Having a better conversation about appropriation

With help from Fred Moten

Over the past year, my church has been in the midst of exploring anti-racist worship practices. One of the perennial questions for majority white congregations is how we negotiate the place of worship resources that don’t originate from white people. This question often comes in the phrasing of “should white people sing Black gospel music.” It is a question about appropriation.

Throughout the year I began to notice the wide and ranging ideas as to what is considered appropriation. At one point I heard someone say that appropriation is any time a majority white churches sings songs that originated in the Black church. Others church thought appropriation was mitigated when majority white churches gave proper historical context for music, or paid an additional fee for usage. At one point, we received feedback about utilizing this music only once the origins of that music were captured in worship (with no acknowledgement about the concerns of identifying a pure cultural origin). Each time I noticed that the question of “what is appropriation and how does it function?” was left unspoken.

A couple weeks ago I listened in on a remarkable conversation between Hanif Abdurraqib and Fred Moten that, at one point, touched on appropriation. They talked about the ways in which Black art always takes place under white surveillance not because white people are ubiquitous but because we are entrenched in capital and profit motive. I noticed a shift from conversations I often hear about appropriation, which are more or less about who owns what land/thought/art, to a critical engagement of what we really mean when we talk about theft. Moten explains that Black life is subject not only to theft but also imposition, “shit being taken from you and also having things be imposed upon you.” The form the imposition of white supremacy taken on blackness is the concept of property. Moten explains that his concern with critiques of appropriation is that they “assume the legitimacy of property.” A thing can be owned.

Moten describes the ground rules we’re given by capitalism -- Black life is stolen through a modality that conceives of life as property and then imposes that modality on others. Owned or owning – these are the options presented under capitalism, with Black capacity to claim ownership always in question. “You can’t have shit.” Blackness, Moten explains, fights a battle not to regain ownership but against owning. Resistance takes the form of opening to the claim being made on you. Moten explains that “this is a way of living together that we can share…. We can share this capacity to share, which is also a refusal to own.”

They go on to discuss how the imposition of capital makes this sharing nearly impossible. As soon as white people begin to claim ownership the ability to create something good is gone, because the foundational claim rests on exploitation.

But because Moten is not dissecting who owns what, questions of appropriation also escape strict racial dichotomies. He gives the example of Black people killed by police – it’s not lawyers and doctors and professors who are being subjected to this kind of death. Socially-upward Black professionals “ought to be just as subject to a critique of appropriation as anyone else” because “everyone’s not vulnerable in the same way.” (I thought about this as I read the scathing critique of Kehinde Wiley’s latest exhibition and the artist’s Instagram-kitsch desacralizing of Black death. See also Betye Sayer’s troubling of Kara Walker’s work. See also Zadie Smith’s controversial engagement with the infamous Dana Schutz painting, which she tellingly subtitles “Who Owns Black Pain?”)

Moten then says this: “I’m way less interested in the question of appropriation than I am in the question, what do you want to do? What are we doing here?” In the discourse about appropriation, we continue to have a problem of talking in “an unexamined way about ownership.” Surveillance and capture of Blackness for exploitation are not a problem of who owns Blackness but a problem of Black “capacities to survive” being stolen. “They didn’t just steal,” Moten explains, “they stole what we were doing with it.”

They stole what we were doing with it.

As part of my own work during this grant year I read a couple of books on multiracial churches and their use of music. I was especially fascinated by Gerardo Marti’s book, Worship Across the Racial Divide. Marti’s book is a sociological inquiry into 12 churches in LA that successfully achieved multi-racial worship, by which he means at least 20% of the congregation is people of color. Marti explains that he looks at musical tradition because this is largely considered a key to making worship communities more diverse (and I hear this all the time).

