The earth shook and then wailed and then groaned this morning and I’m now beyond sad… I’ve just received some difficult news: a celestial light just went out, theologian James H. Cone has passed…
What Cone means to me—not just the books but the man, not just the ideas but the person—I don’t have the ability to put into words. But words are my medium; they are all I have, what has me. So I conjure them, they having held and summoned me…
James Cone gave us a way to hear the break or the breach of blackness both within and that exceeds the Christian faith, the faith that was weaponized to enable racial capitalism and black and indigenous, settler colonial destruction. He announced an otherwise creed. Not the Apostle’s Creed but a Creed of Blackness. Credo: black (un)belief. I believe in blackness, its holiness, its sacredness. I love its differentiated, peacocked beauty. When Cone said, “Blackness,” when he said, “God is Black,” he was saying this. He was saying, I love you, every last one of you. He was saying, “God so love the world…” He was trying to help us understand the black radicalism of such a statement. He was saying that beyond this world of a brutalizing, racially gendered capitalism, God so loves the Earth…
And so, make no mistake, James Cone was a “wake worker,” working “in the wake.” His work moves according to the rhymics, the off-beat syncopations of the silences of and “in the break.” He was doing “wake work,” improvisatory “break work” before we had these terms in our intellectual repertoire.
Jim, you’re now with Cecil Taylor and my momma Rose and my big momma Hattie… You’re among the cloud of witnesses. And you’re already missed. I have tears in my eyes… I cry…
May we further the “mysticism of the protest,” the “mysticism of the riot,” for blackness is a Mystic Song, and for over 50 years, Professor Cone, you did the work. You were giving us music lessons. May we step up and advance and carry on the work of (Black) Study.
