Rethinking Black Rage in and with James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power

Abstract

By exploring how Cone employs and emulates Black literary sources, this article argues that his theological writing can be understood as often translating and thereby making explicit the significance of the inner, emotional lives of Black folks, particularly Black rage, into Black theological thought. The argument, in other words, is that Cone’s writing is an ethical performance of rage and a literary process of reforming his rage. His performance of rage is ethical in that it is morally motivated by injustice and indifference. It is not a performance for its own sake or to simply blow off steam. The performance takes a literary form and becomes the means through which his rage is reformed. The aim of this article demonstrates how his theological writing copes with and transforms rage into ethical discourse.

“For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake”—Frederick Douglass.

(Douglass 1996, p. 118)

“The sin of American theology is that it has spoken without passion”—James Cone.

(J. H. Cone 1990, p. 18)

1. Introduction

Resigning from the pastorate to join the emerging social movement in Ferguson, MO six days after the police shooting of Michael Brown in August 2014, Rev. Osagyefo Sekou1 emerged as a distinctive voice among clergy activists. In an interview with The Chicago Reporter about the movement in Ferguson, he declared, “This ain’t your daddy’s civil rights movement. It’s not going to be black people marching in suits and cuff links. It’s going to be rageful. It’s going to be angry. It has tattoos. It’s queer. It’s primarily women-led. It’s unreligious” (Han 2015). Sekou draws our attention to the rapidly changing character of, what was then called, a new civil rights movement. This movement called into question a wide range of political norms related to leadership, respectability, sexuality, gender, religion, and public display of emotions.

Specifically, Sekou’s claim that this new movement is “unreligious” and “rageful” is the place at which this article seeks to enter and expand. In contrast to how the Civil Rights Movement is commonly characterized (or caricatured) as pious and respectable, the “unreligious” character of the new Ferguson movement should be underscored.2 In fact, as the nascent Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum in Ferguson, it occasioned many opportunities to (re)consider the limitations and possibilities of religion in responding to social unrest in general and enraged Black citizens in particular.

It is not surprising to find religion and rage working against each other. In Ferguson, Black pastors and ministers were found to be quelling rage while angry protesters pulled away from them and their politics. The reemergence and prominence of a serious effort in Ferguson to trouble the role of religion amid social protest created opportunities to harness rage in new liberatory ways. Those efforts were met with attempts to suffocate the inception and promise of that rage. Whether by a Black clergy person or white politician, enraged protestors were often told to “cool off”, since emotions are said to cloud reason. But what if our emotions contain reasons of their own?3 What if our emotions are more likely to lead us to act justly, instead of over-relying on dispassionate reasoning or calculus that often leads us to unjust inaction? What is striking is that Sekou who “left the pulpit for the streets of Ferguson” (Han 2015), describes himself as “Reverend” despite engaging in what he calls “unreligious” and rageful protest.

This kind of rage has long been part of Black radicalism in the United States. Many Black writers across generations from David Walker to Fredrick Douglass to Lorraine Hansberry to James Baldwin to Alice Walker have expressed in their writings a rage that is deeply critical of religion, even to the point of rejection. James Cone, the founder of modern Black liberation theology as an academic discipline, was influenced by this literary tradition of Black writers. Cone began his writing career in the 1960s during paradigmatic moments of resistance by Black people and shared in the simmering rage of this defining historical moment. Two years after completing his doctorate and beginning teaching at Adrian College outside of Detroit in 1966, he grew frustrated with the white academic discipline of theology because it “seemed irrelevant to black life and suffering” (J. H. Cone 1986, p. 43). “So I quit reading it”, Cone concluded, “and devoted myself to reading secular writers, mainly blacks, who at least did not use religion to cover up human suffering” (ibid.). That these writers, for Cone, were “secular” and “Black” should not be overlooked.4 Having immersed himself in this new and rapidly growing body of Black literature would later have a profound impact on the form and content of his thought. Such impact can be easily seen in the title of his first book, Black Theology and Black Power (BTBP), in 1969, the year after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination.

