On March 20, 2023, HDS hosted the final installment in the the six-part series Religion and the Legacies of Slavery: A Series of Public Online Conversations. The featured speakers were Karen L. King, David F. Holland, Dan McKanan, Terrence L. Johnson, and Tracey Hucks.
This session was a discussion among presenters reflecting upon the insights shared throughout the series. In addition to identifying themes and throughlines among sessions, presenters returned to the overarching questions that framed this collaboration: What does the academic study of religion teach us about the complex histories and legacies of slavery? How can a deeper understanding of the roles of religion enhance our commitment to reparative action in our contemporary times?
Full transcript:
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Religion and the Legacies of Slavery. A Series of Public Online Conversations. Reflecting on Religion and the Legacies of Slavery. March 20th 2023
DIANE MOORE: On behalf of our dean, David Hempton, welcome to our last in a series of six webinars on religion and the legacies of slavery, co-sponsored by Harvard Divinity School, the Harvard Legacy of Slavery Initiative, and Harvard X. I'm Diane Moore, and I'm the faculty director of Religion and Public Life here at Harvard Divinity School. And it is my pleasure to co-host this series with my friend and colleague, Melissa Wood Bartholomew, associate dean for our Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and belonging.
On behalf of us both and our many staff and faculty colleagues who have helped bring this series into being, we want to welcome the hundreds of participants who are joining us for this presentation this evening, representing over 80 countries, and the thousands of people who have participated from around the world in the series as a whole. We are deeply moved by your interest and so grateful for your presence.
Tonight is the sixth in a series of critical conversations, building upon and beyond the work of the Harvard 2022 Legacy of Slavery Report. In this series, we explore through the head and the heart what the academic study of religion teaches us about the tangled histories and legacies of slavery and racism here in the United States and beyond.
These tragic legacies are alive and present in many forms, as the news on any given day, in any given hour devastatingly and consistently reveals. We hope that by gaining a deeper understanding of the complex power of religion relevant to historical and contemporary manifestations of racism and White supremacy, that this knowledge will enhance our commitments to reparative action and racial justice and healing in our own times and in our own contexts. Ultimately, these conversations are in service of advancing our vision of just world at peace, healed of racism and oppression.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: We pause out of reverence. We pause to acknowledge and honor those who came before us, who are Indigenous to this land, and the African and Indigenous people who are enslaved in this country, including the more than 70 people of African and Indigenous descent who are enslaved here at Harvard University as detailed in the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Report.
As a descendant of Africans who were enslaved in this country, I am aware of the potential impact of hearing this tragic history. We want to remind everyone that as we proceed through these difficult conversations and listen to the exchanges, it is important to be attuned to what might be stirring up in us, happening in our bodies, and particularly, as we navigate our emotions regarding ongoing manifestations of the legacies of slavery in this country. So please remember to breathe and take care of yourself during and after the session.
We invite you now to pause and breathe with intention and to focus on your breath as we lift up the Harvard University Native American Program's acknowledgment of the land and people. We acknowledge that Harvard University is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett. The original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay respect to the people of the Massachusett Tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusett people.
But for the stolen land and the stolen labor, this country and this University would not be. Our acknowledgment of the land and people extends beyond words. It is expressed through our action and is connected to what we have been doing through these series, this conversation. This series is a part of the broader work, stemming from our school's commitment to reading the Harvard and Legacy of Slavery Report as our common read text this year. As we engage with this, report we are discerning our institutional actions for redress and ways to support the University in implementing its recommendations and even expanding upon them. And we aim to further our vision of a restorative anti-racism, anti-oppressive Harvard Divinity School and of a world healed of racism and oppression. This is sacred work.
DIANE MOORE: Thank you, Melissa. As all of you know, this is our last in this series, and we're highlighting it as a plenary conversation about what we've learned and the implications of what we learned for moving forward for us as members of the Harvard community and we hope for you also as participants in this series.
Before we turn back to our panelists to have them introduce themselves and to give an overview of the highlights of each of their sessions, to bring us all up to speed, Melissa and I will both share some brief reflections about our hopes for the series and why we embarked on this adventure together.
So I'm going to begin by just saying that I had I have many hopes for this series, all of which were surpassed relevant to my wildest dreams. But the hopes that I want to highlight for you now are three. I was hoping that we could promote the public understanding of religion in service of just world of peace, which is the Religion and Public Life mission statement. And I was hoping we could do this through giving audience members opportunities to better understand the enormous and complex power of religion in human experience.
As we learned through this series, religion has always functioned and continues to function, to promote the full range of human agency from heinous crimes against humanity, such as slavery, to nearly unfathomable acts of courage, compassion, and moral imagination, such as enacting reparations for stolen lands and labor. By understanding this power, we hope to give audience members tools to confront the harmful impacts of religion and to enhance the generative capacities in their own lives and contacts, whether they identify as religious or not.
And the second hope was to challenge common misrepresentations of religion by demonstrating how religions are internally diverse as opposed to uniform. How they evolve and change over time, as opposed to being ahistorically static. And how religious influences are embedded in all aspects of human experience, including so-called secular arenas, and cannot be contained within the, quote unquote, private sphere of individual belief and ritual practice. These are common assumptions about religion that we hope that we dispelled in our conversations throughout the series.
And finally, I hope that the series has inspired audience members to realize that their human agency matters in shaping cultures and contexts where the myriad legacies of slavery can be diminished and where the process of reparative action and racial and justice healing can commence.
So thank you for your attention to this series and to all that we've learned from you and with you through the conversations that we've had in the chat and also through responses to the questionnaire that we sent out to you a couple of weeks ago. And many of you responded to that questionnaire and will be responding to those responses as the evening progresses. And I'll turn it over now to you, Melissa.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: Thank you, Diane. And I echo the gratitude. This has been an extraordinary series. Now along with the series being a tool for educating the broader global community, my hope was that it would also help HDS and Harvard understand more deeply the University's connection to slavery and the horrific race science that justified slavery and the role of religion, all in furtherance of our work of redress and repair.
