The Waco Horror

One possible direction to press Cavell in a theological register is to read the centering of the ordinary as an explicit critique of the messianic, that is, of discontinuous eschatological formations of redemption. Cavell’s fear that we take too much for granted about our everyday lives—in what our shared language and therefore our shared world implies—certainly lends this pressure. Any sense of uncritical or one-sided otherworldliness threatens to perpetuate the failure of not taking language seriously, which entails not only a failure of acknowledging a certain wonder and weight with regard to our linguistically constituted worlds, but also a failure of seeing how theologizing eschatological discontinuity or apocalyptic escape is tied, …show more content…
The lynching of Jesse Washington, or “the Waco Horror” as W.E.B. Du Bois was to infamously call it, is one of the most well-known spectacle lynchings in the post-Emancipation nadir of anti-black terror. It happened in front of a crowd of thousands of spectators and with the collusion of local authorities; Jesse Washington was mangled on the courthouse lawn and tortured on display in the city-center. Memories of this horror, like the city’s geography, were segregated. In light of regional, national, and even international media attention and condemnation, many white Wacoans employed strategies of forgetfulness, hoping to distance themselves from this incident for which the city was being shamed. Enduring the traumatic effects of this terrorism (along with the many other lynchings that occurred in McLennan County) throughout the juridical segregation and anti-black discrimination of Jim Crow, black Wacoans did not forget, and tied this disaster to the history of lynching. God’s judgment of the white supremacist city came in the whirlwind: divine violence disclosed divine solidarity with the marginalized black community, and, in a way, vindicated the memory of Jesse Washington. As one …show more content…
It may in fact be the case that it is only through attention to the everyday and the ordinary that such broader theological connections can be made if one is not to surrender the responsible work of historical and ethnographic description to the threat of doctrine divorced from body. What Cavell distinctively gives then, as I suggested above, is crucially not a critique of eschatology, but a standpoint that looks to its language, knowing that the worlds against which and towards which eschatologies strain are internal to the distant and intimate words and stories of the people who tell them. This is to say, we are not forced to take leave of the question of eschatology in the descent into the ordinary; precisely in this descent we find that eschatology must be a question about the ordinariness of people for whom God could and must be expected to act in history in just this way—in the case of black Wacoans: a form of life against and underneath the terms of a white supremacist racial regime. Cavell allows, in other words, for a particular ethnographic investigation into the forms of everyday living that shape the basis from which this (or any) theological structure of anticipation is possible, and indeed, orients us to the tactility of such a structure of anticipation—that eschatology must be more like taking measure of the excitability of an arterial pulse than