“Black Theology” and “Black Power” represent the religious and the secular for Cone, respectively. BTBP is Cone’s theological answer to the Black Power movement. His approach fuses Christianity [the religious] with Black Power [the secular]. But in order for this fusion to be made possible, Cone had to reevaluate and reconceptualize the theology of Christianity—the whiteness of Christian theology. At this moment, we would expect for Cone to reach for Black Christian sources with which to critique white Christian theology and to construct his new Black theology based upon those Black Christian sources in order to respond to Black Power. He does not, however, take this seemingly obvious approach. There are many reasons that could explain taking the less obvious course, from his lack of exposure to Black religious sources (J. H. Cone 1997, p. xi) to being compelled by Malcolm X’s critique of Christianity as “the white man’s religion”. Whatever the case might be, it is clear that Cone felt something in the radical politics of Black Power and Black “secular” writers of the era that he did not feel from the silence or status-quo responses Black churches and clergy were offering by 1968.

For Cone, Black Power represented unmitigated, impassioned truth-telling by Black folks about the systemic causes and effects of their oppression, and about white European Christians in America (and in Africa) who have enabled this oppression. Black Power expressed not merely what was generally unexpressed but also what was actively suppressed by a theological and spiritual anti-blackness that structures Europeanized Christianity in the United States, known also as white Christian nationalism. As he was developing his own theological voice in a new “Black” mood, what Cone found in Black Power was a clear-eyed, full-throated articulation of rage that refused to be constrained by white (Christian) norms, logics, and practices. He also found in Black Power a call issued by the then LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), one of the movement’s prominent literary voices, to the Black artist to counter the effects of white nationalism by “aiding in the destruction of America as he knows it”.5 Baraka argued that Black artists of his generation had a duty to “report and reflect the nature of society” with precision and “exactness”. Such precise renderings would inspire, “move”, and embolden the Black community while simultaneously putting white nationalists on notice. Cone understood Baraka’s call to the Black artist to be for “all aspiring black intellectuals” (J. H. Cone 1997, p. 3) and increasingly saw himself as part of this group. Like others of his generation, Cone had been “moved by the exactness of [the Black artist’s] rendering” of society. Black Theology and Black Power, then, is an attempt to answer Baraka.6 Cone’s first book seeks to “move” his readers with its exactness like many Black literary writers had “moved” him. What deepens Cone’s connection to this literary tradition is his desire to write theology not only in a new form that bears the imprint of this tradition, but also with the same emotions—particularly rage—that Black writers like Baldwin and Baraka used to write novels, plays, essays and poetry.

By exploring how Cone employs and emulates Black literary sources, this article argues that his theological writing can be understood as often translating and thereby making explicit the significance of the inner, emotional lives of Black folks, particularly Black rage, into Black theological thought. The argument, in other words, is that Cone’s writing is an ethical performance of rage and a literary process of reforming his rage. His performance of rage is ethical in that it is morally motivated by injustice and indifference. It is not a performance for its own sake or to simply blow off steam. The performance takes a literary form and becomes the means through which his rage is reformed. The aim of this article demonstrates how his theological writing copes with and transforms rage into ethical discourse. Cone’s ability to transform this rage solidified the connection between his work and the broader Black literary tradition of what Lawrence Jackson calls, “the indignant generation”, that “group [of mid-twentieth century Black writers influenced by Richard Wright] who theoretically transformed their indignation at Jim Crow to manufacture a strata of artworks that secured and pronounced a new era of psychological freedom for African Americans” (Jackson 2011, p. 3). Like many of those writers, Cone’s theoretical/theological transformation of indignation is interested in creating “artworks” not only of “psychological freedom”, but also of political freedom and spiritual freedom.

