S06E09: The Legacy of Charles H. Long Part 2: How & Why White Supremacy Persists

Ever wonder how a 15th‑century church decree still shapes who owns land in the United States today? We follow the Doctrine of Discovery from papal bulls and royal charters to Supreme Court opinions, then ground that history in living Haudenosaunee sovereignty at the Scano Great Law of Peace Center—a collaborative space built on values, relationship, and the Two Row Wampum way of working side by side without domination.

We open up Charles H. Long’s influence to frame religion as a structure of meaning that orders power and history, then test that frame against the erasures baked into American myths. You’ll hear how Jesuit deeds claimed Onondaga land before arrival, why the Sullivan–Clinton campaign marked a violent turn, and how “Christian discovery” morphed into U.S. property law in Johnson v. McIntosh and resurfaced in City of Sherrill v. Oneida. A retranslation of the papal bulls makes the language of conquest legible, while a frank look at personal ancestry—Mayflower lines, the Pequot War, the Erie Canal—models accountability to the benefits and harms we inherit.

From there, we widen the lens through decolonial and Indigenous studies: coloniality as a living order, the white possessive as an ontology of control, and racial capitalism’s demand for land. We track bans on Indigenous ceremonies, the Dawes Act’s allotments, and then the resurgence that refuses disappearance—urban ceremonies, language renewal, landback, and a metaphysic of kinship with more‑than‑human relatives. A womanist reading of the lynching of Eliza Woods confronts the semiotics of terror and exposes how Christian nationalism sanctifies domination, calling us to craft counter‑meanings rooted in art, ritual, and communal care.

We close by pairing Long with Sylvia Wynter to ask a bolder question: what new myth of the human can we create beyond either‑or binaries and nation‑state horizons? Thinking blackness as method and Indigenous covenant as practice, we sketch a path that is material, epistemic, and spiritual—toward institutions and relationships that embody right relation rather than reenact extraction.

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Transcript

Setting The Stage And Purpose

SPEAKER_02 0:02

So um I wanted to give credit to uh little discovery with taking care of the architect group for the uh until after well when long passed that was when we're gonna but uh we hope maybe we can keep this going.

