Around this time of year there is plenty of talk about religion and sports. People are praying for their team to win and others are questioning whether it is a prayer wasted. The Super Bowl is like a religion of its own where believers pay a high price to gather together in quasi-fellowship with the hope that their team will overcome. It’s a house divided but tonight the house will come together under the banner of the gospel for an exhibition of “fellowship, faith, and football.”
Tonight, in New York City’s Madison Square Garden, gospel artists and football players will join together for the Super Bowl Gospel Celebration, an event in its 15th year that is the “first and only Gospel event sanctioned by the NFL for the Super Bowl weekend.” This year Patti LaBelle, Donnie McClurkin, Mary Mary, Natalie Grant, and Tamela Mann will belt their hits while more than 40 of the best NFL players in the league will exchange their cleats and competitive spirt for choir robes and singing in perfect harmony. The show will air in national syndication on broadcast television statements in February. Until then, check out the video clip with highlights of last year’s SBGC.
It has been nearly four years since Florida A&M University’s last full-term president but today the university trustees announced, after a 10-2 vote, that they selected Elmira Mangum to be president of the 126-year old institution. This is welcome news because the university has gone through hard times over the last four years. From the death of drum major Robert Champion and the resignation of then president James Ammons to the drop in enrollment and financial troubles, Mangum’s leadership could help right the ship. Mangum is also the first woman to be installed as president at the institution. She comes to FAMU fresh off a vice president for planning and budget position at Cornell University where she helped the university out of a structural deficit during the economic downturn. She has over 28 years of experience at several institutions of higher learning which, many hope, will serve her well as she steps into her position leading the school situated on the highest of seven hills in Tallahassee, Florida.
I stand with many FAMU alumni in hoping and praying that her installation will lead to our institution shining brighter than it ever has. Here’s to a new and fruitful season for one of the nation’s top historically black universities and here’s to its new president, Elmira Mangum, PhD. Please keep Dr. Mangum and the school in your prayers and good thoughts and they transition forward.
For a longtime I didn’t wear figure-flattering clothing to church. I figured this type of clothing wasn’t appropriate for the space and, of course, I had learned that my clothing could lead a man into temptation. So I tried my best to keep my skirts knee-length and A-line and my dresses flowing. Not until I reached my mid-20s did I begin to dabble in wearing figure-flattering clothing to church because I became comfortable with my body for my sake. I remember on one particular day of wearing a form-fitting outfit a close female friend looked at me and said, “Wow, why don’t you dress like that more often?” She asked. “You are bodied-down,” she said. I thanked her for her compliment, but in the same moment felt a slight pang inside. My bodied-down self and the bodied-down selves of many women in the church have long been concealed and subdued because of the effect it might have on men. Women have had to pay the price for the possibility of a man’s temptation instead of men learning how to temper their desires and divert their eyes. Women are told to be careful about the way they dress lest the man stumble. One wonders how many of these oh-so-vulnerable men are ever asked to stumble into a therapist’s office. It is as if anytime a woman puts on something that shows her figure, she must be dressing for a man and not for the sheer pleasure of enjoying her own womanhood. The problem is as old as time and yesterday it reared its head again when Erica Campbell, half of the gospel duo Mary Mary, released pictures from the photo shoot for her debut solo album. Dressed in a form-fitting, knee-length turtleneck dress, social media tongues were wagging and a pastor commented on it on Facebook saying,
“THIS IS NOT OKAY. Yes, you are a beautiful, curvy woman…but NO MA’AM YOU ARE SINGING THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHRIST. Saints…smh COME ON.”
Though many assumed this comment came from a man, it was actually from a female pastor, Apostle Stacey Wood, who issued a long response explaining her comment. That the comment came from a woman and not a man indicates the pervasive nature of the church tradition that thrives on concealing women’s bodies. This tradition reaches further back than many of us are aware of. There has been a struggle between body and soul dating back to Plato, the Greek philosopher from the 4th Century, BCE. In his “Phaedo,” Plato wrote, “the soul is most like the divine, deathless, intelligible, uniform, indissoluble, always the same as itself, whereas the body is most like that which is human, mortal, multiform, unintelligible, soluble and never consistently the same.” For Plato, the body is subordinate to the soul, the former being only the temporal prison of the latter. His sharp distinction between body and soul was instrumental to the ways in which he categorized lower and higher pleasures–for him sexual pleasure would be considered a lower pleasure because it diminished the power of eros for higher things. Augustine, the most prominent theologian in the history of Western Christianity, was influenced by the work of Plato and many interpreters have read him according to this same duality, suggesting that they impact sexual desire—the body puts us in danger of putting sexual desire ahead of the higher goods. These teachings have all become a part of the Christian tradition and have weaved their way into the fabric of our churches, making it nearly impossible for people not to look at the body as anything other than a vessel for temptation and sin, with sex often being the sharpest example of both. The problem with this conception of the body, however, is that it is deeply in conflict with two of the most significant doctrines of the Christian tradition: Incarnation and Resurrection.
