White Women's Christ, Black Women's Jesus

By Matt Stone

Introduction

            Jacquelyn Grant's White Women's Christ and Black Women's Jesus is a work of constructive theology that opens with a critique and closes with a proposal. The critique is directed at white feminist theology, which Grant argues has claimed the language of liberation while failing to account for the specific and compounded suffering of Black women. The proposal is a womanist Christology centered on the figure of Jesus as co-sufferer, a Christ who is not encountered beyond suffering but within it, and whose solidarity with those facing triple oppression provides not a warrant for endurance but a foundation for resistance and dignity.

Grant's argument is that the theological tradition has consistently universalized from positions of relative privilege, and that correcting this error requires starting over from a different place, namely from the experience of Black women in America whose suffering is shaped simultaneously by race, sex, and class. This paper argues that Grant's womanist Christology is the most significant contribution of the book because it transforms the question of who Jesus is from an abstract doctrinal matter into a politically and historically accountable claim, and because it insists that the co-suffering Jesus is not a figure of resignation but a source of active resistance.

The Failure of White Feminist Christology

            Before Grant can build her own Christological proposal, she has to clear the ground. Her critique of white feminist theology is not incidental to the book. It is the methodological foundation for everything that follows, because it establishes why a new starting point is necessary.

            Grant examines the work of Rosemary Radford Ruether and Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, among others, and finds that despite their genuine commitment to liberation, these thinkers reproduce the universalizing error they criticize in mainstream theology. Ruether's prophetic-liberating Jesus, for instance, is presented as standing against patriarchy and for the poor. But Grant argues that when Ruether specifies whose experience anchors this Christology, the answer is implicitly white and female. The category of "women's experience" that drives white feminist theology does not interrogate its own racial composition. It assumes that gender is the primary axis of oppression and brackets race and class as secondary variables. For Grant, this is not a minor oversight. It is a structural failure that makes white feminist theology a hermeneutics of one stratum of the relatively privileged, not a hermeneutics of the oppressed.

            Grant makes a related argument about the relationship between white feminist theology and Black liberation theology. White feminists appropriated the methodological framework that James Cone and others developed, particularly the idea that revelation discloses itself from the underside of history, and applied it to their own situation. But they did this without reckoning with the fact that white women and Black women did not share the same underside. The racial hierarchy that structured American society, including the women's movement, remained intact even within theologies that claimed to speak from below.

            This critique matters for Grant's Christology because it establishes that the question of who Jesus is cannot be answered by starting from a generalized or abstract experience of oppression. The starting point has to be specific, and the most specific, most fully burdened starting point available, Grant argues, is the experience of Black women in America. 

The Womanist Framework and Triple Oppression

            Grant turns to Alice Walker's definition of "womanist" as the methodological basis for her constructive proposal. This choice is not merely terminological. Walker's characterization of the womanist as audacious, committed to the wholeness of entire peoples, and historically serious about survival establishes a framework that is more capacious than feminist theology while remaining grounded in the specific reality of Black women's lives.

            The central analytical concept Grant develops within this framework is what she calls triple oppression: the interlocking reality of race, sex, and class as they converge in the lives of Black women. This is not simply a quantitative claim, that Black women suffer more than others. It is a structural claim about how different forms of domination interact. A Black woman's experience of sexism is not the same as a white woman's experience of sexism, because it occurs within a context already shaped by racial violence, economic exclusion, and the particular history of Black women's bodies as sites of white control. Similarly, a Black woman's experience of racism is not identical to a Black man's, because gender shapes how racial domination is imposed and how it is internalized.

            Grant's argument is that this interlocking reality creates a particular vantage point from which the gospel becomes legible in a specific way. If the gospel is good news addressed to the oppressed, and if the genuinely oppressed are those who face the full convergence of these dominations, then the gospel is most fully readable from the position of Black women. This is the epistemological wager at the center of the book. It is not a sentimental or identity-political claim. It is a theological argument about where revelation discloses itself most clearly. 

