To Be Black Is To Be Divine. God Lives In Our Blackness.
”You are altogether beautiful, my darling; there is no flaw in you.” - Song of Songs 4:7. To be Black is to be divine. God lives within our Blackness. Our relationship to our Blackness is our relationship with God.
God created everyone to reflect God’s image in some way. But God left us a very specific love letter.
Embedded in our skin is where we find God’s love. To be Black is to be divine love embodied.
This is because God is the God of the oppressed.
Wanting to educate Black people that we can both be unapologetically Black and Christian, Reverend James Cone created Black Liberation Theology.
BLT centers this concept that God is the God of the oppressed, meaning God divinely loves Black people. But Cone also understood that we need to meet God with a specific form of reciprocity.
Cone believed that “to be free, [we] must first love [our] Blackness.”
Another way of understanding this is: Our freedom is tied to our capability to remain loving through the oppression we face. And that begins with loving ourselves, especially our Blackness, because our Blackness is where God resides.
What does loving our Blackness look like? This could be saying affirmations as we rub shea butter into our skin. Teaching our children that all shades of Black are beautiful.
This could also be unapologetically loving ourselves out loud, and by doing so teaching others how to treat us. Because how they treat us is how they treat God. God lives in our melanin.
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