Good dualists that we are, we too often forget that the incarnation of God happened through a human body–the Virgin Mary’s body as the birthing vessel and the body of Jesus that she brought forth. “And the Word become FLESH and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth (John 1:14, NRSV).” God used a fleshly body to do saving work on this earth and though many denied the efficacy of this body’s power to do saving work, it did. This is not to separate Jesus’ humanity from his divinity, but it is to make a particular point that Jesus came in flesh to do God’s will, empowered by and imbued with God in himself. It is to say that the infinite God is united to a finite human in fleshly form. We also forget that the resurrection of Jesus that had to take place for fulfillment of his prophecy and our redemption is a bodily one, so much so that the narrators of his resurrection appearances felt it significant to talk about him walking around, eating and drinking. Incarnation, then, the union of the Creator with creation, is the affirmation of bodies—not just one body but all of them—and resurrection is their redemption and fulfillment, along with all created things. The new life we live in Jesus is through these bodies which we do necessarily give up as the temple of the living God. We don’t abuse these bodies by presuming they are full of temptation and sin precisely because we know of the original sacrifice that was made through Jesus’ body and blood. Our bodies are bodies built by the gospel of Jesus Christ and because of this our first task is not to judge them as one thing or another but to receive them just as we imagine Jesus would have received them, with grace and mercy.
I want to suggest that Erica Campbell’s dress and body are not the problem. Too often, rather, the Church has been the problem, allowing itself to be captive to a sort of Folk-Platonic dualism that disproportionately conceals women’s bodies—especially black women’s bodies (when they’re not being offered as spectacle). This has the result that the invisibility of the body has become a prerequisite for holiness, preventing us from recognizing that the bodies are holy as such, in virtue of the one through whom and for whom all things were created. Moreover, in this context the gifts women offer to God are too often not recognized as the good gifts that they are, but are rather undermined and tossed aside. Instead we need to bring ourselves into the light of Jesus, who does not conceal bodies but makes bodies visible in his life, death and resurrection, and who didn’t and doesn’t judge humanity by appearance, except to reaffirm the words of the Creator that humans, bodies and all, are very, very good.
It’s a funny thing when more of the focus can be on what Campbell is wearing than the fact that she is continuing to proclaim the gospel in her life’s work. She is still in the business of proclaiming the gospel through song and I would wager that this instance is not the first in which we have seen her wear something figure flattering, nor will it be the last. Therefore, we can choose to debate and obsess over what she is wearing, implying that her figure-flattering clothes are going to cause the saints to stumble which in turn perpetuates the damaging body and soul duality brought to us by Plato and his promoters. Or we can choose to believe that a dress is just a dress and she is going to continue to do good work for the kingdom, drawing women and men to Christ by way of her gift in singing. Long story short, it’s time to get out of Plato’s closet. That means getting out from under the philosophical and theological assumptions that lead us to stymie the good work of bodies, and that allows us to define a Christian woman’s commitment to the gospel according to the dresses she wears.
Yesterday morning news broke in Orlando about Vanessa VanDyke, a 12-year-old student at Faith Christian Academy who is in danger of being expelled because of her hair. VanDyke has a head full of natural hair that she has worn in a large blown-out ‘fro style for the last year, but recently, because she complained of children teasing and bullying her, her hair has become a problem. Like many private schools, FCA has a fairly stringent dress code policy that includes restrictions on hair. According to the policy, “Hair must be a natural color and must not be a distraction to include but not be limited to: mohawks, shaved designs, rat tails, etc.” VanDyke’s hair is a distraction by way of its size and shape and the school administration is threatening to expel her if she doesn’t cut and shape her hair. The 12-year-old now has one week to decide whether to cut her hair of risk expulsion from the school. So who should change in this situation, FCA or VanDyke? Or is there a fair compromise that can be reached?
As an institution established on Christian principles Faith Christian Academy has a particular responsibility to encourage their students toward faithful behavior which includes embracing diversity. In this day and age diversity goes beyond the color of someone’s skin and reaches down to the particular cultural practices of the person, which, as we have witnessed in the last few years, includes the different hairstyles that evolve from the culture. Significant to this understanding is teaching young boys and girls that most black children don’t come into this world with straight hair and their hair, in its natural state, ranges from being straight to being tightly curled. Unfortunately all some children know is the so-called normativity of straight hair without knowing that there is usually a high price that little black girls pay to get that straight hair like her white female counterparts. The decision of a young black girl to wear her hair in its natural state isn’t one that should be held against her, not by a playground bullies or school administration. But in order for this to become the new normative—sad to say this—it must be taught to children at an early age that the world around them isn’t going to be full of people with straight hair. Maybe teachers should take a page from Jane Elliot’s Blue Eye/Brown Eye exercise except instead of dividing the classes into a blue eyed, black eyed group they are separated into Straight Hair/Natural Black Hair groups to allow children to experience what it feels like when someone bases their discrimination and disdain for you on external characteristics. But beyond trying to teach bullies a lesson through social experiments, the children need to be taught that making fun of a little black girl because of her hair is to make fun of the wondrous way in which God created her. This should be Faith Christian Academy’s concern, that the children who are making fun of and bullying VanDyke are making fun of God’s design. The school’s handling of this situation positions them as bullies on a number of counts–according to their bullying policy:
“Bullying can be direct or indirect, blatant or subtle, and it involves an imbalance of power, repeated actions, and intentional behavior.