It has served as an additional offering for our HDS community to engage in slavery fought, alongside our common read conversations. And indeed, the series has strengthened our foundation for understanding the broad scope of the work of repair, specifically regarding the race science that Harvard advanced and that supported slavery, racial segregation, and fueled systemic racism around the globe. Racism that continues to flourish today within systems, institutions, and individuals.
The work of repair must include a focus on the psychological implications of the race science and the role that religion has played in advancing the race science and racism. And specifically, the role of scholars and professors of religion, ministers, religious leaders and leaders broadly, working towards repair. This requires being attentive to the personal work of addressing the impact of this harmful science and distortions of religion on our own formation. The way we see ourselves and each other and specifically, the way we see Black people.
I hope that we have created an atmosphere for an honest reckoning within ourselves, so that we can create a space where we're breaking our sole ties to slavery. Deepening our understanding of the relationship between religion and racism and slavery and the role of religion in promoting the myths supported by race science and our understanding of our divinity school's ties to this history underscores our commitment to embedding this work of repair into every part of our work here at the Divinity School.
This includes the work to not only transform our school into a restorative anti-racist and anti-oppressive HDS, but to help train our students who are going out into the world as scholars of religion, ministers and leaders, to ensure that they are equipped with this knowledge. This will prepare them for the work of eradicating racism and oppression out in the world at the intersection of religion and social change in whatever area of scholarship, ministry, leadership, religious or otherwise, they are engaged in, to advance just peace and the vision of a world healed of racism and oppression. Diane.
DIANE MOORE: Thank you, Melissa. So I'm going to ask our faculty colleagues to join on screen right now, and I'm going to ask them to please provide two to three takeaways that you hope that audience members would have learned or heard in your presentation. And I'm just going to introduce you all briefly in the order that you present that you presented with the titles of your presentations. And then I'm just going to turn it over to each of you to respond to that question in order of appearance, beginning with you, Karen.
So Karen King started us off in the series with a session entitled, Enslavement in the Formation of Earliest Christianity. And David Holland followed Karen in conversation with Kathryn Gin Lum on Religion, Race, and the Double Helix of White supremacy. Dan McKanan then offered a session entitled Harvard Divinity School and Slavery Family Stories. Followed by Terrence Johnson, who made a presentation on Memory, History, and the Ethics of Reparations. And Tracey Hucks finished our individual presentations in conversation with Dain and Constance Perry in a session entitled, Slavers and Slavery: A Dialogue with Descendants.
So thank you all of you for those incredibly rich presentations individually. And we're very excited about hearing your reminding us of the takeaways from your session and then engaging in conversation among all of us about what we all learned from each other and what we plan to do moving forward from this encounter. So Karen, please, turn it over to you.
KAREN KING: Thank you so much. And thank, everyone, again so much for the time and the attention that you've given us. As a historian of early Christianity, I wanted to focus out of my own expertise on several points. And among them, important to me was making it clear that Christianity was formed, and its scriptures were written in a society where slavery was ubiquitous. And that has had several really important kinds of consequences.
It's important to know, first of all, that the Bible does not have a single coherent or consistent message about enslavement. But its materials have been interpreted and lived out in many ways. And that has several consequences. One is that people are therefore accountable for how they interpret, use, and live out the teachings of the Bible. So people who have used it to justify slavery, or were themselves enslavers, or who still use it to justify dehumanizing treatment of any person or group on whatever basis are accountable for the harm that's done.
It's important to note that this Bible doesn't tell a single story. There's always a danger of a single story. The Bible has been used also to nurture a theology of a God who shares in pain and suffering, requires justice and kindness, and who opposes enslavement and its legacies. So it matters what stories are told. It matters that they are diverse, they are complex, and that they're true. Thank you.
DAVID HOLLAND: And I'll echo Karen's appreciation for the organizers of this series and for the viewers and participants who have really enriched my own understanding through their questions and observations. The central concern of my discussion with Kathryn Gin Lum lay in the importance of recognizing that the modern category of race and the practices of racism have not been, as some scholars have influentially suggested, solely the product of self-consciously secularized or even secularizing scientific worldviews.
Rather, Kathryn argues that the constituent components of racism, including the points of connection between racialized thinking and slavery and its legacies, carried historical baggage attributable to racialized traditions of human othering. Most notably, she sees not just an analogous pattern, but an actual causal relationship between Christian traditions that divided the world into the saved and the heathen and a colonizing white supremacist view of humanity that divides the world between those who rightly will power and those who are the rightful subjects to that power.
If we are to unravel these devastating legacies, we need to have a clear understanding of their origin stories. And the study of religion is an appropriate, maybe the appropriate disciplinary site for an exploration of the connection between binary religious thinking and the power dynamics of racialized colonialism, especially as it relates to the Atlantic system of African slavery and its enduring consequences.
For a place like Harvard, it is especially important to note that this binary connects to the Western Academy's long patterns of similarly dividing the world into the studies and the studied. Awareness of the history of heathenizing also draws attention to another problematic assumption in the discourse about race and slavery. And that is the notion the beliefs which hold one's racialized characteristics to be changeable are necessarily more humane in substance and consequence than beliefs in racial immutability.
Professor Lum has worked to help us understand that belief in changeability, what in a religious sense we might call convertibility, can be just as destructive and deadly. And indeed, it was the concept of convertibility that often served as the initial justification and long standing explanation for European and American slave systems. In a contemporary frame, this work helps us understand both the sources and the implications of the phenomena that today get tagged with the title of White Saviorism.
At a few points in the discussion, Kathryn and I grappled with the ethical question of what this history means for those who want to pursue productive aims and interventions in the world but do not want to perpetuate the toxic racialized and/or colonizing paternalism that often stows away in the baggage or even on the face of such effort. As our exchanges suggested, that is a profoundly challenging question. But among the answers that come out of this conversation is that any hope at addressing it must begin with a clear-eyed awareness of this history and its persistent influences.