Long’s Legacy And Today’s Crisis

Teaching Religion And White Supremacy

Scano Center And Haudenosaunee Partnership

Wampum Method And Shared Values

Founders, Democracy, And Slavery

Doctrine Of Discovery Explained

Papal Bulls To U.S. Property Law

Personal Lineage And Structural Trauma

Whiteness, Media, And Responsibility

SPEAKER_03 0:32

Uh we'll see, you know, but uh I think you can get the vibe, uh, you know, catch the vibe of long and the what we're trying to do here is a kind of building community, uh, which doesn't often happen uh at the AAR. Um but um you know uh I uh in my presentation, and I love this picture of Long as well, um in my presentation, I've been thinking a lot about Charles Long these days and what's happening in the in the country. Um but I'm always, as David was saying, um I'm always conscious of how we can crawl back through colonialism uh to analyze um what is now a white supremac Christian nation, um, because frankly that's what we are. And so how do we come to be here? And how do we how do we see our way through? And I think that's the conversation I think Long would want us to have. I teach a class called Religion and White Supremacy. I've been teaching it for decades, uh, really inspired by uh Charles Long's work and David's work. And um and it's been in the last couple of years where it's been packed. Um students really want to talk about this uh topic and how we how it is that we are here now. And my what I try to give them is the long view. That is not just the Charles Longview, but the the long historical view that has to do uh with the center of what we're doing now in our work, and I'm mentioning um uh Adam and Sandy and others in the room on the doctrine of Christian discovery. Um something that Sandy had mentioned earlier is uh I'm the founding director of the Scano Great Law Peace Center, where we where we decolonized the narrative of the Jesuits coming to Christianize the Onondaga and uh at Onondaga Lake, which is their sacred lake, where the Great Law of Peace was founded. Um lots to say about that, but I'm gonna resist. Um and uh we worked collaboratively with the Onondaga Nation, which is right there in Syracuse, it's the heartland of the Hood and Shoney or the Iroquois Confederacy, Sixth Nation Confederacy. So the Scano Center, and many of you have already been to the Scano Center, um, and uh uh and so it is a collaborative venture, and we what we've done is rather than call it a museum, because the Onondaga in meetings with them said it can't be a museum, apologies to the Peabody and other other institutions, but they are sites of theft for the Hood Noshnee. So it had to be a living space. Um and um and we had to also, this is my recent book called The Urgency of Indigenous Values, um, where we settled, so we had a conversation about the status of religion among the Hood Noshone and Indigenous peoples more widely. And uh of course, as you all know, religion has been used as a weapon against Indigenous peoples. And that's kind of the focus of what we're trying to illuminate in our work now. Um so we we decided that the best way forward to collaborate, and I'll talk about that more in a minute, uh, was through a category of values. Uh values has many different meanings and uh it's signified in different ways, but but that was something that we could work together around, right? Um and at the Scano Center, uh Scano means simply peace, but it also means peace that can only be achieved when human beings are in proper relationship with the natural world. And so that element of scano goes all the way through the narrative. Again, I'm going to resist talking too much about it. This is a picture of Charles Long and Sandy and me at the Scano Center. Um we uh were lucky enough to give him a tour in 2018 before he passed, um, and like he always does, he just sort of opened up uh this this kind of all all the kind of you know fissures that we were examining in the Scano Center, and of particular interest, and I'll just mention this one. But why was it that the founding fathers were in council with the Hood Noshone learning about democracy all through the 18th century up until the Revolutionary War, right? Why is the American period that breaking point, right? And Long said it has to do with slavery. That's why they were fighting the Revolutionary War, going to your point, you know. So he opened up that moment, right? How could they be friends for years and decades and decades and then suddenly flip and attack the Hood Noshone in what's called the Sullivan Clinton campaign? It's like this burned uh scorched earth campaign against the Hood and Ashone, right? So, anyway, that's just an aside. But but at the Scano Center, we can have those kind of conversations, and that's why we created it the way we did. Um and uh we saw it less a tourist site and more a kind of educational, uh a kind of educational opportunity, because that's where the Great Law of Peace was founded thousands of years ago. We have a French fort there. Uh there are conversations about how we should deal with the French fort. Some have suggested we should burn it down, but that would be you know kind of ruining an icon of Syracuse. But um, this is a this is an event where we had a number of Haudenosaunee people there, and and non-uh Haudenosaunee was one of our doctrine of discovery conferences where we had a papal bull burning ceremony, and I'll get into that in a minute. Um but uh so Onondaga Lake is kind of a special place in a lot of ways, and I'm going to sort of run through this as well. Um, the Hudnishone people, if you if you know, they had tremendous influence uh during the colonial period. Um we're working with the National Archives in London right now on their exhibit on Revolution 250, the making of the USA, and they're interested in the Hood Noshone influence on Western democracy and the development of Western democracy. Nobody in this country is, but they are. And so we've been in, you know, we've been interviewed and all that, and that's going to be happening in May next year. Uh if you watch the Ken Burns special, there was a kind of reference to the Hood Noshone in the first episode, but then, you know, we don't know what that is, right? So uh again, uh, you know, the narrative is really confused. But but anyway, um, so the Hudnishonee are a kind of deep feature of American history that has been systematically eliminated from the narrative of the United States. Um, the two row wampum. This is a wampum belt, an agreement between Hood Noshone people and the Dutch from 1619 or 1613. And it's a it's a physical artifact fact, it exists. It's their their um understanding of the relationship, this cohabitation relationship between Europeans and the Hood Noshone. Um, and specifically, it refers to the Hood Noshonee sailing down the river of life in their canoe with their cultural protocols and all that, and the Dutch sailing down the river of life in their vessel, in their ship. Um, and they are not to interfere with one another, the three rows of white beads in the middle. And those are referred to as the silver covenant chain. And that language is picked up by the English and other Europeans all through the American period. And but for us, this is a methodology, right? This is a way that we can collaborate and staying in our lane, so to speak, and then but work together on shared values of urgent mutual concern, right? That's the that's the operative idea here, right? So that's that was the lead for uh the Scano Center. So the doctrine of Christian discovery. Um Sandy and I have had a a podcast for the last what five