Embracing Colorblindness

2021 ◽  
pp. 98-130
Author(s):  
J. Russell Hawkins
Keyword(s):  
United Methodist ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
New Rhetoric ◽  
White Evangelicals ◽  
American Society

Chapter 4 traces the transformation of segregationist theology into the blossoming ideas of colorblind individualism in the early 1970s. This chapter narrates the integration of the United Methodist denomination to demonstrate how some white evangelicals adopted a language of colorblindness in an attempt to subvert racial integration. The story of South Carolina’s Methodists illuminates ways that religious ideas can adapt to the imperatives of the culture in which they reside. Accordingly, this chapter demonstrates that while many evangelicals were still influenced by traditional notions of segregationist theology, the growing acceptance of racial equality in American society dictated the need for new rhetoric to keep segregationist Christianity in line with cultural benchmarks of acceptability. Colorblind individualism proved to be such rhetoric.

Rethinking Racial Justice

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Valls
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Controversial Issues ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Black Institutions ◽  
American Society ◽  
Racial Lines

American society continues to be characterized by deep racial inequality that is a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. What does justice demand in response? In this book, Andrew Valls argues that justice demands quite a lot—the United States has yet to fully reckon with its racial past, or to confront its ongoing legacies. Valls argues that liberal values and principles have far-reaching implications in the context of the deep injustices along racial lines in American society. In successive chapters, the book takes on such controversial issues as reparations, memorialization, the fate of black institutions and communities, affirmative action, residential segregation, the relation between racial inequality and the criminal justice system, and the intersection of race and public schools. In all of these contexts, Valls argues that liberal values of liberty and equality require profound changes in public policy and institutional arrangements in order to advance the cause of racial equality. Racial inequality will not go away on its own, Valls argues, and past and present injustices create an obligation to address it. But we must rethink some of the fundamental assumptions that shape mainstream approaches to the problem, particularly those that rely on integration as the primary route to racial equality.

THE ENDURING CHALLENGE OF RACIAL INTEGRATION IN THE UNITED STATES

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-24
Author(s):  
Sharon Stanley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The United States ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Mutual Transformation ◽  
Access To Resources ◽  
New Model

AbstractThis paper formulates a new model of racial integration for African Americans in the United States, based upon a careful consideration of the weaknesses in previous models. Instead of spatial mixing, this model of integration calls for transformed habits of interaction between citizens in public spaces, as well as a redistribution of power, understood as access to resources and opportunities. Integration along these lines would produce mutual transformation rather than compulsory assimilation. However, this model does not necessarily answer the concerns of integration critics who question the capacity of the United States to achieve true racial equality. Hence, the conclusion considers three significant obstacles to the achievement of integration, and acknowledges that unprecedented, radical transformations would be necessary to lay the groundwork for integration. In the end, both integration pessimism and a renewed commitment to integration are reasonable and defensible responses to our still-segregated present.

Is the Bible Racist?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Laats
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Bob Jones University ◽  
The Bible ◽  
History Of ◽  
White Evangelicals ◽  
K 12

The civil rights movement helped all Americans reevaluate their ideas about racial equality and justice. On the campuses of evangelical and fundamentalist schools, that debate was fueled by a conflicted history of racism and anti-racism among white evangelicals. A few schools, led by Bob Jones University, insisted that racial segregation was an intrinsic part of true fundamentalist religion. Most other institutions, however, moved in fits and starts toward greater racial egalitarianism. By the 1970s, those debates also included a new and expanding network of evangelical and fundamentalist K-12 schools, schools dependent on colleges and universities for their teachers and textbooks as well as for their guiding philosophies.