The Co-Suffering Jesus

            The heart of Grant's constructive proposal is her account of the co-suffering Jesus, and this is where the book makes its most original and most demanding theological contribution. Grant reconstructs the Christology that Black women have actually lived through their engagement with scripture, the slave narratives, the spirituals, and the testimony of the Black church tradition. What she finds is not the triumphant Christ of white mainstream Christianity, aligned with the social order and implicitly coded as the guarantor of American innocence. She finds a Christ who was himself lynched.

            Grant is careful to specify what she means by this identification. She is not arguing that suffering is ennobling, or that Black women should find comfort in the idea that Jesus suffered as they have suffered. That reading would slide directly into a theology of submission, which she explicitly resists. Her argument is more precise: that the experience of radical dehumanization creates a particular kind of access to the person of Jesus, because Jesus was himself radically dehumanized. He was condemned by the state, abandoned by his community, subjected to public torture, and denied the dignity that should belong to any human being. The Black women who encountered this Christ in the spirituals and in the slave testimony were not romanticizing their suffering. They were recognizing a structural parallel that had genuine theological content.

            Grant draws on the spirituals as primary theological documents, not as folk expression but as evidence of what Black women actually believed and how those beliefs functioned. The spirituals are not, in her reading, expressions of resignation or otherworldly consolation. They are records of subversive hope, of the assertion of human dignity against a system that denied it, and of the conviction that God's presence in suffering was not an endorsement of suffering but a resource for surviving and resisting it. The co-suffering Jesus is therefore not passive. He is the one who accompanies those who suffer and whose presence in that suffering authorizes resistance rather than submission.

            This is the central theological move that distinguishes Grant's Christology from any reading that would use Jesus's suffering to justify endurance. The Christ who suffers with Black women is the same Christ who was himself killed by the powers of his time, and who is therefore not aligned with those powers. His solidarity with the oppressed is not a spiritual comfort that leaves the structures of oppression in place. It is a theological indictment of those structures.

Christology as Methodology and the Question of Universality

            Grant's Christological argument carries a methodological implication that extends beyond the specific content of womanist theology. If Jesus is most clearly known from the position of those who face the full convergence of race, sex, and class oppression, then doing Christology correctly is not simply a matter of choosing the right doctrinal formulations. It requires starting from the right place. The experience of Black women is not a special case to be incorporated into a theology already constructed on other grounds. It is, in Grant's framing, a privileged hermeneutical site, the location from which the co-suffering Christ is most fully visible.

This claim has consequences for theology done from any other location. White feminist theology failed not because white women did theology, but because they did not acknowledge the social location from which they were doing it, and therefore could not see its limits. The same criticism applies to Black liberation theology: in centering the experience of Black men as the normative site of oppression, it reproduced within itself the gender hierarchy it should have been contesting.

One genuinely difficult question that Grant's argument raises is the relationship between the particularity of her Christology and any claim to universal theological significance. She is making claims about who Christ is that are grounded in a specific community's experience, specific historical conditions, and a specific configuration of suffering. And yet those claims have implications for how anyone does Christology. Grant does not fully resolve this tension, and I do not think she is wrong not to. The unresolved character of the tension is part of the point. A Christology that prematurely universalizes has already left behind the specificity that makes it honest.

Conclusion

            Jacquelyn Grant's White Women's Christ and Black Women's Jesus makes a case that cannot be dismissed as merely polemical. It is a careful, methodologically serious argument that the figure of Jesus has always been politically located, that the location matters theologically, and that the co-suffering Christ encountered in the tradition of Black women's faith is not a marginalized variation on mainline Christianity but a more honest account of what the gospel actually says.

Grant's thesis is clear: Christology must be accountable to the experience of those who bear interlocking oppression, and it must begin there not as a concession to politics but as a requirement of theological integrity. Her argument succeeds because it grounds the co-suffering Jesus not in abstraction but in the documented testimony of a specific community, and because it refuses to let that Jesus become a warrant for the endurance of injustice. What Grant recovers from the slave narratives and spirituals is a Christ whose solidarity with the oppressed is itself a form of resistance, and a theological method that demands the same honesty from anyone who claims to follow him.

 Grant, Jacquelyn. White Women's Christ and Black Women's Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response. AAR Academy Series. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989.