years, six years? Uh Adam's our producer, so he um tells me everything. And um but uh called the mapping the doctrine of discovery. And we had a variety of different people on talking about. We've had David on, we've had um Orin Lyons, if you know Orin. So a number of different prominent people that have uh talked to us about the uh about their understanding of the doctrine of discovery. But at Onondaga Lake, and this is just one example, it could give you lots more, Onondaga Lake, the Jesuits came in 1658-56 with the deed, a land grant that gave them 600 square miles of land around Onondaga Lake. This is the land grant, we had it translated from French. Um, the Jesuits, before they even arrived, they already owned the land. So that's what we're talking about, right? So this is the doctrine of Christian discovery. The Onondaga have their own version in a wampum belt that tells a very different story than the Jesuit story, right? So the gap between these two texts, if you like, um uh is that um essentially the Onondaga threw them out because there was this they were planning uh a takeover of the uh the Confederacy. And so uh and Orin actually, we meet regularly with Orin Lyons, and he he described this episode in kind of cinematic detail, you know, of them approaching the Jesuit and cutting off his little finger. I've never heard anything like that in the Jesuit relations, right? And that they would say they said, if you don't leave, we'll do much worse. And then they escaped, right? So that's the kind of thing that we're uh we're grappling with uh at the Scano Center. So there are these contrasting versions between the Jesuit relations and the wampum belt. Um and they have different values associated with each kind of textual record. Now the doctrine of Christian discovery, this is our this is our Columbus statue in Syracuse, New York. Uh it's uh the the it's the uh desire of the mayor um that it come down. Right. Um I could talk a lot more about that as well. But essentially I use this as an illustration of the doctrine of discovery, right? Beginning in 1452, um succession of Catholic popes gave Christian monarchs sanction to seize lands and goods and enslave non-Christian peoples. This is the origin of the transatlantic sea trade, right? Um this is in response to the rise of the Ottoman Empire, the you know, the fall of Constantinople, and then the discovery of Africa, and then the Americas is all a kind of continuation of the Crusades in some ways, right? So there you kind of have to look at the whole, the long picture here, right? Um so again, Native people, and I find this all over the world, native people are keenly aware of the doctrine of discovery, but most others have no idea what that means. All right, so Christian nationalism. Um I'm gonna spend a little time with this. So 15, uh 14, we're doing a translation project, a retranslation of these papal bulls. And our colleague Sebastian Mudrow, who loves Church Latin for some reason, I don't know why, but he he he he's retranslating these um these papal documents so they can be utilized, and we're trying to make those available open access right now, right? So um Pope Nicholas V authorizes King Alfondo V of Portugal to invade, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, take away all their possessions and property. So that's raiding West Africa, right, in the mid-1400s. Then you skip over to after Columbus, the infamous Borgia Pope, uh, basically rifts off the same kind of language, justifying and amplifying the subjugation of barbarous nations that are not Christian. Then the Cabot Charter, sorry, it's a little bit screwed up, Cabot Charter, King Henry VII, uh gives sanction for the Cabots, uh, John Cabot and his sons, to seek out, discover, and find whatever isles, countries, and regions of the heathens and infidels that before this time had been unknown to all Christian people. That's why we speak English, right? And then this morphs into U.S. property law with the Supreme Court case Johnson v. McIntosh in 1823, where the Supreme Court issues that um Christian people have rights and lands inhabited by natives who are heathens, right? So we that Chris the Catholic uh language morphs into a Protestant nation-building project. Okay. And then as recently as Cheryl in 2005, Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsburg writes the almost, I think it's unanimous decision against the Oneida Nation that if we were to return land to the United Nation, that would put the doctrine of discovery on its head. Okay? It would essentially underline, undermine property law. So it's not a partisan issue, it's kind of baked in to the structure of the United States. And this goes right to what Charles Long was talking about, I think. I hear his. So, you know, this idea of manifest destiny, of, and this comes from gas painting, American progress. So this idea of property as fundamental to personal power and pursuit of these ideals has been decimated indigenous peoples, right? Now I also want to personalize this because I'm kind of obsessed with my own background as a white guy, right? Um actually, well, this is all screwed up. So Adam just took this picture like an hour ago of me. Remember this place, Dubby? The boiling crab? So uh my ancestor, my ninth great-grandfather John Arnold, had a place on Harvard Square in 1635, right? Got off the boat, and then was a founding uh father of Hartford, Connecticut, and was a beneficiary of the Pequot Massacre, if you know about those things, right? So, you know, how are we to kind of grapple with the internalization of these what I heard in the room when you were when you were introducing yourself was trauma a lot of times, right? And so how do we deal with that kind of uh how how we've been generated, you know, in our bodies and how that how that expresses itself in where we are. And I would often talk to Long about this, you know, like what do white people have to do about this, right? So also six of my ancestors came across on the Mayflower, which is very interesting as well, um, including William Bradford, so I've been reading his stuff. I just found this recently. And this year is the 200th anniversary of the Erie Canal, uh, 1825, which decimated the Hudenoshone, cuts right across the Hudenoshone Territory. And and uh also um my ancestors were along the canal as well. And that's a that's a screenshot from Ancestry. It shows them going right across uh upstate New York, right through Hudn-Shonee territory. And so I've been making I've been doing talks with uh the leadership of the Hudenoshone talking about the trauma of the Erie Canal and how it's better, you know, it's formed as a kind of um uh uh um uh you know the burned over district, right? The burned over district and all the okay, yeah, that's this here Sacred Waters with uh Jake Haideguay Edwards. All right. So why the white guy? I've been kind of haunted by this interaction, this uh episode on Joy Reed's Joy Reed's podcast. You know, she was kicked off MSNBC and now she has her own podcast. She interviewed um Robbie Jones, whose book uh Hidden Roots of White Supremacy I find very, very enlightening, very important book, actually. And uh anything Robbie says, I kind of tend to believe because he's really a smart guy. Um and they had this really important interaction about whiteness and where it comes from and how we can grapple with it, because I think that's what we're doing in the country, and I and I think it's important that we subject these categories to some kind of historical depth. All right, and that's all. That's all I want to say, but uh thanks very much.