Black Theology and Black Power represents Cone’s first artwork, a rageful portrait of the birthing and development of Black liberation theology. Some of the crucial sources and materials for his Black theological paintings come out of not only the oppressed social, political, and economic conditions of Black folks, but also their irrepressible emotional lives. In effect, Cone’s Black theology attempts to reveal the theological soul of Black folks, a deep wrestling with the presence and absence of God in the midst of their oppression and the theological legacy of white supremacy that has justified and rendered such oppression as inconsequential, especially to God. Affect, then, forms the substructure of his theological thought. Specifically, in acknowledging the ways in which Cone invokes and refracts the rage of “the indignant generation”, this article shows that rage is generative for and constitutive of Black theological thought.

2. Rage in Cone

2.1. The Significance of Rage: Emotional and Ethical

Many scholars have commented on the anger and the overall passion that suffuse Cone’s writings. Social ethicist Gary Dorrien writes, “Cone’s early version of the liberationist alternative spoke in a voice of rage” (Dorrien 2001, p. 164). In the foreword to the 1986 edition of A Black Theology of Liberation, Paulo Freire noted that it is “a passionate book, passionately written”.7 These kinds of cursory observations tempt the reader into believing that Cone’s anger is an addendum to his theological thought because there is not a sustained attempt to think through the presence and role of rage in the formation of his theology.8 This has the unintended, interpretive effect of understanding rage to be additive, instead of constitutive to his theological thought. An additive interpretation of rage implies that it is dispensable to the interpretation process. A constitutive interpretation, however, accounts for the indispensability of rage for interpreting Cone. That is to say, Cone’s theology cannot be fully understood without accounting for the rage that forms and informs his theological thinking. Here, I offer a constitutive interpretation, which is also a generative interpretation precisely because it recognizes the way in which rage generates and motivates his theology. Such an interpretation as offered by this essay begins where Cone begins his massive intellectual project.

In the introduction of Black Theology and Black Power, the words “anger” and “angry” appear for a combined four times, each word twice.9 Yet, the introduction is slightly more than three pages. Were we to include quotations, the count would increase to six. Other related terms like “emotion(al)”, “emotionally”, and “feeling(s)” occur seven times including citations. When combined, these terms occur twelve times, which is significant for such a short chapter. The conceptual terrain that these terms light up charts a pathway into the affective substructure of Cone’s thought. While these luminous terms do not light up everything, they represent affective signposts inside the deep structure of his thinking. The most significant signpost is what Cone says explicitly about his motivation for writing BTBP, as is evident in the following passage:

This work, then, is written with a definite attitude, the attitude of an angry black man, disgusted with oppression of black people in America and with the scholarly demand to be ‘objective’ about it. Too many people have died, and too many are on the edge of death. In fairness to my understanding of the truth, I cannot allow myself to engage in a dispassionate, non-committed debate on the status of the black-white relations in America by assessing the pro and con of Black Power. The scholarly demand for this kind of ‘objectivity’ has come to mean being uninvolved or not taking any sides.

(J. H. Cone 1997, p. 2)

There are two significant features of the affective substructure suggested by this passage: the emotional and the ethical. Both are coordinated with concepts, such as anger, attitude, authority, anti-objectivity, and anti-neutrality. The emotional/impassioned and the ethical are co-constitutive. One is entailed in the other. They are separated for heuristic purposes.

2.2. Anger’s Appearance, Attitude and Anti-Objectivist Objectivity

2.2.1. Anger: Its Appearance and Role

Anger is the place from which Cone writes. It orients his head, heart and hand. Before Cone began writing Black Theology and Black Power, his anger had been simmering. In 1968, it began to boil while witnessing an unconscionable number of Black people whose lives had been taken away by police brutality and unjust wars abroad (and domestic); the lives denied by unmitigated state power (e.g., surveillance, false arrests, the new state apparatus known as the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program); and the lives diminished by racial inequalities (e.g., poverty, unaffordable housing, employment discrimination). There was much—too much—about which to be angry. That anger had overtaken not only Cone, but also many Black citizens across the nation. With each passing year in the 1960s, one riot had become worse than the previous one from 1965 in Watts to 1967 in Newark and Detroit. The country once again exploded almost a year later in the Spring of 1968 at the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His simmer having now reached a boiling point, Cone responded, saying:

