An interview with M. Shawn Copeland

Fortress Press: Your new book with Fortress Press—Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being—is about theological anthropology. How does your focus on black women’s experience make it different?

MSC: Let me begin by sketching the context within which Enfleshing Freedom may be situated. The basic theological genre in which I work is practical-political theology; the main question with which I wrestle is social suffering; and the chief doctrinal locus for this work is theological anthropology. Enfleshing Freedom focuses critical theological reflection on the meaning of being human by attending primarily to black women’s experience of suffering and oppression. Now suffering and oppression, to borrow a term from Gustavo Gutierrez, are experiences of density and intensity; yet, such density and intensity neither exhaust nor limit black women’s experience. Suffering and oppression are only one aspect of the complex social pattern of human experience. At the same time, privileging the suffering of those whose bodies have been despised, abused, and mocked simply because those bodies were female and black evokes the suffering body at the heart of Christian belief, the body of the crucified Jesus.

Methodologically, Enfleshing Freedom resonates with Delores Williams’ category of wilderness experience (that is, blending religious and secular experience, male/female/family inclusive, human initiative and resistance, and so on) and echoes Karl Rahner’s axiom regarding the intimate relation between Christology and anthropology. Taking black women’s bodies as the locus for theological reflection underscores the theological anthropological relation between the social body and the physical body. Such concreteness avoids the trap of detaching the embodied human subject from historical or social or religious contexts.

Placing black women’s bodies at the center of theological anthropology reiterates that black women and children and men are stamped indelibly with the image of God. Theological reflection on their experience expresses in the particular what is a universal claim.

FP: What’s the larger religious significance of black women’s experience?

MSC: In Enfleshing Freedom, I argue that since the expedient subjugation of various peoples to negatory racialized difference in the fifteenth century, all human bodies have been caught up in a near totalizing web of body commerce, body exchange, body (de)valuation. Focus on black women’s bodies does not exclude or trump other bodies or persons but rather claims human subjectivity for us all.

I believe unequivocally that whatever our creedal confession, cultural-ethnic heritage, historical background, economic status, political affiliation, race, gender, or sexual orientation, human beings are intrinsically, metaphysically, ineluctably one. Social oppression profoundly breaches our unity, our basic intersubjectivity and sociality. Privileging black women’s bodies demonstrates both these claims specifically and particularly.

FP: You use Bernard Lonergan’s work a lot. Why is he important to you?

MSC: I came to graduate theological study with a question and a concern. My grandmother, to whom Enfleshing Freedom is dedicated, often said to me, ‘Everyone can’t like you.’ This was a direct reminder that, as an only child, I was not the center of everyone’s world; it was also an indirect caution about anti-black racism. In the summer of my twelfth year, I was not inclined to attend summer camp, so I took courses in French language and world history. The world history course introduced me to the Shoah: This new knowledge was heartbreaking and infuriating. And then, the thought formed in my mind that if people do not like you and hold power over you, they can eliminate you. This formulation shocked me, and that shocking knowledge directs my theological praxis on behalf of all who endure social oppression.

Lonergan’s methodological proposals present tools for handling several issues: Lonergan’s account of human knowing or cognitional theory demonstrates the invariant structure of the human mind—not the Western mind but the human mind. His explication of bias discloses breaches not only in the ethics of human living but also in the very ethics of human thinking. His emphasis on foundations in theology calls not for a priori principles but for the theologian’s rigorous intellectual, religious, and moral conversion. His reminder that theology is not only a matter of faith but also of culture shows that, since there are multiple cultures, there will be multiple theologies to express within those cultures the one faith.

Lonergan pushes the theologian to use her mind and use it well, to work out the relevant categories on her own. Bernard Lonergan was my teacher; his work and example continue to challenge and inspire me. I will always be grateful to him.

FP: Are there any applications of your anthropology for Christian discipleship?

MSC: Yes, of course! The chief application for my thinking on anthropology in relation to Christian discipleship is the praxis of solidarity. As a theological category for Christian social praxis, solidarity concerns the empathetic incarnation of Christian love. It is an intentional moral and ethical task.

Solidarity begins in anamnesis—the intentional remembering of the dead, exploited, despised poor. This memory cannot be a pietistic or romantic memorial. Intentional recovery and engagement of the histories of suffering is fraught with ambiguity and paradox. The victims of history are lost; but we are alive. Our recognition and regard for the victims and our shouldering responsibility for our part in their condition grounds the moral basis for Christian solidarity. Moreover, a move toward solidarity should never be confused with sentiment and its tendency to persuade us to forget the cruelty and conflict that domination causes. Solidarity mandates us to shoulder our responsibility to the past in the here-and-now in memory of the crucified Jesus and all the victims of past history.

But authentic solidarity is never simple, never easy. We stumble when we fail to scrutinize critically the pleasure we experience in our own privilege (for example, gender or racial or sexual or economic). Such a personal interrogation uncovers the difficulty of a life of authentic solidarity, a life of Christian discipleship. We must guard against any temptation to self-deceit or self-delusion, any temptation to deny freedom, any temptation to act as though nothing has happened. We cannot shoulder the responsibility of solidarity alone; agapic praxis characterizes Christian community. In remembrance of the body of Christ broken for the world, the followers of Jesus, in solidarity with one another, stand shoulder-to-shoulder, beside and on the side of the exploited, oppressed, and despised.

M. Shawn Copeland is the author of Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being. Click here to connect with M. Shawn Copeland on Fortress Forum today!