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Black religion in the age of Trump, in whatever age really, needs friendship as practice. And black religion in the age of Trump needs blackqueerness. Blackqueerness is fundamental to but also excluded from the institutional practice of black religion because it unsettles identity fully, because it is open and capacious and enduring. This, its being open and capacious and enduring is its gift, not as identity but as relation.
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When black religion functions in the service of, rather than against, empire, dominance and violence, it loses its life and breath, it ceases to be the practice of radicalism, it relinquishes friendship.
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In Michel Foucault’s interview “Friendship as a way of life” he says: in friendship you must invent from a to z how to be with another, which at its initial moments is formless. In other words, we must be inventional to respond to the urgency of any now moment. Black religion in the age of Trump must rediscover friendship.
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The interpersonal is how I come to understand the problem of religiosity, as a person attempting to practice blackqueer life and relation, having been excluded from the religious communities that have formed me because of doctrinal and theological breaks between those communities and my practice. There are questions that would be necessary for reestablishing relation, for rediscovering friendship: how are you; can you help me understand; is there a way for us to practice relation in our difference? But these questions cannot be asked under the regime of identity because it is a thing that assumes a stable core coherence, an unchanging essence. But what black religion is, is a freedom impulse, a liberatory drive and verve, it is not identity but practice. We must learn how to practice relation, we must learn to refuse to relinquish one another for something like doctrinal integrity of traditions of churches, mosques, masculinities.
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I have been writing about white supremacy as the renunciation of the flesh, how white supremacy is the practice of renunciation of relation, of the social, of blackness. And I have been teaching Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and have been thinking a lot about the character Harpo. He loved to cook, to clean, to take care of the children. But because he wanted to be a “real man,” because he wanted to participate in patriarchal dominance, he was willing to relinquish his joy, his absolute delight and happiness, he let go friendship, in order to compel his wife Sofia to mind him, and he was willing to do this with brutal violence.
Harpo gave up his joy to attempt the normative. And I think about the black church’s relinquishing of blackqueer folks, their release of joy and delight found in blackqueer praise and practice, in order to attempt normative doctrine and theology of sex, sexuality and sin. It is heartbreaking. The desire for normative function and form—whether the guise of patriarchy as a system of domination, religious chauvinism, normative gender and sexuality as a mode of queer antagonism, settler colonialism, antiblack racism—dispenses with difference, renounces possibility for and of and about relation.
The Color Purple shows that men have the ability to do emotional, intimate and aesthetic labor, it brings Harpo lots of joy to do it, it brings Harpo lots of misery to live a normative life. Walker elaborates the ways the systems of domination called patriarchy, heterosexism and queer antagonism produce occasions for men to practice renunciation of the social field in which this kind of labor is produced.
So when Harpo relinquishes the care work he enjoyed in order to be a “real man,” to enact patriarchal power, he also practiced the refused relation to his own capacity for intimacy and friendship with Sofia that the work made possible, it is the renunciation of labor and of the sociality that is had and gained and practiced through that labor. He gives up, and relinquishes, the capacity for being in relation in a way that is deeply emotional, intimate and physical. He gives up friendship as a way of life, forestalling it. He gives up intimacy as a way of lovingness and livingness, refusing its capacity for radically altering who they could be.
Harpo might be the practice of black religiosity in the age of Trump when it acquiesces to empire, to patriarchy.
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We must rethink tradition; how do our particular practices of Christianity or Islam or Buddhism or agnosticism open us up to relation. This question of the possibility for being moved is informed by my reading of Imani Perry’s Vexy Thing: that we must contend for relation with one another, that we must be open to being moved by one another. This openness to being moved is what black religiosity as practice teaches. This capacity for being moved, undone, vulnerable, is relinquished in the concept of identity grounded in a past of resistance that then presumes any current political position is itself radical. But radicalism, like blackqueerness, is practice. Relation with people that practice blackqueerness is blackqueer because it is a mode of relation against patriarchy. Relation with people that practice radicalism is radical because it is a mode of relation against normative function and form, a practice of insurgency against violence and violation.
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Finally, there is a film, “Purple Rain” that stars Prince that we all know. There is a film based on “Purple Rain” located in Nigeria spoken in the Tuareg language titled ”Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai,” which is a Tuareg phrase that translates “Rain the Color of Blue With a Little Red In It” … (the language has no word for the color purple).
I think the difference between ”Purple Rain” and ”Rain the Color of Blue With a Little Red In It,” is beautiful. Beautiful because it illustrates the way we have to search language for feeling, for familiarity, for that which can be lost if we think ”there is no word for purple in that language.”
Just because there is no word for it doesn’t mean it’s not real, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, doesn’t mean it’s not effective. We can find delight and joy in the gap between, the space where difference is practiced and felt and known. This delight in difference is what black religion in the age of Trump, which is another way to say black religion in the age of Thomas Jefferson, which is another way to say black religion in the age of racial capitalism, antiblack racism and settler colonialism, needs to rediscover. In such a rediscovery will be the reckoning with the urgency of our times, times that span at least from 1492 to today.