Many Black women know the worry well. They have heard Scripture used to keep them quiet in church. They know that, further back, the same book was preached to people their ancestors’ owners wanted obedient. So the question is fair: is the Bible good for Black women, or has it only ever served the people who wanted to control them?
Ekemini Uwan, a public theologian and co-founder of the Truth Table podcast, answers that the Bible is good for Black women. She grounds that answer in the record of the people who abused it. If enslavers had really believed the Bible served them, they would have handed it over gladly. Instead, she argues, they worked to keep it out of enslaved hands. The harm done with Scripture was real. It came from what readers added to the faith and from who held the pen. It did not come from the text itself.
What exactly is the charge?
The charge is not only that some Christians behaved badly. It is that the Bible itself is a book of control, so that a Black woman who trusts it is trusting the instrument of her own oppression. Lisa Fields puts the objection in its sharpest form when she says many people conclude the Bible is not a liberating book at all, only something that keeps Black people marginalized. Lisa also notes a related criticism that runs through Black communities: that Christianity is a pacifying faith, one that makes people passive in the face of injustice.
Uwan does not treat this as a fringe complaint to be dismissed. “I think we have to validate people’s objections,” she says. She ties that listening to the command to love your neighbor as yourself. That matters for how the rest of her answer works. She is not trying to win an argument against wounded people. She is asking them to look at evidence they may not have been shown.
She also makes an admission that a less careful defender might avoid. Speaking of Scripture, she says plainly that it “has been used” against people, and then: “We have to say that that is true.” Any honest answer has to start there. Whatever else is true about the Bible, slaveholders preached from it, and men have quoted it to shrink women’s lives. The real question is what that history proves.
Why would enslavers hide a book that served them?
Here Uwan makes her most distinctive argument, and it turns the objection around. If the Bible were simply a text of oppression, the people who held power over enslaved Africans would have had every reason to spread it freely. “We know that slave holders would not have been trying to concoct their own Bible,” she says. And again: “They would not have been withholding the text from the enslaved.”
Her reasoning is about incentives. People do not edit and ration a book that already says what they want. According to Uwan, enslavers knew what certain parts of Scripture would do in the minds of the people they held, naming the narratives “particularly in the prophets about our liberation, or just even Genesis one about us being made in the image of God.” She argues that those passages led to resistance and revolt, and that the enslavers knew it.
The Genesis passage she points to is short and easy to read past. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). The verse places the image of God on both the male and the female, with no ranking of peoples. A system that depended on treating Black women as property had good reason to fear a sermon on that verse.
This argument has a limit, and naming it makes it stronger. Uwan’s claims about what enslavers knew and what Scripture inspired are historical assertions. They deserve the same scrutiny as any other claim about the past. The argument also does not prove that every passage reads easily or that no hard text exists. What it does establish is narrower and still powerful. The people with the most to gain from calling the Bible an oppressive book behaved as if they did not believe it. Their editing is a confession that the full text worked against them.
What got added, and who added it?
If the text is not the source of the harm, something else must be. Uwan locates it in what she calls “our reception of the faith” and in “the white supremacist additives.” For Black women, the additives stack. She names them one after another: “It’s the misogyny that’s added on top of the faith.” “It is the sexism that’s added on.” She adds rape culture to the list and sums up the whole pile as “These wicked sinful additives that get people confused and get them twisted around.”
The word additives does real work. An additive is something mixed into a substance that was not part of it. The image lets a Black woman say two things at once without contradiction. What was preached to her grandmother’s grandmother was poisoned. What it was mixed into was not the poison. Separating the two is not denial. It is diagnosis.
Lisa Fields sharpens the point by focusing on motive. She says “people go to the Bible to use it as a tool for their agenda,” when they should be coming to the Bible to be used by God. On her account, the reader who comes to be transformed lets the text change them. The reader who comes with an agenda bends the text to fit it, whether that agenda is white supremacy, racism or misogyny. That gives a test anyone can apply: who is being changed by this reading, the reader or the text?
Uwan does not leave the misuse as a neutral mistake. She says God is not pleased by it, and that “there’s judgment that awaits those who do that” if they do not repent. On her reading, the Bible does not just survive its abusers. It stands against them.
Can the oppressor look like you?
A simple version of this history would cast all the distortion on one side: white enslavers, then and now. Uwan refuses that version. Her caution to anyone who calls the Bible oppressive is to “beware of the interpreter.” She explains why: “Because the Bible is absolutely a weapon in the hands of an oppressor.” Then she adds a line that cuts closer to home: “And the oppressor can look like you.”
She spells out what she means. The person twisting Scripture against a Black woman may share her race. That person may share her sex. The distortion is not confined to one group or one century. For Black women this is a necessary word, because some of the hurt they carry came from inside their own churches and from people who looked like them.
This also keeps the argument honest in the other direction. If the question is how a reader comes to the text, that question applies to everyone, including a reader hungry for a liberating message. Wanting the Bible to free you does not exempt you from reading it faithfully. Lisa’s test of coming to be used by God, not to use God, has no exception for good causes.
Uwan makes a related observation about critics on college campuses and elsewhere who point to Christians acting against their own faith. She says they are right to see the incongruence, and she gives a reason that may surprise them: “the reason why they know that is because they’re made in the image of God.” The moral sense that recoils at a slaveholder’s sermon is, on her account, itself a mark of the God that sermon misrepresented. The critic’s outrage is evidence for the Bible’s claim about human worth, not against it. From there she draws a line the reader has to learn to see, between “who is just talking about Jesus and who is actually gonna be with Jesus.”
What about the hard texts themselves?