Finally, I would note that for the field of religious studies, this work teaches by example, the importance of recognizing the transformability of historical categories and the importance of avoiding a trap of colonialist scholarship that would fail to see the agentive actions of those who are labeled heathen, turning that very category into an instrument of their own anti-racist activity. So much more could be said about this complex and influential history, but I'll leave it there for now.
DAN MCKANAN: Thank you all so much. It's such a delight to be part of this challenging, deep conversation, and I'm very grateful to everyone who's had a hand in making it possible. In my presentation, I shared some of the things that I learned from the slavery report about how slavery was connected to the lives of Harvard Divinity School's founding professors, students, and donors.
And what I learned is that these people were much more implicated in the international slave trade than most other New Englanders of their generation. Just because slavery was officially abolished in New England did not mean that the founders of Harvard Divinity School were not implicated. Specifically, many of these founding families were among the Americans most involved in the French slave-based colonies of both the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean.
That's where the donors made their wealth, and that is the wealth behind the families of many of the early faculty and students. And I looked at these family stories through the lens of moral injury. Divinity School-affiliated people like William Ellery Channing and Thomas Wentworth Higginson were deeply opposed to slavery, but they grappled throughout their lives in very complex ways with the fact that their fathers or grandfathers had made their fortunes through enslavement.
And one of the things that I really discovered as I explored those stories is that people who experience that sort of moral injury, even as they took courageous steps in opposition to slavery, continue to live in a moral universe that centered Whiteness and that centered the experiences of people like them and in many ways contributed to a legacy at the Divinity School of centering certain experiences, moral injury experiences more than the physical injuries of people who were enslaved.
And this brought me to a lot of reflection about Harvard's endowment because while the stories of our ancestors are very ethically complex, in many ways, the financial wealth that they left to institutions like Harvard is not ethically complex. It's very much a product of the theft of labor, the theft of land, the exploitation of people. And so I close by inviting all of us to think about strategies of reparation that involve a complete transformation of the power structure and the work of Harvard Divinity School, and Harvard University, and so forth.
TERRENCE JOHNSON: Great. Thank you, Dan, and to my colleagues. And again, I want to acknowledge the organizers of this event and also to share my gratitude with the audience for your participation. This is actually something very new for me in terms of my research. I've thought about reparations for a long time and have wanted to dive into it. But for various reasons, I always put it on the shelf. And so in many respects, I'm very grateful for this opportunity to share some of my developing thoughts.
And I really wanted to create a kind of framework for how we actually might engage the very topic of reparation. Many of us come to the topic assuming that this is something that was a debate started in the '70S or debates started by frustrated African-Americans. And in fact, we see, since the very early emancipation period, that people are contemplating and wrestling with this idea of to what do we owe the formerly enslaved? And so there's a long history of debating reparations in this country. And I want to situate some of my argument with that basic starting point.
And then I really want to show that in light of this historical starting point, that it shows that very viability of reparations. The fact that we have been debating, engaging, trying to make sense of the harm that's been done to these human beings, that to me, it sets the very stage for the viability. Often people have said, look, there's no political currency in this conversation. And yet I want it to show there actually is currency because we have a road map. We have, as the young people will say, receipts in which learned folk, very lettered people have been arguing for reparations and for a certain kind of accountability.
Then I also really wanted to, in some ways, show how we can then sort of change the starting point for the conversation on reparations. The question necessarily isn't why it happened. But I want to move toward what then President Ruth Simmons says to the question of to what do we owe these human beings and their ancestors? And that question I think re-enters the debate.
And then lastly, I wanted to, in some ways, set the stage for institutions to begin thinking about what is their role in this whole conversation? And as one friend once told me that an institution's budget reflects its moral imagination. And I really wanted to generate a conversation in which this is not simply a conversation about reports or about going to the archives. We can do that. We can contemplate. We can debate. We can piece together new information.
But I believe we've come to a particular moment in history in which now we, as Dan said, must think about how then do we take this conversation as a kind of starting point for reimagining right new institutional kind of cultures, new traditions because without sort of practices of habit, without rethinking what we take for granted, what's fundamental about our institutions, i.e. the budget, then this conversation is simply an intellectual exercise that will not have any merit on the ground. And so with that, I just want to again thank my colleagues for just pushing me in terms of my own sense of responsibility before engaging a highly contested topic.
TRACEY HUCKS: Thank you, Terrence. And I also want to thank the host for being invited to this very important conversation. I'm trained as a historian of religion. And I have committed my work to disclosing invisible and muted histories. That's the work that I commit myself to. And in this conversation, it was about unmuting those conversations with the descendants of those who were the slave traders. Unmuting and unsilencing those histories of those who are descendants of the enslaved. And also being a part of this collective conversation of unmuting and unsilencing the history of slavery as it relates to Harvard University.
One of the things that I wanted the audience to take away from this was the sense of our expanded notion of the geography of slavery. That it was not just a southern phenomenon. That there was this notion of the deep north, where slavery was entrenched in New England economy. I really appreciate the report on the legacy of slavery when it states, quote, slavery thrived in New England from its beginnings and was a vital element of the colonial economy. So too was slavery integral to Harvard.
And so I wanted it to be widely known in terms of the ways we think about slavery and the geographies we think about slavery, just to remember that the first enslaved people are coming into New England in 1638. And not forget that 200-year history of enslaved African presence in New England, in the north.
I also wanted a sense of what do we do with this dialogue, and how do we engage in dialogues around this history? And Dain Perry offered us one approach to doing that. It's this notion of what's sacred listening? And he defined it as listening with an open heart and an open mind. It's important that we have an opportunity to say what we feel and also know that what we are saying is being heard. And I want to say, that's not an easy thing. Because that listening requires listening to pain, to listening to shame, to listening to anger, to listening to guilt, to listening to trauma. And so it ultimately is about listening and engaging in dialogues that require courage from us to do that work.
