Arts & Sciences Magazine

By Steve Holt

As James Howard Hill, Jr., passed the first anniversary of his joining the CAS faculty, he was mindful of the rich genealogy of Black intellectuals who came before him. Howard Thurman (Hon.’67), former dean of Marsh Chapel and mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr. Prathia Hall, a Civil Rights leader credited as a key inspiration for King’s “I have a dream” speech, who later became the Martin Luther King, Jr., Chair of Social Ethics at BU’s School of Theology. And, of course, the inimitable King (GRS’55, Hon.’59) himself.

“These are three major figures—spiritually, politically, morally—in the history of this country,” says Hill, an assistant professor of religion. Hill wants to not just pay lip service to figures like Thurman, Hall, and King, but rather hopes his scholarship and presence on campus will “invite us to sit with their own haunting legacies.”

Haunting is a theme that emerges frequently in Hill’s research and teaching. He’s interested in the ways trauma maps itself onto individuals and groups, later emerging in public life as a sort of specter that challenges prevailing narratives. For Black Americans like Thurman, Hall, and King, the trauma of racism would serve as a haunting driver in their lives, work, and prophetic words. Many celebrities and musicians live haunted lives, Hill says. When actor Will Smith slapped Academy Award host Chris Rock on stage in 2022, lost in the world’s horror at “a single act of personal violence” was the detail that Smith had lived with the guilt of witnessing his father commit an act of violence against his mother, Hill says. Pop star Michael Jackson, about whom Hill has written and taught extensively, also lived an adult life haunted by abuse he suffered at the hands of his father. “Haunted children, should they survive, become haunting adults,” Hill says.

Hill would know. Having also experienced childhood trauma, he considers himself a haunting adult, an identity that seeps into every aspect of his academic life. That haunting shows up in the BU courses Hill teaches on Black studies, US religion and culture, and critical theory, as well as his longform writing. His cultural criticism on race, sports, politics, and religion has appeared in The Syndicate, Black Perspectives, and Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, and an upcoming book—The Michael Jackson Cacophony: Religion and the Politics of Black Popular Culture, 1963–1989—is currently under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

A Preacher’s Kid

Hill’s father was an itinerant minister to predominantly Black Baptist churches in North Texas. While gospel music was occasionally on rotation in the Hill household, Hill remembers the secular R&B his parents played: Whitney Houston, the Isley Brothers, Chaka Khan, Stevie Wonder, and, yes, Michael Jackson. Hill calls his father an “amateur documentarian” because of his propensity to archive their family’s milestones and activities through video and photography. But Hill’s father had a temper and could be violent toward his children and wife. Hill knew what he was experiencing and witnessing was not right, but he also didn’t tell anyone about it because, as he puts it, “these people who are acting out in violence are also displaying deep moments of love and tenderness.” 

The fallenness of the world, a theological foundation of the family’s Baptist faith, played a part in normalizing for Hill something that was anything but normal. “I wasn’t surprised to see the broken state of my family, because theologically, I was taught from the earliest age that the world is broken,” Hill says. “I was taught that every single person, from the youngest child to the president, the parliamentarian, the king, the monarch, ‘there is none righteous, no not one.’”

As a teenager, Hill turned to his faith for direction and comfort. He used his allowance to buy study Bibles, which he read voraciously—even the footnotes. Occasionally, he says, his reading of scripture forced him to reckon with the “failure of my family and community to actually live out what they were teaching.” His thirst for learning took him to first to Southwestern Assemblies of God University in Waxahachie, Texas, Dallas Christian College in Farmer’s Branch, Texas, and finally to Criswell College, a small Christian school in Dallas. Hill continued his theological studies at Southern Methodist University for his master’s of theological studies, and then Northwestern University to work on a PhD. It was in this period that Hill began to understand the abuse he withstood and witnessed as trauma and to develop a shockingly empathetic view of his abuser. His father had grown up in central Texas during Jim Crow, served in the Navy during the Vietnam War, and turned to addictive substances as a coping mechanism.

“Both of my parents will hold themselves accountable right now, to this day,” Hill says. “If I choose to look at my parents and love them, and understand that they did not create themselves, that is a generational dialogue—that you can’t tell the story of my parents without telling the story of central Texas, about what they had to see as Black children in Texas.”

Toward Haunting Joy

Hill’s experiences growing up shapes his academic work as a self-described theorist of religion. That steady diet of R&B music he absorbed in his childhood home is now fused with his religious studies and Black identity. His PhD dissertation is a critical study exploring the intersection of race and religion in the life and music of Michael Jackson. His book on the same subject, The Michael Jackson Cacophony, is due to be published in late 2025 or early 2026, he says. 

At BU, Hill teaches courses on race and religion, Black popular music, and the effect of environmental degradation on vulnerable populations. He says that Black music can serve as a lens to view the history of the United States. “While the nation is developing these notions of freedom and democracy and liberty, the spirituals from the plantations are talking about ‘this mean old world,’ about being delivered,” he says. “There are writings about how America is a great experiment of democracy on the world stage. As this knowledge is being codified, what’s not being codified on the authorizing level is the account of the enslaved, who were not allowed to read, not allowed to write. But through music, they’re telling a different story about freedom, democracy, possibility, or the lack thereof.” 

A more recent exploration for Hill is what he calls haunting joy, which he says he discovered when he became a father and looked at his son with unconditional love. Soon after the birth of his son, Hill found a trove of his father’s photographs and home videos and began to explore photography for himself. “There’s no way I can see my son laugh and not harken back to those former years, to take a photo of my son and realize that my father was also a documentarian,” he says. “I’m realizing that wow, what I am doing for my children, my parents did for me. They did see me this way.” Hill is writing about his own haunting, and the joy that has emerged, in his next book, Haunting Joy: Essays on Religion, Black Popular Culture, and Overcoming Childhood Adversity, which is under contract with Fortress Press.

Hill brings a trauma-informed understanding into classes he teaches, asking students not to check their experiences at the door but embrace and engage with them as learners. “One of the primary symptoms of [childhood post-traumatic stress disorder] is hypervigilance,” he says. “You walk into every room and notice things others might miss. There’s a way in which that is seen as a symptom and negative. In no way am I thankful for my childhood trauma, but we can choose to instrumentalize even the most haunting dimensions of our lives in service of building a better world. When I realized the entangled relationship I have to the world, I am far more sensitive, tender, and present.”

Top photo by James Howard Hill, Jr. Learn more about Hill’s photography.