“I’m a seventy-eight-year-old woman.... I feel that I’m a very strong woman. When I lost my son, that’s when I found out that I really had two feet and I had to stand on my own feet. I had to stand and be a woman.”
– Mamie Till-Mobley, in a 2000 interview with Studs Terkel[1]“We can all stand today in gratitude that [Mamie Till-Mobley] walked among us, that she gave her only son that we might be free. And I hope in her memory we will continue the struggle that she so valiantly fought.”
– Carol Moseley Braun, on the occasion of Till-Mobley’s death in 2003[2]
On
August 27, 1955, Mamie Till Bradley got a call from her uncle in Mississippi
and was told that her fourteen-year-old son, Emmett Till, had been kidnapped
and was still missing. She would
learn four days later that Emmett had been the victim of a horrendous lynching,
his body left mutilated at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River. Determined not to let her son’s death
be in vain, Mamie Bradley (later Mamie Till-Mobley) fought those who would bury
her son quietly, in a locked pine box—she had Emmett’s body returned to Chicago
at great expense, and held an open-casket funeral, open to the public and the press. Up to 100,000 people saw what had
become of Emmett Till’s body, and thousands more saw pictures in Jet magazine.
A whole generation was galvanized by this shocking example of the
realities of race hatred, a generation who would go on, months later, to
boycott the buses of Montgomery, Al. and set ablaze the fire of Civil
Rights.
Throughout
the trial of Ray Bryant and J.W. Milam, the men who later admitted to Till’s
murder, Mamie Bradley’s identity as a woman and a mother was hotly contested by
both sides of the case. Till’s
supporters painted her in the light of universal motherhood; she had raised him
well, warning him to show proper deference to white people, and was now
overwhelmed with grief, supported by parents and pastors. Till’s opponents, however, sought to
cast her as a stereotypical Black mother, seeking to profit on the funeral,
whose nervousness at coming to Mississippi for the trial was evidence of
indifference toward her son.
In
spite of these exaggerations and misrepresentations, and against warnings from
those close to her, she took her private grief and made it public. In her courageous decision for a public
funeral, she chose to stand up at this toughest moment and say, this is what
America has done to my family.
This is the pain I bear. As
she puts it in her memoir, Death of Innocence:
This would not be like so many other lynching cases, the hundreds, the thousands of cases where families would be forced to walk away and quietly bury their dead and their grief and their humiliation. I was not going quietly. Oh, no, I was not about to do that.... [People] would not be able to visualize what had happened, unless they were allowed to see the results of what had happened. They had to see what I had seen. The whole nation had to bear witness to this.[3]
Mamie
herself and many after her have compared Emmett’s death to the death of
Christ. Certainly this is true, as
they were both violent state-sanctioned murders/executions of innocent people;
but I am less interested in the similarities between the deaths themselves and
more interested in the ways both were resurrected in the lives of the people
who, by that resurrection, bring a kind of salvation. This is the kind of resurrection posited by Dorothee Soelle:
Jesus lived on in the minds and actions of his friends who carried on his
teachings and legacy.
Soelle
describes three elements of resurrection—new language, new lifestyle, and new
community. All three revolve
around the love, solidarity, and equality experienced by resurrected people who
are necessarily connected to one another, for as Soelle suggests, resurrection
can only happen within a community.
This community is one that learns a new language of freedom, rather than
that of the oppressor, and one whose members do not organize themselves
hierarchically, but in humility and equality.[4]
Soelle’s
resurrected community is not a utopian one. She does not delude herself that equality will be easy or
painless, but speaks from the foot of the cross, mindful of the violence in her
native Germany as well as in America, South Africa, and all over the
world. She says, instead, that the
only way to truly experience God is to be vulnerable to these attacks: “To
choose life means to embrace the cross.
It means to put up with the cross, the difficulties, the lack of
success, the fear of standing alone.... To embrace the cross today means to
grow into resistance. And the
cross will turn green and blossom.