And finally, one of the things I thought that was really important that came out of the webinar that I did with Dain and Constance Perry was this need, particularly in the United States, for the importance of intra-white dialogue. There was many instances within the webinar where he directly talked to the audience and said, specifically White people, I'm referring to White folks. He said, quote, we don't know what we don't with regard to race. And it's important that we take the time to learn and to understand the multigenerational trauma that particularly African-Americans but all people of color live through in this country. And that multigenerational trauma is very significant. And the ignorance of White folks toward it is very significant.
And so the sense of what Does it mean to begin to have interracial conversations and dialogues among White people. And those of you who have written in, talked about beginning that work, beginning that work in your churches. One participant wrote in, saying that for the past seven years, she has gathered White women together to talk about what she calls undoing our own racism. And so really wanting to have these cross-racial dialogues but also wanting to emphasize in the webinar the sense for the importance of interracial dialogue as well.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: And this is so, so beautiful. And so we want to hear you all engage with each other. We want to engage with all of you together. So given what we've all heard and what you just shared, what are your responses to the two questions that framed the series? And those two questions were what does the academic study of religion teach us about the complex histories and legacies of slavery? And how can a deeper understanding of the roles of religion enhance our commitment to reparative action in our contemporary times? So those are two initial questions. And Diane, I want to just ask you if you can just start us off.
DIANE MOORE: Yeah. First of all, thank you for those summaries. They reminded me of the depth. I took extensive notes, but I again heard some new things in your retelling, and just deeply grateful for your thoughts and presentations. One overarching theme I think comes to mind for me when I think about the importance of the study of religion and how it can help us understand the power of religion in more nuanced ways than is common in public conversation.
In our work in Religion and Public Life, we encounter and know that there are deeply embedded assumptions about religion that are just taken as true that are actually quite problematic and are unquestioned. They're kind of seeming to be self-evident truth. And for us, we realize that that's not because people aren't capable of understanding complexity. It's that there are very few opportunities for people to be exposed to the study of religion, as opposed to the experience of one's own faith, community, or public conversation about religion that's often portrayed, again, through media or through journalism, which is not the same as the study of religion.
I think the one thing I want to invite us to think about relevant to this conversation is that there's a common assumption that somehow, religion is either a positive or a negative force. And in fact, religion is both. Religion is a powerful force. That's what we are trying to represent through this series and through Religion and Public Life in general.
And the danger of presuming that religion-- having debates about religion as good or bad distracts us from the essential power of how religion is functioning, again, in both terribly heinous ways, as we've seen in the history of this conversation and the history of the legacies of slavery relevant to religion. But also, it distracts us again also from the incredible power that we can muster and coalitions we can build across sectors relevant to promising aspirations that religion can also inspire.
So I think I just wanted to say that the study of religion helps challenge that binary of good or bad religion or that real religion is actually, quote unquote, good religion, and that other forms of religion are somehow misrepresented or misinterpreted. The study of religion helps give more complexity to that and challenges that binary and really ends with the fact that religion is powerful. How we as human beings decide to use that power is really within our capacity to decide. And I hope that through this conversation, that all of us will have better tools, including me, better tools to recognize that power and how it's functioning in our contemporary lives, and to challenge the negative impacts of it, and to enhance the positive. So that's one take, one important comment I wanted to make about the power of religion and the study of religion.
KAREN KING: Can I just build on that, Diane? Because this was one of the central important points about the way the Bible can be interpreted. Some people will say, oh, the Bible is pro-slavery. They read the Bible. They find that there. And so then that means either that authorizes and justifies enslavement or else, they have to throw the whole thing out.
And I think the important thing is to realize that we have a responsibility to understand and to really dig in deeply to the complexity of this literature that was written in a context of a society of enslavement. But to realize that it says multiple things. And in the talk, I talked about Paul, Letters of Paul, which are an important part of the New Testament. They're really hard, but he has trouble with them. But Paul says at least three things. He says that there's neither slavery nor free in Christ Jesus, so they don't apply. Or price followers are not heirs, but they are slaves. Or all people are enslaved. I mean, he says it all.
But in a way then, what one does with that, the complexity of how one meets that, who does it, and what it says is so important. So thank you for emphasizing that point.
DIANE MOORE: Thank you.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: One of the things that was so compelling from your talk was the Negro Bible. And it distinguishes the work of interpreting and understanding the different stories within the Bible versus this deliberate act. That people went to the extreme measures of actually crafting a Bible, extracting books from the Bible, like Song of Solomon, Song of Songs, that highlight the beauty of Blackness, for example, to especially design this Bible to underscore oppression against Black people, to justify slavery.
So it's just strikes me this deliberate act. And then the other point that you raised so powerfully was accountability. So this is helping to underscore the accountability of scholars of religion, ministers, Christians specifically, who carry this legacy. And to understand and appreciate the legacy and the impact of this deliberate act of utilizing the Bible, the Word of God, to justify enslaving the Black people. That's a different exercise. I mean, that was just really, really, really striking to me.
KAREN KING: Well, thank you for that. And just to say, it is really astonishing how much had to be taken out.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: I think also, it's striking in terms of the responsibility, and the fact that we don't know that, and that it's not a part of the regular discourse, the conversations in schools, in churches, and so forth. So it just adds to the level of responsibility that Christians, White Christians in particular have to this history, to dismantling this history, and understanding the legacies, the longstanding psychological implications of this deliberate act.
DAVID HOLLAND: Maybe I can just jump in there, Melissa. And just to note that this process or the desire to create a scripture in support of White supremacy is very much in keeping with something that came out of our discussion in our session. The idea that White supremacy is a belief system with its own symbols, and doctrines, and even rituals, and as you note, with the desire to create even sacred texts in the process of the pursuit of its own power.
