The Persistence of White Supremacy Beyond Desegregation

2020 ◽  
pp. 161-198
Author(s):  
Joanna Brooks
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
American Christianity ◽  
White American ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Lds Church ◽  
Voter Suppression

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.

scholarly journals War, religion, and white supremacy in comparative perspective: South Africa and the American South

2004 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 193-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
R M
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
White American ◽  
Southern States ◽  
Religious Symbolism ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
The American South

The southern states of the United States of America and South Africa share a number of analogous historical realities. One of these, which is the main subject of  this article,  is  the way in which the memory of a lost war had fused cultural mythology and religious symbolism to provide a foundation for the formation and maintenance of attitudes of white supremacy in both contexts.  This article seeks to achieve a historical  understanding of the complex interrelationship between the development of cultural identity and Protestant Christianity by  focusing on these issues in the histories of the Afrikaner and the white American Southerner in comparative perspective. 

Mormonism and White Supremacy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
American Christianity ◽  
White American ◽  
Mormon History ◽  
Moral Innocence

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.

American Christianity, White Supremacy, and Racial Innocence

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Joanna Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Skin Color ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Moral Issue ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
White People ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
American Christianity ◽  
White American

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.

3. African American Christianity: The early phase (1760–1863)

2014 ◽  
pp. 32-46
Author(s):  
Eddie S. Glaude
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Early Phase ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Churches ◽  
American Christianity ◽  
Emancipation Proclamation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Populations

The majority of African Americans are Christian. Black Christianity has played a critical role in the history of African American responses to white supremacy in the United States. ‘African American Christianity and Its Early Phase (1760–1863)’ is the first of four chapters that examine this complex history and introduce key moments and personalities, as well as the importance of black churches over the course of three historical periods. The early phase covers the period when the economy of slavery dominated political matters up to the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the plantation regime. Slavery defined the contours, even among free black populations, of black Christianity during this period.

The Religious Micropolitics of White Over Black

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-54
Author(s):  
Joanna Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Mormon History ◽  
Lds Church ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Critical Moments

White supremacy gains power through millions upon millions of micropolitical decisions that people who believe they are “white” make every day. The idea that being “white” was good and valuable took shape over time as people who believed they were “white” preferred one another’s interests over the interests of those who were non-“white” and so began to consolidate group power. This chapter introduces the micropolitics of white supremacy—the day-to-day choices and interactions through which whiteness assumes value. It investigates critical moments in nineteenth-century Mormon history when LDS Church leaders chose to privilege the interests of whites over the lives and concerns of African Americans, setting into place the micropolitical foundations for a fully institutionalized white supremacy.

scholarly journals ESSAY ON HUMAN (RACE RELATIONS) IN THE UNITED STATES

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-267
Author(s):  
Frederick D. Bedell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Power Structure ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
History Of ◽  
Voter Suppression

This essay speaks to the context of domination and subordination in particular as it pertains to White Supremacy/White Privilege as manifested in the history of slavery and “Jim Crow” in the United States. It is within this historical context one can discern the present status of race relations in the United States that continues to foster race discrimination through the policies of the ethnic majority (white) power structure, e.g.-institutional racism, voter suppression laws, gerrymandering of voter districts and banking policies to name a few areas. The research of books, papers, television interviews and personal experiences provides a testament to present government policies that endeavor to maintain a social construct of dominance and subordination by the white power structure in the United States.

The Myth of the Christian Nation

2018 ◽  
pp. 82-129
Author(s):  
Richard T. Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Early Date ◽  
White American ◽  
Christian Nation ◽  
Martin Luther King

While America’s founders sought to create a nation of religious freedom, not a Christian nation, Christians in the early nineteenth century effectively Christianized the American Republic through the Second Great Awakening. Over the course of American history, many whites have accepted the claim that America is a Christian nation. Blacks from an early date, however, have argued that Christian America is a hollow concept, informed by assumptions of white supremacy. In the nineteenth century, David Walker ridiculed the notion of Christian America, while Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells claimed that the idea of Christian America was a cover for horrendous crimes against blacks. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, blacks as disparate as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and James Cone unmasked the myth of a Christian America. By the twenty-first century, the collapse of Christian dominance in the United States could be traced, at least in part, to the complicity of white American Christians in the myth of White Supremacy. Many white Christians responded by attempting to restore a lost golden age, ignoring their complicity in the myth of White Supremacy that had helped bring on America’s fourth time of trial.

God[’s] hung from a tree

2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-41
Author(s):  
Anthony Sean Neal
Keyword(s):  
Reflective Thinking ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Attitude ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
American Christianity ◽  
White American ◽  
Secular Religion ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Howard Thurman

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.

scholarly journals Experiential Learning in Ghana: Decentering the White Voice

2021 ◽  
Vol 121 ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Robin Chapdelaine ◽  
Megan Toomer
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Study Program ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Black Bodies

White supremacy served as the foundation of the transatlantic slave trade and the subsequent practice of chattel slavery in the United States.[i] As such, it is not an exaggeration to say that US history is rooted in the oppression of non-white populations who have experienced and continue to experience various forms of physical and emotional harm. It is in this context that we examine how undergraduate students from XXX University, a predominantly white liberal arts institution, experienced the summer 2019 study abroad ‘Maymester’ excursion to Ghana where the transatlantic slave trade was the main focus of one of the courses, Precolonial African history.[ii] We argue that an interracial dialogue on the terror of whiteness on Black bodies and in Black spaces, which is steeped in historical context, develops when white student voices do not predominate classroom discussions. By centering the co-author’s account of the program, we show that when decentering the white voice, which is generally that of the dominant student population, white students can achieve a reconsideration of their understanding of self, others, and of African and global histories. This article also stresses the importance prioritizing cultural competence as a student goal in light of some of the preconceived notions they held about Ghana and Africa, and finally, we argue that universities have a moral responsibility to introduce Anti-racist pedagogy into the classrooms as a measure to fight white supremacist ideology.   [i] Gary Dorrien, “Achieving the Black Social Gospel, “ Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospe (New Haven, CY: Yale University Press, 2018), 1. [ii] Split into two courses, the four-week study program spanned two weeks each.

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