What do the battles for environmental justice and racial justice have in common? According to Manhattan College’s Associate Professor of Global Christianity, Dr. Jawanza Eric Clark, they are one and the same.
That is the premise of Clark’s latest book, which is taking seminaries across the nation and world by storm, “Reclaiming Stolen Earth: An Africana Ecotheology.”
“In his work, ‘Whose Earth is It, Anyway?’ Dr. James Cone asserts that ‘the logic of white supremacy is the same logic that leads to the destruction of the planet,’” said Clark. “In my book, I’m claiming that two of the most vital issues confronting us, the problem of racial injustice and the ecological crisis, derive from the same source, the problem of whiteness, specifically white, Western culture. Western society has turned the natural world, the land/Earth specifically, into a commodity (a product that can be bought or sold).”
Clark says this commodification of land is the outgrowth of turning human beings into commodities (i.e. Native Americans and Africans).
“We have to ask, if the same culture that got us into this problem of impending ecological destruction with a legacy of oppressing and marginalizing Black, Brown, and Red communities, can be trusted to get us out of this situation. Perhaps those oppressed communities have something to offer to the healing of the Earth,” added Clark, former pastor of Houston’s Shrine of the Black Madonna.
Clark’s book “Reclaiming Stolen Earth” examines the history of land dispossession of African and African-Americans and the subsequent exploitation of the land and offers insights from African traditional spirituality and wisdom presenting a different approach to healing the Earth. Clark says this involves shifting from a time-oriented culture to one that prioritizes space and being in harmony and in right relationship with the people, living creatures and the rest of the natural world.
Clark, who will be in Houston for a book signing on Saturday, Aug. 19 at 1 p.m. at the Shrine Cultural and Events Center (5309 MLK Blvd, Houston, 77021) and preaching the next day at the same location during the Shrine’s worship service at 11:30 a.m., also discusses in his book Rev. Albert B. Cleage Jr., who founded the Shrine and is known in theological and Black Power circles as the “Father of Black Liberation Theology.”
“I discuss his innovative conception of God as cosmic energy and creative intelligence. I present him as an organic intellectual who was trying to cure Black people of their “double consciousness” or acceptance of the “myth of Black inferiority.”
