Episode 203: Race & Religion in what’s now the US
Transcript!
PDF transcript. Also available via our Buzzsprout page.
Shownotes (because citations are political)
This episode has Megan stealing from Ilyse’s arsenal of teaching strategies: she does a shock and awe of racialized religion throughout US history.
We had a lot of names and places, but only one key word this episode! Find them in our glossary. It was:
Orientalism
The 101:
(where we did the professor-work)
This episode has a simple—but not easy—thesis: The US was built through religion and race, and specifically through an economy of white Christian supremacy. Americans’ understanding of race is directly tied to religion and vice versa—whether we know it or not.
Shocking no one, the episode is us trying to make sure y’all know it.
To review:
Race = social construct;
We have taught ourselves that skin tones, behaviors, languages and ways of speaking, foodways, attitudes, geographies, and demeanors can be distilled into a single, essential identity.
We learn how to “do” and understand race from culture.
Race is a way of maintaining boundaries of difference and social control
BUT ALSO race inspires radical resistance, creativity, and new ways of understanding and being in the world.
Religion in the US, Megan argued, is a key way that race was constructed in the US. Because, originally, religion was the primary justification for enslaving and murdering Black and Native folk: they are heathens, they are idolaters, they are unworthy of being considered humans. But, then folks (forcibly, often) converted. Which didn’t stop the enslavement or the murdering.
This moment, we suggested, was literally the moment in which we see the concept of “race” emerge in what’s now the United States. Specifically, we see scientific arguments that Black and Native peoples are essentially, “biologically” different—that is, inferior—to Christian Europeans. This is the series of moments where whiteness becomes an identity, where whiteness becomes not only “the norm,” but also privileged as essentially superior to all other races.
Which, in turn, gets used to justify more white Christian European imperialism and violence.
Christianity was always part of this mix. Always. Like, always. For real, always. We’ll stop now. But trust us: always.
The matrix of power and logics of supremacy relied on the ways in which “white” = Christian and of European descent.
Being Christian wasn’t enough; being European wasn’t enough, being light-skinned wasn’t enough. Whiteness, as an identity, in the US relies on the matrix of all these.
Megan’s shock and awe started early and ended late, all while showcasing the ways that race and religion made each other in US history. Here’s the highlights:
Boston Tea Party. Those brave men were so brave as to dress up as Native folk in order to not get in trouble.
Enslaved Muslims. Did you know that many enslaved Africans were Muslim? Wonder why they don’t teach that in US public schools…
Abolitionists, like the Grimke sisters, used the Bible and Christianity; so, too, did pro-slavery white folk.
Zitkala-Sa argued that Native religions should be taken as seriously as Christianity and allowed to survive.
The so-called Great Awakenings also help us see religion and race as tied up together. Great Awakenings. Some that tried to live into racial equality (like the Shakers) and some that used science to argue for white supremacy (like the Church of Christ, Scientist).
Early Mormonism’s racialization as not-Christian and not-white, namely in the portrayal of Joseph Smith as “eastern” “Islamic” or “Oriental.”
(Racist) immigration legislation passed in 1890 and 1924 that restrict Chinese and then Asian immigration more broadly into the US.
Which meant: few Shinto, Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim immigrants.
But, while there was little Muslim immigration until 1965, Muslims were in the US and Islam was imagined as a “Black religion.” Because of religious movements like those of Noble Drew Ali and the Moorish Science Temple as well as the Nation of Islam, both of which were innovative spaces to claim Blackness apart from US racialized Christianity.
Today’s imagination of Islam as “brown”—a shift from other periods in US history—shows how racialization is a ongoing process.
After 1965, we see so-called “eastern religions” becoming part of the US consciousness, which led to (white-led) movements like ISKON in the US, and various appropriations and racializations.
To summarize:
Americans’ understanding of race has never been separate from their understanding of religion
US religions are always racialized—but if we don’t hear “religion” being talked about in specifically racialized terms, it’s 10000% fair to assume people mean something like white mainstream Christianity.
