On the Pole for Freedom: Bree Newsome’s Politics, Theory, and Theology of Resistance

 

Bree Superhero
Image courtesy of Artist Rebecca Cohen
http://rebeccacohenart.tumblr.com
(Image altered from original)

Bree Newsome is my shero. And my new favorite theorist and theologian of resistance. On Saturday, she scaled a flagpole in Columbia, South Carolina to take down the Confederate Flag, which has felt acutely offensive in the less than 14 days since a vile, misguided, millennial neoconfederate walked into Black sacred space and murdered nine of our people.

I woke to the news of the massacre of nine faithful souls at Mother Emanuel AME Church on a trip abroad for work and play. Startled and devastated, I lay in bed wondering whether to wake my homegirl sleeping next to me, because like me, I knew she was tired of waking up each morning to structural devastation and systemic heartbreak. That’s what these times have felt like – like no time to catch one’s breath between blows. Undone and outdone, I jostled her awake anyway, as the tears started to leak from the edges of my eyes.

I’m a church girl. My ardent feminism hasn’t yet been able to overcome that. Believe me I’ve tried. But I know that I am here today because of many a Wednesday night spent communing with God and the saints at Wednesday night Bible Study and Prayer Meeting. This isn’t so much my spiritual practice anymore, but it remains the practice of so many Christian folk I love. Dylann Storm Roof could have murdered any one of them. Any one of us.

In the aftermath of these killings, we’ve turned once again to debating the merits of the confederate flag. I despise the stars and bars. I resent having grown up in a place where my classmates and their parents flew that flag freely, pasted it on car bumpers, with the disingenuous tag line, “it’s heritage not hate,” and reveled in their nostalgia for rebellion. They expected Black folks to be silent and unoffended, expected us to ignore that the celebration of that flag essentially communicated the sentiment, “We wish y’all were still slaves.”

Bree Newsome offered the holiest of “fuck thats” to such foolery and went up the pole and took that shit down.

My heart still swells for her courage. But I also think we would do well to see all the ways in which her act of resistance opens up space and possibility for us in the realms of faith and feminism.

As she took down the flag, she spoke to it: “You come against me with hatred and oppression and violence. I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today.” On the way down, and as she was arrested, she recited the first verse of the 27th Psalm: “The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life: of whom shall I be afraid?”

The clear Christian framing of her act of civil disobedience matters for a number of reasons. As the families of the nine slain offered their forgiveness to Roof for his heinous acts, I was incensed at what felt like a premature move to forgiveness. While I feel compelled to honor the right of these families to grieve and process this loss in the way that makes most sense for them – after all this is first and foremost their loss—I also wonder about whether churches have done a disservice in making Black people feel in particular that forgiveness must show up on pretty much the same day as our grief and trauma and demand a hearing.

If God is indeed “Emmanuel” – translated “God with us” – then how could this God demand that we forgive, and forgive, and forgive again, while we our being led like so many lambs to the slaughter? How about we leave the forgiving to Jesus and the grieving to human beings, assuming that Black people are in fact human, and not superhuman? But here’s the thing – this isn’t a referendum on forgiveness. I’m clear that forgiveness does a particular kind of spiritual work, a work of healing, a work of freedom, that we need. My problem is that however important forgiveness may be as a personal act, forgiveness does not make for sound and effective politics. Maybe I’ve finally found an area in feminism that I want to remain personal and not political.

I don’t forgive Dylann Roof. I don’t forgive white supremacy. I don’t forgive white supremacists. I don’t forgive patriarchy. I don’t forgive capitalism. I don’t forgive these systems or their propagators (complicit though I also am) because we have not reckoned with the magnitude of their devastations, deaths, and traumas. I don’t forgive those who still have a knife at my throat. I’m not Jesus. Black women are not Jesus.

So Bree Newsome was a reminder to me that forgiveness is not the only thing faith can look like in public. Faith in public can look like a demand – for justice, for recognition, for grace. Faith in public can look like calling white supremacist evil exactly what it is and “coming against it.” Faith can look like a Black girl climbing a pole. Faith can look like that Black girl looking into the face of power and telling those come to arrest her that she ain’t “neva scared” in the name of God.

And because I’m me, and this is we, let me loop back to that penultimate line. “Faith can look like a Black girl climbing a pole.”

We wouldn’t be connoisseurs of Crunk in these parts if we did not point you to the hilarity of those law enforcement officers yelling at Bree, “Ma’am. Ma’am. Come down off that pole.” Watch here.

Bree’s non-violent direct action against the state of South Carolina places her in the best traditions of the Civil Rights Movement. There’s no denying that.

But Black people have been staring at that rebel flag forever. What is new and important is that Black women, largely because of a heady mashup of hip hop and Black feminism, now have a different relationship to the pole. I’m only being slightly flippant.

I mean, let’s not trip: Discourse about Black girls on poles is ubiquitous these days. Stripper culture made that flagpole a circumstance rather than an obstacle. T-Pain fell in love a few years back. Today Usher “don’t mind.” And despite how far we’ve come in pro-sex feminism, most bougie Black girls I know have as a goal the keeping of their daughters, if not themselves, off the pole.

