Americas Africans Essay Example

What I expected in “Remapping and Rethinking African American Religion” was a toying awareness. This awareness would consider Why a chosen religion was to be divided for African Americans. Or How the religion has affected African Americans in a irreplaceable or unrepeated way. Instead, the delivery is, as warned, about concepts of broad thinking and explaining humanity.
“Humanity is best defined by “ambiguity”” (64) and these words are simplest of the chapter to which I cannot argue. The African American religion is definitely bulked with ambiguity toward sin and pleasure and fear and pride, but it always closes on choice. With religion, the choice is to improve, to be aware, to do better. Though this explaining is rich in its theories and reasoning, I am unsatisfied.
The text’s unspecified religion is definitely about how it has been reflected in the African American struggles. What I expected was a tease on the Alternatives or Minor religions of the African American. Or possibly, what was lost when African Americans no longer practised African Religions. Fortunately, the bigger context of “Rethinking African American Religion” is not about pointing out the wrongs and misunderstanding of a given group. With use of philosophical minds, the text focuses greatly on what it means to gather an identity, feel welcomed, and have possibility based on spiritual strength.
The chapter is not about focusing on the scheme, or how a religion has possibly strangled a given culture. I suppose it is here where my disappointment is rooted. The religion of African Americans is under the umbrella of Christianity. The describing of it is not nearly as controversial as I would like as examples are provided in a child stricken with an epiphany of self-awareness (68), and a slave reorganizing the kind of love he has for his owner (71). These examples are dramatic because one realizes he is the world’s problem and the other addresses a change in that equation. Religion is merely handled as a solution to better the self, but not a tool to level the inequalities. I would agree that this is because the ability to level is impossible.
The matter I truly found agreeable about this chapter was in identifying the reasoning of religion. This definition was provided in a subchapter, comparing religion to “challenging viewers to think beyond the concrete presence of particular colors and shapes” (85) to see inner purpose and meaning. And is because this latent definition, that I find the rest of this chapter lacking.
It is in mind of this that I appreciate that theme of “quest” (63) is evaluated on paper instead of being lead to the reader’s imagination. The word could have easily been left to implications due to the meaning and action “having numerous ways of understanding and expressing onself” (63). We are, as the chapter title suggests, to remap and rethink, whatever conventions or concepts we already have in African American Religion. We are to turn them over to understand not only the appealing aspects but the squeamish and uncomfortable, but that didn’t happen for me.
More could have been asked. I feel this in reflection of ““How does it feel to be a problem” to be an object of historical curiosity an oddity”. (69) I feel this way because there is a knowing anger involved. Not from the prescriber of this question but for the person to answer it, specifically the “African American” who is knowingly blamed for many a political issue, social awareness, or sour community. This is a question that passes more often amongst the “African American” who is still bruised from an identity that cannot be washed off, cut off, forgotten, or dislocated. What I would ask is for other ethnicity. Though it may reach too far from the context of this chapter, I would look to those monitors who were historically-rich for objectifying. I would ask “How does it feel to profit from those you consider a problem?” “How does it feel to be the one who declared what is a curiosity or oddity?” “How does it feel to be the children of masters?” But given how religion has taken affect in the life of African Americans, from the slaves to the free, I don’t see how the “encounter with the Christian God” (82) has been taken apart for the tool that it is.
You ask “How does this chapter overall relate Black Religion in America”. It doesn’t. In my opinion against the abstract reasoning, I am not convinced of such a connection. If anything, I would feel uncomfortable to use this text to estimate an opinion about African American Religion. Though African American Religion has certainly a distinctive life of its own, I would not go so far as to call it Black Religion. Though the essay does nothing to consider this type of label, a religion for Black People couldn’t possibly be the same for African Americans. In fact, I would believe the religion of America’s Black people would sincerely have little to do with the religion of African Americans. In my mind, Black Religion would have to be mindful, cautious, of African-America’s scared-angry child and starved-negotiating slave since American religion has been both too much of a weight and a whip. I think appropriate religions for Black people would shun this kind the Christian God, and seek backwards, towards the beliefs of a pre-colonial Africa.