Bullying is cutting someone off from essential relationships.
Bullying includes isolating the victim by making them feel rejected by his/her community.”
There is an imbalance of power at play with FCA currently threatening VanDyke with expulsion unless she cuts and shapes her hair–they have the upper hand and she has nothing to do but be subordinate. FCA is cutting VanDyke off from the essential relationships with friends she’s had she since starting at FCA in third grade. FCA is isolating her by threatening expulsion and making her feel rejected by both the school administration and students all because of her hair. It seems clear that the school is not practicing what it preaches to its student about the “Golden Rule,” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Because surely if the school was practicing what it preaches and really being concerned about “avoiding practices which cause the loss of sensitivity to the spiritual needs of the world and which have an adverse effect on the physical, mental, and spiritual well being of Christian students” VanDyke could not and should not be moved. FCA has made Vanessa VanDyke’s hair a distraction and now they are trying to force her to change it—read conform her hair to their standards. But maybe VanDyke has a particular responsibility in this situation.
Do we protest too much when a situation such as this could be remedied with a ponytail, a bun, a French braid, etc? VanDyke’s hair is beautiful and she should be free to wear it as she pleases, but in exercising freedom to wear her hair as she pleases, is she still accountable to others? Yes, the other kids making fun of her need to be sat down and taught a lesson. And she shouldn’t be penalized by the administration for the way she way she wears her hair. But is there some particular course of action she must take beyond fighting to wear her hair as she pleases? The one thing that I can’t shake is the possible vanity of this situation. What does it mean to fight for the right to wear your hair is big as you please at the expense of other things? Maybe there are other ways that her hair could be worn. I know that many would argue that this is conceding to the politics of respectability, but we should question what it is we do with the freedom of expression we have. In this case, it is one little girl’s freedom to wear her hair as she pleases but should that trump everything else? FCA bears the brunt of this situation and the school administration must understand what it means to categorize a child’s hair as a distraction over say bullying, but I don’t want to miss an opportunity to discuss what a fight for individual freedom of expression costs and whether that cost is always worth it.
Not many people outside of the diaspora understand how connected black people are to their hair, even when we’d rather not be connected to it. We struggle with our hair but for many—present company included—the moment we go natural we discover what a great gift God has given us in this hair. One head of natural hair presents many possibilities for a little black girl or an adult black woman. It can be worn in a big blown-out ‘fro, a teeny-weeny ‘fro, a twist out, a braid out, in braids or in twists, wavy, or pressed straight. That isn’t even a comprehensive list of the possibilities that reveal themselves for natural girls and women. Suffice to say that to go natural is to be faithful stewards of what God has given us as God has given it to us. But I’m also fearful of what it means when that hair begins to eclipse other parts of our lives. When we become obsessed about our hair to the detriment of other parts of our lives and we are willing to sacrifice things for it. VanDyke’s hair is glorious but at what point does the fight for it become vainglorious? To be clear (again), FCA is losing this battle because all eyes are on them as the umpteenth school to use a child’s hair as grounds from suspension or expulsion. But as we continue to see more and more cases of children being sent home for wearing their natural hair in a particular way, what can we do about it? What is the executive decision that parents must make about their children’s hair? How do we negotiate full self-expression in the midst of the dominant culture that remains disinterested in it, without sacrificing things that are significant—in VanDyke’s case it is access to quality education at a private institution? As you can see, there is no simple answer to this. VanDyke will be damned if she does change her hair because many will think she sold out and she will be damned if she doesn’t change it because she might be expelled. To conclude this and say we must learn to pick our battles may show a sign of defeat, but maybe, just maybe, we have to sacrifice some things for a short time just to get where we need to be. For FCA this means stepping off of their “hair as a distraction” soapbox in order to allow a little girl to continue to grow and thrive and for VanDyke it may be that every now and then, she pulls that beautiful hair back into a still beautiful bun or ponytail or alternatively beautiful style.
But what do you think? Doth the school protest too much about her hair or doth she protest too much about her hair? This is what her and her family will be deliberating on this Thanksgiving. We give thanks for hair, but do we give up things for it too? Weigh in with your thoughts.
