Prophetic Fire and Creative Flourishing

Black social Christianity remains a creative tradition of theological, political, activist, and public intellectual discourse. Chapter 6 tracks how an ongoing tradition of Black social Christianity refashioned and renewed its thinking about democratic socialism, cultural criticism, Black feminism, gay and queer sexuality, modern theology, the womanist tradition, and national politics. It features Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, Obery Hendricks Jr., bell hooks, Traci West, Victor Anderson, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, and Monica A. Coleman, and builds toward a discussion of the Barack Obama era and its legacy. The coming of Obama changed the social and political landscape in which all Black intellectuals, activists, and church leaders operated. It fuelled a narrative about America reaching or approaching the post-racial cosmopolitanism that he symbolized. It triggered a torrential right-wing backlash that refuted the happy-cosmopolitan story. Obama said as little as possible about race until seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was gunned down in February 2012 and his murderer was acquitted the following year. Meanwhile police officers cut down many others as though their lives did not matter. Obama, in the White House, heightened the danger to Black Americans in the street. Black Lives Matter, a movement hard to see coming when Obama was elected in November 2008, symbolized what came of the Obama era.