Cole Arthur Riley. This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us. Convergent Books, 2002. ISBN 978-0-593-23979-7.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Susan Moore, an African-American physician in Indiana, was hospitalized with the virus. She caught the attention of media outlets when she posted a video of herself on her Facebook page, recounting how her white doctor at IU Health had dismissed her severe neck pain and breathlessness, refused to give her Remdesivir, and told her she should go home.

“This is how Black people get killed,” Dr. Moore said in her video. And indeed, after being discharged from that hospital, she was admitted to another hospital twelve hours later.

Within two weeks, just a few days before Christmas, she died.

Dr. Moore also had said in her video, “I put forth and I maintain, if I was White, I wouldn’t have to go through that.”

She’s not wrong.

As recently as 2016, Kelly M. Hoffman, Sophie Trawalter, Jordan R. Axt, and M. Norman Oliver revealed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Recent work suggests that racial bias in pain treatment may stem, in part, from racial bias in perceptions of others’ pain. This research has shown that people assume a priori that blacks feel less pain than do whites.”

This bias has a long history in this country, thanks in no small part to the pseudoscience that proliferated during chattel slavery and then wed itself to medicine during the Industrial Revolution. One such pseudoscientist was Dr. Samuel Cartwright, who invented what he called “drapetomania,” a mental illness he claimed caused slaves to run away. Another doctor was Marion Sims, known as the Father of Gynecology, who invented the speculum now used in gynecological exams worldwide. Yet, he believed in the fable that Black people, and especially the enslaved women he experimented upon, did not feel pain like white people do. In fact, he conducted dozens of surgeries on three slaves in particular with no remedies for pain and no ether either.

So when my daughter gave me Cole Arthur Riley’s This Here Flesh as a birthday gift this year, a book that explores how Riley has been “sick for four years with a litany of neurological disorders that refuse to reveal their origin,” I wondered what other horrors the book might reveal. Riley writes poignantly and incisively about her mysterious condition and details the problem in her eyes that requires continual treatment to stave off, but not entirely prevent, blindness. She likewise writes powerfully about another aspect of her body: Her skin color.

Although Riley doesn’t testify to racist medical treatment per se in her book, she does plumb the depths of white supremacy in all its myriad manifestations to expose how it has, indeed, colored, in destructive ways, our perceptions of what it means to be made of Black flesh. Likewise, Riley “takes time to undo the whiteness of God,” by which she means “the historic, systemic, and sociological patterns that have oppressed, killed, abducted, abused, and discredited those who do not exist in a particular body.”

By which she means, “Whiteness is a force.”

Riley’s story unfolds in fifteen deeply contemplative chapters about her own health struggles, lessons learned from family members, and meditations on Scripture and the insights of authors such as Bell Hooks, James Baldwin, and Howard Thurman. The organization of chapters is logical and moving, beginning first with the dignity of all people, created in the image of God as Riley believes we are, then moving to the importance of the places that form us. Such writing opens up into wonder and belonging as well as fear, lament, rage, and justice. Riley doesn’t shy away from complex, terrifying realities as she goes. And as the book winds down, she walks us through repair, rest, joy, memory, and finally, gloriously, liberation.

Riley’s entire book, in fact, is one, steady march toward liberation.

Both poetic and moving, the book is rooted in reality and research. Indeed, Riley even offers a helpful bibliography at the end. Mostly, though, I appreciated how she weaves in her interpretations of biblical texts amid her story and how she makes plainly visible truths that sadly, the white evangelical church has largely ignored. Along these lines, I found her chapter on lamentation rich with wisdom and insight. For instance, Riley asserts,

A spirituality that depends on positivity will lead not only to emotional fallacies but also eventually to delusions of all kinds. Hundreds of thousands of people can march for miles declaring Black Lives Matter, and you will find it so disruptive to your delusion of positivity that you will not become curious or sensitive. Instead, you will find yourself defensive of the fallacy. You can listen to the story of someone’s depression, and your instinct will be to find silver linings so that you yourself feel some kind of resolve. People whose faiths are predicated on happiness make for dangerous friends and woefully disconnected fellow humans.

