For the Love of (Black) Christ: Embracing James Cone's Affective Critique of White Fragility
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Throughout his written work, James H. Cone proclaims a message of liberation that takes into account both the sociopolitical structural and emotional dimensions of life together. Cone suggests that we cannot settle for—in fact, we cannot even have—love without justice, or justice without love. In this article, I look at Cone's body of work to uncover and reclaim what he performed, but did not explicitly theorize, in his pursuit of love and justice: the dismantling of white fragility, a white supremacist affective construct that shapes much Christian theology, including what seeks to further the cause of racial reconciliation. I then theorize the distorted love that Cone critiques, drawing on the affect theory of Sara Ahmed and the critical whiteness theory of Robin DiAngelo, finally suggesting an alternative vision of love that is consistent with Cone's theology. This alternative vision presents love as acceptance of one's radical, even fundamental, need for the beloved. In contexts of racial tension, this love does not guarantee happiness or comfort, but instead offers aid toward repentance and salvation. In this view, black love for white people cannot be expected to take the form of endless affirmation and encouragement, but instead should look like belief in the capacity of white people for moral and ethical action.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".