If dominant groups tend to universalize their norms, and if they sense that they are God’s divinely elected nation, then you can expect overconfidence in interpreting social realities. I believe this overconfidence is one of the main reasons that white Christians were some of the loudest advocates for slavery and Jim Crow as they are today for black and brown incarceration, anti–immigration reform, and the labeling of most practicing Muslims as “terrorists.” Often it has been the small, outsider white Christian traditions that have at least partly perceived some of these failures in white
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