By the summer of [1968], I had so much anger pent up in me that I had to let it out or be destroyed by it. The cause of my anger was not merely my reaction to the murder of Martin King. Neither was it due simply to the death of Malcolm X or the killing of so many blacks in the cities. My anger stretched back to the slave ships, the auction block, and the lynchings. But even more important were my personal encounters with racism in Bearden, Little Rock, Evanston, and Adrian.

(J. H. Cone 1986, pp. 46–47)

Writing through his anger was Cone choosing not to be destroyed by it. The refusal to be destroyed by anger gave birth to Black theology, a new discipline, which testifies to the fact that anger does not always destroy. Anger also creates new life. “The writing of Black Theology and Black Power”, Cone notes, “was also a conversion experience. It was like experiencing the death of white theology and being born again into the theology of the black experience” (ibid., p. 48). Anger, then, created new life not only in the world of Cone—the arrival of Black theology into the world—but also in the person of Cone—the transformation of a theologian who happens to be Black into a Black theologian (J. H. Cone 1999, p. 251).

The power of rage enabled Cone to write a paradigm-shifting book in five weeks. He was possessed by rage. And it completely transformed him into a “Black” theologian. For Cone, such power is otherworldly. When one avails oneself of rage, one is also availing oneself of its spiritual powers. As Cone himself explained, “The spirit of another invades one’s being and compels one to tell the truth. That was something of what I felt in writing Black Theology and Black Power… the divine Spirit, who I believed was compelling me to write” (J. H. Cone 1986, p. 52). The energies of rage could be said to have invaded the arms, hands, and fingers of Cone. They spoke what refused to be spoken. Cone, thus, became a willing vessel so that the truth with which rage speaks could be heard over the deafening silence of white theology. In Christian theological terms, one could say that Cone was superintended by the Holy Spirit during the writing of Black Theology and Black Power. That is to say, God guided the enraged pen of Cone for God’s own liberatory purposes. In this sense, the God of the oppressed liberates the rage of the oppressed.

In contrast to ancient Greek conceptions of rage in heroic characters who largely, according to Peter Sloterdijk, “lack reflective inwardness, intimate conversations with themselves, and the ability to make conscientious attempts to control their affects” (Sloterdijk 2010, p. 10), the spirit of Black rage that possessed the human host of Cone did not render him reckless or unrestrained. Instead, Cone maintained custody over his own desires, memory and body while also availing himself of the spirit’s demands. Describing this formative experience, he writes: “[W]hen I thought about the long history of black suffering and the long silence of white theologians in its regard, I could not always control my pen or tongue. I did not feel that I should in any way be accountable to white theologians or their cultural etiquette” (J. H. Cone 1990, p. xv).

Having been born again and possessed by the spirit of Black rage, Cone had broken free from the chains of his white theological education that were holding him back. Raphael Warnock explains that, “What World War I did for [Karl] Barth, the Detroit Riots and the Civil Rights Movement did for [Cone]”.10 These events fueled his anger, which was already bubbling slightly above the surface, empowering it to speak with his own theological voice. The anger of Cone, however, could not be spoken principally through European theological modalities, and if for no other reason, as Willie James Jennings argues, “Christianity in the Western world lives and moves within a diseased social imagination” (Jennings 2010, p. 6). His anger exceeded the boundaries of white theological reasoning strategies as well as academic writing practices. In order for his anger to speak in a new theological voice with affective and moral integrity, Cone needed to reject the diseased dominative terms of his white theological training and white theology itself.