So I’mma say that the pole here – flagpole though it were – still marks a liminal space of possibility for what Black resistance beyond respectability looks like. Bree Newsome’s Black girl body climbed a pole, quoting scripture, to take down a flag that is emblematic of so much violence enacted on the Black body by the U.S. nation-state. Her act exploded every simple discourse we are currently having about what faith demands, about what decorum dictates that we should accept, about what are acceptable forms of resistance for (cis) Black women’s bodies.

Bree Newsome has challenged and enriched my faith and my feminism. She has reminded me that how Black girls move through space always changes the terms of engagement.  She has reminded me on this week when we celebrate marriage equality and the bible thumpers abound, that the only good use of scripture in public is to help us get free.

(If scripture got you spiritually and rhetorically beating the shit out of gay people, women, and Black folks, rather than bible thumping the shit out of capitalism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy, you’re using it wrong.  God ain’t on your side and you might have the devil on your team.)

I still don’t know where God was in that Charleston Church on June 17th. But I do believe God used a Black girl to serve notice on principalities and powers that be that a change is coming. The flag is back on the pole. But it flies somehow with significantly less swag. And indelibly imprinted on my memory is Bree Newsome’s body, fully in possession of the rebel flag, now untethered from its hinges. A Black girl with the trophy of white supremacy in her clutches is the only sermon on freedom I’ll ever need.

29 thoughts on “On the Pole for Freedom: Bree Newsome’s Politics, Theory, and Theology of Resistance

    1. Yes I don’t even know what else to say, but YES!!!!!!!
      Aso Beautiful, elegant, spoke to my heart and spirit. Just Yes!

  1. Black ‘girl’ ??? Bree Newsom is 30 years old – what an insult! Would you call a 30-year-old black man a boy? And you call yourself feminists? Not in my book. And that click-bait title with a subtle reference to strippers ‘on the pole’ says more about you than Ms. Newsome. You’re annoying people AWAY from feminism. And stop using that ridiculous,annoying words like ‘shero.’ There is nothing exclusively male about the word ‘hero.’ You’re as good for feminism as fundies are for Christianity. Pitiful.

      1. 34? Then I’d say it’s time to grow up and start calling a woman a woman.

  2. Sorry, but I couldn’t bring myself to want to read it, when my eyes fell on ‘black girl’ – and nearly didn’t click, with that title.

  3. “I still don’t know where God was in that Charleston Church on June 17th.”

    As a Christian, you should understand that God has a purpose for everyone. Those poor people dying in exactly that way is what spurred this conversation along. Also, when things are going well, people start forgetting to thank God. It seems like they really only return to God or even acknowledge Him when something terrible happens. This massacre of Black Christians brought so many multicolored strangers together in faith, despite Roof’s prediction. As uncomfortable a thought as it may be, God may very well have been using Roof to that end, sort of like Judas was used in Christ’s death. I’m still pondering that one, myself.

    Finally, because they were Christian, they are already home with Him. If it had been any other place but a church, you couldn’t be as sure that the victims had accepted Christ, yet. But I just have this image of warm Christian folk singing and praising and opening their hearts, and I can’t imagine a more ready moment to meet the Creator. I wish this hadn’t happened, because it makes this world so much more terrifying, but I trust that God’s hands are all over it and He knows what He’s doing, though it may take a minute for the rest of us to catch on.

    1. This is poor theology and I wish that you had not wasted your time writing. It is too soon to start locating God in the actions of Dylann Storm Roof. What we encountered through him was nothing less than the absurd. And just like piss-poor preachers and those of weak faith, you turn from that encounter–an encounter that obscures God, that voids and evacuates meaning, and that silences speech–to offer some asinine statesmen of what helps you go to sleep at night. Those of us with courage and guts and LOVE call upon the cloud of witnesses, the ancestors, upon those who know how to mourn and lament and grieve and we ask God to make the word make sense again. We ask God to transform and to bring life and fullness where there is now death and emptiness. In other words, those with courage go THROUGH. Please keep your evasive and avoidant theologies for somebody who’s savior did not die on the cross, who’s body was not lynched, and who was not the victim of state violence. Stop defending God because clearly, God chooses to suffer with us rather than hide behind your defenses.

      1. Thank you for your reply, Angry. I would argue that it’s never too soon to look for God in any context. You know He’s there, why are you trying to leave Him out? The OP even briefly pondered it, and that’s what I was responding to. I disagree with your assertion that my faith is weak simply because I look to God for comfort. Yes, His word does help me sleep at night; I’m sorry it’s not enough for you. You see, He didn’t give His only son so He could suffer *with* us; He did it so He would suffer *for* us. He went to Hell so we wouldn’t have to. If you really trust in that, then you don’t need to ask God to make this world make sense, because you know this world is not your home. I know you’re angry, and I would never tell you that you shouldn’t be. What I am saying is to strengthen your resolve to trust His promise. It’s so easy in these times to let rage twist your faith, and it seems like you’re on that path, because of how you derisively dismiss the faith of others who look to God for healing and not action. It’s much more difficult to trust the simple yet profound promise that what He has already done is enough. It would ask a lot of you to commit to that viewpoint, but that’s the kind of courage you should be praying for.

        You can call on ancestors, angels, whomever you like to help you through this. I’ll call on the One who died on the cross for me.

    1. Brilliant, fantabulous, articulated like so many of us needed. Thanks, as always.

  4. I agree that scripture used by black people in the cause of freedom is the right use of scripture. Yes, Bree Newsome is a wonderful shero of faith, feminisim, and black liberation. A great post.

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