We survive the cross.”[5]
Mamie
Till-Mobley embodied just this kind of resurrection-through-crucifixion. In the very midst of her pain, she was
emboldened to “stand and be a woman,”[6]
and in speaking give voice to her experience and the experiences of
African-Americans across the nation.
Her resurrection brought life to her community, as countless civil
rights activists were empowered by the spirit of Emmett Till.
Her
defiant use of the word “woman” in the above quote (“When I lost my son, that's
when I found out that I really had two feet and I had to stand on my own feet. I had to stand and be a
woman.”) is a sharp contrast to the usual construction of “stand up and be a
man.” I’m sure that Till-Mobley’s
use is influenced by the difference in expectations of African-American women
and of white women; it is not unusual for a Black woman to be thought of as
strong, and less usual for white women (though with all the additional baggage
each image entails). However, the
strength that Till-Mobley cites could be a necessary corrective for all women,
bombarded with messages of weakness and passive acceptance of suffering.
In
many theologies, Jesus’ crucifixion is used not as a source of strength and
defiance, as Till’s was for his mother and for the Black community, but is
instead used by religious leaders to encourage women to keep silent and accept
their suffering, often at the hands of their husbands or the religious leaders
themselves. Jesus is seen as
person whose only purpose for living was to suffer and die, and his noblest accomplishment
is cast as his “obedience unto death.”
Feminists have rightly objected to this distorted overemphasis on the
cross, whereby we celebrate Jesus as a model of passivity and subordination to
a Father figure.
As
Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker make clear in Proverbs of Ashes, this link between christology and domestic violence
becomes explicit when women are taught that they should endure abuse and/or
rape because it is “their cross to bear,” that there is something salvific in
their suffering per se. Christianity’s emphasis is often on
Jesus’ gentleness, meekness, and selflessness, which is held up as an ideal
disproportionately before women, often cited directly by religious
leaders.
It
is clear that classical theologies which emphasize the suffering (and
passivity) of Jesus above all else need to be thoroughly reexamined in order
for the church to have anything to offer women. And yet, if we do not speak of Jesus’ suffering, how do we
speak about the very real suffering of women, of people of color, of other
marginalized groups? I believe
that here again, Mamie Till-Mobley provides a powerful example.
African-American
women have long been expected to possess the strength to deal with whatever
American life might throw at a Black family, yet to struggle silently,
absorbing pain and violence without emotion. Till-Mobley, by contrast, took this strength, and rather
than suffering quietly, had the courage to make her grief and suffering public
news. This speaking out was itself
healing for her, and helped begin the painful process of healing for all of
America. As Rebecca Parker puts it
in Proverbs of Ashes, “Violence ... is
assisted by silences. To stop
violence, silences have to be broken....
Hearing one another into speech gave rise to a new community, a
community of life.”[7] We can read Parker’s “new community” in
the light of Dorothee Soelle’s “new community” of the Resurrection; it is not
just suffering and death that brings people together in community, but it is speaking about this suffering. Emmett Till would not have been resurrected in the minds of
civil rights activists if Mamie had allowed him to be buried quietly. In her strength she cried aloud, and it
was this one mother’s courage that brought a community together.
Suffering
exists. Racial- and gender-based
violence exists, war exists, crucifixion exists. The death of Jesus, though gruesome and painful, has been
smoothed over, talked around, and generally softened ever since Easter morning,
because we do not want to look suffering in the face. We cannot deal with the painful realities of it, just as we
often deny the painful realities of our own lives. Theology has glossed over the suffering of Jesus by saying
that it was somehow redemptive, that Jesus “didn’t really feel pain,”[8]
by displaying only the empty cross and forgetting about the broken body of
Jesus himself. It is only by
speaking of this suffering and our own suffering that we can begin to heal our
relationships, which have been fractured by abusive marriages, by rape, by
lynching.
Yet,
speaking itself is a radical act when we are taught and conditioned to endure
silently, when speaking up invites more violence. As Traci West puts it when speaking about victims of sexual
violence, a woman is most vulnerable at the point when she says “No.”[9] It takes strength and courage to stand
up to those who abuse us, internal power that they try to beat out of us. Yet, the powers of this world do not
always succeed, because of the indomitable power of the human spirit, buoyed by
the Spirit of God.