2.2.2. Anger as Attitude

Cone’s anger was then forced to build a new intellectual home in which to dwell and from which to speak anew. This new home would become a new body of knowledge and academic field of study called “Black theology”. The affective materials through which he chose to build it is what Cone calls a “definite attitude” (J. H. Cone 1997, p. 2). That attitude represents a particular set of deep intellectual, affective, political, and moral sensibilities. As Cone writes at the beginning of BTBP, “This work, then, is written with a definite attitude, attitude of an angry black man, disgusted with the oppression of black people in America and with the scholarly demand to be ‘objective’ about it” (ibid.). This “definite attitude” is what I take to be the first Baldwinian resonance (before his first explicit reference to Baldwin) in Cone’s entire corpus. In Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin’s first collection of essays written fourteen years prior to Black Theology and Black Power, he states:

I know, in any case, that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this means that in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage. At the same time I had no other heritage which I could possibly hope to use–I had certainly been unfitted for the jungle or the tribe. I would have to appropriate these white centuries, I would have to make them mine–I would have to accept my special attitude, my special place in this scheme–otherwise I would have no place in any scheme.

(Baldwin 1998, pp. 7–8)

Cone’s “definite attitude” has an uncanny resemblance to Baldwin’s “special attitude”. The latter (Baldwin’s “special attitude”) comprises of a distinctive or special African (American) inflected affect, perspective, heritage, role, and deep sense of self within at least one “scheme” that is organized by modern European concepts of “race” or, more precisely, “racecraft” (See Fields and Fields 2010). This special attitude is what Baldwin himself possesses as an African American and brings particularly to European literature, music, art, history, culture, and religion. In this sense, Baldwin’s “special attitude” can be understood to inform the meaning of Cone’s “definite attitude”.11 In fact, just as Baldwin “brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude”, Cone later tells his reader that his first book “attempts to bring to theology a special attitude permeated with black consciousness” (J. H. Cone 1997, p. 32). Here, later in BTBP, Cone replaces “definite attitude” with Baldwin’s exact phrase, “special attitude”. Although Cone does not explicitly cite Baldwin in this passage, the striking Baldwinian resonance seems hard to deny.12

What’s more, Cone’s special/definite attitude, significantly influenced by Black Power, is “permeated with black consciousness”, not unlike Du Bois’s “double consciousness”. This attitude signals a special affect, perspective, insight, and consciousness. Having such an attitude enables him to develop a different kind of critical sensibilities that are more rooted in his particular Black experiences, traditions, and faith while being able to strategically occupy and transgress European epistemes. Although neither Cone nor Baldwin nor their ancestors had chosen to be “a kind of bastard of the West”, they have found themselves having been born in the West. This is precisely why Cone, like Baldwin, is an “interloper”, one who can be in the white world, but not of the world. As interloper, Cone’s attitude provides ways of being able to identify, discern, and attempt ways of being in and not of this world, especially as it was constituted during the 1960s. His attitude, not entirely unlike Baldwin’s, is angry but not uninformed, angry with what it really knows about what’s wrong with the worlds made (through massive amounts of destruction wrought) by Europeans colonizing the planet and what it means to reckon with heightened moral and spiritual sensitivities that emerge because of what is now known. As Audre Lorde suggests, “anger is loaded with information and energy” (Lorde 1984, p. 127). Broadly speaking, Cone’s own special/definite/angry attitude positions him to be an interloper of European theology similar to how Baldwin is of European literature. That attitude offered Cone a more critical method for interpreting European theologies, including their American varieties, as well as a (self-)critical method for finding his own theological voice. As an interloper, Cone is able to more critically inhabit European theological discourses while radically calling into question one of its most misguided epistemic preoccupations with “objectivity”.

2.2.3. Anger as Anti-Objectivist Objectivity

For Cone, “objectivity” must be placed in the crosshairs of Black rage. “The scholarly demand to be objective” generally requires the scholar to be detached from the world around them with morally disinterested scholarly methods. As we might recall, however, Cone argues:

Too many people have died, and too many are on the edge of death. In fairness to my understanding of the truth, I cannot allow myself to engage in a dispassionate, non-committed debate on the status of the black-white relations in America by assessing the pro and con of Black Power. The scholarly demand for this kind of ‘objectivity’ has come to mean being uninvolved or not taking any sides.