King and the Other America

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvie Laurent ◽  
William Julius Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Mass Mobilization ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Economic Issues ◽  
Black Liberation Movement ◽  
Poor People's Campaign ◽  
American Society

Did the Civil rights movement of the Fifties and Sixties fail to address economic issues and to grasp that class, beyond just race, was the main cleavage and the greater hindrance in American Society? Many historians and social scientists contend that the movement too narrowly circumscribed its mission, deceptively assuming that specific race-based demands were the only way to achieve social equality and racial fairness. This book argues that, despite an inability to hamper a growing class divide, significant members of the Black Liberation movement actually intertwined civil rights to economic issues, some of them defending that class was trumping race when it comes to racial equality. Time has come, they argued, to build an interracial coalition which would bring substantive freedom to the lesser-off of America, Blacks being at rock bottom. This book will demonstrate that Martin Luther King Jr. was profoundly shaped by their conviction that racial equality was embedded in the broader class struggle, as illustrated by the forgotten Poor People’s Campaign of 1968. Although carried out postumously, the Poor People’s campaign, presented as much an interracial mass mobilization demanding redistribution as the culmination of King’s comprehension of the entanglement of class and race. It also dovetailed with compelling academic works which, either preceding or following the campaign, have vindicated its framework.

The Use and Abuse of the Law: Public Opinion and United Methodist Church Trials of Ministers Performing Same-Sex Union Ceremonies

2012 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 953-1005
Author(s):  
Christopher Waldrep
Keyword(s):  
United Methodist ◽  
Political Process ◽  
United Methodist Church ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Methodist Church ◽  
Same Sex Marriage ◽  
Church Law ◽  
American Society ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Roll Back

Law in the United Methodist Church (UMC) is a product of democracy, written by elected delegates to a legislative body, recorded in a book entitledThe Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church. As “a Book of Law,” theBook of Disciplineis “the only official and authoritative Book of Law of The Methodist Church,” according to the Methodist Church's Judicial Council in a landmark 1953 ruling. Despite this declaration, the Judicial Council had no idea in 1953 that it had addressed a question that in 20 years would divide not just the Methodists, but Americans and American Christians generally. In the last 30 years of the twentieth century, controversies over homosexuality led American Christians into debates over the role law should play in their churches, while Americans as a whole debated the role churches should play in their law. United Methodist conservatives discovered that by rallying populist majorities to rewrite church law, they could then use church trials to roll back what they saw as excesses from the 1960s still plaguing American society. Writing any law is necessarily a political process, but in the UMC, church trials became political battlegrounds as well, contests to determine if rank-and-file clergy approved church rules against anything resembling a same-sex marriage.

The Gay Nineties

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gwyneth Mellinger
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
Professional Organizations ◽  
Integration Model ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Way

This chapter focuses on the 1990s, when the ASNE's Goal 2000 advocates contended with a shift in the way the broader diversity community envisioned social justice. As the more expansive concept of multiculturalism gained traction in American society, the racial integration model, on which Goal 2000 was premised, became outdated. The need for greater inclusiveness in the ASNE and its hiring initiative crystallized at the 1990 convention when an editor announced that he was gay, becoming the first gay ASNE member to be out within the organization. This chapter examines the contentious identity politics that dominated the ASNE in the 1990s as professional organizations for nonwhite journalists gained and exercised greater power and many white editors grew weary of being continually scolded for not increasing the number of nonwhites working in their newsrooms.

To “affirmatively further fair housing”

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Desmond S. King ◽  
Rogers M. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Housing System ◽  
Fair Housing ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Housing Systems ◽  
Everyday Reality

This chapter considers what makes racial equality in the American housing system such a divisive issue. Because housing choices profoundly affect people's personal lives and yet also have enormous public consequences for the structure of the nation as a whole, there arose concerns to make sure that America's housing systems are not systems of racial inequality. But the fact that housing is so central to Americans' personal lives is also a major reason why they have long been more resistant to efforts to end de facto segregation in this area than in any other, except the related one of public schools. Here they remain profoundly divided even on the desirability of strong enforcement of anti-discrimination policies aimed at making residential racial integration not only an attractive ideal but an everyday reality.

