Dismantling White Supremacy and Racial Innocence

2020 ◽  
pp. 199-206
Author(s):  
Joanna Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
P Systems ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
White American ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Communities Of Color

Systems as pervasive as white supremacy do not just transform quietly. They must be recognized, investigated, understood, and intentionally abandoned or dismantled, and their impacts to communities of color must be repaired. Predominantly white American Christian communities that wish to take moral responsibility for the advantage-taking that has yielded white privilege and Black suffering must engage with the concept of reparations. But how does a religious community—a predominantly white American Christian community—begin to conceive of reparations? This chapter assesses the pathways toward dismantling white supremacy open to predominantly white American Christian denominations, including Mormonism, through institutional and grassroots changes.

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arguments, the book draws from Mormon history from the 1830s to the present, from an archive that includes speeches, historical documents, theological treatises, Sunday school curricula, and other documents of religious life.

scholarly journals Is There A Place For Us? Social Workers of Color As Outside Agitators Within the Profession

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 978-988
Author(s):  
Michael Rangel
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Communities Of Color

The outside agitator narrative has been used to discredit and harm people of color for decades. Currently, it is being used as a forceful tactic to separate the movement for Black lives from the broader narrative that racism is deeply rooted in American social structures, institutions, and everyday life. This article examines the implications of how the profession of social work has similarly and simultaneously maintained a culture of white supremacy and racist ideologies in our work. As outsiders in a predominantly white profession, social workers of color act as outside agitators when dispelling myths and practices used in and for communities of color. By centering the lived experiences and knowledge of social workers of color, all social workers can increase their awareness of racism within our profession and work together to dismantle the culture of racism and white supremacy that persists within social work.

White Privilege, Racial Innocence, and the Costs of Anti-Racist Dissent, Mormon Examples

2020 ◽  
pp. 111-160
Author(s):  
Joanna Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Predominantly White ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Political Capital ◽  
Church Members ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Lds Church ◽  
Gender Belief

Just as white Christians develop silent agreements among themselves to define morality in individual terms that take no responsibility for systematic anti-Black racism, white Christian churches develop means for managing and disciplining adherents who do take on anti-Black racism in a serious and discomfiting way. This chapter reconstructs a lost archive of dissent by LDS Church members against white supremacy in Mormonism, including public criticisms by national figures like Stewart Udall. It analyzes the calculus of identity, race, class, gender, belief, belonging, and social and political capital that condition dissent in religious communities, observing that white privilege and status in predominantly white Christian churches allow some to dissent more publicly and with lesser costs than others.

Originalism, Infallibility, and the Institutionalization of White Supremacy

2020 ◽  
pp. 55-84
Author(s):  
Joanna Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Predominantly White ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Predominantly White Institutions ◽  
White Institutions ◽  
The Will ◽  
Will Of God

When a predominantly white religious community casts its lots, chooses whiteness, and designates its Black scapegoats, history shows that it attributes these outcomes to the will of God. White Christians begin to tell themselves that although Black suffering is regrettable, it is inevitable. Predominantly white institutions assume the facade of inevitability and timelessness and the exclusion of Black people hardens into a self-perpetuating fact. This chapter examines how systematic theologies produced by American Protestant “fundamentalists” and Mormon theologians alike contributed to the erasure of histories of Black exclusion and normalized anti-Black racism as timeless, essential, and originating with God. This in turn contributed to the institutionalization of anti-Black segregation and discrimination in Church bureaucracies.

scholarly journals Orthodox Christian Bulgarians Coping with Natural Disasters in the Pre-Modern Ottoman Balkans

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 367
Author(s):  
Raymond Detrez
Keyword(s):  
Natural Disasters ◽  
World View ◽  
Cultural Influences ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Moral Value ◽  
Secondary Importance ◽  
Orthodox Christian ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Ottoman Balkans

Premodern Ottoman society consisted of four major religious communities—Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Armenian Christians, and Jews; the Muslim and Christian communities also included various ethnic groups, as did Muslim Arabs and Turks, Orthodox Christian Bulgarians, Greeks, and Serbs who identified, in the first place, with their religious community and considered ethnic identity of secondary importance. Having lived together, albeit segregated within the borders of the Ottoman Empire, for centuries, Bulgarians and Turks to a large extent shared the same world view and moral value system and tended to react in a like manner to various events. The Bulgarian attitudes to natural disasters, on which this contribution focuses, apparently did not differ essentially from that of their Turkish neighbors. Both proceeded from the basic idea of God’s providence lying behind these disasters. In spite of the (overwhelmingly Western) perception of Muslims being passive and fatalistic, the problem whether it was permitted to attempt to escape “God’s wrath” was coped with in a similar way as well. However, in addition to a comparable religious mental make-up, social circumstances and administrative measures determining equally the life conditions of both religious communities seem to provide a more plausible explanation for these similarities than cross-cultural influences.