I appreciated how often Marti said the quiet part out loud. One example of this was inclusion of a study in which white people, Latines, Asians, and Black people all described the “most authentic worship” as traditional Black gospel music. The reason people across racial categories were drawn to this music was the access it provided to emotional inhibition – personal and elevating. It felt like an uncomfortable fetishizing of Black gospel, a way to provide the pleasure of “true worship” while disengaging from the historical and socio-political struggles that produced this music. In addition, leaders of these churches were primarily invested in creating a certain type of experience, not in generating diversity or expanding anti-racist commitments.

I thought about the passive formation work this does on a congregation. A particular form of Black music (gospel) becomes the mediator for authentic worship and authentic Blackness, and that is another form of essentializing Blackness (Black music – music that originates in the Black experience -- is also jazz, hip hop, hymns, Christian contemporary music, blues. All these forms of music operate within shared and hybrid forms of life and experience, the kind of sharing economy that Moten describes). In the churches Marti studied, gospel music was useful towards an end (church growth, a positive feeling, preparing listeners to receive the sermon). None of those ends were the role of Gospel music in the Black church, which was and is (if I may) trust in God to survive the catastrophe of slavery and its generations, the personal and corporate participation in this story of survival that proceeds and exceeds tragedy, and the resilience to move through this tragedy towards a redemptive future that is both spiritual and political.

I noticed both in the book and in our year of exploration as a church that people again and again returned to negotiation of worship resources along Black/white racial lines. It was rare for me to hear a conversation about the work done by hymns originating from Indonesia or Spanish-language music or Indigenous Christian prayers in majority white churches. It’s not a surprise, given that the US church exists through the theft of Black labor. And I can’t ignore that white supremacist capture touches everything – Indigenous land and communal preservation, anti-Asian discrimination through model minoritizing, ideologies that divide class and labor relations, language justice to the growing majority of Spanish-speakers in the US.

But the way towards an anti-racist vision of worship often feels mired in the same critiques Moten is no longer interested in engaging. The conversations I hear about appropriation often turn inward towards therapeutic anti-racism (do we feel connected, are we really allies, are we committed to the cause?). I’m not invested in that kind of evaluation.

But I am interested in questions of a sharing economy that can answer Moten’s questions: What do you want to do? What are we doing here? And this is the place where honesty and self-examination of intention are helpful for churches – for all churches. If you’re utilizing Gospel music as attractional for Black people – why do you want more Black people in your church? Is this an outflow of a form of anti-racism that prizes representation because you’re worried about the optics? Is your church invested enough in Black liberation to be able to commit to the political work that comes with the Gospel tradition? What are we doing here?

One of the fascinating parts of Marti’s book was the sense I got throughout that worship is about an individual having a particular experience of connection and closeness to God, and that we are welcome to utilize whatever is available to manipulate an experience towards that end. For me, as a pastor and worship leader, worship is a public and corporate act that announces the truthfulness about the shape of the universe – Jesus is Lord, Caesar is not. All of our lives bend in this direction, and in the peculiarity of the Lord’s Day, on the day when the upheaval of the power of death is subsumed in resurrection, we gather to announce this together.

I recently shared in a time of reflection about our grant that one of the takeaways from this year is that who we are six days a week is who we are in worship. If we’re instrumentalizing Black culture to cleanse our white shame, that will show up in worship. If we ignore disability in our workplaces, that will show up in worship. If we believe the purpose of our lives is to live in relative lack of conflict and that it’s better to ignore problems than to address them openly, that will show up in worship. If we believe racism is solved by relationships and cultural competency – that’s what our worship will look like.

Over the past year, I’ve thought, what is the truth about Jesus enacted in the peculiarity of worship at Raleigh Mennonite? That truth cannot be enacted within the confines of European production of art and aesthetic. Even if we were to attempt a kind of limiting in this way, we’d be dishonest about the extensiveness of theft that produces even the most insular white aesthetics. Instead, I find myself asking the questions Moten asks: what do I want this to do? Maybe this can lead us to more interesting and hopeful conversations as a church.