Decolonial Binaries And Coloniality

Race, Possession, And Land

Bans, Allotment, And Racial Capitalism

Resurgence, Landback, And Metaphysics

Urban Ceremonies And Relational Personhood

Global Indigenous Solidarity

Intermission And Listener Prompt

SPEAKER_00 19:51

Hi all. I feel like my work dovetails quite nicely. I'm just gonna read a little. Bit. And I wanted to tether into Long's work. I don't actually typically draw from him. I more typically draw from indigenous studies, decolonial thinkers. But you know, in Long's work, significations, he's talking about these binaries, right? He talks about civilized, uncivilized, like civilized, primitive, rational, non-rational. And he describes them as fundamental to the hermeneutics of modernity. And, you know, I think along these lines, and I realize that his thinking did really influence mine when I was reading his work in grad school. And I like to think with decolonial and indigenous studies scholars partly because they talk about the nature of settler colonialism or as decolonial scholars call the nature of coloniality, right? And we can think of coloniality as these systems, these ideologies, these structures that were developed in the colonial period, but that remain. And of course, settler colonial scholars will say, well, we've never really left the colonial period, we're still in it, right? So for me, I read indigenous religious life, primarily its resurgences in cities, among urban indigenous peoples, as a form of metaphysical resistance. I think of it this way, because indigenous dispossession is not just material, it's also immaterial, it's metaphysical. It's an outcome of metaphysical claims. So according to historians like Roxanne Dunbar or Tees, she talks about how white supremacy is rooted not just in the Crusades, right? This long history. She says it's developed in that context through this idea of cleanliness of blood, right? Meaning determining who is a true Christian, who is not, in relation to Jews and Muslims, right? And that this intensified over centuries. So this Spanish caste system is then brought to the Americas, right? And it becomes a new template for understanding who is who, who has power, rights by proxy. So decolonial scholar Nelson Maldonado Torres tells us, well, there are these debates happening in the 16th century among Spanish settlers. Do native peoples have religion? Do indigenous peoples have religion? If they do not have religion, do they have souls? If they have no souls, can they be converted? Can they become rational actors of God? In this context, you know, Long talks about empirical others. And here we could see the creation of ontological others, right? In this sense, indigenous peoples are perceived to have no legitimate metaphysical claim to their lands or to political agency, autonomy, right? So this assumed ontological difference is then further legitimated in the Enlightenment through this anthropological category of race. So it becomes, it's drawing from this long genealogy, becomes race, right? And in this context, indigenous peoples are deemed primitive. Europeans are deemed white and thus civilized. Here, modernity is grounded in these new conceptions of the human, what Maldonado Torres describes as a new racial division of humankind. So we could see coloniality as operating through this ethic of dehumanization, what I like to call a non-ethic, right? A kind of non-ethics directed at ontological others. As anthropologist Patrick Wolfe has told us when he's describing settler colonialism, he says, well, it employs, it totally relies on a grammar of race, right? And it facilitates this grammar to reach its overarching goal. What is its goal? Ultimately to clear any obstacle to monopolizing land and resources, whose indigenous lands, right? He says, whatever settlers may say, the primary motive for elimination is not race, it's not religion, it's not grade of civilization, but access to territory. This is all about material gain. So we can understand racism, it serves this, it serves as an ideological structure, it determines socioeconomic relations between European settlers and indigenous peoples. And as Cedric Robinson has argued, racism is not extrinsic to capitalism, meaning that racial capitalism relies on this logic of othering. It cannot operate outside of it. So racial capitalism, the kind that would emerge out of Christendom as an imperial project, is predicated by a need for land. Because again, in a native context, as an indigenous context, land is kin, not property. So Dunbar Ortiz tells us in the 16th century, a pre-modern Europe eliminated the commons, in particular in England. The commons are eliminated. The commons are the place where people can go hunt and fish, grow food, graze, have cattle. You eliminate the commons, you're coercing people into industrial capitalism. You do that by force, but also through ideologies, right? Those that were resisting, right, that didn't want to give up their land-based lifestyle, they're pathologized as quote, violent, stupid, lazy, right? Barriers against material project. They're standing in the way of material progress. They're accused of witchcraft. So in this sense, we can understand that scarcity becomes, it's manufactured. So you have this logic of manufactured scarcity, pathologizing subsistence lifestyles. These two logics go into the colonial print. So these English settlers who are foreclosed from lands, they come to the New World and they're trying to push indigenous peoples off their lands through these two logics. Initially, they seize lands through things like Terranulius, doctrine of discovery, right? Divine right. But as the world secularizes, they use the concept of private property and also citizenship, right? So it's linked to the logic of the nation. Who is a legitimate citizen, who is not. She argues that within this context, whiteness signifies the ontological capacity to possess. She says it means you become self-possessed and politically agentive, but also that you have the ontological capacity to lay claim to indigenous lands. In the sense, whiteness itself is a possession that can possess by proxy. She says whiteness is tied to power and dominance despite being fluid, vacuous, invisible. White possession functions socio-discursively through subjectivity, through knowledge production. It's something that can be possessed by subjects. It must have ontological and epistemological anchors in order for it to operate, right? It seize power. In the sense we can understand the white possessive as a currency of power, ontological epistemic power. It seizes, it re-territorializes indigenous lands. In the process, indigenous lands understood as kin become settler property. In the modern project, racism is institutionalized through knowledge production, through in the academy, right? You want total epistemic and material control. Maori scholar Linda Tuay Smith describes these imperial projects as relying on a discursive field of knowledge. She says discoveries about and from the New World expanded. They challenged ideas the West held about itself. The production of knowledge, new knowledge, transformed old knowledge, ideas about the nature of knowledge, validity about specific forms of knowledge. These are commodities. They're commodities of colonial exploitation as other natural resources. In this sense, knowledge collected about indigenous people serves the greater goals of settler colonialism, and as long as argued these discourses shape your American identity, their sense of what it means to be civilized. The Enlightenment's drive to discover deemed indigenous knowledge property, the possession of white settlers. In addition, the West positional superiority determines what kind of knowledge is legitimate and what, or rather, whose was not. Here, coloniality is a set of asymmetrical relations rooted in white supremacy to justify racial capitalism and white possession. At the end of the so-called Indian Wars, right, end of the 1800s, 1870s, 1880s, U.S. leaders are looking to assimilate Native peoples into the American project. So they're confined to reservations. In this context, there's a federal ban on indigenous religious life. This comes with the 1883 Religious Crimes Code. As historian Clyde Holler writes, federal reformers believed, quote, if all Indians are assimilated, the Indian problem would disappear. So here the perceived Indian problem was twofold. One, the state sought to eliminate Native nations, to permanently neutralize them as a political threat, right? So that's taken care of. But also you relieve your financial obligation to them by treaty. If you can eliminate them, you no longer it dissolves the treaty. It becomes moot, right? In this sense, the elimination of indigenous religious life seems promising, but it's quite difficult. Haller explains, quote, the missionaries in the field who confronted the task of civilizing and Christianizing the Indians had struggled for years against traditional culture. The medicine men, they had so much influence the people were not willing to step away from these leaders. One such reformer, Gideon Pond, was confounded by Lakota religious leaders. He was so frustrated. He writes in his journals, he says, science reveals they are frauds. To him, it's very obvious they are frauds. What really confounds him is their ability to manipulate the material world, especially when it's proven true. Pond writes, they foretell future events, often with a sufficient degree of accuracy. Persons who are almost reduced to a skeleton by disease, in a day or two, they're suddenly restored to perfect soundness by their agency. In this sense, indigenous religious life threatens the metaphysical and thus epistemic and political authority of settler colonial power. The existence of that power in itself is a threat. Soon after the ban in 1883, federal leaders invested in Manifest Destiny, would they critique reservation land. It's held communally. They're saying this is too socialist. This is a socialist system. We have a problem with this. Especially Senator Henry Dawes. He decries the lack of selfishness that this communally held land. He says, you know, and this is a quote from Dunbar Ortiz's book. He says, selfishness is the bottom of civilization, in his view. The 1887 Dawes Act would break reservation lands into individual allotments. So what does this do? It frees up surplus land that is sold to settlers. This is basically a land grab. Again, of racial capitalism and white possession. However, these examples offer us a solution. Indigenous movements, particularly contemporary movements, but really the whole time, for hundreds of years, they're generally driven by the material geopolitical goals of decolonization, what we can think of as landback. What some say the repatriation or even the rematriation of lands to indigenous peoples. Nishnebeg scholar Leanne Simpson theorizes indigenous liberation in several ways. She says this is a project of resurgence. It entails reclamations of language, lifeways, relations. This resurgence counteracts feelings of powerlessness, but also the colonial shame, what I like to think of as ontological wounding, right? Ontological trauma. Her work builds on Tyaki Elfred's, who is a mall, he's a Mohawk scholar. He argues that indigenous nations can restore their political power by restoring their spiritual power. He says this agency is key, it's fundamental, but you can't restore it without actually restoring your traditional values. Very resonant with what Philip is saying. It says this kind of self-conscious traditionalism, it relies on consciously reconstructing indigenous ethics such as respect for land and all relations, living in right relation. Similarly, scholars like Vine Deloria Jr. have said, you know, decolonization is really about a shift in worldview. Or we can think of a return to an indigenous one. In the sense, indigenous decolonization is material, it's ideological, but it's also metaphysical. And this is where my work comes in. So we think about this immaterial dimension of decolonization through native world making, or really the kinds of reclamations of ceremonial life that happen in urban spaces. What I like to describe as transnational meaning outside of a singular native nation, but also from those coming from south of the US-Mexico border, right? Those that are reclaiming these traditions. So in my field work, when I'm studying and looking at this regeneration of religious lifeways, people smudging, sweat lodging, sun dancing, and coming together, creating ceremonial spaces, they often feed and nurture what some of my interlocutors call Indian Way family. Knitting together kin for those that may be estranged from their own home nations, from their own families. I argue that these reclamations of indigenous metaphysical life, they're restoring indigenous ontologies. They're restoring a kind of relational personhood that doesn't just see other peoples as kin, but sees land and its inhabitants, right? It's other than human or even more than human inhabitants as kin, as having personhood, agency, value. In this sense, liberation relies on this transformed understanding of oneself in relation to a greater reality. One where individuals began to see themselves as literally coextensive with all life. In this context, you heal the shame of ontological othering. You belong again to the world. You belong in the world, you belong to it, you are connected. In the sense, the restoration of an indigenous metaphysic enables urban indigenous peoples to function in right relationship with the greater community. Again, acting as its stewards, acting as its protectors, restoring this sense of mutuality, right? Reciprocal care. More, the rise of stewardship movements. We've seen this in Standing Rock, we've seen this in multiple places, I don't know more. It inspired many of them to act in solidarity with these movements. They were really inspired to act with other Indigenous peoples. Creating what scholars like Nick Estes have described as a contemporary form of Indigenous internationalism, right? Really a global decolonial movement that seeks to transform and dismantle empire in all its forms. In this sense, we can understand that indigenous religious life, as it's reclaimed, is a direct challenge to settler colonial ethics and ideologies. But also as these people come together, they're envisioning a future beyond empire. I think that's where we're at in this moment. So I'll leave it there. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 40:51