So as a belief system that persists even in the face of vast amounts of evidence to the contrary, it's hard to imagine, actually for me at least, an academic setting better equipped to analyze, deconstruct, and unravel the belief system of White supremacy than the study of religion, where doctrines, and symbols, and scriptures, and ritual, and interpretation, and even potentially violent zeal have long been the object of inquiry within this field. And so White supremacy very much should be an object of inquiry for students of religion.
TERRENCE JOHNSON: And also if I can add. I think what's quite fascinating, and I learned this from my teacher, Karen King, in terms of when I was a graduate student here, sort of the multiple ways in which we use hermeneutics to interpret a sacred text. And so I think religion, it opens a possibility for reimagining, like the starting point for how we engage sacred texts.
The assumption is that we read the text for many Protestants, and you're seeking something from it. There's an entire set of histories and undisclosed debates that have happened that inform how we read. So part of what I think we've done is really force people to sort of rethink, how do I engage / how do I then challenge the starting points in which I engage religion? I think categories like Whiteness, White supremacy, while we hear them regularly, we've yet to really I think decode them in public debates.
And I think we've attempted to lay a groundwork for rethinking, OK. We can't take religion for granted as this personal, individualistic encounter with the divine, right? That these multiple histories that we have to contend with and lots of debates. And I think the more that we learn and disclose the debates that happened, say, for example, in the Pauline letters for example, I think the greater capacity went to hear new evidence, but also the greater capacity, I think, to then move and shift and expand how we use the text, and to think about it in terms of community, and think about a much broader perspective.
TRACEY HUCKS: One of the things that I would add is the great historian of religion, Albert Raboteau, the late Albert Raboteau, said that religion and particularly, Christianity for the enslaved was a double-edged sword. And so how do we come up with authentic and truthful stories that really talk about that double-edgeness of that? How do we restore the history? How do we begin to advance knowledge that begins to speak truthfully about the complicity with religion, slavery, and the rise of modernity. That they were moving hand in hand.
How do we then interrogate some of the theologies and the theological anthropologists that developed about Black people, the evilness of Blackness, and how do we begin to do that work honestly, truthfully, and within the context of the study of religion. But also, I would say, how do we embrace the interdisciplinarity and the transdisciplinary of the work that we do?
So one of my questions is yes, the study of religion can be a leader in this conversation, but I want it to be reciprocal also. What does slavery and the study of slavery have to teach the study of religion? How might we rethink how we teach and how we do and write in research history, particularly denominational history? What does it mean when we have now individual diocese, the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, the Baptist Church, Methodist Churches, all thinking about their historical alliance with slavery and the slave trade?
And most recently, what does it mean for us to say teach the Church of England, which recently pledged 100 million pounds, acknowledging its shameful past and wanting to address past wrongs for its investment in the South Sea Company, which was responsible for the transport of some 34,000 enslaved Africans. And knowing that today's profit, they would have yielded 1 billion 361 million pounds from that. So how do we really begin to think about how the history of slavery will change the impact and the way in which we teach authentically with integrity, with truth and honesty in the classroom?
DAN MCKANAN: One other thing that I think the study of religion can bring is some deep understanding of the ways that we relate to the ancestors one of the most basic things that religious traditions do is orient our relationships between people who are living now and people who've lived in the past. But in the context of colonialism, in the context of enslavement, that dimension of religion was often pushed to the margins because the fact of the matter is that colonization and enslavement are ways of breaking kinship.
So it was perhaps inevitable that the religions of the colonizers would wind up shifting to put an emphasis on me and God, rather me and the sacred through the thicket of my ancestors. And the study of religion is now kind of catching up to the full complexity of religion and the centrality of ancestors to that. And that can provide all of us with better tools for thinking ethically about accountabilities to ancestors who suffered profoundly and ancestors who perpetrated atrocities.
TERRENCE JOHNSON: Tracey, I just want to ask you a question. I'm curious in terms of the authenticity piece because my students often try to push me in terms of, well, what does it mean then to teach authentically, right? And part of what I want to suggest or how I've been trained is that, well, we're always questioning the starting point. And so this idea that we are inserting one particular reading of Christianity to overcompensate or to push against another reading I think is, in some ways, a misnomer.
And part of how I was trained in terms of thinking through African religions in general but African-American studies also is this idea that you're constantly complicating, right? Not necessarily displacing but complicating truthfulness of the very origins and the origin stories that we're using to discuss slavery, for example, or discuss Christianity's role in enslavement.
Because many people push back and say, well, your authenticity is actually attempting to bury my story. Or your authenticity is simply trying to paint one picture. And I think my struggle is how then do we show people that we are trying to bring in multiple ways of reading, that are attempting to again open the can and open traditions, rather than foreclose them.
TRACEY HUCKS: Thanks for that question. For me, it's not about curating a sense of history that we give to our students. It's about I think courageously being able to boldly walk into that double-edginess, to really step into that authenticity. And it's not always comfortable to be in that space, to give as full and comprehensive as a history as we can, so that it doesn't paint itself like this wonderful portrait of history or him, but that it really is messy, that it is painful.
And we live into the spaces both when it touches our own personal history and when it indicts our own personal history also. How do we model that, I think, in authentic ways without trying to somehow preserve some kind of pristine history that has never and will never serve us?
DIANE MOORE: This conversation reminds me of also challenges that I have in the classroom. And I think I share, all of us do, which is that if to do what we are speaking about, which is to challenge normative assumptions, narratives, to make more complicated histories that are often taught or presumed to be simple. We often encounter, then our students will say, well, what do we do with that? We're always deconstructing. We're deconstructing. We're showing how we can challenge a idea or a narrative. But what do we do with that? How do we respond to that?
And one hope that I have in my teaching and in our teaching is that we create pathways in our experiences in the classroom and even body memory if we will, if you will, of what it means to think about complexity not as something to avoid or to be resolved, which is so common the case, but to be embraced as generative, as generative opportunities. And I just wonder if others of you have those kind of challenges in the classroom and how you respond to that question of what do we do?
