Being Human: Race, Culture, and Religion

In Being Human, Chicago theologian Dwight Hopkins explores what constitutes humanity and the human being as grounded in three realities -- culture, self, and race. Race and the specific experiences of those determined as black prove to be central to Hopkins' account of what the human self is and is called to be. Speaking as a white student of theology, the chapter on race was deeply unsettling, as the author exposes how pervasive racist assumptions and narratives are in even the most reflective and philosophical discourses in European culture. Quotations from heavyweights of the Enlightenment paint a disturbing and challenging picture of white refusal to participate in a unified human family. These reflections on the categories of culture, self, and race take up much of the book and are followed by thirty rich pages that finally develop, with the aid of black folktales, a theological anthropology centered on care for and service of the poor. In Hopkins' forceful argument, failing in faithfulness to the downtrodden represents a fundamental break with what God has ordained humanity to be -- no other concerns can supersede this fundamental attribute of humanness. Being Human has poweful things to say to a church that continues in many ways to deny the full humanity of its brothers and sisters of color. It also speaks prophetically to the material condition of all poor and working class people, whom God wishes to participate fully and equally in the Kingdom. Very highly recommended.