Do you need help catching up on today's topic? Or do you want to learn more about the resources mentioned? If so, please check our website at podcast.doctrine of discovery.org for more information. And if you like this episode, review it on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And now, back to the conversation.

The Lynching Of Eliza Woods

Semiotics, Symbol, And Justice

Cross, Conjure, And Ancestor Power

Naming Christian Nationalism’s Harm

SPEAKER_05 41:12

Well, good afternoon. I've already introduced myself, but what I did not say is how I became very much intrigued by the legacy of Charles Long. When I was in my PhD program, one of Charles Long's sons was my advisor. Well, he called himself Charles's long Charles Long's son. Lee Butler. And Lee taught me a lot. And Charles Long taught Lee a lot. They spent a lot of time together. What I want to do with this little time is essentially give you a story to help connect both my own methodology, which is womanist, to the kinds of insightful ways we have been inspired by long to open ourselves to deeper understandings about the cores of our beliefs and then how it is that we might even interrogate some things. So here we go. Paul Lawrence Dunbar, see if I can get him up here, wrote a poem, The Haunted Oak. And it tells the story of lynching from the perspective of the tree. Dunbar personifies the oak tree as a witness to the crime of lynching. Published in 1900, the poem is part of a collection entitled Lyrics of Love and Laughter. One verse in the poem describes the tree's pain in holding the body of a swinging, dying person and the injury the tree suffered when its bow was deeply bruised from the dangling body as it succumbed to the senseless violence. Poetry, according to Charles Long, together with other aesthetic practices, serves as a kind of crucial extra church role in producing and pronouncing the deeply threaded connection between the religious imagination and the complexity of the human response to experiences from which one draws religious meaning. Dunbar's poem expresses a kind of religious polemic against human cruelty when it states, and I quote, and nevermore shall leaves come forth on the bow that bears the ban. I am burned with dread. I am dried and dead from the curse of a guiltless man. Now the poem was about the lynching of a man, but I want to tell you a story about the lynching of a woman. Eliza Woods, a black female from Madison County, Tennessee, worked as a domestic for the Wootons. Mrs. Wooton was found dead in her home. The coroner's autopsy showed she died from ingesting rat poisoning. Without due process and against her vehement denial, Eliza was hoisted off to jail when a search revealed in her home that she had rat poisoning. On August 18, 1886, a violent mob of white men broke into the jail, kidnapped Eliza, took her to the tree on the courthouse lawn, stripped her of her clothing, hung her, and after she wiggled to death, then pumped her naked body with bullets. Picture Eliza naked, hanging from a tree on the courthouse lawn. Some would categorize this spectacle lynching, this as a spectacle lynching, a form of racial terror designed to exact fear and intimidation to enforce white supremacy. Undoubtedly, it was that. It signifies the phenomenon of lynching prevalent in Eliza's era, and of course, is making a comeback in its present moment. And simultaneously, it signifies and symbolizes crucifixion. Charles Long reminded us, signifying is worse than lying. These words from a familiar African-American idiom are juxtaposed in Long's epithet in the introduction of the book Significations, with a quote from Ferdinand de Sasseur, who asserted in a quote, the bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Long recognized Sauceur's rejection of a theory that language as a naming process only, you know, a list of words, each corresponding to the thing that it names, somewhere along the line fails to get true meaning because you have to have something more than fixed meaning at work in phenomenology. Long affirmed that such a theory, quote, assumes that ready-made ideas exist before words. It does not tell us whether a name is vocal or psychological in nature, end quote. And this is why Long found semiotics useful to break down the signs so that one could understand the components of the structure and the function. Naming this tragic death of Eliza Woods a lynching falls short, I submit, of delineating the polyvalent circumstances giving rise to the religious meaning conjured by such a phenomenon. Long also determined that, quote, all is not signification, end quote. He stated, in a quote, there is a long tradition in the interpretation of symbol that defines the symbol as an intrinsic relationship between the symbol and that which is symbolized. Long established the idea of religion as orientation. Now, as I move through this, I like that picture. Even though it's a picture representing him posthumously, he's always thinking, always inviting us to think beyond the thing we think we already know. And the religion of any people is more than a structure or thought. It is experience, he says, its expression, its motivation, intentions, behaviors, styles, and rhythms. And this for long is underscored by the brutalities and oppressions endured by Americans of African descent. Now, credence must be given to the kind of theological elasticity described by Tracy E. Hucks in her book Yoruba Traditions and African-American Religious Nationalism. Hucks notes, anti and post-bellum within Protestant Christianity, the religious experiences of blacks in America consistently revealed, quote, a creative interplay with non-Christian orientations that collectively formed multiple identities of African-American religiosity. So, in some sense, the cross that Eliza endured, and note I have titled this little talk, Eliza Woods' Cross on the Lynching Tree. Eliza endured this, and I submit is fit to analyze it over against some traditional Christian writings. So for instance, Rowan Williams in his treatment of Jesus' death on the cross, in his manuscript, The Wound of Knowledge, suggests that a historical examination from the New Testament to Luther to St. John of the Cross concludes with the idea that to Christians looking for a sign and assurance, the cross offered only the sign of the Son of Man of God hidden in the death of Christ. As the ground of theology and everything within it, it offered not a reasonable deduction, but an experience of hell from the conviction that only in hell could the goodness of the good news be heard for what it was. Well, Eliza Woods had an experience with hell, no doubt. Now, this is what was written once she was picked up. She was titled The Poisoner. Mrs. Wooton is taken from the jail. Mob of determined citizens and hanged in the courthouse yard. Five bullets fired into her body, a vivid scene never to be forgotten by those who witnessed it. The first lynching that ever occurred in Jackson, Tennessee. There was one headline. Another one, which I won't go into, but basically also describes the mob, and it's a record of the fact that she was crucified. So you can't really erase that tribute. Now, the Equal Justice Initiative has tried to bring about justice, but these are the these are the iconographies that I can find around Eliza's um or ordeal. So she's she's lynched on August 18th. On the 19th, this circular goes out, that's she devil. This one goes out a little later, essentially showing what the mob was doing. And all in all, what we have is a tree that still sits on the courthouse long. So the question becomes: what is justice? Who's justice? Where does it come from? Who can avail themselves of it? This is why white supremacy remains. Because justice doesn't apply to everyone. And no matter how you factor it, even if you put up what the EJI considers an initiation of justice, a placard with black and white folks relishing the fact that it was uh Ida B. Wells who brought the attention to the situation, and that anti-lyching process through the NAACP continued, and there was a legal precedent, somehow or another, it has always remained. And the question I have today, as I saw Eliza Woods own this stub at the EJI Museum, and the one that I have of Rowan Williams is can America imagine the wound to my knowledge? Understanding this was a prevalent experience of my ancestors. Let me say that as I bring this to a close, it is understanding and knowing the stories. It is not only understanding and knowing the stories, but expanding our understanding of how those stories have application that will help us snuff out this idea. Because as I understand it from a womanist perspective, Linda Thomas gave us some words to live by. Linda Thomas suggests that the method of womanism or womanist theology validates the past lives of enslaved African women by remembering, affirming, and glorifying their contributions. After excavating analytically and reflecting critically on the life stories of our four mothers, the methodology entails construction and creation of a novel paradigm. She says, We who are womanists concoct something new that makes sense for how we are living in a complex gender, racial, and social, or racial and class social configuration. We use our foremothers' rituals and survival tools to live in hostile environments. Moreover, we gather data from a reservoir of bold ideas and actions from past centuries for an enhanced and liberating quality of life for black women today. So the weaving of the past into the present and back into the past allows us to produce a polyvalent, self-constituting folk culture of African American women. And in other words, the past, the present, and the future fuse to create a dynamic multivocal tapestry of black women's experience intergenerationally. So what does that mean? Well, Long used the term polyvalence as well. The concept for him was about having more than a single form, a single approach. And I wanted to raise this point. The polyvalence that both Long and Thomas referred to invoked the ancestral spirit and legacy to which Eliza connected through her death on the cross, pierced by her side by bullets, hung on the cross until she died, Eliza endured a most miserable, tragic death. Yet the conjure tradition will suggest that when the lived experience of ancestors like Eliza Woods is examined through the lens of Charles Long's concept of orientation in conversation with the poetic expression of Paul Lance Dunbar and the womanist methodology, what we have is Eliza going through a sacrifice very similar to what Jesus went through. And the question becomes what happens to someone who is pierced in the side? I want to say they become water people. I want to suggest to us that the signifier placed Eliza on the cross as a sacrifice. And they didn't learn until three years later, on the third year, the horrific crime that Eliza was killed for. The husband of Mrs. Wuppon, under the travail of his guilty conscience, came forth and said, Guess what? I'm the one who killed my wife. Now Eliza couldn't get any worldly justice, but I'm concerned and I want to suggest that some of us are living beneath our means because there is a power. And as soon as the people understand the power of spirit, things will change.

