Thread by @KeepingIt_101

so I think I'm going to cheat a little bit

bc I'd planned to start from e101 and just tweet you through the anti-racist resources we've tried to provide

BUT our work on e203 & 204 are probably the most relevant to today's action

so...

#ScholarStrike

I'm instead going to start with the race & religion timeline we lay out in e203

in part bc it's possible to get a whole PhD in American religions and still miss a lot of this history unless you explicitly go looking for it

#ScholarStrike

(hint: one of us did. you'll never guess which one.)

THESIS for this not-yet-released episode / also for this season: we built America out of religion and race, and specifically through an economy of white christian supremacy.

#ScholarStrike

Americans’ understanding of race is directly tied to religion and vice versa -- whether y’all know it or not. Not exaggerating.

this isn't one of our cute like "I swear my own research is important" moments

Americans USED religion to construct race

#ScholarStrike

race is (as we discuss in e201) a social construct

meaning people made it up

NOT meaning that it's fake or unimportant

race is meaning we make on and about our bodies and the bodies of others

#ScholarStrike

and as with all social constructs, race isn't about benign difference

it's about social order and power

it's about access to resources

it's about valuing one kind of race (in the US but not only in the US: whiteness) over other races

#ScholarStrike

race as a social construct always makes me think of Coates' letter to his son

about the ways racism is a visceral experience

that theories of race "land, with great violence, upon the body"

#ScholarStrike

theatlantic.com/politics/archi…

what does all this have to do with religion, I hear you asking?

LOTS

settler-colonizing european christianity is how folks we now think of as Americans learned to think they/we were white

(see Baldwin, "On Being White and Other Lies")

bannekerinstitute.fas.harvard.edu/files/banneker…

#ScholarStrike

Religion plays a key role in the construction of race in what’s now the United States, and by “plays a key role,” I mean “had to figure out how to keep enslaving Black folks and trying to wipe out Native folks after forcibly converting a bunch of them.”

#ScholarStrike

bc originally, euro christian settler-colonizers could justify enslaving forcibly transported African and Caribbean folks and attempting genocide against Native folks bc these non-euros were non-christians

they were "strangers"

#ScholarStrike

see Dean Emilie Townes, _In a Blaze of Glory_ on the christians/strangers distinction pre: US construction of race & whiteness

and the persistence of religious distinctions in justifying slavery

abingdonpress.com/product/978068…

#ScholarStrike

but surely you know that these euro christian enslavers/genociders forced Native and enslaved Black people to convert to christianity

so what happened?

race

race happened

#ScholarStrike

at roughly the same time europe is inventing "religion" as a distinct category of human experience, is expanding its reach and appropriating global resources, we see european scientists "discover" that people from not-europe are, like, "naturally" inferior

#ScholarStrike

I'm using scare quotes because this is gross racist bullshit

but it's also important to know that it was capital-S Science in the 18th and 19th centuries

religion and imperialism and scientific theories of white supremacy are co-constitutive

#ScholarStrike

this is when euro christian settler-colonizers learned to think they were white

and learned to think whiteness was superior to all other racial expressions

and used whiteness to justify more christian european imperialism and violence

#ScholarStrike

[we spend more time on the podcast talking about how race and whiteness are not fixed; @tressiemcphd talks a lot about the elasticity of whiteness in _Thick_; this comes up a lot in the minoritization of religio-racial groups]

#ScholarStrike

thenewpress.com/books/thick

so what's now the US, even before it became "the United States," is based on these principles of racialized religious superiority and "freedom," but not for everybody.

@syljohns again: freedom for some requires the unfreedom of others

marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/conversations-…

#ScholarStrike

when @GeeDee215 says white supremacy is in America's source code?

yeah, like this

and religion--what came to be white euro christianity--helped write that source code

#ScholarStrike

https://twitter.com/GeeDee215/status/901467678707240962

BUT we are not fully understanding the relationship of religion and race in what's now the US if we're only focusing on violence and oppression

bc the creation of American Blackness ALSO makes space for creativity and resistance and community and joy

#ScholarStrike

please note: the fact that Black Americans have used religion to reimagine themselves, their history, & the world outside legacies of violence and oppression does NOT mean slavery or white supremacy were/are in anyway okay

(oy, the things we have to say in 2020)

#ScholarStrike

SO: America starts by privileging both whiteness and Christianity and doing unthinkable violence to folks they decided were either not white or not christian or both.

