Editorial

Abstract

This editorial is written against the backdrop of the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement following the callous murder of George Floyd at the hand of the police in Minneapolis. As heinous as George Floyd’s murder was, we need to recognize that most Black people do not experience the same extreme level of police violence, in their daily operations of life. Rather, what we face is a litany of often covert forms of racism that are not so visible and dramatic as brutal murder caught on camera. The racism that many of us experience is systemic in nature, often hidden in “plain sight”, which the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed as being more than just our paranoia or having “chips on our shoulders”. The “Black Lives Matter” movement emerged to counter the patently obvious fact that, throughout the so-called “developed” world, Black lives do not matter. This is not just a question of economics or materiality; it is also about seemingly intangible matters such as the impact of racism on our psyche and associated questions of representation and spirituality. The articles in this issue all address aspects of Black Lives Matter in the differing thematic and intellectual frameworks deployed by the various authors. The creation of Black theology, first as a lived, experiential resource responding to the terror of slavery and Black oppression on the plantations of the Americas and the Caribbean, to becoming a systematic, rational study of the nature and the being of God in response to the continued negation of Blackness in the latter half of the twentieth century; this intellectual movement has always asserted that Black Lives Matter. Given this overarching theme for this issue, it is no wonder, then, that we should commence it with an extended piece detailing the life and intellectual biography of the greatest of all Black theologians, the inimitable, James Hal Cone. This piece is the longest article we have ever published in this journal, but it is fitting to do so, as one could legitimately argue that the discipline of Black theology, and therefore, this journal might not exists without James Cone. The need to assert that Black Lives Matter is in itself an outrage. The many years of White silence and inertia is a testament to a culture in which the normality of White supremacy was so embedded in our structures and systems that most decent, law abiding, White people remained untroubled at the existence of Black suffering and pain. The articles in this issue are a poignant reminder of the substantive cause that lies at the heart of Black theology, namely, that of Black agency and self determination as a riposte to the stultifying presence of anti-Black racism and White supremacy.