(J. H. Cone 1997, p. 2)

From the beginning, Cone’s rage alerts him to the inherent dangers of white theological methods that demand “objectivity” that it is more akin to “objectivism”.13 For Cone, to be objective, from the white scholarly view, is to be dispassionate, disinterested, and disengaged. On this view, emotions, unlike reason, are generally regarded as weaker, insufficient, or invalid grounds for determining what’s objective or the truth. This kind of “objectivity” inherently grants ultimate epistemic authority not merely to “reason” for it is assumed to be a stronger and more stable ground, but also to whoever can lay claim to that reason.14 Cone, however, finds this white scholarly approach to Christian theology to be deeply troubling because, at the most fundamental level, it is morally indifferent to the suffering and death of Black people, undoubtedly, for its own “reason”.

He is also troubled by how white theologians use “objectivity” to mystify both their obvious human involvement as well as the (racial) particularity of their whiteness in their production of theological discourse. White theological discourse conceals its own white hands while deifying them at the same time, thereby framing its own approach to be the proper, superior, godly or “God’s” way to think theologically. That approach is a powerful methodological sleight of hand. Cone demystifies this sleight of hand with much emphasis and plain speech this way:

Although God is the intended subject of theology, God does not do theology. Human beings do theology. The importance of this point cannot be emphasized too strongly because there are white theologians (as well as others greatly influenced by their definitions of theology) who still claim an objectivity regarding theological discourse, which they consider vastly superior to the subjective, interest-laden procedures of black and other liberation theologians.15

Cone’s rage exposes the ways in which white theology masquerades as objective and value-neutral, thereby concealing its own hidden, subjective interests, and passions. Cone’s impassioned meta-philosophical analysis and criticism are not just evident in the aforementioned passage, but also across his entire corpus. One common way of characterizing Cone’s new theology and the passion with which he gave deep articulation to it can be usefully summarized by Cecil Cone, theologian and one of the fiercest critics and brother of James: “Cone’s Black Theology is threatening to many white people. Proceeding in a rational, objective manner, Cone develops his Black Theology in such a way that the sound and tone of his work becomes that of an angry black militant, not only chiding his people for their ‘hang-ups on white ways’ but unleashing the full depth of his anger against white men and their structures in society” (C. W. Cone 2003, p. 81).

Beyond the fact that Cecil Cone is James Cone’s brother and his earliest critic, Cecil Cone’s causal observation is important for at least four reasons. First, it reveals the extent of James Cone’s anger against white power structures and those, including some African Americans, who sustain them. Second, Cecil Cone, unlike most commentators on the work of James Cone, recognizes the significance of “the sound and tone” of Cone’s writings. However, Cecil Cone does not reflect on the significance of his sound and tone because, like most commentators, he immediately focuses on the content of Cone’s thoughts. Third, it is worth noting that Cecil Cone does not seem to see a problem with claiming James Cone’s theology as “proceeding in a rational, objective manner” alongside the claim that “the sound and tone” of his theology is that of “an angry black militant”. On the one hand, Cecil Cone rightly recognizes that one can be rational and objective as well as angry, Black, and militant at the same time. Fourth, on the other hand, Cecil Cone seems to underappreciate the ways that James Cone’s “objective manner” needs to be distinguished from an “objectivist”.16 On my view, this would suggest that James Cone’s anger is not against “objectivity” altogether but rather “objectivism”.

In this sense, we should understand that Cone’s anger is indeed objective. It possesses its own kind of objectivity, an anti-objectivist objectivity. Anti-objectivist objectivity is not to suggest that his anger is against all objectivity. It is against particular forms of objectivity that refuses to come to terms epistemically with the existential and material conditions under which ordinary Black people live their lives as well as with the fact that “too many people have died, and too many are on the edge of death”. The “anti-objectivist objectivity” of Cone’s anger can be generally described as a kind of moral objectivity that is spiritually rooted.17 What makes his anger morally objective is that it is based upon certain moral norms that we, human beings, cannot help but share in order to live peacefully together on this planet and the anger that is felt and expressed when those norms have been seriously violated, particularly at the expense of people of African descent for at least the last five hundred years.

