Becoming Black: Ideality and Reality in Barth and Cone

ABSTRACT This article compares and contrasts James Cone’s use of “blackness” with Karl Barth’s use of “Israel”. It argues that, by contrast with Barth’s overdetermined use of “Israel” as a fixed designator for a fixed people, “black” for Cone is a deliberately mobile designator, shifting (roughly) between skin colour, ancestry and cultural heritage, and political and theological disposition. It thus has the requisite suppleness to enable Cone’s theology to speak prophetically both into the specific context of oppression for which he writes, and beyond. Barth’s theology, prophetic in principle, but lacking attentiveness to his Jewish neighbours, fails to achieve the same level of pertinence. The article continues by arguing that racial capitalist critique can be understood as a faithful outworking of Cone’s legacy, the oppressive logic of racial capitalism providing a significant context within which to understand what “becoming black” might mean today.