Abstract

The existential demands of race speak to the necessity of conceptualizing what race is in conjunction with what it means to be human. Both meanings intersect epistemologically and phenomenologically, such that what race is informs what it means to be human as much as what it means to be human informs what race is. In this way, “blackness” becomes both the concept and the embodiment of what race is and what it means to be human. Theological anthropology presents a framework by which “what race is” as a concept can be distinguished from “what it means to be human” as an embodiment. This distinction is calibrated through a theologizing about God from the meaningfulness of “what it means to be human” beyond “what race is.” More importantly, this differentiation is respectively between “what race is” in theory and “what race is” in praxis as what it means to be human, to the extent that what becomes specifically existential in the meaningfulness of race is translated by what becomes generally existential in the meaningfulness of human embodiment.