That we can't only-- I think this is true. I will claim that it is wrong for us to only deconstruct, to take apart, to challenge. We have to then help know what does it mean to rebuild, or reimagine, or engage with complexity in different ways? And I just wonder. I'd love to hear your responses to that.
KAREN KING: I really love the way you framed that because people often have said to me, oh, you're comfortable with all that complexity, but I'm not. I really need to know what I need to do here. And you're really so not helping. But for me, that complexity is not about, as Tracey was saying, getting the story. It's a complex story. And then that's what we're doing. But that provides this opportunity precisely for the kind of accountability that Melissa was talking about.
And one is not then coming up with the right story or even the right three interpretations of Paul or whatever. But rather, a practice of asking, as Terrence is, where are we starting? What are our assumptions? What are the possibilities? How have people interpreted this? Where are they coming from? What are their consequences? What are their contexts? What are the consequences of what they're doing?
So this becomes a habit of practice of reading, of constantly saying, what complexity am I not seeing? Whose voices have I not heard? What assumptions have I not seen? And again, I can understand how one can get lost in that too. But that kind of practice might then cultivate both a kind of sense of humility, a kind of sense of courage, and then a sense that actions do have consequences. So one needs to be careful, but one needs to act.
DIANE MOORE: Love that.
DAVID HOLLAND: Might just note that as a historian, I've long believed, and I'm far from alone in this, within the discipline of history and well beyond, that the denaturalizing of assumption is not paralyzing. It is in fact empowering. Because when we assume that the world that we've inherited somehow had to be as it is without recognizing that it's the product of choices, it's one option among a number of contingencies.
When we recognize that there were paths not taken and there were choices that result in the things that we've inherited, it reminds us that we have an opportunity to shift the arc of history as well. And so you can talk about the complex process as disempowering or paralyzing. And I can understand how that can sometimes be the case. But I think when we recognize that the central concern with the contingency of history actually produces the opportunity to act in our present. And that's what I hope we're empowering our students to recognize.
TRACEY HUCKS: I also, I loved your notion of reimagining. One of the things that Dain Perry said in our conversation was he said there's an umbilical cord that extends from slavery and that violence to the violence that we see today. And if we cannot reimagine, if I cannot reimagine it for my students, and for the communities that I feel accountable to, and to the ancestors that I'm accountable to, then we will be in a very desperate moment.
When I'm in the classroom, it's not a moment that's disconnected, and I'm teaching the historical violence. It's not disconnected from the contemporary violence that one is experiencing and that we're experiencing in our society. And how do you join those two together when we're trying to train not just scholars but leaders to be a part of that, that very messy, violent, complex world?
DIANE MOORE: I love that. I'm sorry.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: I was going say, that's the urgent work, Tracey. I just appreciate you illuminating that. That's the urgent work of the study of religion. That is praxis. That is the urgent work. That's why we're here. And I'm still like savoring your question, whether it's the history of slavery have to teach the study of religion. And from that, in that, it's also like what does the enslaved have to teach the study of religion?
Because for people to, in spite of a text being distorted, to be able to utilize a religion and make it their own to survive, is one vehicle to survive something as traumatic as slavery, they have a lot to teach us. So I just appreciate all that you have shared in your reflections because it signals your ability to make those connections, to help our students really understand in a real practical way how this resource and religion can be-- how it was applied by people centuries ago, and how it's the contemporary resource for today.
TERRENCE JOHNSON: And Diane, I would just add that I think when students raise a question to what do I do with this, I would push back and say, well, I'm not sure you truly or you've embraced and you understand and embody what we've just debated. Because as the question to me is really saying, I'm not necessarily comfortable with the logical conclusion or the conclusions of this particular argument.
Because when you understand the material and when you sort of comprehend what's happened, you don't ask what to do. You insert yourself in the material, right? When the slaves, again, as you well know, the Raboteau and other folk, when they heard certain narratives, they simply inserted and say, oh, this is what I hear. Now here's how I act.
We're just reading Doris Williams in class today, Sisters in the Wilderness. And so idea that how do you take what is, and simply, they engage. And so she wasn't necessarily looking for an answer to sort of Black women's oppression, but she was trying to figure out, what did they do? How did they respond? How do I go to different texts and narratives to discover what happened?
And it wasn't simply, but they simply read the material and engaged it, in it through the sources that they were given. And to me that speaks to a way in which people assumed they have the right to respond and that their only way to stay alive was to respond and to respond with courage. And I think sometimes, because we are so comfortable in our middle class ideology, the middle class sort of comfort zones, that we ask, well, how? How do we make this practical when in fact, if you read and you engage, the answers are there if you embody it. But what we're really saying is I'm not sure I can do this because it might mean my livelihood will change in drastic ways.
DIANE MOORE: I think you're really right, Terence. And I would add, I think there are two barriers that that question signals or two embedded assumptions or structures. I'll say structures. One is this notion that all things are fixable through action. Like what do I do to fix something? Which I think presumes a very instrumentalized understanding of education that I think is pretty common now and has been now embedded in educational assumptions for several decades now. But it's not inevitable. So I appreciate that comment from you, David, that these structures are not inevitable, but they can feel inevitable.
The other frankly is White privilege, which is that White people need to do something. Like you fix something. You take action. You do something. That I think is also really problematic, rather than just sit with what you just spoke about very eloquently. But the implications of what it means to really embody these stories and these narratives. And so when I was talking earlier about body memory, of being comfortable in discomfort, if you will, or accepting discomfort and also accepting complexity as potentially routes for new kinds of moral imagination and generative engagement is something that I feel like is deeply, deeply part of the richness of what religious studies can offer and needs to offer.
