Words of Wisdom
Thinking margins
In the book, Deeper Shades of Purple, Theologian Shawn Copeland discusses thinking on the margins as essential to a womanist critique. For Copeland, such a critique is “not merely because [womanists] disapprove of the distinction between opinion and knowledge.” [1] Her observations are critical as African descended women in religious scholarship and religious leadership carve out a space for their own full humanity.
Copeland’s statement lets us know that the distinctions between opinion and knowledge must be interrogated – but the work cannot stop there. As scholars, we are aware that students will come to us and want to know how they must use potentially harmful texts as foundational to their own religious and theological beliefs. As clergy, we are also called upon to combat assumptions that women are inherently inferior. We are challenged to evaluate the belief that women today, like the Genesis character of Eve, are seen as having a dangerous thirst for knowledge that is only quenched by disobedience.
This thirst for knowledge may come disguised in a cultural rhetoric that refuses to “obey” the canon of religious epistemology inherited in many of our churches. Copeland reminds us that our “sass” or verbal challenge, is a “gift from the Ancestors.” Says Copeland,
Enslaved Black women took up verbal warfare in order to regain and secure self-esteem, to gain psychological distance, to tell the truth, and sometimes, to protect against sexual assault. The word “sass” derives from the bark of the poisonous West African sassy tree. [2]
Copeland goes on to explore the way the sassy tree’s bark, mixed with other barks, was used test or punish those accused of witchcraft. Our ancestral mothers used verbal sass as a form of “ready defense that allowed them to return a portion of the poison the master … offered.” [3]
[1] Shawn Copeland, “A Thinking Margin,” in Deeper Shades of Purple, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, p. 231-32
[2] Copeland, p. 233
[3] Ibid