Moving from Margin to Center: The M2M Network and African Descended Women
The Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network aims to confront barriers limiting African descended women's religious leadership by advocating policy changes to increase representation, while also transforming foundational knowledge production models to enable organic spiritual insights from marginalized communities to reshape oppressive theological paradigms. This necessitates moving beyond diversifying voices to interrogating entire ingrained assumptions that implicitly privilege qualities associated with White Western masculinity in religious discourse and education.
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The Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network aims to amplify the religious scholarship and leadership of African descended women. Operating from a Pan-African lens, M2M confronts structural barriers that limit Black women’s entry into positions of influence within religious institutes, both ecclesial and academic. The network highlights religious contributions of marginalized women across the diaspora while advocating for policy changes to increase representation.
Narrow conceptions of authority that exclude African women's unique perspectives often cause their oppression (Williams, 2013). Mainstream religious reasoning frequently focuses on dominant groups’ notions of sin, community and justice rather than integrating insights from subjugated standpoints. Consequently, the reinforcement of interlocking hierarchies of race and gender causes distortions to emerge.
Philosopher of race, Charles Mills, analyzes notions of personhood and ethics developed under White supremacy which inevitably carry remnants of racist bias (Mills, 2017). Likewise, pioneering womanist ethicist, Katie G. Cannon, has shown how White male framings of core theological constructs like salvation often fail to resonate with the actual systemic exploitation endured by African American women (Cannon, 1998). Abstract universalisms obfuscate or obscure the realities of violence and dehumanization that pervade Black female lives.
Womanist scholars emphasize that analysis not grounded in engagement with oppressed communities risks recentering privileged voices. Emilie Townes contends White Christians habitually theologize through an unexamined assumption of normative superiority (Townes, 2011). This manifests in choice of research questions, theoretical frameworks, canon, and methodologies.
Problematizing Modes of Knowledge Production
As sociologist Patricia Hill Collins demonstrates, supposedly impartial academic norms often implicitly privilege qualities associated with White Western masculinity (Collins, 2000). People unfairly perceive womanist approaches that emphasize subjective expressiveness, visionary pragmatism, and engaged participation as less rigorous or authoritative.
Rather than adding marginalized perspectives into existing frameworks, M2M contends foundational knowledge production models require transformation. The validation of African descended women as religious leaders and scholars necessitates epistemological innovation allowing organic, grassroots spiritual insights to reshape theoretical paradigms.
This means moving beyond diversifying voices to interrogating entire ingrained assumptions. As womanist theologian Jacquelyn Grant notes, resistance to curricular expansion rarely stems from outright racism but rather paternalistic prejudice doubting the intellectual capacity of non-European traditions (Grant, 1989). Afrocentric religious thought must no longer be patronizingly viewed as lacking academic “standards of excellence.”
Whiteness Dominates Theological Education
Christian seminaries and theological institutions frequently served as key sites for indoctrinating religious justifications of segregation amongst future White ministers and congregations, as Joyce E. King documents in her text “Dysconscious Racism”. Academies and missionary training programs reinforced ideas of Anglo-Saxon cultural superiority and Black inferiority through their teaching and selective historiography well into the mid-20th century (King 2013). As womanist history illustrates, religious institutions frequently served as key sites for indoctrinating moral warrants for White supremacy up through to the present.
The promotion of Anglo-Saxon cultural assumptions and Black inferiority shaped seminarian teaching, harmful historiography and missionary training programs. Completely revisioning the entrenched pedagogies, framings, and epistemic racism that masks itself as religious universality is required to dismantle this damaging theological legacy.
As theologian Willie James Jennings expounds, Whiteness operates as distorted ideological scaffolding falsely elevating the White experience as spiritually prototypical (See Jennings 2014). Even absent overt racial language, White normativity manifests subtly in unacknowledged biases about righteous authority, sin, community, ethics and the presumed objectivity of Eurocentric interpretative paradigms.