The Fantastic Hegemonic Imagination

Decolonizing The Sacred And Moral Worlds

Accountability And The Common Good

Long, Black Studies, And 1492

SPEAKER_01 58:09

As a womanist Christian social ethicist, Charles Long's work has been an important resource for me to understand how religion is weaponized to aid those who would do power grabs of annihilation and disrespect. As you can tell from my very frame, I have a particular kind of religious worldview in mind when I say this that comes from various, comes with various names, Christian right, Christian nationalism, white Christian nationalism, and on and on. And though I could launch into a full-throated response on any of these characterizations for today, I'm more interested in probing the troubling forms of religiosity that feeds them and sustains the more radical right notions of what religion is and should be in a society that is already diverse as we already are. And no amount of denial, INS raids, defunding the arts, podcasts, op-eds, defunding education and health care, militarizing the police, shifting the military to domestic policing, and scaring the bejesus out of wealthy white male business folk in the media, tech industries, auto industries, legal firms, and such will make us any less diverse. But as I suspect, along with most of us here, that the reality of who we are culturally. Socially, religiously, will not keep those who thrive on narrow landscapes of the world from trying to impose and enforce their narrow carapace of how religion should, must, do, function in the world, and also drive how to construct the framework of our national identity. Simply put, the relationship between religion, nation states, and authoritarianism finds its core in the colonial imagination that sees religion as belief, ritual, and, as long notes, a structure of meaning that orders power, identity, and history. And this structure spawns cultural systems that mold how we orient ourselves to the world. But then in a demonic chess move, colonialism's distortions of domination and control sacrilize hierarchies and oppressions, disfigure and warp any notion of the common good, human dignity, and an appreciation of diversities as gifts, benefits, and challenges, and instead see diversity as antipatriotic threat, waste, and social fragmentation. Distortions such as this, then, reveal the ways in which religion is a part of culture, policy, politics, and history in modern nation states. And these nation-states are religious projects that depend on a mythic imagination of order, destiny, and sacred legitimacy. This is where I am in productive conversation with Long's view of the nation-state as a religious project whose roots are in colonialism, with my notion of the fantastic hegemonic imagination rooted in a flawed socioreligious imagination. I use this term to describe the ways in which dominant cultural narratives, ideas, and beliefs shape and influence our collective imagination and understanding of the world. The hegemonic imagination is often grounded in a particular set of assumptions, values, and norms that reinforce existing power structures and hierarchies as normal and natural. The fantastic refers to the ways in which the dominant cultural narrative narratives such as literature, media, and other forms of art can sometimes rally, rely on fantastical or mythical elements to reinforce its claim to authority and legitimacy together. The fantastic hegemonic imagination serves to mask or obscure the underlying power dynamics that are at play. Brutishness, bullying, colonialism, imperialism. It describes the way in which dominant groups in society, such as white, male, heterosexual, elite, and able-bodied individuals, use their power and privilege to shape and control the social imagination. And no, I am not leaving women out. I just don't have time to include them this time. It creates and reinforces narratives about who belongs and who does not, what is valued and what is not, and what is possible and what is not. And yes, they are harmful and oppressive to marginalized groups because they are manifestations of a warped social consciousness that breeds on suppression and spite. The concept of the fantastic imagination, fantastic hegemonic imagination, is not only descriptive, it is also prescriptive in highlighting the need for marginalized or liminal groups to resist these narratives and to create their own counter-narratives that challenge and disrupt dominant power structures. Long's definition of religion as the structure of meaning through which humans orient themselves to the world and to the sacred notes the impact of the colonial and post-colonial world as one of conquest and a self-congratulating understanding of what is sacred, civilized, and human. I see this in part as variations on whiteness that undergird white supremacy as normal, natural, and sanctioned by the white divine. This totalizing domination has shaped racial, gender, sexuality, and more hierarchies that legitimize oppression as divine order. We see this American sacred in Manifest Destiny, Divine Election, and Christian nationalism, all of which are the results of the colonialized sacred imagination. Both Long and I see that the Western colonial imagination has made evil sacred. By exposing the colonial sacred, Long understands religion as meaning-making that structures reality and power, and through the hegemonic imagination, I am invested in understanding and exposing how cultural imagination produces moral meaning that sustains evil. His analytical lens is that of colonialism and the religious imagination. My lens is that of race, gender, sexuality, class, and the moral imagination. Long has unrelenting focus on erasure and domination through religious categories. I focus on the ridiculous, the outrageous, or the fabrication of marginalized bodies as symbols of evil. Long's goal is to decolonize meaning and reclaim suppressed sacred worlds. I want to subvert hegemonic fantasies and cultivate a liberative moral imagination. White supremacy persists because it is the product of institutions and the symbolic and moral worlds we inhabit, our myths, symbols, and meanings that make injustice appear to be normal, rational, and good. The reality is that white supremacy, like almost everything else I can think of in the colonial project, is up to no good, or certainly has no interest in what might constitute making real and tangible a demanding notion like the common good. Whether it is liberation through resignification or re-imagination, we will need to curb our assumptions and perhaps even our ardent desires for a better world and ask, what the hell are we really doing? Are we really seeking to reclaim and reinterpret the sacred from the standpoint of those who have been dismissed as primitive or interesting? Those worlds have been erased or caricatured, and instead we seek to discover the divine in the other side, not the underside, the other side of history. Are we engaging liberative moral imagination that faces the ridiculous realities of oppression and refuses to be defined by them? And instead we imagine otherwise by creating moral visions rooted in survival, thriving, and the sacredness of gendered black-brown beige lives. Long teaches us that the struggle for justice is not only political or social, it is cosmological. And this places all of us on the potter's wheel to examine the ways that we are both vigorous opponents of a stultifying status quo and can have the feet of clay and fail to speak, let alone act, to bring in greater spaces of justice and hope. White supremacy persists because it is more than a lone act of one person like Nicholas Fuentes, or groups like the League of the South, America First Foundation, or the Aryan Freedom Network. It is both long structures and the interstructured systemic of the hegemonic. In other words, it's baked into us, all of us, and the only way to undo or even attempt to eradicate it is to be relentless in holding ourselves accountable to our actions and inactions, our thoughts, the caricatures we carry around in our head and live in our lives. In short, do James Baldwin's first works over for ourselves and in our communities. And then we might have someone who has done the work of internal ongoing transformation who can bring something useful to the challenge of building, creating, and maintaining the promise of the common good that recognizes this nation is a totally unfinished project. This must be tangible, embodied in relationships, practices, and visions that feel and are real. We must cultivate a shared sense of being human together, whether it is Long's religion as the grammar through which we imagine ourselves and others, or calling out the hegemonic within us, we must shift, we must lift up art, testimony, liturgy, expand empathy, and rehumanize what society and we have erased. And we must refuse at every turn others' definitions of wholeness. What and who counts as human, what is divine and holy, what is truth, myth, primitive, modern, sanctioned, particularly if they are the only ones benefiting from them. Thank you.

