Thursday, 22 February 2018
BLACK HISTORY MONTH
No More Pain: Spirituality in the Black Community
The
Black community has sought to struggle for social equality, religious
freedom has been the spearhead of their fight against oppressive
structures. With respect to wherever you may fall on the religious
spectrum, every form of spirituality has been essential to the Black
experience, while also being expressed in unique ways within Black
culture. Additionally, religion has very much been a coping mechanism
for African-Americans in the face of suffering.
If anyone intimately knows about suffering, it would beAfrican-Americans.
Suffering can be a cause of the powers that be, natural experiences, or
life’s inconveniences. In the Christian language, a religion of
suffering does not only entail complacency in the midst of evil, but
rather one to seek good during a fallen world and pressing forward.
Suffering is unfortunately something that no human has managed to
escape; it is inevitable. If you are living, at some point you will
experience some form of anguish.
Jesus
has never promised that his people would be exempt from experiencing
turmoil in life. In fact, God, from a biblical standpoint, arranges our
inconveniences for eternal purposes, while simultaneously promising to
walk with us through our suffering. One of my favorite writers,
Ta-Nehisi Coates, further explains this point in his book “Between The World And Me.”
Coates expresses:
Like
Coates, none of us have a place to retreat in response to the dope boys
on the corner, that the prison system craves, or the young men
abandoned by the system that have been in Rikers Island Prison
throughout the time that Kalief Browder spent
there. God, being all-powerful and all-knowing is an everlasting
paradox. However, our doubt has not caught God by surprise, nor does the
evil and suffering of this world.
Why is Black Theology Significant?
In
Christianity, there is a lot of range for intellectualism, feminism,
and Black politics. Through these margins, Black Christians have room to
biblically theorize and strike the status quo head on. Most well-known
revolutionaries, who were Black Christians,
have been unapologetic in their exposing of the systems that have
winked at American capitalism for centuries. African-American Christians
were not reluctant to condemn white people for their involvement in the
suffering of their brothers and sisters, as well as their religion that
subtly reinforced the idea that black people were to naively accept their social condition.
Black theology must
be recognized as a doctrine that springs from the depths of the souls
of an oppressed group of people. This expression of Christianity is an
affront on the white-washed religion that was used to colonize and
enslave Africans. Additionally, this theology confronts the notion that
any group must trustingly endure suffering inflicted upon them. The
significance of spirituality in the Black community is its response to a
world that has excluded Black self-esteem and sanctioned our pain by
stripping our independence throughout history. Religion has been the
only constant peace in times of suffering since slavery. In any case, God does not insist upon us blindly accepting any form of suffering that comes outside of his will.
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International Decade for People of African Descent, which commenced January 1, 2015 and ends December 31, 2024
Africa Now! September 16, 2015 Haki Madhubuti and Pan-Africanism & Communism
Africa Now! September 16, 2015
Topics and Guests: Liberation Cultural Activist Haki Madhubuti; and Pan-Africanism and Communism.
In Africa Now!'s continuing spotlight on the International Decade for People of African Descent, which commenced January 1, 2015 and ends December 31, 2024 today the show features two writers who have connected the peoples of the African World with their writings—Dr. Haki Madhubuti and Professor Hakim Adi.
Their works have highlighted the liberation struggle in the African World.
We start with a previous conversation with Dr. Haki Madhubuti and in the second part of the show Africa Now! talks to Professor Hakim Adi on Pan-Africanism and Communism.
For over 40 years Professor Haki Madhubuti has been a pivotal figure in the development of a strong Black literary tradition and a major figure of the Black Arts Movement.
He has published more than 31 books (some under his former name, Don L. Lee) and is one of the world’s best-selling authors of poetry and non-fiction. Madhubuti’s latest books are Honoring Genius: Gwendolyn Brooks: The Narrative of Craft, Art, Kindness and Justice (2011) and By Any Means Necessary, Malcolm X: Real, Not Reinvented (co-edited with Herb Boyd, Ron Daniels and Maulana Karenga, 2012).
In 1967 he founded Third World Press, the oldest independent publisher of Black thought and literature in the country. For more than forty-five years, Third World Press has published a rich tradition of African American writing by authors such as poet and publisher, Dudley Randall; Illinois Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, Gwendolyn Brooks; poets Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Mari Evans, Margaret Walker, and more.