Where
do we get this power? It is
transcendent, yes, a part of the great mystery of the Divine. But the incarnation of Jesus shows us
another example of power: God comes to earth not as Almighty God, but as a
baby, as a friend. He taught his
friends a new way of living, a new way based not on lordship and dominance, but
of community and solidarity.
Jesus called [the twelve] to him and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:25–28)
It is this non-hierarchical model of new community cited
by Soelle as “the resurrection,” and it is this model that provides hope for
the marginalized within all communities.
When
power can be redefined as the power to stand up to oppression and the power of
self in community, it is available to all. Though Mamie Till-Mobley had none of the dominant,
oppressive power of society’s definition, she had the world-changing power to
speak of her pain when everyone told her to be silent, to challenge the whole
nation to bear witness to the lynching in which it was complicit. Yet, she herself was still subject to
manipulation and misrepresentation by the press, both black and white.
Jesus’
words about community were not just addressed to those who already were “servants of all.” He speaks to “whoever wishes to be great among you.” This statement is precisely the
challenge that the gospel presents to those in power: “Whoever wishes to be
great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you
must be your slave.” Anyone who
finds themselves in power over anyone else must renounce that power in order to
be a faithful follower of Jesus.
In
his example, Jesus lived out the concept of solidarity to its fullest. He was not superior to his disciples,
nor they to him. They revered him
as a teacher, and yet he washed their feet. He was regarded as a messiah figure, and yet he defied expectations
by accepting the world’s hatred on his very flesh. His human body itself bore the marks of the life he
lived. For humans, embodiment is
both our greatest gift and our greatest liability. Our bodies are where we feel pleasure and friendship and
love; as well as pain, shame, and humiliation. To shut ourselves off from physical pain also diminishes our
capacity to feel pleasure and love, because in many ways those extremes are
intertwined. If we do not make
ourselves vulnerable to a lover or friend, we cannot create deep bonds. And yet, when this vulnerability is
exploited, we withdraw and close ourselves off, and it becomes even harder to
form close relationships. Radical
love requires taking the risk of exploitation by making oneself vulnerable, as
Jesus did with love for humanity.
The
difficulty comes when this offering of self comes into conflict with
self-preservation. As Joanne
Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker make clear in “For God So Loved the World?”
Christian teachings about the death of Jesus are often at odds with the idea
that women have any right to care for their own needs.[10] Yet, as generations of feminists have
pointed out, we must not slip into the male-socialization model of denying our
emotions and relationships in the name of self-preservation. But as long as women are the only ones
making themselves vulnerable in this way, women will go on being abused. Just as Jesus called for “those who
would be great” to give up their dominance, men and all those in power must
begin to accept vulnerability as an acceptable way of being.
It
is here, I believe, that some of the contemporary “Men’s Studies” thinking
might be relevant. Briefly, when
Men’s Studies is at its best, it is an application of feminist principles of
cultural criticism and deconstruction to the task of denaturalizing male
identity: realizing that masculinity is just as much a cultural construction as
femininity. Masculinity, in the
dominant Western framework at least, means hardness, invulnerability, military
strength, aggression, and control of others. Just as the cultural construction of femininity is
inextricable from selflessness, vulnerability, and victimhood, masculinity is
defined as the polar opposite. As
long as the male ideal is a victimizer, women will be victimized.
