Antiracist Preaching: Homiletical Strategies for Undermining Racism in Worship

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Notes

“Yep …. Inside each and every one of us is one true authentic swing …. Somethin’ we was born with …. Somethin’ that's ours and ours alone …. Somethin’ that can't be taught to ya or learned …. Somethin’ that got to be remembered …. Over time the world can rob us of that swing …. It get buried inside us under all our wouldas and couldas and shouldas …. Some folk even forget what their swing was like.” From The Legend of Bagger Vance, dir. Robert Redford, 120 minutes, Paramount, 2000, DVD.

D. Marvin Jones, Race, Sex, and Suspicion: The Myth of the Black Male (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 35–36.

Linda Martin Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), Kindle Edition, 221.

Charles L. Campbell, The Word before the Powers: An Ethic of Preaching (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 107.

Justo L. González, “A Hispanic Perspective: By the Rivers of Babylon,” in Preaching Justice: Ethnic and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Christine Marie Smith (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1998), 93.

Conscientization is the process by which a person's experiences lead him or her to recognize the difference between the nature of things and cultural differences, to unmask unjust myths and to explore alternative moral decisions. Ada Maria Isasi Diaz, En la Lucha [In the Struggle] (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 160–61.

Christine Marie Smith, ed., Preaching Justice: Ethnic and Cultural Perspectives (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1998), 3.

“The decision to examine exactly who our ancestors, all of them, have been—with each other and with everyone else … is an accounting of the debts and assets we have inherited, and acknowledging the precise nature of that inheritance is an act of spiritual and political integrity.” Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories: History, Culture, and the Politics of Integrity (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1998), 75.

Martin Brokenleg, That the People May Live, ed. Christine Marie Smith (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1998), 30.

Eunjoo Mary Kim, Preaching in an Age of Globalization (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 70–71.

Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossings Press, 2007), 132.

Eric H. F. Law, The Word at the Crossings (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2004), 119–20.

See, as an example, Mary Alice Mulligan and Ronald J. Allen, Make the Word Come Alive (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2005), 114.

Jennifer Harvey, Whiteness and Morality (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2007), 46.

Theresa Fry Brown, An African American Woman's Perspective: Renovating Sorrow's Kitchen, ed. Christine Marie Smith (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1998), 55.

González, “A Hispanic Perspective,” 83.

Traci C. West, Disruptive Christian Ethics (Louisville, KY: Westminster, 2006), 139.

González, “A Hispanic Perspective,” 95.

Vincent Harding, personal communication, Wildgoose Festival, Shakori Hills, NC, June 2012.

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Suzanne Wenonah Duchesne

Suzanne Wenonah Duchesne, a PhD candidate in Liturgical Studies at Drew Theological School and an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church, serves as adjunct professor at Moravian Theological Seminary. This article is based on research for her dissertation, which is focused on antiracist preaching.