.
Harris: [00:42:24]
You know, there's got to be something about somebody like Malcolm, who is self-taught. But he was so eloquent [and had] a very analytical mind. He taught himself how to read in prison and that kind of thing. And the whole prison experience. If you are able to survive, it's going to make you stronger and tougher, just surviving, and getting through. And so I have great admiration for both [Malcom and Martin]. As a matter of fact, in my own office, I have large, almost life-sized photos of both King and Malcolm X. And I think these people have to be kept alive as a part of the conversation, so that young people won't get too far removed from the things that these persons advocated and stood for.
Harris: [00:46:21]
The Obama syndrome is complex because he created this aura of being so loved, particularly in the Black community. You know, my wife has a picture of Obama on the fireplace mantel [usually] reserved for either some image of Jesus or King. Obama has joined them in Black residences and Black hearts. And I think what Obama represented was a kind of hope for the downtrodden, for people who looked like him. But Obama had many other things going for him, including the fact that his mother was white; including the fact that he was a magna summa graduate from Harvard Law School; including the fact that he was the first Black editor of the Harvard Review. So he was a poster boy for what white America could tolerate. You know, I'm also skeptical about any Black person who can be directly linked to American chattel slavery ever getting that far.
Harris: [00:49:09]
And also, I postulate, from time to time, that it would be very difficult for a dark-skinned or dark complexioned Black to move ahead as quickly as somebody like Obama did to the Senate and to then ascend to the presidency. Whites and blacks tend to love and support him. regardless. And I think part of that is their identification with him. He represents to some extent part of their identity, if only half so. But still, I have friends who have said that the Obama presidency lulled black America to sleep. That his presence pretty much shut down all Black protests. And because of his presidency, there rose groups like Black Lives Matter that had to rise up in the presence of Obama because of the sleepiness. It was like a lot of Blacks were convinced that justice had been served; equity was evident; that we were on a trajectory toward something better. But we all know that that was definitely a false conclusion, if not a false premise.
Hawkins: [00:51:41]
The Blacks moved on up to the east side, but the building was owned by Trump.
Harris: [00:51:47]
Absolutely. That's a great analogy.
Hawkins: [00:51:54]
My favorite quote from the chapter is:
To be poor is to suffer in silence or in protest. It is to suffer hunger, poor health, and ridicule from the rest of society. I know the meaning of the gratuitous amelioration of suffering, and I know the searing pain of a toothache that lasts for endless days and nights because we could neither afford to go to the dentist, nor the doctor unless it was a serious life-or-death issue.
This is simple but profound in its own way. It points to a level of suffering that most white people, other than poor people, can't fathom. Who puts off going to a dentist in an emergency and just deals with the pain?
Harris: [00:52:38]
Yeah. Well, you know, I think in poverty, you literally have no choice, particularly if you had the sight that the type of pride that my father had, you were not, you know, as I said earlier, in search of a handout. You could not afford insurance. And, this story emanates from the fact that I went to the dentist for the first time when I was 16 with a toothache. And the other thing about being poor is that if you go to the dentist with a toothache, there is no discussion about a root canal or anything like that. It's just Black and white. This tooth has to be extracted. No discussion about saving the tooth or anything like that. So that's just a reality of being poor.
Harris: [00:54:50]
But it was outside of my consciousness to do anything but to have the tooth extracted. And clearly outside of my dad's consciousness -- I mean, he didn't want to take me to the dentist in the first place. So I'm saying that this is kind of emblematic of Black life, particularly in terms of poverty and being poor. And even Obamacare helped a lot of people, but Black people complain to me all the time about how Obamacare is not really helping them. They still have to pay a certain amount of money that they don't have. And this is probably not ideal, but it is better than having no coverage at all.
Hawkins: [00:57:12]
But in that quotation can almost sum up the Black experience. The searing pain of toothache that lasts for years, and you can't afford to do anything about it, and you have to figure out some way of getting around it.
Harris: [00:57:51]
Absolutely so.
The understanding of the text by the reader often exceeds the writer's understanding. The analogy between the toothache and Black life is exactly what the book is about.
