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Introduction: Intersecting Race and Religion
- University of Virginia Press
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Introduction Intersecting Race and Religion In March 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign is nearly upset by the release of footage of his former preacher, Jeremiah Wright, employing black theology to critique aspects of U.S. history and policy. This ignites a political firestorm, culminating in Obama’s denouncement of Wright’s “extremism” and an unprecedented speech directly focusing on the issue of race in America (Kantor 2008).1 As late as August 2010, after President Obama has been in office for more than a year and a half, the number of Americans believing he is a Muslim continues to rise, with almost one in five saying he is a Muslim. The proportion of individuals believing he is a Christian as he professes drops to its lowest two-year point of 34 percent (“Growing Numbers of Americans” 2010). In 2010, a spate of controversies emerges regarding the role of the Muslim faith in America, fueled by a planned Islamic center in downtown New York near the site of the former World Trade Center. President Obama is criticized for not speaking as boldly and as quickly in defense of Muslim Americans as President Bush did—but also criticized when he does defend Muslim Americans (Gustin 2010). Obama is critiqued for not being as strong a defender of racial minority interests as he is of religious minorities (McAllister 2010). The early experiences in office of the first African American president pulled back the curtains on a complex drama about faith and race in American political life that has not been well understood. Separately, each incident demonstrates a different way in which the forces of race and religion in the United States intersect . Collectively, they illuminate that neither race nor religion in this moment 2 Introduction can be responsibly understood without a thorough grasp of how the two categories function in concert. That Barack Obama could be simultaneously accused of being Muslim and insufficiently protective of Muslim Americans, of being too black and not black enough, of belonging to a church that is “too political” in its faith and of not being Christian, could only happen in the United States. Why would being a Muslim American citizen be a liability, in the land of E Pluribus Unum and constitutionally enshrined separation of church and state? Why has Obama’s blackness become equated, for many Americans, with religious otherness, and vice versa? How could President Bush be praised for defending Muslim Americans after the events of September 11, 2001, while two-thirds of Americans worry about President Obama doing the same thing?2 The controversy over Reverend Wright’s speech provides a sense of just how differently groups of Americans think about the relationship between race and religion. (Race and religion are understood here both as historical influences and as deeply held identities.) One way of putting it is that the racial segregation of most Americans at eleven o’clock Sunday morning results in radically divergent ways of interpreting race and political events. For many African Americans (and other groups of color), religious faith has long been an important resource for enduring and overcoming American racism and a lens through which to critique it. From that perspective, Wright’s views, while perhaps extreme, could be understood to fit into a larger context of surviving white supremacy. For many whites, however, the idea of using theology to critique racism or to build racial solidarity is foreign—even though their own religions have facilitated exactly those functions. But in a nation deeply informed by racial and religious hierarchies , both whiteness and Christianity have drawn their political power partly from their invisibility to those who most benefit from the privileges accorded to them. Thus, many whites do not recognize the combined influences of race and religion in their own histories. The two related controversies the president faced in connection to Islam illuminate additional aspects of the interplay between race and religion in the United States. First, that Obama in particular was (and still is) accused of being Muslim derives from the reality that many religious minorities have, from America ’s beginnings, been marked as “other” along racial as well as religious lines. Islam is one of the most glaring examples today, but it follows on the heels of numerous predecessors. The rolls of racially othered religious minorities include Native Americans, Hindus, and Buddhists—and also, for a time, groups that eventually became “white,” such as Irish Catholics and Jews. This racialization of religion developed because the...