Choose the Slave! The Moral Imagination of White American Christianity

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Megan Black
Author(s):  
Joanna Brooks

Systematic anti-Black racism did not end with the legal abolition of chattel slavery in the United States. It simply changed shape: into debt peonage, criminalization, mass incarceration, housing segregation, sexual predation, voter suppression, and discrimination of all kinds. The same holds true for systematic anti-Black racism in white American Christianity. This chapter examines how structures of everyday white supremacy persisted in everyday Mormonism beyond the end of the priesthood and temple ban, especially through rhetorical strategies on the part of LDS Church leaders that evaded historical facts or dismissed history as insignificant and demonstrated no commitment to responsibility, reconciliation, or reparations.


Author(s):  
Joanna Brooks

This book examines the role of white American Christianity in fostering and sustaining white supremacy. It draws from theology, critical race theory, and American religious history to make the argument that predominantly white Christian denominations have served as a venue for establishing white privilege and have conveyed to white believers a sense of moral innocence without requiring moral reckoning with the costs of anti-Black racism. To demonstrate these arguments, the book draws from Mormon history from the 1830s to the present, from an archive that includes speeches, historical documents, theological treatises, Sunday school curricula, and other documents of religious life.


Author(s):  
Joanna Brooks

Since when and on what grounds have white American Christians declared themselves innocent of the sins of their generations? When did white American Christianity excuse itself from grappling with the most serious and far-reaching human abuses to make as its object instead the perpetuation of an undisturbed and unchallenged hold on continuity and capital? This chapter examines how mass media contributed to the production of white racial innocence by featuring spectacles of white patriotism and “wholesomeness” including, prominently, Mormon performing acts. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the Osmonds enacted a spectacle of innocence that normalized anti-Black racism as an unremarkable element of a “wholesome” morality. Their performances engaged audiences in a silent agreement to “forget” racism and to claim a moral high ground without taking responsibility for the oppression of people of color.


Author(s):  
Joanna Brooks

Racism is not a simply a character flaw or extremist conduct; racism is the centuries-old system of social organization that has marked people with dark skin as available for exploitation—for advantage-taking of their lands, labor, bodies, cultures, and so forth. “White supremacy” refers not only to the grossest forms of racist terrorism but also to the entire system of ideas, beliefs, and practices that give white people better chances based on perceived skin color and ancestry. This chapter reviews American Christian theology, history, US law, and critical race theory to frame an assessment of white American Christianity’s failure to grapple with anti-Black racism as a moral issue.


2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-41
Author(s):  
Anthony Sean Neal

As Black people struggled for freedom from oppression in the United States, toward the end of the modern era of the African American freedom struggle, a reflexive moment was taken to assess Christianity and its meaning for those whom Howard Thurman referred to as the “disinherited.” This article attempts to take up the pattern of reflective thinking, which began with Howard Thurman, James Cone, and William R. Jones, extending the thought forward to its natural conclusions. In doing so, the author intimates that the concepts that lead to racism and racial aggression are bound within the signs, symbols, and frameworks of white American Christianity, which has become a secular religion or secular way to order society. These signs, symbols, and frameworks continue to do the work of setting the ground for each subsequent generation to demonstrate a similar racial attitude as the preceding one. They also set the groundwork for Black reflective thinkers to find necessary the development of a posture of rejection toward white American Secular Christianity and all its derivative forms.


2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Lam ◽  
Kathleen J. Sia ◽  
Grace Yeh ◽  
Lawrence H. Yang

2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-490 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jodi Kaufmann

As a white, American wife of an Iranian, I spent several months in Iran in 1979 and again in 1987. My experiences on these trips to my husband's home were profound and devastating. These experiences deeply troubled my understanding of what it meant to be a citizen of the United States. In this autoethnographic narrative, I work between experience, people's history, published history, theory, and poetry to trouble my position as an American.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-57
Author(s):  
S. N. Shumov

The spatial analysis of distribution and quantity of Hyphantria cunea Drury, 1973 across Ukraine since 1952 till 2016 regarding the values of annual absolute temperatures of ground air is performed using the Gis-technologies. The long-term pest dissemination data (Annual reports…, 1951–1985; Surveys of the distribution of quarantine pests ..., 1986–2017) and meteorological information (Meteorological Yearbooks of air temperature the surface layer of the atmosphere in Ukraine for the period 1951-2016; Branch State of the Hydrometeorological Service at the Central Geophysical Observatory of the Ministry for Emergencies) were used in the present research. The values of boundary negative temperatures of winter diapause of Hyphantria cunea, that unable the development of species’ subsequent generation, are received. Data analyses suggests almost complete elimination of winter diapausing individuals of White American Butterfly (especially pupae) under the air temperature of −32°С. Because of arising questions on the time of action of absolute minimal air temperatures, it is necessary to ascertain the boundary negative temperatures of winter diapause for White American Butterfly. It is also necessary to perform the more detailed research of a corresponding biological material with application to the freezing technics, giving temperature up to −50°С, with the subsequent analysis of the received results by the punched-analysis.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document