Hawkins: [00:59:01]
Some people, myself included, believe we should be striving, pressing for a turn toward Democratic Socialism, maybe similar to Germany or Australia. What are your thoughts on this?
Harris: [01:00:00]
Yeah. I think that this country is not amenable to fostering that kind of political economy because of the embedded racism that is in the consciousness of our nation and our society. There is some tolerance for democracy, even though you can see that it's crumbling and failing. But, when you couple that with the language of socialism, I think it becomes completely repulsive to the majority of American people. And they put on blinders. And the thinking is that this means we're going to be doing more for Black people and poor people, and they're already a drain on our society, and on our economy, and so forth. So I think that it has no chance of prevailing
Hawkins: [01:06:47]
People want to take democratic socialism as a term and make believe it's alien or something, but LBJ had some democratic socialism at work with the Great Society. Health, Education,Welfare. Every American needs free health, free education, and a couple thousand bucks a month to spend.
Hawkins: [01:09:43]
So you said there was a personal passage that you wanted to close with.
Harris: [01:09:52]
I'll close with a personal passage from my project for the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship that I applied for. This piece is called "The Fire This Time" or "The Gate of Hell."
Harris: [01:10:48]
On the morning of October 15th, Ambrose Augustine Jones started out from his house at 118 Pleasant Avenue just to stretch and walk a mile or so. It was the way he would clear his mind and relax because he had lost his job when the Ford plant moved to Myanmar. It had been 13 months of depending on the newly subsidized food bank on the edge of downtown Richmond. That particular day as he got to the corner halfway between his house and the elementary school, he realized that he was being followed by two black men in a pickup truck. The pickup truck itself was black with red stripes and had a customized sport package with 22 inch spinners. Ambrose, without turning his head, could feel the truck creeping slowly behind him. He kept up his face, his pace, walking and listening to rap music through his earbuds. It was his ritual designed to help. Mediate the nagging pain in his lower back. He had suffered from sciatica and a high school Achilles injury from playing football. He had been knocked unconscious by a defensive lineman as he tried to throw a long pass, which was intercepted. It was the last home game of his senior year. The school was new, but the curriculum teachers and students were the same, mainly black and poor.
On that day, Ambrose was distracted, but still could finally hear the loud, boisterous music coming from the creeping truck. Then, for the first time, he could tell it was country and bluegrass music by Charley Pride and the Dixie Chicks and Willie Nelson. He was in his zone. And not paying much attention at first.
"Hey, n-word," a voice yelled, "Ain't you a long ways from home?" Ambrose kept walking, looking straight ahead. He never said a [?] word. "Shine, you don't hear us talking to you. Are you deaf?"
"Y'all go on now. I live just across the way."
"This is my neighborhood. You think you're better than us? We're going to teach you a lesson for walking in places you don't belong."
With that. Two burly black guys jumped out of the truck and knocked him to the ground. One of them, the one chewing tobacco, kicked him in the face and then spat on him. He was bleeding and yelling for help. Spit and tobacco juice slathered his face. An old grey haired white woman heard his struggle, ran out of her sprawling Cape Cod house. With a sky blue picket fence. I tried to help him to his feet. But he was too heavy. Ambrose had grown to be six feet three inches tall and weighed 240 pounds. He was the high school quarterback whose pro football ambitions died the same day.
He was knocked unconscious and remained in a coma at the Medical College of Virginia. So as the white lady saw him stretched supine on the pavement, she called the police and the fire department. They came to the scene but quickly left without ever writing a report or taking a statement from her. Ambrose decided that day after his beat down by two Black vigilantes acting like the police. We had reached him with the barrel of a pistol when he was 15 that he would never be unprepared to defend himself. The George Floyd murder and his own brush with death at the hands of two Black brothers made him angry and cold. Before that day of being attached or being Black while walking, Ambrose was almost healed from his past physical abuse and trauma. He spent evenings always helping kids and taking groceries to the elderly. At first it was just a flash of memory, but then the flashbacks, like crystal clearness, came back into focus. There were the same police officers that tortured him as a teen. You could see their faces like ghost of the past, torturing him all over again.
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