The HeART of Black Survival
On February 06, I presented my final thesis presentation titled The HeART of Black Survival: A Reconciling the Voices of Being Black, Christian, and Creative. Below is the gist of my thesis, of which I received an 85% ! Y'all--I'm graduating in May!!!!!!!
As I think on my experiences of being a black Christian creative, I have felt that I could not both create via my life experience and my expression of love for God in the most authentic manner. In this thesis, I write of my experiences in three black churches and how they have shaped me into the person I am today. I will share original music, poetry and foster a space of conversation where one can begin to understand the dialectical tensions of being "conservatively radical".
The sample below is from pp. 73-75 of the final thesis.
James Cone (1991) indicated that “the power of song in the struggle for black survival” is precisely what the spirituals and the blues are about . For those akin to the blues the need for refreshing came alive through the “sound and rhythm of black humanity” (KL 35). For the other portion of people expressing themselves set apart from the Saturday night juke box, were those unleashing the same pent up energy and tension at the church. The Spirit of God was not the imagination of those believing--it was real, tangible and evident as the Spirit were “buildin’ them up where they were torn down and prop-pin’ them up on every leanin’ side...God’s presence with the people and God’s will to provide them the courage and the strength to make it through (KL 43).
For myself, this “buildin” up and release of energy is an authentic representation of what Cone describes as the need for black music to be lived before it can be understood (KL 72). I mentioned God feeling more emotional to me because that was my real lived experience. Cone believed that to the outsider there would be a clear lack of understanding of the Spirit if you weren’t a “participant in the faith of the people who created the songs.” He described a “power and energy” that was released during black worship to a “God of emotion” (KL 72). I was living my life experiencing the adverse or negative effects of being black in America (e.g., mass incarceration, being raised by my grandmother, absent father, etc.).
I believe similarly to Cone that the use of academia to understand the Spirit of God is not enough. The person who is attempting to understand, must in essence, be a willing participant of the power of the music. When I lift my hands in worship as a sign of surrender, I am allowing for that Spirit to compel me to it’s rhythm and the faith it affirms for me. Relayed with confidence, Cone believed that is was not possible to be a black person and encounter black emotion without it moving you.
The cognitive dissonance experienced when I wrote songs was not a struggle at this time in my life. The latter and more present time I have found challenges in which I will speak to in a later chapter. At this point, the music, similar to the root of blues, was purely functional (KL 1380). I was naturally inclined and inspired to write about my “feeling and thinking” which aided me in coping with my day-to-day struggles. Though the theological division of the secular or “devil songs” and the religious songs happened and the focus shifted from the existential experiences of being black in America to being either spiritual or christian in nature or in the oppositional seat. Cone states,
“The blues are “secular spirituals”. They are secular in the sense that they confine their attention solely to the immediate and affirm the bodily expression of black soul, including its sexual manifestations. They are spirituals because they are impelled by the same search for the truth of black experience” (KL 1421).
-Excerpt from "Courage to [Authentically] Create: An Autoethnography on the Cultural Implications of Being Black,Christian, and Creative."