On her book New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration
Cover Interview of April 19, 2017
Lastly
I hope that readers will come away with tools to think about
the complicated ways that race and religion have interacted with one another in
American history. Ideas about race, racial categories, and racial identities
have changed over time, and religion has contributed to how Americans have thought
about race, enacted policies that maintain racial hierarchy, and move through the
world as racialized beings.
The specific case of the religio-racial movements highlights
the complexity of conceptions of race among early twentieth-century African
Americans and black immigrants from the Caribbean. Recent discussions of the
possibility of a post-racial America assume that race is fixed and that people
inhabit obvious categories. The history of these groups shows a more
complicated story. Their perspectives may not have become the dominant ones,
but their challenge to conventional understandings of racial identity and the
role of religion in black life took place in a larger context of discussion
about the meaning of blackness.
Exploring the histories, beliefs, and practices of the
religio-racial movements also encourages us to recognize diversity within
African American religious life. These groups have long been characterized as cults
in a way that marginalizes them as illegitimate in relation to religious
orientations considered acceptable in the American context. As a label, cult
perhaps says more about the assumptions of the person deploying it than about
the theological and social characteristics of any particular movement. Describing
the groups in a way that I think captures what motivated participants avoids
privileging certain religions as authentic and true over against others that
are denigrated as invented and false. Rather than labeling the groups cults and
attaching assumptions to them, such an approach requires attending to their
specific theologies and practices as well as situating them within the broader
landscape of American religious life.
[M]odern art still commonly refers to a rather narrow range of meaning and scope. It basically focuses on developments in Paris (Impressionism etc.) in the nineteenth century, and to selected Euro-American movements in the twentieth century (Cubism, Abstract Expressionism etc). But if we understand modernity as a socially transformative condition that was in force across much of the world from the nineteenth century on, how are we to understand artistic practices that were associated with these momentous changes?Iftikhar Dadi, Interview of March 26, 2012
The two world wars of the twentieth century were a product of the dislocations brought about of modernization in an environment where great power competition and the drive for hegemony were conducted primarily by violent means. Now that this era has passed in Europe and is receding in much of the Pacific rim, and hegemony achieved by force is no longer considered a legitimate ambition, the security requirements and fears of great powers should decline.Richard Ned Lebow, Interview of October 4, 2010
Lastly
I hope that readers will come away with tools to think about the complicated ways that race and religion have interacted with one another in American history. Ideas about race, racial categories, and racial identities have changed over time, and religion has contributed to how Americans have thought about race, enacted policies that maintain racial hierarchy, and move through the world as racialized beings.
The specific case of the religio-racial movements highlights the complexity of conceptions of race among early twentieth-century African Americans and black immigrants from the Caribbean. Recent discussions of the possibility of a post-racial America assume that race is fixed and that people inhabit obvious categories. The history of these groups shows a more complicated story. Their perspectives may not have become the dominant ones, but their challenge to conventional understandings of racial identity and the role of religion in black life took place in a larger context of discussion about the meaning of blackness.
Exploring the histories, beliefs, and practices of the religio-racial movements also encourages us to recognize diversity within African American religious life. These groups have long been characterized as cults in a way that marginalizes them as illegitimate in relation to religious orientations considered acceptable in the American context. As a label, cult perhaps says more about the assumptions of the person deploying it than about the theological and social characteristics of any particular movement. Describing the groups in a way that I think captures what motivated participants avoids privileging certain religions as authentic and true over against others that are denigrated as invented and false. Rather than labeling the groups cults and attaching assumptions to them, such an approach requires attending to their specific theologies and practices as well as situating them within the broader landscape of American religious life.