The connection of Pan-Africanism and Communism is the subject matter in the book Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and The Diaspora, 1919-1939 by Hakim Adi.
Sage Journals states that “Hakim Adi in Pan-Africanism and Communism sets out to demonstrate historically the ways in which Pan-Africanism and Communism were not such completely separate currents in the inter-war period…but rather became briefly, to some extent, fused in the struggle for black and colonial liberation. …Adi’s Pan-Africanism and Communism stands as a valuable and pioneering institutional history of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW), which he rightly notes was ‘a communist organization with a Pan-Africanist orientation.’”
Dr. Hakim Adi is currently Reader in the History of Africa and the African Diaspora at the University of Chichester in England. Professor Adi has written extensively of Pan-Africanism and the modern political history of the African Diaspora. He is the author of West Africans in Britain 1900-1960: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Communism (London, 1998); joint author with M. Sherwood of The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited (London, 1995) and Pan-African History: Political Figures from Africa and the Diaspora since 1787 (London, 2003).
Click here to listen to Africa Now! of September 16, 2015--Liberation Cultural Activist Haki Madhubuti; and Pan-Africanism and Communism.
Originally broadcast on WPFW 89.3FM, Washington, DC. Tune into Africa Now! live on WPFW 89.3 FM in the Washington, DC Metropolitan area or visit www.wpfwfm.org on Wednesdays from 1:00 to 2:00PM (Eastern).
Topics and Guests: Liberation Cultural Activist Haki Madhubuti; and Pan-Africanism and Communism.In Africa Now!'s continuing spotlight on the International Decade for People of African Descent, which commenced January 1, 2015 and ends December 31, 2024 today the show features two writers who have connected the peoples of the African World with their writings—Dr. Haki Madhubuti and Professor Hakim Adi.
Their works have highlighted the liberation struggle in the African World.
We start with a previous conversation with Dr. Haki Madhubuti and in the second part of the show Africa Now! talks to Professor Hakim Adi on Pan-Africanism and Communism.
For over 40 years Professor Haki Madhubuti has been a pivotal figure in the development of a strong Black literary tradition and a major figure of the Black Arts Movement.
He has published more than 31 books (some under his former name, Don L. Lee) and is one of the world’s best-selling authors of poetry and non-fiction. Madhubuti’s latest books are Honoring Genius: Gwendolyn Brooks: The Narrative of Craft, Art, Kindness and Justice (2011) and By Any Means Necessary, Malcolm X: Real, Not Reinvented (co-edited with Herb Boyd, Ron Daniels and Maulana Karenga, 2012).
In 1967 he founded Third World Press, the oldest independent publisher of Black thought and literature in the country. For more than forty-five years, Third World Press has published a rich tradition of African American writing by authors such as poet and publisher, Dudley Randall; Illinois Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, Gwendolyn Brooks; poets Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Mari Evans, Margaret Walker, and more.
The connection of Pan-Africanism and Communism is the subject matter in the book Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and The Diaspora, 1919-1939 by Hakim Adi.
Sage Journals states that “Hakim Adi in Pan-Africanism and Communism sets out to demonstrate historically the ways in which Pan-Africanism and Communism were not such completely separate currents in the inter-war period…but rather became briefly, to some extent, fused in the struggle for black and colonial liberation. …Adi’s Pan-Africanism and Communism stands as a valuable and pioneering institutional history of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW), which he rightly notes was ‘a communist organization with a Pan-Africanist orientation.’”
Dr. Hakim Adi is currently Reader in the History of Africa and the African Diaspora at the University of Chichester in England. Professor Adi has written extensively of Pan-Africanism and the modern political history of the African Diaspora. He is the author of West Africans in Britain 1900-1960: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Communism (London, 1998); joint author with M. Sherwood of The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited (London, 1995) and Pan-African History: Political Figures from Africa and the Diaspora since 1787 (London, 2003).
Click here to listen to Africa Now! of September 16, 2015--Liberation Cultural Activist Haki Madhubuti; and Pan-Africanism and Communism.
Originally broadcast on WPFW 89.3FM, Washington, DC. Tune into Africa Now! live on WPFW 89.3 FM in the Washington, DC Metropolitan area or visit www.wpfwfm.org on Wednesdays from 1:00 to 2:00PM (Eastern).
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