Sylvia Wynter And Planetary Thinking

Myths Of Creation And The Human

Thinking Blackness As Method

Toward A New Humanity

SPEAKER_04 1:11:27

What more is there to say? We've had a history of religions approach to the contact of cultures and white supremacist, Christian nationalism, a decolonial encounter with history of religions and settler colonialism, a womanist theological and a womanist ethical encounter with white male supremacy and white supremacist white supremacist Christian nationalism. And now we're going to offer a theological thinking of Charles Long in relation to black studies. It's interesting that Long's affiliation with black studies goes underrepresented and under-theorized. As if it's just a mere placeholder in the academy and not the actual encounter with what Long is doing. And so what we'll do first is we'll move through hosting why we need to move to Long in this manner. We'll go back to Alpha, Myths of Creation, to host our question. Second, we'll look at the encounter, and we'll take the event of 1492 as a way to begin to engage thinking and the project of thought. But we're going to do it in conversation with one of Long's interlocutors that goes underremarked in these conversations, and that's none other than Sylvia Winter. Both she and Long occupy the same space in two critical volumes. One, Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas, A New Worldview, that opens up with Sylvia Winter's programmatic statement, 1492, A New Worldview, in conversation with Charles Long's New Space, New Times, Disjunctures and Context for a New World Religion. They also encountered, engaged in the same space with Joyce King's edited volume on black education. And it was their constant encounters on the South Sea Islands in Georgia, where they had these engaged conversations, both Sylvia Winter and Charles Long, about these new opportunities for thought itself, moving beyond an either-or dichotomy. This is what uh Amy Cesaire wants us to get beyond in discourse on colonialism. And too often our logical structures are structured under uh either-or. And this is both what Sylvia Winters argues against and Charles Long, because then it uh pushes us within a raciological uh framework whereby we mistake the map for the territory. In other words, we think of white supremacy as the as the enemy, and if we can just get rid of white supremacy but continuous raciology, then we have uh we've now uh done our work. Then I'll conclude with some uh remarks on how do we begin to think blackness. This is a question that is coextensive that Charles Long surfaces in 1968, to which uh we have uh in many ways forgotten the question, but yet it's taken up uh in an exemplary manner by none other than LaRone Bennett in the Challenge of Blackness, an essay that he uh an essay and lecture that he gives as the first uh first lecture of the uh directors of black studies uh seminar at what would become the Institute of the Black World. That was first the Martin Luther King Jr. Center headed up by Vincent Harding. So that's our itinerary of thinking uh for about roughly about 10 minutes. We'll do it in 10 minutes, okay. Uh first, uh, let's have some epigraphs to think with. First, one of Long's uh thought partners, W.E.B. Du Bois, and we go back to that classic of 1903, The Souls of Black Folk. And at the end of the first paragraph of the first uh of the first essay, Du Bois writes to the real question how does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word. Du Bois refuses the grounding of a logic that creates blackness and people as problematic or pathological. And then he begins to elaborate anotality of knowledge, and that's where you read the remainder of the essays, and that's why the essays range over form and function. Du Bois also writes the using of men for the benefit of masters is no new invention of modern Europe. The using of men for the benefit of masters is no new invention of modern Europe. It is quite as old as the world. But Europe proposed to apply it on a scale and with an elaborateness of detail of which no former world ever dreamed. The imperial width of the thing, the heaven-define audacity, makes its modern newness, that is, of white supremacy. And so I've titled this the imperial width of the thing. Charles H. Long and the question of the human as a modality of how do we begin to establish a new myth of the human. We also want to thank with Mary Evans, Blackness, a definition that she offers in 1969. Blackness is a political culture concept that is innovative. It rethinks forms, systems, and methodologies, placing black minds, black energies, and black resources to a common goal. The creation of a new man and a redirected, reshaped society supportive of him. When you're reading these statements and understanding the context of long, you seem we don't want to make long this exemplar as we do with European thinkers. We want to see long within a genealogy and a community of thinkers and a practice of thinking together, much like the Arts of Interpretation Unit, which gives that space of a practice of thinking together. And lastly, Charles Long himself. This is in 1968 on the pages of Criteria, where both he and uh Nathan Scott offer a response to the student uprising at the University of Chicago. And Long writes the visibility of the black community in America is our challenge and opportunity to develop a theology of freedom, a freedom for humanity, a new humanity. Bob Dylan's With God on Our Side appears on his 1964 iconic album, The Times They Are Changing. The song is part of the 1960s folk revival, along with Dylan's increasingly political, salient lyrics of the time. The song would be one of Dylan's one that Dylan would later call his finger-pointing song. He would then leave his signature acoustical style after this album for his electric style. The song combines Dylan's personalist philosophy with his growing ethically anarchist commitments. Adapted from the 1957 song The Patriot Game by the Irish folk singer Dominic Bahan, which memorialized the political death of a young Irish Republican Army soldier, with God on Our Side questions the ideal of political loyalty based on blind obedience to nationalism and unquestioned religious belief. Dylan's song underscores the pitfalls of religious nationalism and foregrounds his mercurial, complex, and ever changing relationship with Judaism and Christianity. With God on our side reminds us that the challenges and changes of identity and political loyalty are never easily negotiated, particularly when authorized and guaranteed by appeals to God. In the wake of Dylan's song, Religion continues to preoccupy the center of American public life. At a time when the very foundation of America of the future of American democracy is, to put it lightly, intensely contested, religion functions both as a panacea and as a problem. It animates our most intense debates and fuels our highest aspirations. Yet the tremendous challenge of the moment requires considered and critical reflection on a number of issues, including how and in what ways scholars can and should engage in public life and with what concept of religion. In a moment when the nation is embroiled in an intense struggle over the future of American democracy, it is imperative to develop fresh ways and new perspectives to understand how the language of religion has effectively usurped the language of politics. That is, in our political conjuncture, we are not merely in a struggle over the good and the commons, but rather how the politics of religion have been critically aligned along an axis of that which is considered ultimate. Paul Tillich's evocative statement, The Boundary is the best place for acquiring knowledge, is the first sentence of his autobiographical statement on the boundary, an autobiographical sketch. It is a leap motif that Tillich employs to narrate his life. For us, it captures a spirit that we can begin to think through in order to understand the politics of religion in our contemporary moment. In many ways, this liminal thinking along the boundary is what Charles Long directs us toward. We return to the exemplary example of Charles Long because the question of the human that preoccupies his thought would cause us to return to an inaugural scene of writing in which the very criterion of thinking itself is revealed as that of myth making and that of creation. Detailed in Charles Long's Alpha, The Myths of Creation, we return to not only Long's understanding of creation or Long's delineation of examples of creation, and remember that text is a text that appears in a number of uh number of texts that take examples of phenomena that Long bookends by an introduction and then introduction to each of the creation myths that are taken from around the world. Long is thinking in a planetary manner. That is critical. I mean the nation state becomes one unit of analysis, but it cannot stand as the unit of analysis. It has to be planetary. But Long begins his project by orienting uh by orienting us to a critique, a critique of the critique of religion. Long provides us with this critique that leads to creation by first uh analyzing and then critiquing the work of Edward Taylor and Max Mueller. Long identifies a common peculiar form of rationalistic bias in their work. Long then writes, because of this limited conception of the reality, which language purported to express, they were, he was able to, because of his limited conception of the reality of the language he purported to express, writing of Max Mueller, he was unable to understand the buoyant language of myth and religion in terms other than pathological. So Long under the rationalism seeks to create pathologies of other ways of knowing, even any other ways of knowing that still use rationalistic uh forms and structures. Long also recognized other factors of a more general character. So Long does not settle just for the critique of rationality and its emergence in the moment of modernity. And this is where uh will Nelson and I will begin to have to modulate that by going back with um with uh uh um not uh Nelson and also with uh what's my man that dude? Walter Mignolo. This is why they've they've sort of now been poaching on Sylvia Winter. Because now it's like, hold up, but Sylvia Winter has a different formation. Um because you you we're still thinking that it's the rational episteme that's also the the only target. Long has already said that is a target, but it is not the only target. So the rationalist episteme can't be our only one. So he says, uh Long writes, we have reference, uh Long writes that there are other factors of a more general character that limit the import of this orientation. Quote, we have reference to a new hermeneutical situation. Long writes, we have, this is in Alpha, myths of creation. We have reference to a new hermeneutical situation. By hermeneutical, we mean the attempt to understand the human reality in