34 pages • 1 hour read
The Cross and the Lynching Tree
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Background
Authorial Context: James Cone as a 21st-Century Author
When The Cross and the Lynching Tree was published in 2011, the United States of America had recently elected its first Black president, Barack Obama. As the last in a long line of books that James Cone had published on the subject, The Cross and the Lynching Tree addresses major issues of race, religion, and cultural assumptions that had been the focus of his academic career for almost half a century, starting in the 1960s.
On the one hand, the election of a Black man as President of the United States represented a new frontier for race relations in the country, proving that this was a new possibility in a country that had never achieved that before. In general, cultural expectations had become generally positive and optimistic about the future of race relations and new social harmony in a country haunted by its violent past. On the other hand, it would be false to say that such a significant symbolic achievement had somehow healed the wounds caused by the country’s white supremacist past that saw men and women of African descent as subhuman and unworthy of being treated with basic dignity and respect.
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