Racial Capitalism, Organizing, and Religious Practices: the Work of Conjuring a New World

Aaron Stauffer, PhD is the Senior Research Fellow at the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School. He completed his PhD in Theology and Ethics with a concentration in Christian Social Ethics in May of 2020.

In the spirit of the recent uprisings across the nation and world in response to police murders of black and brown people, the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice held three Interviews on Racial Capitalism with prominent academics, activists, and public figures.

The inaugural forum for Interventions features reflections by Wendland-Cook staff on these interviews with Dr. Angela Coswer, Dr. Vincent Lloyd, and Rev. Dr. Altagracia Pérez-Bullard. The forum continues the conversation between these scholars and offers ways forward for the church to deepen its commitment to liberation movements. To see the entire forum, click here. This is Aaron Stauffer’s contribution.

Racial Capitalism, Organizing, and Religious Practices: the Work of Conjuring a New World

Aaron Stauffer

August 13, 2020

Naming our current economic and racial order in terms of “racial capitalism” is to align our words with our reality. Social movements seem to have outrun our dominant moral, political, economic, and even religious imaginations that purport to inspire visions of freedom. To speak of “racial capitalism” here is to honor part of the original insight of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. I say “part” because his argument includes much more than what this forum addresses. To assert racial capitalism as a hermeneutic is to say that race and class are crucial tools in building liberation movements. Only by thinking with an intersectional lens do we begin honor the multidimensional, overlapping, and interlocking nature of the constructed yet very real and embodied realities of race and class.

To think in terms of racial capitalism is also to think about the role of social movements and their deployment of art, poetry, song, dance, and the work of organizing itself as crucial activating forces that can “conjure” a new world. This is because neoliberal capitalism, as an economic system, also forms and shapes our racial, cultural, political, and religious lives and what we imagine liberation amounts to. The best and most powerful social movements in this country’s history know the power that culture and history of working people play, alongside their labor, in inspiring people-led movements for liberation.

Vincent Lloyd has written some about this—and that’s why I wanted to interview him for this series. He has dropped a sentence or two in recent articles, but the idea never takes center stage, so far as I can tell. He does this in a recent piece titled, “The End of the World: Reflections from Black Activism,”

The world is never fully captured by domination. There is always a remainder. Because domination has infected our language and our perception, we cannot point to that remainder and name it. But in song, poetry, dance, protest, and prayer we can conjure it now, and we can project it into the future, visioning a world without domination, after the world’s end. New life awaits after the end of the world.

When I asked Lloyd where he had seen this sort of conjuring he referenced the work of Andrew Prevot’s Thinking Prayer and Kyle Lambelet’s ¡Presente! But that leaves unaddressed a few questions, namely: what’s the work of religion in the use of art in protest and social movements? What about slow, patient work of organizing in conjuring a new world? My sense is that there is a deeper, more mundane connection between the work of religion in organizing and protest practices. Answers to these questions will also help us redefine and reclaim the work of religion itself.

Here is my take: Religion and religious practices are worked out—produced—in organizing spaces. Organizing is hard work, and the labor of mobilizing, educating, agitating, and organizing people can generate religious sensibilities. How we answer the broad question of how social and cultural movements “conjure” a new world helps us redefine and reclaim religion itself and understand the work of religion in organizing and protest practices.

For example, consider the role of art in the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ annual Year of the Worker Party. When I attended this action several years ago, I encountered a musical stage positioned by the Florida coastline, where the CIW colors of bright yellow and red waved through the blue sky in long banners, shouting “Hope!” “Justice!” “Dignity!” Painted cardboard puppets caricatured the CIW target companies of Wendy’s and Publix. Images of tomatoes and farm workers were carried throughout the more than 1,500-person crowd as they pressed near the stage led by a range of musical artists. There was more than a sense of collective effervescence. Here art, song, and dance were used to concretize and conjure—in however general or oblique a manner—their ideals.

Or, consider the simple example of the relational meeting. The bread-and-butter of organizing, the relational meeting is a chance for organizers and leaders to probe into the sacred values that ground one’s commitment to a movement. A relational meeting is an intentional, public individual meeting focused on what we care most about, and what we are willing to do for those things and people to protect them. People join organizing movements to fight for and protect those things they hold to be sacred. We are moved to action when acts of horrendous violence occur that violate, destroy, or threaten things or people we hold most dear. In the relational meeting organizers and leaders witness and honor people’s stories that testify to the things and people we hold sacred.

Stories of violence are not always spectacular. Horrendous violence often works surreptitiously and slowly. Workers are denied human dignity and health care protection. Lawmakers call special sessions to go after civil liberties and civil rights of freedom of speech or protest. We can sometimes only capture the full depth of the violence and horror through story and narrative. This is why the space of the relational meeting can turn deeply religious by a simple question: why do you care about this fight? What are you willing to do about it? This is the space where what matters most is narrated and figured in our lives—it is where we learn to be better humans and where we learn what matters most to us, which is often not money or things, but values and persons we hold sacred. This is the stuff of religion.

But such practices are always caught in the eschatological “not yet.” The working of these religious and political practices is not to foreclose our definitions of justice, or even to too neatly define the Kingdom of God come to earth. The formation of relational bonds through the stories of what we hold sacred is holy work. Conjuring a new world is very practical and mundane work. The creation and use of art generates our religious imaginations, and is mixed up with paint and fabric, coffee and conversation.

To admit this is only to start to explore how religious practices and protest practices are lived out in our social movements amidst such horrendous formations as racial capitalism.