A Kenotic Struggle for Dignity

Abstract

Although Booker T. Washington stands outside the theological canon, his writings offer a pragmatic theology that connects the desire for dignity to a kenotic Christology through an ethic of unceasing work. While Washington's project to improve the lives of African Americans in the Jim Crow–era South was severely compromised by political circumstances, problems within his theology of work made his project especially susceptible to those circumstances. The tragedy of Washington's theology stems from his making dignity contingent upon work being recognized as useful by a worker's community. His kenotic ideal of “Christlike” work can actually degrade workers, if their community refuses to recognize their work's merit. Workers’ anxiety about dignity causes them to pour themselves into their work, but a racist society sees African American workers as inherently undignified. Even without Jim Crow's pervasive violence, the postindustrial reappearance of economic doctrines that characterized Washington's era makes his theological ethic relevant again.

Religious Ethics and the Human Dignity Revolution

“…. Work yields dignity, but it consumes the self” (Malesic 2016, 404, 405). In short, prevailing social practices and the values that ground them still apportion dignity and shape our understanding of the “human” with which it is associated “in ways that exclude as much as include, that mark out only the members of certain groups as truly, fully human, while others are regarded as second class” (Herdt 2021, 208).…”