#relg102 Medium Post 10/13

I had not engaged with any of the materials before this week, but I was particularly struck by Pinn’s and Floyd-Thomas’s writings. While there was certainly overlap between the two authors, the two also differed on key concepts.

Both Pinn and Floyd-Thomas emphasized the importance of the Black body and the tradition of objectifying Black people. Pinn points to the use of Black slaves as a source of labor: while their bodies were important to produce crops, Black people were “no more significant than cattle” (Pinn, 78). Later, white people used the mutilation of Black flesh through lynching as a source of terror and to enforce the world order they had created. These “‘rituals of reference,’” like lynching, were an important part of maintaining white superiority. Likewise, Floyd-Thomas points to the sexualization of Black female slaves, whom their white masters viewed merely as sources of future labor (by producing offspring). Black women became “embodied and sexualized” under this system(Floyd-Thomas, 40). Much later, White women tried to further this stereotype of the promiscuous Black woman; however, they also tried to create an image of Black women as the “desexed, nurturing mammy” (Floyd-Thomas, 40).

Despite the similarities, I was struck by how different some of their ideas were. Though Black religion and theology serve as a form of resistance for both Pinn and Floyd-Thomas, Floyd-Thomas sees womanist theology as more of a guide to improving the Black woman’s life and condition and bettering the way in which Black women are viewed. This not only diverges from Pinn, but also from the male-dominated Civil Rights Movement and from Black Liberation Theology.