BUT ALSO amazing pockets of Black and Native resilience and resistance and creativity

#ScholarStrike

like Nat Turner's prophecy-turned-rebellion

#ScholarStrike

lithub.com/nat-turners-di…

like Sojourner Truth arguing that Black women are blessed by God

(even as white suffragettes ghetto-ized her speech, spoilers for episode 205)

thesojournertruthproject.com/compare-the-sp…

#ScholarStrike

Like Zitkala-Sa arguing that her Native ways of being in the world are as valid and as vital as christianity

#ScholarStrike

classes.matthewjbrown.net/teaching-files…

#ScholarStrike

the 18th and 19th centuries see surges of radical religious innovation ("great awakenings")

some NRMs try to live into racial equality, like the Shakers

books.google.com/books/about/Gi…

#ScholarStrike

Other 19th century NRMs use science and theology to argue for white supremacy, like the Church of Christ Scientist and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/g…

early LDS is an interesting example here bc even as the Book of Mormon says some explicitly white supremacist things, mainstream American christians are racializing Mormons by comparing them to Muslims

(illustration is from The Mormon Wife, Life Scenes in Utah)

#ScholarStrike

race, religion, and capitalism also a late 19th century big old white supremacist mess re: Chinese & Japanese workers immigrating to the US to do low-wage & often quite dangerous labor

bringing awareness of "eastern" religions like Buddhism
& Shinto

#ScholarStrike

AND ALSO racist-ass immigration reform that explicitly excludes Asian immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries

which has a massive impact on America's religious landscape

#ScholarStrike

SO MUCH to cover here, but we focus on how racist immigration policies inadvertently lead to excluding Muslim immigrants AND to the longstanding American racialization of Islam as a Black religion until the mid-20th century

#ScholarStrike

you really want @JLWeisenfeld on Black religious innovation in the 20th century, obvs

#ScholarStrike

nyupress.org/9781479888801/…

but the short version is that much Black religious innovation in the US gets coded as "cult," and is subjected to state surveillance and violence

@syljohns AGAIN plus check out Lerone Martin & @KGinLum's chapter especially

#ScholarStrike

ucpress.edu/book/978052028…

.@mpgPhD's #NUcults is specifically focusing on the coding of Black religious innovation and resistance as "cult"

she's tweeting through that syllabus tomorrow, but you can see it here first:

static1.squarespace.com/static/5ef7e85…

If you're thinking about race and religion in the US, you need to be thinking about the 1965 immigration act

not sure any other single piece of legislation has such an effect on the American religious landscape

#ScholarStrike

https://twitter.com/mpgPhD/status/1240311737070518272

bc increased immigration from Asian countries = huge surge in Buddhist, Muslim, and Hindu populations in the US

plus a spike in "eastern" inspired NRMs, which freaked out the parents of nice white college kids who suddenly started chanting in Sanskrit

#ScholarStrike

OR: America's cult scare was a lot about white supremacy

you're shocked

#ScholarStrike

LOTS LOTS LOTS more to be said here, but e203 focuses specifically on how American Muslims shift from being racialized as explicitly Black until the mid-20th century

to being racialized as Arab by the 1970s

#ScholarStrike

and how neither of those racializations actually captures the global lived complexity of Muslims and Islam

#ScholarStrike

We close by thinking with @DrSuad's _Muslim Cool_, that "'Muslim' is not simply a label of faith but rather a religious designation, which mediates access to and restrictions on the privileges of being an American" (24)

#ScholarStrike

nyupress.org/9781479894505/…

.@DrSuad further notes that "American" is "itself also a racialized category"

and if you haven't checked out her video on the @ScholarStrike YT page, you gotta

#ScholarStrike

this thread barely scratches the surface of the messy entanglements of race and American religion, but it'll do to start

we'll be back after lunch with more #ScholarStrike resources and RTs

don't forget: our DMs are open if you want us to post resources on your behalf!