Therefore,
I believe that just as the feminist movement has revealed new models for
women—of which I believe Mamie Till-Mobley should be one, for her strength and
defiance borne out of love—men need new examples of ways to live out
masculinity. Jesus’ vulnerability
and selflessness is only ever held up as a model for women, and yet he is a
perfect example of a man who rejects dominance, rejects militarism, rejects the
standard definition of earthly power in favor of community, solidarity,
vulnerability, and love. The
crucifixion is a key element of this redefinition of power and of masculinity:
not only has Jesus made himself vulnerable to physical pain and physical
brokenness, but in his nudity and forced sexual shame, there is a literal
“emasculation” and something akin to public rape.[11]
Yet
here a comparison with lynching becomes problematic. The history of lynching in America has always had an
explicitly sexual tone, centered as it was around anxieties about black
male–white female relations. Often
the victim’s genitalia were cut off, and were the most prized body parts as
trophies of the event. As lynching
was generally an expression of anxiety about the position of Black people in
America, the particular sexual focus points to anxieties around sexuality more
specifically.[12] While I would never praise the violent
emasculation of any man, neither can I support the cult of (white) womanhood
that was the explicit impetus behind these anxieties; based as it was on an
image of femininity almost comically divorced from reality.
Here
again I would suggest that the dominant ideal of masculinity is to blame; just
as white males maintain power over women (when their dominance is challenged)
through violence and rape, so too they respond to challenges from people of
color with sexualized violence.
The maintenance of white male sexual superiority depends on the
emasculation of all who would challenge it. When the power of white men is challenged, they respond in a
sexualized fashion particular to whomever challenges it. Lynching was an expression of the
negotiation of the role of people of color vis-à-vis white people, and because
the cult of white masculinity depends on sexuality for its maintenance,
lynching took on a sexualized tone.
As has often been suggested by theorists of sexual violence, rape is not
usually an expression of uncontrollable sexual desire as much as it is an
expression of control over the victim.
In this framework, then, rape and sexualized violence against women is
also a response to challenges to male-dominance.
So in view of all this, who is Jesus Christ for us today? Can we remember the violence of the crucifixion, in view of the history of violence against the black community, while remaining faithful to the experience of women? I believe that Jesus’ human life and death provide a springboard for examining social realities in our day and subsequently challenging them in the quest to live out the kingdom (kin-dom) of God on earth. Dorothee Soelle provides an example of a way to begin, although I wish to call for a more thorough social-critical analysis than she offers. Jesus is a role model for all people in the dismantling of white patriarchal supremacy, and points to a God whose commitment is to a radically mutual and loving humanity.
But what of the transcendence of God? I have provided here a solidly social and human view of Jesus, which I believe is essential, yet I do not want to lose sight of the Divine. I do see the transcendence of God in community, in resistance to oppression, in standing up for yourself when everything but God tells you not to. It is hard—perhaps impossible—for a mortal human to describe with any accuracy the parts of God that are beyond our perception. I am confident in the glimpses of the Divine that I have gotten in the love and solidarity of people on earth, the vision of God in human life through Jesus, and the knowledge that, while I do my best to describe what I know of God, this God is bigger and more complex and more glorious than anything words can capture. And for this, I give thanks.
[1] interview by
Studs Terkel, 2000. available at
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200110/terkel
[2] West, Malcolm R.,
“Mamie Till-Mobley, civil rights heroine, eulogized in Chicago,” JET Magazine,
January 27, 2003.
[3] Till-Mobley,
Mamie, and Christopher Benson, Death of Innocence. New York: Random House, 2003. p. 139.
[4] Soelle, Dorothee,
Essential Writings. Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis Books, 2006. p. 136–140.
[5] ibid. p. 108–110.
[6] see note 1
[7] Brock, Rita N.
and Rebecca Parker, Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and
the Search for What Saves Us.
Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.
p. 108.
[8] see Hengel on
Docetism; Hengel, Martin, Crucifixion.
London: SCM Press, 1977. p.
15–21.
[9] West, Traci;
during a guest presentation in the Field Education Seminar, section 3, at Union
Theological Seminary, 4/15/08.
[10] Brown, Joanne
Carlson and Rebecca Parker, “For God So Loved the World?” in Joanne Brown and
Carole Bohn, ed. Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse: A Feminist Critique. New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1989. p. 2.
[11] Tombs, David,
“Crucifixion, State Terror, and Sexual Abuse” in Union Seminary Quarterly Review v. 53 Nos. 1
&2, 1999. p. 104–107.
[12] Dray, Philip, At
the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. New York: The Modern Library,
2002. p. 82.
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