2.3. The Moral Visions and Vexations of Anger

Immediately after calling into question the scholarly demand to be objective, Cone cites the highly regarded Black social psychologist, Kenneth Clark, to strengthen the moral basis of his critique of objectivity. One might have expected Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka or James Baldwin to appear. Instead, Cone appeals to Clark’s Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power, not to explain the hardships of the “dark ghetto” as the title might suggest, but rather to unsettle established scholarly methods especially when:

moral issues are at stake, noninvolvement and non-commitment and the exclusion of feeling are neither sophisticated nor objective, but naive and violative of the scientific spirit at its best. When human feelings are part of the evidence, they cannot be ignored. Where anger is appropriate response, to exclude the recognition and acceptance of anger, even to avoid the feeling itself as if it were an inevitable contamination, is to set boundaries upon truth itself. If a scholar who studied Nazi concentration camps did not feel revolted by the evidence no one would say he was unobjective but rather fear for his sanity and moral sensitivity. Feeling may twist judgment, but the lack of it may twist it even more.18

There are numerous aspects of this passage worth considering, not least its insight into the theoretical background of Cone’s thinking. First, it should be noted that the passage begins with “moral issues are at stake”. Whatever else is known about objectivity, what needs to be understood is that morality cannot be easily disassociated from it. Second, human feelings should not be dislodged from what counts as “objective” because they are “part of the evidence”, clues pointing to what the truth might be. Third, to exclude anger out of hand limits what can be known about the truth. Fourth, possessing feelings does not foreclose the possibility of being objective. Lastly, embracing the swaying power of emotions is less risky than living with the malpractices from misjudgments that would ensue without them.

It should also be noted that Clark is the first person cited in Black Theology and Black Power. Turning to social psychology is significant because I take Cone, at the beginning of his theological project, to be signaling, justifying, and demonstrating the indispensability of emotions like anger to (his) theological thinking. After the above citation of Clark, Cone writes:

The prophets certainly spoke in anger, and there is some evidence that Jesus got angry. It may be that the importance of any study in the area of morality or religion is determined in part by the emotion expressed. It seems that one weakness of most theological works is their ‘coolness’ in the investigation of an idea. Is it not time for theologians to get upset?

(J. H. Cone 1997, p. 3)

That the exemplars of the Christian tradition, including Jesus, “got angry” suggests that anger should not be dismissed. Cone goes so far as measuring “the importance of any study in the area of morality or religion” based upon “the emotion expressed”. It is important to recognize Cone’s metaethics and metaethical analysis, and the normative role anger plays within them. This enables him to gain a more critical foothold on the “coolness” of most theological works in his view. For Cone, those works should be regarded with some suspicion precisely because they are too cool, too dispassionate and detached. By the following year when he wrote his second book, A Black Theology of Liberation, Cone intensifies his metaethical critique of coolness.

The sin of American theology is that it has spoken without passion. It has failed miserably in relating its work to the oppressed in society by refusing to confront the structures of this nation with evils of racism. When it has tried to speak for the poor, it has been so cool and calm in its analysis of human evil that it implicitly disclosed whose side it was on. Most of the time American theology has simply remained silent, ignoring the conditions of the victims of this racist society.

(J. H. Cone 1990, p. 18)

White American theology, in Cone’s view, can be cool, calm, or silent in the face of human evil because it “is largely an intellectual game unrelated to the issues of life and death” (J. H. Cone 1997, p. 85).