The strongest form of the objection does not rest on misuse alone. Some passages are hard on their own terms. Uwan grants this. She acknowledges that “there’s many nameless women in the Bible” and that readers will find difficult texts and real oppression on the page.
Her answer is a distinction about what kind of writing these passages are. “The Bible doesn’t hide sin,” she says. A narrative that records violence against a woman is reporting what happened. When Scripture describes people’s sinful acts, Uwan says, “it does not mean it’s prescribing a way of being.” Instead, “It is telling us just how low down we can get.”
This is the difference between description and command, and it changes how the hardest stories read. A book that told only flattering stories about its people would be less believable, not more. The Bible’s record of what men did to women is part of its honesty about sin, and a reader who treats every story as a model to follow has misread the genre. That distinction does not make every hard passage easy. It does remove the assumption that whatever the Bible records, it approves.
Where do Black women appear on the page?
The claim that the Bible ignores women like them is often fed by images more than by the text. Lisa observes that iconography has hidden the diversity of the people in Scripture, so many readers never notice who is actually there.
Uwan starts with Hagar, an enslaved Egyptian woman cast out by the household that used her. In Genesis 16, God meets her in the wilderness. Hagar is the first person in Scripture to give God a name, and Uwan stresses who that person is: “The first person to name God is an African woman.” The name Hagar gives is recorded in Genesis 16:13: “Thou God seest me.” Uwan describes it this way: “She had the holy boldness to name God.” The first theological title spoken by a human in the Bible comes from an enslaved African woman whom everyone else in the story had treated as disposable.
She points next to Mary Magdalene, the first person the risen Jesus chose to reveal himself to. In John 20:17, Jesus sends her to tell his brethren that he is ascending to his Father. Uwan draws out what follows from that sending: “Because of Mary, we know about Jesus.” The message every later Christian received passed first through a woman’s testimony.
Lisa adds a reading of that scene that answers an old misuse directly. Readers have long blamed women through Eve, who handed Adam the fruit. Lisa notes that at the resurrection Jesus reverses the pattern: he hands the gospel to a woman, and she carries it to men. In that reversal Lisa Fields hears God saying “you’re not going to make women the problem.” She calls it a corrective for anyone who would use Eve to view women in a negative light.
Uwan also names Zipporah, who acted in a priestly role when she saved Moses, as another woman whose place in the story readers often skip.
Did the Bible make Black women passive?
The pacifying-faith charge can be tested against actual lives. Uwan points to her own heroine, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and describes her as a civil rights leader, orator and organizer within the National Baptist Convention. In Uwan’s telling, Burroughs gave a speech on how women were being hindered from using their gifts in the Baptist church, helped build a women’s organization within that convention, founded a training school for women and girls in Washington, D.C., and fought segregation and lynching.
Uwan read aloud from Burroughs’s own words about the Bible. Burroughs wrote that the Bible reveals God as no respecter of persons and that it does not put the stigma of inferiority on any race. She grounded that claim in Scripture, echoing Colossians 3:11: “Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.” Uwan’s summary of Burroughs is simple: “She walked it, she talked it, she lived it.” Her point is that Burroughs did not resist injustice in spite of her Bible. Her Bible was the source of her resistance.
Uwan places other women in the same line, naming Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary McLeod Bethune among ancestors who lived consistently with what she calls the liberating gospel of Jesus Christ. Lisa draws the conclusion bluntly. Faith does not make a person docile, Lisa Fields says, and “if it made you docile, you got it wrong.”
Uwan’s own story is a quieter counterexample to the idea that the Bible reached Black women only through their oppressors. Her grandfather pastored in Nigeria. Her grandmother catechized her, taught her the Psalms and the creeds, and sang Psalm 1 with her in the family’s language. The Bible came to her as an inheritance from an African church, not as a tool handed down by a master.
Who gets to define the book?
Underneath the whole question is a matter of ownership. If the slaveholder’s edited Bible is the real one, then the people who distorted Scripture get the final say over what it means. Uwan’s argument denies them that say. The ancestors who wrestled with the same question, she says, had the discernment to disentangle the wicked deeds of oppression from “the pure, unadulterated word of God.”
She also admits that argument alone will not settle it for everyone. Evidence helps and can strengthen faith, she says, but evidence by itself does not save. People saw Jesus’ miracles and still did not believe. So she ends with an invitation drawn from Moses, who after Israel’s idolatry asked God, “I beseech thee, shew me thy glory” (Exodus 33:18). Uwan tells women wrestling with hard texts that their wrestling puts them in good company, and that they can bring that same request to God without fear that he will back away from hard questions.
That is where the history leads. The people who fought hardest to control what Black women heard from Scripture did not trust the full text in their hands. A Black woman reading that text for herself today is doing exactly what they tried to prevent.
Quick answers
Is the Bible itself oppressive to Black women?
Ekemini Uwan argues it is not. She locates the harm in white supremacist, misogynist and sexist additions laid on top of the faith, while saying plainly that Scripture has been used as a tool of oppression.
Why does it matter that enslavers withheld the Bible?
Uwan reasons that slaveholders would not have concocted their own Bible or kept it from the enslaved if the full text served them. Their editing suggests they feared passages on liberation and on every person bearing God’s image.
Can people inside the Black church misuse Scripture too?
Yes. Uwan warns readers to beware of the interpreter, because the oppressor can share your race or your sex. The test is how a person comes to the text.
What about the violent or demeaning stories in the Bible?
Uwan says the Bible does not hide sin. Describing what people did does not mean prescribing it. Many hard stories show how far people can fall.
Where does the Bible honor women like me?
Uwan points to Hagar, an African woman who was the first person to name God, and to Mary Magdalene, the first person sent to announce the resurrection. Lisa Fields reads Mary’s commission as God refusing to make women the problem.