She follows that up by incisively asking, “[A]re you so committed to the delusion of positivity that you will stand by unmoved as those who bear the image of God cry out in pain?” I couldn’t help seeing Mike Pence turning his head away from the children in cages at the border during his time as Vice President when I read this passage. I also couldn’t help feeling convicted myself.

Although I participated in such BLM marches, often don my BLM T-shirt, use antiracist pedagogies in my classes, and compose poems that reckon with my own whiteness, I’ve often found it difficult to sit with another person’s depression, anxiety, or pain without being Miss Silver Lining myself. So when I read this, I thought especially of my daughter, who’s on the spectrum and lives with me because of her many chronic ailments that’ve disabled her as an adult. I find myself far too many times trying to provide quick fixes in her moments of despair, only to hear her beg me to allow her to lament.

At times, I myself have been a dangerous mother.

Whiteness, it turns out, only likes to write happy stories.

Yet, having joined a Black-led, multi-ethnic church six years ago, I now know what Riley means when she also says,

I don’t know if I’ve encountered better emotional truth-telling than when visiting Black churches. Black people of faith know how to wail. And they know how to crack up. . . . When it’s not being consumed, Black lament is something to behold. Some churches know how to shake the numbness from your flesh.

In other words, I’m now learning that lamentation goes hand in hand with faith. Thankfully, as Riley meditates on Jeremiah 9:20, which says, “Hear, O women . . . teach to your daughters a dirge, and each to her neighbor a lament,” she notes that “[l]ament is intergenerational” as well as “something that can be taught.” Reading Riley’s book is one way to learn how.

In fact, Riley’s intergenerational trauma informs her metaphysical insights throughout the book, a journey that includes the incestuous abuse her paternal grandmother endured as well as her father’s imprisonment. Acknowledging such trauma goes hand in hand with her justified rage over injustice, noting that such “anger itself is a function of reconciliation,” for it “is never holier than when it acts in defense of the dignity of a person or a piece of creation.”

As necessary as activism is, Riley continues, because it is the “body of justice,” she also realizes that “bearing witness to injustice can be weary work.” And indeed, she notes how like many, she has “grown weary of talk of reconciliation,” mostly because those who talk about that don’t understand it can’t come without confession, the request for forgiveness, and repair.

How necessary these insights are in our present cultural and political moment!

Riley also discusses the need for rest and “unapologetic care for the body,” which she believes is the “deepest yet most neglected of needs.” Riley sees rest “not [as] the reward of our liberation” but rather as the “path that delivers us there.” Indeed, even as Riley reinterprets Psalm 23, she writes, “I find it beautiful that in the face of terror, God doesn’t bid us toward courage as we might perceive it. Instead, he draws us toward fear’s essential sister, rest—a sister who is not meant to replace fear but to exist together in tension and harmony with it.”

There is great wisdom on these pages, for Riley doesn’t traffic in the “either/or” realities that some forms of Christianity promote. Instead, she sees how “[j]oy situates every emotion within itself. It grounds them so that one isn’t overindulged while the others lie starving. Joy doesn’t replace any emotion; it holds them all and keeps any one of them from swallowing us whole.” And so it is, that joy holds sorrow in its expansive hands.

Likewise, this is why Riley believes liberation isn’t just some future goal but can be found in the past as well. In fact, as she writes, “liberation stretches out in both directions. It is what you’ve inherited, your first and last breath.”

Ending her book on that note, I couldn’t help but think about Dr. Susan Moore and her last breath, which still makes me want to “cry, [and] flip the table.” Thanks to Riley’s wisdom, however, my anger also stirs me, as it will you, to “go repair [the table] in time for the feast.”

By Julie L. Moore