history. And then Long begins to elaborate how this hermeneutical situation creates new opportunities for understanding across, and history is for long space and time. It's not history in a disciplinary formation. This situation is caused by new research, and for long it was depth psychology, existential philosophy, literary and art criticism, and historical study itself. Long's critique of a categorical project of reason was augmented by the recognition of the fullness of critique, a new hermeneutical situation that should give us pause when we uncritically deploy certain methodological and theoretical tools to understand our new hermeneutical moment. In this moment, Long realizes that the myth of man, the myth of the human, is being echoed across different domains. And in so doing, how do we begin to understand the new human that's emerging? Involved in every myth, Long will write, is the expression of the uniquely human element. It is the intention of the myth, which is timeless. If a new age is emerging, it must be understood in mythic terms, for it is it is in these terms that the new is ordered and humanized. This is where we now begin to engage in 1492, a new worldview, the creation of that myth and the ordering of worlds and of humanity, even of those racialized worlds and racialized forms of humanity. In many ways, we can find ourselves attempting to escape the prison house to which we trap ourselves back in if we don't understand the deep mythic forms that are operative without the understanding the emergence of the human. And for Long, Long reminds us of several factors. One is with Long, he reminds us that we have to begin to think through not only a spatial logic, but also a temporal logic that begins to order us. In many ways, what we are beginning to think through is that our temporality, our sequentiality of concepts, then gives us the order of the human and the order of our critique. We need to be very careful that we're not thinking our critique doesn't operate to the same temporality of the human that then moves in a dominant hegemonic manner. We also need to recognize, and this is it this is Sylvia Winters' attention to it. Sylvia Winters reminds us that we have to understand this cosmogonic schema, her word. Her word, in 1492, a new worldview. The usurption of man as the supernaturalized conception of the human. Both Winter and Long want us to move beyond just either or ways of thinking, and wants to move us beyond the rationality, uh, the orthodoxy of rationality to the heresy of thinking 1492. In other words, they want us to understand how did complex worlds come together that were always already complex. We can't think of 1492 and uh the emergence of uh of Columbus without understanding Columbus's uh first trips along the uh Portuguese coast of Africa. So Columbus doesn't come to the to the Americas tabla rasa, he's already recognizing that that's already a way of being. And once you break that hemispheric uh that zone uh south of the western uh west coast of Africa that we've already colonized in the Canary Islands, then you have a new way of thinking about that's extended along the axis of the entire world. This is a planetary move. And when we think within nation-state boundaries for a planetary logic, our nation-state boundaries are inadequate to the task of the challenge that we're facing intellectually. Sylvia Winters writes that this is uh this miseducation, our normal modes of critique, then functions strategically to absolutize the behavioral norms encoded in our present culture-specific conception of being human. In other words, what Sylvia Winters is saying is we absolutize the ways in which we think of, let's say, use the word trauma, and then we read them back across space and time, and then across all peoples. And the response, the human responses we read out because the categories continue to think for us. This is something that uh CLR James would remind us of in 1948 in his writing on uh on uh Marx, James would say the categories have us by the throat. And he'll also elaborate that with his critique of Hegel and Hegel's uh logic, in Hegel's logic. Sylvie Winters continues, allowing it to be positive as if it were universal of the human species, and ensuring thereby that all actions taken for the sake of the well-being of its referent model continue to be perceived as if they were being taken for the sake of the human in general. What Winters reminds us of is once we enter that torrid zone, that boundary that defines the liminal space between the Western Hemisphere and those others, we can then import those same binary logics into this torrid zone that Europe has defined spatially, we bring them back conceptually. And it is this conceptual reinscription of Europe's project within the project of critique that long wants to move us beyond. In this last section, I want to move us to thinking blackness. Notice what I said thinking blackness. Not black, not even long, but how do we think blackness? Long reminds us that that we long reminds us that uh we're in search of a new meaning, a new humanity, that serves as an index for his thought and a key principle underlying the conception of what we're what we are supposed to do, not only in in the history of religions, but as the but as the vocal but as vocation itself. But to leave it at that is to under in underestimate the critical import of Long's thought and miss the broader opportunity for intellectual renewal, represented by the one who has been called the bringer of problems? I'm always concerned when Long is too readily assimilated as an answer to our prefix and postfix questions. Indeed, the questions he raises, how how he raises can, however, inadequately be expressed in the following manner. Do our modes of knowing, critical and or otherwise, bracket too much of the human condition that makes knowledge possible? How do legitimate knowledges, critical knowledges, abstract away the historical and material realities of the world? In other words, how and in what ways do dominant regimes of knowing serve as a prison house of thought and facilitate dehumanization by design? Long's practice inspires such questions in facilitating an emergence of another surface for interrogating the project of thinking. In so doing, he instructs us to take up and extend particular intellectual practices that open up new spaces for elaborating the conditions of possibility for thinking and being otherwise. For long, for over half a century, he wanted us to move beyond the sites in which we traditionally host these questions. And for me, this site now to host the Project of Thinking becomes the first Black Studies Directors seminar convened by the Institute of the Black World in 1969. It is this site where Lerone Bennett issued his critical epistemological and ethical challenge to those assembled regarding the intellectual and political problem space of blackness in the Academy and in the broader world. Under the title The Challenge of Blackness, Bennett challenged those directors to view the issue of blackness as not just a mere descriptive of a condition elaborated within the geopolitical and historical confines of a distinctive Western and uniquely American imaginary. Rather, he sought to encourage an interrogation of blackness along an axis of elaborating the condition of possibility for an other knowledge and an other order of being. Recognizing the limitations of the dominant episteme, Bennett states, we are about the task of defining, defending, and illustrating blackness. Notice blackness is not defined. We often create this teleology from the 1960s as blackness being absolutely defined to 2025 where we already know what blackness is by just bringing in some black folks, sprinkling them along, and not thinking with them. That becomes quite different. That's a different project. We are about the task of defining, defending, and illustrating blackness. We believe blackness is a total challenge, and because of the fact that at certain levels, basic conflicts of interest express themselves as conflicts of rationalities, we see the rationality of blackness as a total challenge to the world. 1969. Remember, Charles Long writes his theology of freedom and of blackness, uh, of black the uh visibility of the black community in 1968. This is a constellation of thinkers, folks. The critical achievement of Bennett's statement is the acuity and integrity of defining the intellectual task as an open thinking of the theoretical, methodological, and categorical implications of blackness for elaborating a new order of knowledge commensurate with a new world that's emerging in this moment. Blackness becomes the condition of possibility for another formation of knowledge, a chaos that is a cosmos of new opportunities for creating new knowledges and new forms of collective life. Blackness oscillates within a political and intellectual nexus so elegantly captured in the statement by Tony Morrison when she writes, there is no romance free of what Herman Melville called the power of blackness, especially not in a country where there was a resident population already black upon which the imagination could play, through which historical, moral, metaphysical, and social fears and problems and dichotomies could be articulated. Thus blackness operates as a problem space, whereby and as a possibility space, I'm sorry, whereby an ensemble of questions and answers around which the horizon of identifiable stakes, conceptual as well as ideological and political, hangs with new possibilities of being. In many ways, Bennett's challenge of blackness served to inaugurate a foundational rethinking of the protocols of society and the academy, as well as the dictates of disciplinary knowledge. Indeed, what is at stake is nothing less than the integrity of knowledge's organization according to a profound commitment to a history of radicalized thinking that emerges with a new mode of being human in the world. The problem of thinking blackness reminds us that the theoretical purchase of such thinking posits an afterlife, particularly after its inaugural scene. It captures new opportunities and facilitates what it facilitates a critical interrogation and appreciation of the thought of Charles H. Long. It also reminds us that the living of blackness becomes a material way of knowing, to borrow from E. Patrick Johnson. Long offers us an exemplary framework with which we can exploit in pursuing hermeneutical procedures that seek an interpretation of the historical range of human expressions in their specificity and integrity, whether in linguistics, art, geography, or even black studies. What Long reminds us of is there's an opportunity for thinking a new way of being in the world. And for us, that new way of being is nothing less than elaborating a new human. A human beyond the myth of man and beyond the super myth of the Superman. Thank you.

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