Having been influenced by Clark’s social psychology, Cone understands that objectivity and its corresponding coolness “too often becomes a kind of fetish which serves to block the view of truth itself, particularly when painful and difficult moral insights are involved” (Clark 1989, p. 79). This fetish brings into greater view how, for Cone, “racism is a disease that perverts one’s moral sensitivity and distorts the intellect” (J. H. Cone 1990, p. xiii). Cone’s anger, however, carries high doses of moral philosophical antibodies that are needed to fight against the disease of racism.

As J. Deotis Roberts keenly observes, “Even when Cone is angry, there is evidence of profound reflection” (Roberts 1993, p. 117). Whatever one makes of the complicated relationship between reason and emotion, it is clear that Cone’s anger has not impaired his reasoning abilities.19 In fact, it has aided them. To be clear, Cone is not anti-reason and only pro-emotions. “Human reason”, for Cone, “though valuable is not absolute, because moral decisions–those decisions which deal with human dignity–cannot be made by using abstract methods of science. Human emotions must be reckoned with” (J. H. Cone 1997, p. 13). Black rage, then, offers white theology a serious opportunity to reckon with its fetishes of objectivity, dispassion, and neutrality and to replace them with the moral objectivity and psychology of Black theology/power.

3. Conclusions

This article has largely been about the unexpected yet fruitful consequences of Black rage. It demonstrated how Cone’s Black rage can surprisingly bear fruit (1) intellectually in the creation of a discipline, Black liberation theology, (2) analytically as a metaethical approach, and (3) ethically as a moral stance and critique. But not only have we considered the unexpected consequences of Black rage; we have also examined its unlikely location. That is, we would not have expected for rage to inhabit theological discourse, especially not with the kind of frequency, intensity, and analyticity that is found in Cone’s writings. Although Cone articulates Black rage within the theoretical frame of theological discourse, it exceeds such discourse, precisely because the influences of Black Power and African American literature enable him to transgress acceptable academic writing standards and redefine what true Christian theology looks like and what it really feels like.

That white supremacy is a “theological aberration” (Mead and Baldwin 1971, p. 32), as Baldwin says, suggests that it requires a serious theological analysis, one like Cone’s that does not place a wedge between reason and emotions, objectivity and feelings, or theory and action. In fact, Cone’s Black theology offers a meta-critical method that integrates theological, affective, aesthetic, political, and ethical analyses (which are the ones foregrounded here, among other forms of analysis), and shows why that integration is important for understanding complex manifestations of oppression. His rage, therefore, is a metaethics animated by the visions, values and vicissitudes of Blackness fused with a liberatory Christian theological discourse that cuts against the grain of injustice, inequality, and indifference.

To be clear, Black rage is multivocal and multifaceted. Cone’s rage represents certain aspects of the multiplicity of Black rage. The Black rage that Cone embodies unsettles unfounded associations about the subjects (as poor) and nature/consequences (as pathological) (See Grier and Cobbs 1992) of Black rage. As bell hooks observes: “[M]ost folks associate black rage with the underclass, with desperate and despairing black youth who in their hopelessness feel no need to silence unwanted passions” (hooks 1995, p. 12). In unsettling these associations, Cone helps us to better appreciate that Black rage, whether of the “underclass” or “professional managerial class”, can resist and transform white affective regimes. In reconsidering the nature and role of Cone’s rage, as this article attempts to do, it can better address the worries of another pioneering Black theologian J. Deotis Roberts who suggests that “Black theology has been caught within the crossfire of the Black rage, White backlash syndrome” (Roberts 1993, p. 122). With my reconstruction of Black rage, Roberts might have to rethink whether Black rage is even on the same plane as “White backlash”.

Although forces like white supremacy, imperialism, heteronormativity, and capitalism seek to threaten, suppress, and destroy Black rage, they also ignite it. The Black Lives Matter movement is one significant contemporary example of Black rage being ignited and suppressed. Cone models the moral courage to express our rage with intellectual verve (See Pickett 2018). He sensitizes us to the literary and liberatory modes that rage can take and how it can become a spiritual gift that has the potential to completely change you and your situation.