Without fully exorcising racialized hermeneutics, religious discourse risks perpetuating the same frameworks used to legitimate oppression while proclaiming universalism. Interrogating entire ideological assumptions thus proves imperative for authentic transformation.
Reimagining Religious Education
Progress requires moving beyond superficial diversification towards rethinking classroom dynamics and programmatic policies holistically to empower marginalized ways of knowing. Merely adding a smattering of “diverse” thinkers as ancillary voices to the traditional canon risks reifying existing hierarchies.
As scholar of decolonial theory, Lori Patel cautions, dominant cultures frequently promote hollow multiculturalism as a mechanism for appropriation rather than authentic pluralism (Patel, 2016). Structural inequities endure despite nominal representation. Fundamentally altering constructions of authority, evidence and knowledge creation is a necessary step towards equitable inclusion of African-descended women religious scholars.
By embracing interdisciplinary engagement with theories of gender, race and decolonization, religious education can transition towards amplifying historically suppressed insights. Rather than dictating acceptable discourse, this entails humility in allowing novel voices to reshape theoretical assumptions. Through encountering subjugated counternarratives, theology students gain an opportunity to confront biases inhibiting growth.
The M2M Research Network provides a model for elevating scholarship of the oppressed from margins to center. By moving from misogynoir (hatred of Black women) toward mishpat (the Biblical word for “justice”), renewed vistas emerge highlighting the radiance of perspectives too long denigrated. With righteousness as guidepost, sanctuaries may yet actualize their universalist aspirations.
CL Nash, PhD, Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network © 2024
Bibliography
Cannon, K. G. (1998). Katie's Canon: Womanism And The Soul Of The Black Community. Continuum. (See pp. 46-71)
Collins, P. H. (2000). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, And The Politics Of Empowerment. Routledge. (See pp. 3-17, 251-271)
Grant, J. (1989). White Women's Christ And Black Women's Jesus: Feminist Christology And Womanist Response. American Academy Of Religion. (See pp. 200-215)
Jennings, W. J. (2010). The Christian Imagination: Theology and The Origins of Race. Yale University Press. (See pp. 6-14, 263-276)
Jennings, W. J. (2020). After Whiteness: an Education in Belonging. SPCK
King, J. E. (2013). “Dysconscious Racism: Ideology, Identity, And The Miseducation Of Teachers.” Journal Of Negro Education, 60(2), 133-146.
Middleton, S., et al. (2016). “The Construction of Whiteness: an Interdisciplinary Analysis of Race Formation and the Meaning of White Identity.” Oxford University Press, 2016
Mills, Charles. (2017) Black Rights/White Wrongs: the Critique of Racial Liberalism. Oxford University Press
Naidoo, M. “Challenging the Status Quo of an Institutional Culture in Theological Training,” Stellenbosch Theological Journal, vol.3 n.2, 2017
Patel, L. (2016). Decolonizing Educational Research: From Ownership To Answerability. Routledge. (See pp. 1-18, 189-212)
Sacco, A. M. (2021). “Race Rendered Theologically: The Entangled Theological and Racial Discourse of Josiah Strong, 1885-1915,” Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard, 2021
Townes, E. M. (2011). Womanist Ethics And The Cultural Production Of Evil. Palgrave Macmillan. (See pp. 36-59).
Williams, D. (2013). Sisters in the Wilderness. Orbis Books
Author Bio
Dr. Nash is a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She examines justice demands from African-descended women religious leaders and scholars, theorizing the way colonizing knowledge models disadvantage them. Dr. Nash’s second project repositions historical African-descended groups from “subjugated” to “subjective” selves using autoethnography. Current projects include: Guest Editor, The African Journal of Gender and Religion, special issue on Black women’s radical faith traditions (July 2024); Director of the Misogynoir to Mishpat Research Network, and the 2024 publication of “A Black Woman’s Prophetic Rage” with The Black Theology Journal 22(3). Her PhD is from the University of Edinburgh.