On her book New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration
Cover Interview of April 18, 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.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
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.