Danté Stewart's Shoutin' In The Fire

Celebrating Black History Month While We're Still Allowed

Two weeks ago at Southern Lights on St. Simon’s Island, I got to hear from and then meet Danté Stewart. During the book signing period, I grabbed a copy of his memoir and got in line. When I got to him, I told him I was a retired sociologist and that I’d noted he was a sociology major at Clemson. He perked up even more than normal and told me he’d just reread C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination. (I wrote in this newsletter about that book almost exactly a year ago.) He asked what other classic books had similar themes and I encouraged him to read Peter Berger’s Invitation to Sociology.

As I noted in the post about Southern Lights, Jacqui Lewis had joked that she and Danté were on their “nice white people tour”. Now that I’ve read his book, I find that joke more poignant than ever. Being with the “nice white people” becomes part of Dante’s story from the time he arrives at Clemson until well into adulthood. He tells how the environment of white (reformed) evangelicalism shaped his self-understanding and how he was eventually awakened to the importance of his racial self-identity.

Being on the Clemson football team meant that he was a known quantity and people wanted him around.

I soon learned that I was not like other Black people. I was the exception. They wanted me there, I believed. To be told I was not like other Black people felt like praise. It felt like belonging. But I didn’t know to care, either. I was home. I had made it. I was the exception (20).

The more he got involved in the white evangelical megachurch, the more enculturated he became. It made him (encouraged him) to distance himself from his past.

The more I pursued white Jesus and his disciples, the more I learned about what felt like the “right” kind of Christianity. The more I learned how to get into arguments to pick apart someone else’s argument (29).

It praised Black bodies singing white worship songs and tearing apart whatever Black people put out in the world. It was a place where I learned to be “Christian” and never to be Black. I began listening to sermons by John Piper, John MacArthur, and other big-name reformed pastors literally every day. Listening to sermons became much easier than listening to myself (30).

In spite of his Black body and his upbringing, he was conditioned to minimize race and become a “nice white person”.

He shares a quote from sociologist W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folks, “One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.” That reference to the Black body is a recurring theme of the book. Yes, it refers to Danté’s own body and his football past, but it also refers to numerous other bodies — dead ones that he saw on video screens.

Throughout his story, he seems to measure time by the deaths of Black men and boys at the hands of police and vigilantes. He references Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Stephon Clark, Botham Jean, George Floyd.

It wasn’t just these stories that troubled him, though they did. It was that the white evangelical environment that had told him he was at home was completely uninterested.

The week after Alton was murdered, our sermon series began to explore marriage. Week after week, we heard what God wanted us to do in our singleness, and what God wanted us to reflect in our marriages, and the grace of God for our sins, and the forgiveness of God for our failures.

Not once during any of those Sundays — or any Sundays thereafter — was there any mention of Alton’s name. Never did the sins named include a country that did not know God but did know violence. None of it mentioned what we were going through. We were being taught, week in and week out, how to be Christian. But we were not being taught how to live in America (66).

His reading patterns shifted to include more Black authors: Baldwin, Cone, Morrison, Angelou, and many others. Still, the white church didn’t get it.

The church we were at said they wanted to be a more diverse church They wanted to accomplish racial reconciliation. After the Trayvon Martin murder, white Christians slowly began to host “conversations” about ways they could bring people together (79).

In that spirit, Danté was asked to lead a small group on race. Their source material would be a book written by John Piper. (Even I would have run away). Danté reflects:

I used to think that talking more about Black life, or even Black faith, was about convincing white people to be better. But that’s too limiting. No — I’ve learned that talking about Blackness is about giving us words; setting our bodies free; living in ways that we feel seen, inspired, protected (128).

As I read the last third of the book with its ongoing references to bodies — Danté’s football past and current running, the bodies of older relatives, the bodies of all those names listed above — my mind went to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. He also writes of the way that Blackness in our society is essentially embodied. On my previous (defunct) blog, I write about Coates’ book and acknowledged that I have no referent for what this is like.

Danté underscores this in his final chapter. He is telling the story of a young Black child at a George Floyd protest shouting No justice! No peace! No justice! No peace! He watches he young body give its all. And he writes:

Then I remembered, that was the hope, her Black body, caught between danger and deliverance. She chose to fight for herself, she chose to fight for her people, she chose to scream and to shout and to march and to dance and to throw her hands up and to preach good news and to remember and to shake foundations and rock souls straight, and conjure up ancestral tounges, and hot sweaty sermons, and dark memories, and dear pledges of love, and broken dreams, and epistles of love, and responsible love. She chose to stand in the face of danger, to hold on to some imagination of a better world, to hope in the midst of social suffering. She chose to keep our memory alive. She became good news for us. It was no creed, no phrase, but love, the love of God at work in one small body (250-251).

She stands in stark contrast to the quietude and triumphalism of the white evangelical church with its focus on right thinking while looking away from the face of injustice.

In many ways, this is a great encapsulation of Danté Stewart’s entire memoir. He found himself in White evangelical spaces that were proud to have him in their midst, at least as a representative of someone who shared their thinking. What they didn’t allow was the thinking that arose from his embodied identity.

And we are all worse off because of it.