It is hard work to listen to histories and traditions that have not been a part of dominant discourse. There are those (within and without the Black community) who respond to such revelations with guilt, shame, and anger. Rather than explore the emotion of a response, too often the rational impulse takes over, creating mincing yet deadly abstractions that result in refusing the invitation to justice and liberatory resistance.

This entrée may be imperative for these groups that have been, until recently, among the dispossessed. Yet too many of our postmodern conversations do not take us beyond reform movements to transformations of social systems and practices that model justice for all peoples and a respect for creation beyond human skin color and the violence that circumscribes our lives.

The first is that knowledge claims are evaluated by experts who represent the viewpoints of the groups they represent. The second is that these experts must maintain their credibility with the group they represent. This makes knowledge claims deeply contextual. However, our awareness of this rich contextuality is often muted by assumptions of a kind of austere objectivity in which truth is pristine. What often emerges, none too subtlely, is the assumption that there is only one truth, one correct answer to the puzzle of the diversities that form us culturally, socially, and theologically.

The first step: “a recognition of the heteromorphous nature of language games” Second step: consensus of rules in language games are local and subject to cancelation.

There is also an intrinsic erosion in the narrative of emancipation, but it differs from that of the speculative discourse; when science plays its own language game, it is incapable of others, such as prescriptions, and cannot legitimate itself. In postmodernity, there is a recognition of multiple language games and a sense of “splintering,” and nobody can speak all the distinct discourses, and no universal metalanguage can join them.