The Bible Told Them So

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Russell Hawkins
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
God's Will ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
White Evangelicals ◽  
American Society ◽  
The 1960S

The Bible Told Them So explains why southern white evangelical Christians in South Carolina resisted the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Simply put, they believed the Bible told them so. Interpreting the Bible in such a way, these white Christians entered the battle against the civil rights movement certain that God was on their side. Ultimately, the civil rights movement triumphed in the 1960s and, with its success, fundamentally transformed American society. But such a victory did little to change southern white evangelicals’ theological commitment to segregation and white supremacy. Rather than abandoning their segregationist theology in the second half of the 1960s, white evangelicals turned their focus on institutions they still controlled—churches, homes, denominations, and private colleges and secondary schools—and fought on. Despite suffering defeat in the public sphere, white evangelicals continued to battle for their own institutions, preaching and practicing a segregationist Christianity they continued to believe reflected God’s will. Increasingly caught in the tension between their sincere beliefs that God desired segregation and their reticence to vocalize such ideas for fear of seeming bigoted or intolerant by the late 1960s, southern white evangelicals eventually embraced rhetoric of colorblindness and protection of the family as measures to maintain both segregation and respectable social standing. Such a strategy spread throughout the evangelical subculture and set southern white evangelicals on a detrimental path for race relations in the decades ahead.

The Nation Past and Present: A Study of Robert Lowell's ‘For the Union Dead’

1971 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Kavanagh
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Robert Lowell ◽  
The North ◽  
Social Disintegration ◽  
American Liberalism ◽  
Die Material ◽  
American Society

In ‘For the Union Dead’ Robert Lowell evokes a landscape which is symbolic in both a social and an historical sense. His aim in doing so seems to be to test the relevance of the traditional ideals of freedom and racial equality in contemporary American society. The landscape is arid and undermined by a garage which stands for the destructive and unreasoned actions of a city enslaved by the motives of affluence. Two major symbols stand together over the abyss of the underground garage, the Statehouse and a bas-relief of Colonel Shaw. The first stands for the actual administration of the ideals of democracy as expressed in the constitution, while the second represents the deepest convictions of American liberalism which motivated the North during the Civil War. This article explores the historical relevance of the death of Colonel Shaw, who was ‘a martyr’ for the cause of die Negro soldiers he led into battle. This is done through historical documents, and through an examination of James Russell Lowell's ‘Memoriae Positum’ which is a celebration of the death of Shaw. The conclusions drawn indicate that Robert Lowell's poem is ambiguous in its treatment of die material relating to Shaw, that he is far less certain as to the relevance of liberalism either to die historical development of American society, or to the disintegrating contemporary scene. Robert Lowell is forced to accept the unreality of claims made for the racial equality, either supposedly realized or hoped for. His vision extends into the future and contemplates social disintegration in the image of atomic destruction which illustrated the destructive power of American idealism in die last war.

Precision and bias in quantitative EDS: ASTM results

1992 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 1654-1655
Author(s):  
John J. Friel
Keyword(s):  
Stainless Steel ◽  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Mechanical Alloy ◽  
Dead Time ◽  
Test Program ◽  
Round Robin Test ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
American Society ◽  
Takeoff Angle ◽  
Standardless Analysis

Committee E-04 on Metallography of the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) conducted an interlaboratory round robin test program on quantitative energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS). The test program was designed to produce data on which to base a precision and bias statement for quantitative analysis by EDS. Nine laboratories were sent specimens of two well characterized materials, a type 308 stainless steel, and a complex mechanical alloy from Inco Alloys International, Inconel® MA 6000. The stainless steel was chosen as an example of a straightforward analysis with no special problems. The mechanical alloy was selected because elements were present in a wide range of concentrations; K, L, and M lines were involved; and Ta was severely overlapped with W. The test aimed to establish limits of precision that could be routinely achieved by capable laboratories operating under real world conditions. The participants were first allowed to use their own best procedures, but later were instructed to repeat the analysis using specified conditions: 20 kV accelerating voltage, 200s live time, ∼25% dead time and ∼40° takeoff angle. They were also asked to run a standardless analysis.

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