DEFYING STEREOTYPES
SoulFood’s most famous event of the year—and what brought Johnson from first semester-skepticism to the black Christian organization—was its annual dinner.
“It really draws the black community because when they start thinking there’s chicken, they’re more likely to come out,” says Shelley J. Thomas ’11, an African-American Christian. “They will always come for chicken and cornbread. You can count on that.”
On average, both Thomas and Johnson agrees that most African Americans at Harvard are Christian, and that Christianity underlies African-American culture.
Thomas says that SoulFood has enabled her to be more religious than she was in her Philadelphia home by giving her a community and forcing her to make a choice about her own religion.
What makes adhering to some Christian tenets more difficult for African-Americans, she says, are certain “hypersexual” stereotypes.
“You could see that in the way black people are portrayed now: you got the movies, you got the dancing, you got things like that,” she says. “I’m trying to live right, but if I go out to this dance, I’m expected to dance like they dance in the movies. I’m expected to wear what they’re wearing. So I think that’s a little more difficult,”
Johnson echoes a similar sentiment, noting that college temptations prevent some students from living in accordance with Christian doctrine in the present, instead relying on the promise of future clemency.
“You have people who want to outsmart God. They say, ‘If I could do it today, why can’t I do it tomorrow?’ So they push things off until they think they’re ready,” he says. “I don’t know what they’re waiting for. Maybe they think they’re going to get holier overnight or more acceptable to God.”
But Johnson disagrees with Thomas’s idea that stereotypes disproportionately afflict the black community.
“A stereotype is a stereotype, and I don’t believe that the Harvard black community especially falls into category of individuals who play into a stereotype simply because the stereotype exists,” Johnson says.
He adds that there is much to unite African Americans around their faith, including gospel music and an upbeat preaching style. On this point, Thomas agreed.
“I might be humming something in class somewhere, and someone hears me and they know the song, and I already go, ‘they’re Christian. They have a Christian background,’” she says.
—Staff writer Naveen N. Srivatsa can be reached at srivatsa@fas.harvard.edu.