scholarly journals Prve kršćanske zajednice / First Christian communities

2019 ◽  
pp. 181-193
Author(s):  
Drago Župarić
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Roman Culture ◽  
Roman Province ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
New Religion

Christianity, having developed in a Jewish setting, quickly separated from Judaism and opened itself to the aspirations of the Greco-Roman world. This paper will explore the first Christian communities in Jerusalem, Antioch and Rome, from whence Christianity spread to the ends of the Mediterranean basin, that is to say, through the Roman Empire. Each of the aforementioned  communities, which were very well respected, will be discussed with regards to  the date of their foundation, the source material concerning these communities, and their prominent characteristics. In other words, this paper will discuss  the spread of Christianity, with reference to the question of the triumphant  campaign of the young Church from Jerusalem to Rome. After the acceptance of pagans into their communities, Christianity as a new religion began to gain importance, and the number of adherents grew quickly. The Christian community was declared an opposition to imperial government, and was already heavily repressed by the mid-1  century. The communities that survived repression sought peace; that is, collaboration between the  Roman state and the “early Church”, which was seen as a new institution. The  cult opened itself more and more to the outside world and different cultures,  which led to the mingling of Christians and pagans, leading to many theological disputes, especially concerning the “divinity” of Jesus Christ. Between the 1st  and 2nd st  century the beginnings of Christianity should be viewed as an organization in which commissions and administrations are present, as the number of believers grew and the need for better organization arose. The basis of the rapid expansion of Christianity in the old world should  certainly be viewed in its universality. The author of this paper touches upon  the question of the beginnings of Christianity in Dalmatia and Pannonia, side by side with Roman culture. Christianity was not very influential in the Roman province of Dalmatia until the mid-3  century, even though it is likely that there were smaller Christian groups here, as well as organized Christian communities.

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. 

Jesus and Paul

2021 ◽  
pp. 139-170
Author(s):  
Donald Senior
Keyword(s):  
Literary Form ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Pastoral Letters ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Paul's Letters

The writings of Paul form a major part of the New Testament. This includes not only the so-called undisputed letters of Paul but also other letters attributed to him in antiquity that might have been written by later disciples of Paul citing him as author to evoke his apostolic authority. This chapter describes what we know of Paul’s life, beginning with his strong Jewish identity as well as his roots in the Greco-Roman world. Paul himself cites his inaugural visionary experience of the Risen Jesus as a decisive turning point in his life, leading him ultimately to be an ardent proclaimer of the gospel to the Gentile world. Paul’s letters to various early Christian communities in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world served as extensions of his missionary efforts. Although fashioned in a different literary form than the gospel narratives, Paul’s letters also portray Jesus’s identity as both rooted in Judaism and exhibiting a unique transcendent character and purpose. Paul’s Christology focuses intensely on the significance of Jesus’s death and resurrection. The so-called deutero-Pauline Letters extend Paul’s theological vision; in the case of Colossians and Ephesians, situating the redemptive and reconciling role of Christ within the cosmos, and, in the case of the Pastoral Letters, bringing Paul’s exhortations about the life of the Christian community to some of the developing challenges of the late first-century church.

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.

Measuring Whiteness: A Systematic Review of Instruments and Call to Action

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 530-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. C. Schooley ◽  
Debbiesiu L. Lee ◽  
Lisa B. Spanierman
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Psychological Study ◽  
Call To Action ◽  
Modern Racism

The psychological study of Whiteness provides one avenue for researchers to help combat racial injustice in the United States. This article is a call to action for counseling psychologists to engage in much needed scholarship and critical examinations of Whiteness. In this systematic review and content analysis, we provide an overview of 18 quantitative measures focusing on various aspects of Whiteness published between 1967 and 2017. We summarize the constructs and psychometric properties of these measures. Our content analysis indicated that constructs assessed by Whiteness measures have shifted in focus over time across four themes: (a) Attitudes Toward Black People/Integration, (b) Modern Racism, (c) White Racial Identity, and (d) White Privilege and Antiracism. We conclude with suggestions on how advancement, development, and use of Whiteness measures could further our knowledge through research examining present-day racial justice issues. The issues highlighted include police brutality, xenophobia, immigration, White supremacy, activism, and training in the field.

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