I want to make one other quick comment. I'm sorry. I didn't want to talk so much. But you're commenting and you're reminding me, Terrence, of your really important connection you made in your presentation about how the no one was writing about understanding Nazism and giving credibility to Nazi ideologies following the war.
And the comments that you were talking about and beginning with slavery, Tracey, reminded me of a really powerful quote by Irving Greenberg, who spoke after the Holocaust. He said, we can't speak about God anymore without considering the face of burning children. And I thought that's exactly what we need to do about slavery, is what does it mean for the study of religion, for us to really have to confront the reality of a world where enslavement was so common and so profoundly ubiquitous as Karen identified? And that is, back to your comment, Terrence, change of a starting point. And I think that change of a starting point is really critical for us moving forward as we think about the impact of these conversations.
DAN MCKANAN: One classic book that raises exactly that question, Diane, is William Jones' book, Is God a White Racist? Where he asks one how to think about the divine in the face of what he called the non-catastrophic character of white racism. The ways in which it persists over centuries, always shapeshifting. And the very challenging theological questions that are raised when you see ideas of divine omnipotence in juxtaposition to ongoing shapeshifting oppression.
TERRENCE JOHNSON: And Dan, even Delores Williams writes similar to this idea that Blacks have lived in perpetual enslavement. So this idea that social death is new or Afro-pessimism, right? We see it in both Jones and the works of Delores Williams 30 odd years ago.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: So we have one question before we shift to the audience questions. We just have one question for you all to consider, which is thinking about the series. What do you see going forward from this series for HDS and for the study of religion? We've touched on some of this already, but if you have anything else you want to offer. What do you see going forward for HDS and for the study of religion?
KAREN KING: It's funny because when we talked about answering that question, it seemed like it was a distinct question. And I appreciate, particularly the way Dan raised it for us when we were discussing what we might talk about tonight. But in some ways, what my colleagues have said tonight already in so many ways addresses the list of things, from Tracey's point about we need to look at what the study of slavery teaches us. We need to look at, at curriculum, at the pedagogy, when you think about what's--
All of the things my colleagues have said seem to me to be the answers that I would have given in going forward to that. And that includes very much the kinds of suggestions that Dan and Terrence and others have talked about in terms of what is reparations? Why should we think about that? What is that going for? And Terrence said that so much more beautifully than I am that I'm muting now. I'm muting.
TRACEY HUCKS: I hope this is just the beginning of-- one of the things I talked about in my webinar is that we have very few spaces to have these conversations. And so I'm hoping that this is just one of holding space for future conversations. And not just virtually but that members can come on our campus and engage us in person dialogue as well as we begin to have and continue to have these conversations at HDS.
I'm hoping that Harvard Divinity School will be a public forerunner for having these difficult conversations. That we will take up a mantle as a space that will hold the moral and ethical principles and values of this institution, its truth to its highest-- its very task, to its highest principles and call upon that. But be a space, that we are not afraid to do that.
And that will be a part of our classroom also. That we will also embrace it. We are teaching leaders that that is a profound vocation for us and a profound moment for us to be teaching leaders who will go out and continue this work. We began the webinar with Sweet Honey and the Rock, we who believe in freedom cannot rest. And I want to be a place and be at a place where we take up as our mantra, we who believe in freedom cannot rest.
DAVID HOLLAND: When we think about our financial obligations and the economic dependence that our school had on these systems of slavery, we can think about ways to put our current resources to use in addressing the very issues that this series has raised, including support for students that are working on these issues, including the resources that might empower faculty to do their own curricular review, syllabus, transformation, to support the ongoing work that Tracey just defined and described.
DAN MCKANAN: One of the things I would hope for in the study of religion is that this conversation can do the work that a lot of the people responding to this panel have suggested, which is to engage a wider spectrum of religious traditions and focus less narrowly on Christianity. One of the really interesting things for me as I followed the money of Harvard Divinity School is that the trail led from slave colonies in the Caribbean to slave colonies in the Indian Ocean to late 19th century profits made in imperial ventures in every corner of the globe.
And I had a really interesting conversation with my colleague, Teren Sevea, who works on Islam in the Indian Ocean world about the range of unfree labor systems in that part of the world at the moment when future Harvard donors were sailing their ships there in the 19th century. There's an enormous amount more for me to learn. And I hope we can expand that dialogue.
And then for the Divinity School itself, I'm really hoping that we will be a seedbed of creative thinking about reparation for Harvard as a whole. We are the right place for this one because we are the part of Harvard that is most dependent on endowed wealth. And two, because as a divinity school, we have connections to so many of the religious communities that have been one, two, or three steps ahead of us in the work of reparation.
DIANE MOORE: Well, thank you. Thank you all for these comments. And again, that this is our question that we will keep alive here at the Divinity School and hope that those in the audience will also be inspired to bring these kinds of questions to their own institutions. And in fact, many of you in your response to our questionnaire, and thank you all.
Those of you who did respond, we received over 65 responses, which we were so grateful for. And the two questions we asked were what did you learn, one, two, three things that you learned from the series? And if relevant, how have you applied your learning in your own context? And the responses were incredibly inspiring we found.
And I just wanted to highlight four themes in the responses relevant to what people have done with what they've learned. And then I'm going to open it up back to our colleagues to highlight particular responses that they wanted to share relevant to their own sessions. And just maybe make a comment or two about that.
So I'll just start by saying that there were four themes that we gleaned from what people are doing with what they've learned in ways that were, again, incredibly generative for us. People are looking to their own family histories to discover enslaved as well as slaver ancestors. So several of you commented that the series has inspired you to look into your own family legacies in whatever arenas that those fell and what you learned in that encounter.
The second theme we saw was that people are looking into their religious or other related institutional histories to uncover connections with slavery and the slave trade. Many of you working within religious communities, religious institutions. Others of you though working in small government contexts relevant to these kinds of questions. Where does the money come from? And just, I want to quote my wonderful friend and colleague Dan to say, the key is follow the money. Just follow the money back. See where it leads you.
