Delores S. Williams contributes a chapter titled "Black theology and womanist theology" to the Companion. In some ways more capacious and in others more critical than the preceding chapters, this summary will do even less justice to her contribution than my earlier ones.
Williams begins by distinguishing womanism from feminism. Her definition, drawing from novelist Alice Walker, is too long to repeat in full but a couple of selective quotes may prove helpful. "What then is a womanist? Her origins are in the black folk expression 'You acting womanish,' meaning ... 'wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered "good" for one' ... A womanist is also 'responsible, in charge, serious ... . [A] womanist is also committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, make and female.' She is no separatist."
How is this different from second-wave feminism?
There was tension between how African-American women defined women's experience and how they thought white feminist wanted black women's experience defined ... Some black women had reservations about white feminist definitions of patriarchy as the primary cause of all the oppression all women experience ... [T]hey were also very clear about the participation of upper-class women with upper-class men in the exploitation of black women's labor ... African-American women could not limit their concern, definitions, struggles, and goals to the survival, liberation, and well-being of women. The entire African American family -- mother, father, children, and black kinsfolk -- was oppressed and confronted by systemic violence.
In short, in my words, Williams advocates for a capacious intersectionality.
Like the other contributors to the Companion, Williams asserts that experience is the foundation of the task of the theologian. But more than any contributor thus far, Williams privileges experience over the biblical text. She criticizes male black liberation theologians like James Cone for drawing exclusively on the liberation of the Hebrew people from Egypt as a paradigm for black liberation. What, Williams asks, is to be made of the "Hagar-Sarah texts in Genesis and Galatians" that "demonstrate that the oppressed and abused do not always experience God's liberating power"? And even more critically,
When non-Jewish people (like many African American women ...) read the entire Hebrew testament from the point of view of the non-Hebrew slave, there is no clear indication that God is against their perpetual enslavement. Likewise, there is no clear opposition expressed in the Christian testament to the institution of slavery.
...
I suggest that African American theologians should make it clear to the [black] community that [e.g., James Cones's] black way of of identifying with God solely through the exodus of the Hebrews and Jesus' reported words in Luke belongs to the black historical period of American slavery.
In the end, Williams gestures toward reconciling her take on theologizing with the broader community: "The womanist way produced by African American women is not something to be imposed imperialistically on women from other cultural contexts." Indeed, she expresses hope that womanist theology ultimately will "bring the spirit of the kingdom closer to our lives and lead to a more liberated world in which women and men live together in the image of God's freedom and grace." The basis for this hope, however, remains unspecified.
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