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Empowerment Ethics for a Liberated People: A Path to African-American Social Transformation. Cheryl J. Sanders. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995, 141 pp. PB. $12.00.
In this time of moral decay, family breakdown, and social upheaval in African-American history, an important work, Empowerment Ethics for a Liberated People: A Path to African-American Social Transformation, has been written by Cheryl J. Sanders, Professor of Ethics, Howard University School of Divinity. Sanders, somewhat like Ezra did for a rediscovered, dusty scroll of the Hebrew Scriptures, has researched, reinterpreted, and presented succinctly more than a century of empowering Christian ethical approaches to African-American moral and social progress, much of which may have become dusty in our memories. In this critical time in the African-American community, Sanders maintains that liberation theology rhetoric. though very important, does not offer to the liberated people the practical solutions for empowering others who are still enslaved in one way or the other. Therefore, she offers to African Americans a path to social transformation. The path she takes is divided into seven independent approaches in chapters of oneword titles-"Testimony," "Protest," "Uplift," "Cooperation," "Achievement," "Remoralization," and "Ministry." The content of each is worthy of mention.
In "Testimony," Professor Sanders has waded through a sea of personal testimonies of slaves and has drawn out the theological and ethical life that empowered them through slavery to freedom. From an ethical standpoint, she analyzes selected testimonies that are discussed through themes of Christian and social ethics, theodicy, emancipation, religion, and hypocrisy of the oppressor. She also presents a critique of the ethical framework that was in operation during the moral decline in the aftermath (1920s and 1930s) of emancipation.
In "Protest" she approaches ethical empowerment and chronicles more than a century of African-American history. With the acknowledgment of the work of Martin Luther King Jr. as a pivotal point, she discusses protest through the work of David Walker in 1929 and Maria Steward in 1931 in the Antebellum Period and into the work of Glen C. Loury and Cornel West in the latter part of the twentieth century. Through the protest documents of Walker and Steward, Sanders illustrates balance in the protest of the sins of the oppressor and...