The third people, actively working within their communities on strategies for strategies for and enactment of reparations. So there's a lot of really exciting work being done. And thank you for sharing some of those experiences with us. And please keep us posted about your progress. Seriously, this is our work as well.
And then the fourth. People talking with family, just individual encounters. People talking with family and friends about what they've learned in formal ways, either through study groups or through shared participation in the series. We had one respondent who was very-- we all found this very powerful. Who requested as a birthday present that their family watch this series with this person, and that they talk about it. And shared some capacity of what that has yielded, which that we thought was really wonderful and creative. And also an informal way through sharing new insights from what they've learned.
And one comment I'll just close with relevant to my hope that in our part of offering this series, was that people will feel empowered to realize that their individual agency matters to shape cultures, whereby different kinds of choices can be made. This person said, I've learned that I can be a positive force by just being aware and perceptive. And I agree because knowledge changes us.
And thank you all for your participation in this series and your sharing of your responses. I'm going to just turn it over now to our faculty colleagues to say, is there anything out of those responses that any of you would like to lift up and respond to as we move here toward the last quarter of our time together?
TRACEY HUCKS: I want to first thank all who wrote in their responses to this series. Thank you for those of you who wrote in, that you've been with us week after week. And we are just so grateful for that. That you've taking the time on your Monday evening to be with us. And also thank those of you who couldn't do it every Monday but took the time to go back and view the recordings also. Thank you for your really important affirming comments for the work that we're doing.
I wanted to highlight two of them. One, I wanted to just really emphasize that one of the things that Harvard Divinity School is really framing itself as is a multireligious context. And wanted to just acknowledge that we had a multireligious audience as well. And for those who-- I did the part on the slave trade. I wanted to also just highlight that those Africans who were captive and enslaved were also multireligious during the slave trade.
Several of you identified that you are Muslim. I wanted to just acknowledge that, Ramadan Mubarak, as we enter into the season of Ramadan soon. But also, as Professor Jacob Olupona tells us, is that those Africans also were very much you know holders of their own Indigenous hermeneutics and knowledge of traditional religions that when they came here.
So I want them on the one hand. Someone asked a question in the Q&A right now about the word, chattel. And Yes we do know that Africans were used as chattel, objectified as economy, as objects of labor. But also those of us who do this work, wanting to humanize them also and not have them only be seen as shadow.
So I wanted to also just highlight that people may not know. Again, wanting to uncover some invisible history, that 30% of enslaved Africans from the Middle Passage were Muslim. That they came here from places like Senegal, present day Mali, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Cameroon, the Gambia. Many of them came through the Port of Charleston. And that they disrupted so much of the stereotypes that one wanted to have about Africans, that they were illiterate. We know that wasn't true.
We know that, particularly our Muslims, those who came who were Muslim were literate. They could write in Arabic. And for those of you who ever have the time, if you ever get to Davidson College, I would urge you to go to the archives and see the work of Omar ibn Said who was enslaved, who actually reproduced the entire Christian Bible in Arabic. And then to protect it, he put his own clothes around it. So to see that original work and to really begin to think about the multireligiosity of enslaved Africans. So that was one that I wanted to highlight. Thank you for those of you who wrote in, who talked about your own religious identities.
The other thing I wanted to highlight was someone named Tanya McCollum, who said that she's been with us every week. I really appreciated the work that she is doing also. But one of the things that she reminded us and reminded me is that we are telling a story about the enslaved, the legacy of the captors, the legacy of the owners, the overseers, the one who were with the traders.
But she put in that some of the lyrics of my favorite song, Lift Every Voice and Sing. The Negro national anthem. When she says God of our weary years, God of our silent tears. Thou who has brought us thus far along the way. And so just wanting to make us clear that it's about the legacy of slavery, but it's also about the courageous legacy of those who were enslaved also. That allowed us to see the humanity as well.
And as being part of my favorite song, in being here, the lyrics that keep me going and what I do is we have come over a way that when tears have been watered. We have come treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered. And that blood lives in me. And it empowers the work that I do. And so I want to thank her for reminding us about the descendants of slavery and the enslaved and also really thinking about another kind of legacy that enslaved people courageously left in this country and in this hemisphere.
DIANE MOORE: Thank you. Thank you, Tracey.
TERRENCE JOHNSON: I received several comments, and I'm grateful for them. But two in particular that kind of just challenged me. One in terms of just reminder that these are human beings who were enslaved. And this whole idea that we have to think about enslavement not simply as property, but as human beings who were confined, who were slaughtered, who were murdered.
And I tried to emphasize that point because part I think of the resistance or a good part of the resistance is the fact that these are people who either deserve to be enslaved, or these are simply lazy people who went astray. And no. We want to change the narrative. These are human beings who deserve some form of reparation.
And then secondly, someone wrote in a way which I hadn't thought about this idea, that we should think about reparations in terms of our existing liberal vocabulary around equality, equity, and justice. And that I believe she indicated that reparations should extend or serve as a way to think about education, about institutional change. And that just as we talk about equality of opportunity, equal rights, when you talk about this idea of reparation for those who have been harmed and wronged by our society. And so that's something I want to think through a bit more in terms of thinking about reparation as a core principle of what we call political liberalism, that the person really I think implied in their comment.
DAN MCKANAN: I'd like to pick up two things that were raised in the responses we received and also in the Q&A right now. And one is expressed by Ian Carter. What is the timeline for Harvard University to implement and complete this process of repair? And I don't fully know the answer to that question. But what I want to say is that the timeline will be set in large part by all of us.
If we take every opportunity we have to talk about the ways in which the work of reparation is intimately connected to our core educational mission and is life-giving for the communities to whom we are accountable, then we one by one will gradually move the institution. And similarly, Dale Mark Benedict raised the question about how we should respond when students ask about other forms of reparation for other harms, in addition to enslavement. And my hope would be that the--