This past weekend I, like many other black people, rushed out to theatres to see “The Best Man Holiday.” We all waited 14 years since the release of the “Best Man” to see our favorite group of friends reunite and when it finally happened it was as if a decade and a half never passed. Morris Chestnut, Monica Calhoun, Nia Long, Taye Diggs, Sanaa Lathan, Harold Perineau, Regina Hall, Melissa DeSouza and Terrance Howard lit up the screen like human Christmas lights strewn together who never lost their shine with their “Good black don’t crack” beauty. Their “good black” didn’t crack and neither did the issues they had in the first movie but little did they know that the movie would present another issue.
As the movie’s stars lit up screens across the country, box office dollars rolled in and by Sunday the movie landed in the number two box office spot behind “Thor.” The film did better than expected, raking in $30.5 million—Hollywood insiders expected the “urban big chill/urban comedy of manners” to make approximately $20 million in the opening weekend. And there’s the rub. The implicit question behind predictions and expectations of the film’s success rests in the idea that a film featuring an all-black cast with the exception of Eddie Ciprian—who often felt like an afterthought rather than a character being built into the franchise–won’t do well. The predominance of one race—specifically African-Americans—in the film apparently makes it hard to sell to “mainstream” audiences. The same predominance of one race made it hard for USA Today writer Scott Bowles to categorize it as anything other than a race-themed movie–until he changed it moments after publishing the headline. Many discussions around Bowles’s gaffe have occurred thus I won’t seek to add to it, but what I do want to discuss is the real race-themed issue that surrounds the “The Best Man Holiday” and other black romantic comedies. “The Best Man Holiday” and similar films featuring a predominantly black cast are not race-themed movies but their existence presents a race-themed issue in terms of viewership. There is a disparity that exists between moviegoers who see those films—predominantly black audiences—and films of a similar nature with all-white casts—predominantly white but with a greater integration of non-white audience members. I want to discuss the possible reasons for the disparity and the possibility that we have segregated love in cinema making “black love” and “white love” a thing over making love a universal aspect of life.
Sitting in the theatre for the Friday night showing of “The Best Man Holiday” I was in a sea of blackness. Some may argue that my geographical location of Atlanta, Georgia had something to do with the demographics, but according to Universal Pictures, 87% of the film’s audience this past weekend, nationally, was African American. I didn’t see a drop of white in the theatre and this was nothing new. I saw “Baggage Claim” on opening weekend at a theatre in Orlando, Florida and I was in the same sea of blackness. As a matter of fact, for as long as I’ve supported black romantic comedies/dramas, I’ve been in a sea of blackness. Within the sea of blackness, 10% or less of the audience are non-black. This is different from your average white romantic comedy in which I’ve observed an integration of audiences. Films such as “Sex & the City”—both installments—come to mind as well as any of the romantic comedies starring Sandra Bullock, Kate Hudson, or Katherine Heigl just to name a few. While many might claim to love a good love story, research shows that some people don’t like love stories featuring an all black cast.
In a May 2011 study entitled, “The Role of Actors’ Race in White Audiences’ Selective Exposure to Movies,” Indiana University telecommunications professor Andrew Weaver conducted two experiments to see how the racial makeup of a cast could influence white audience’s selection of a film. The experiments found that “minority cast members” do lead white audiences to be less interested in certain films, particularly romantic comedies. It was found that race even played a role in white audience’s desire to see on-screen kisses. According to Weaver’s research, “The higher the percentage of black actors in the movie, the less interested white participants were in seeing the movie.” This was particularly the case for romantic comedies, while in the case of non-romantic comedies race doesn’t play a role in white audiences selective exposure to movies. (So it is ok to watch Denzel Washington play a bad cop in “Training Day” or a heroine kingpin in “American Gangster” or for Tyrese Gibson drive fast cars in “Fast & Furious” volumes 1-100?) Granted this research was done with white undergraduates at Indiana University but it is telling. It says something about the ethos of some white consumers and white Hollywood executives toward black people as they are portrayed in the media. Why is it preferable to watch black actors in non-romantic films? Is it easier to watch black people in period pieces re-enacting their lives as enslaved people and domestics a la “12 Years a Slave” and “The Butler” than it is to watch them in a movie primarily about the journey to love such as “Baggage Claim” or “The Best Man Holiday?” Is it difficult to watch a love story between two black people or an interracial couple because of black people’s embattled history? What does it mean to prefer watching the historical lived experience of black people and never want to journey with us to our current lived experience? Our current lived experience which redeems the stereotypical images and misconceptions about black people that pervade mainstream media and makes real the universal search for love and meaning in life.
Yesterday morning news broke in Orlando about
As the movie’s stars lit up screens across the country, box office dollars rolled in and by Sunday the movie landed in the number two box office spot behind “Thor.”