Racialization isn’t fixed, as we see in the example of Islam or Mormonism.
Primary Sources:
(because we, too, exist in the world we’re describing)
Megan talked about sitting with her own complicity in white supremacy.
Ilyse built on that by talking about the ways in which white Jews are reluctant to name themselves as white.
We mentioned the universe of Black Jews on Twitter pushing back on white Jews’ racisms and erasures, among many other online things. Some of those folks worth a follow are:
Story Time:
(citing our theoretical influences)
This time around, we read from Su’ad Abdul Khabeer’s book Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, & Hip-Hop in the United States (2016):
“For many, the categories ‘Muslim’ and ‘American’ are not racial categories: Muslim is a religious designation and American is a national identity. Yet paradoxically, many non-Muslim U.S. Americans’ understanding of who Muslims are in relation to the United States is framed by the question, ‘Why do they hate us?’ The question is an indicator that these categories function as ‘racial projects’ (Omi and Winant 1994, 56). ‘Muslim’ is not simply a label of faith but rather a racialized designation, which mediates access to and restrictions on the privileges of being an American, itself also a racialized category.” (27)
Megan reflected that Abdul Khabeer’s passage (and her whole book) helps us see what we’ve been trying to do all episode: race is not religion, and religion is not race, but American is a racialized and also a religious category. We know this because white Christians count as unquestionably American in a way other groups do not; and when many Americans say “religion,” what they’re thinking of looks a lot like white mainstream Christianity; and, also, when too many Americans say “Muslim,” they assume the person they’re talking about must look a certain way (ie not white) and be a certain way (ie fundamentally not American).
Ilyse parroted Megan a bit, said that her class reads and loves this challenging book every time, and added that what Abdul Khabeer is doing in Muslim Cool is laying bare the way that American mainstream belonging demands Christianity, demands whiteness and holds hostage mainstream belonging to anyone deemed beyond these bounds.
Homework!
(that’s right, nerds, there’s always more to learn)
It’s a new semester! The faculty are excited! We’re no different, sorry about it.
Megan kept it together and only assigned some of the things:
Suad Abdul Khabeer, Muslim Cool, of course.
If you don’t have access to the book, there’s a great explainer/teaser clip from CNN.
Pods help pods, and if you’re into whiteness and America, Straight White American Jesus Pod is worth a listen.
Similarly, Feminists Talk Religion podcast also doing interesting intersectional work.
Emilie Townes’ In a Blaze of Glory is worth your time.
So is Katharine Gerbner’s Christian Slavery.
Timothy Marr’s Cultural Roots of American Islamicism and specifically his chapter about comparisons of Islam and early LDS.
Megan snuck in another assignment after Ilyse’s. Ilyse tolerated it because it’s Sylvester Johnson and Stuart Weitzman’s FBI and Religion, an edited volume that shows how tied up race, religion, and policing are.
Ilyse also only assigned a few things:
We’ve said it before but the Islamophobia is Racism syllabus is really vital so go check it out.
Similarly, Kayla Wheeler curates the Black Islam syllabus which is 40+ pages of work about Black Muslims, globally, with loads of today’s episodes’ themes of US and race theory pieces therein.
Carl Ernst, my mentor, edited a volume called Islamophobia in America that is (and isn’t) about racialized hate.
Edward Curtis’ piece is the most topical, since it details anti-Black Islamophobia and a post-9/11 context & is online. “The Black Muslim Scare of the Twentieth Century: The History of State Islamophobia and Its Post 9/11 Variations,”
Nadine Naber, whose research more or less focuses on Middle Eastern identities and racialization. Her coedited volume with Amaney Jamal is top-notch: Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11.
I cannot recommend highly enough the digital scholarship project “Sapelo Square,” which is co-run by Dr. Suad Abdul Khabeer of Story Time fame.
