Mulatto Bodies and the Body of Christ

Abstract

Ten years ago, in an article for The Christian Century, theologian Jonathan Tran heraldedthe work of three black theologians J. Kameron Carter, Willie J. Jennings, and Brian Bantumas inaugurating a “new black theology.” According to Tran, these three thinkers represented “ amajor theological shift that [would] if taken as seriously as it deserve[d] change the facenot only of black theol ogy but theology as a whole.” Now that ten years have passed, thispaper asks: Has it? And arguing that it has not, I offer reflections on why it has not. At thecenter of my argument will be a critique of the way Carter and Bantum offered their revisedun derstanding of racial identity and hybridity by reimagining the identity Jesus throughmulatto/a bodies and persons. This, I will claim, is a dead end. It is a project that fails todo the very thing it sets out to do, and ultimately, collapses in on itsel f. My aim in makingthis critique is less refutation and more redirection. More specifically, I will hope to resolvesome of the problematic impulses in their appeal to mulatto identity, and in so doing, clearthe way for a new direction in Black Theology.