More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
racism is a system of oppression based on race.
Another definition explains racism as prejudice plus power.
American church has tended to practice a complicit Christianity rather than a courageous Christianity.
“Not only did white Christians fail to fight for black equality, they often labored mightily against it.”
This is especially true with a historical survey.12 A survey covers a large amount of historical territory quickly. It gives readers a sense of the historical patterns and how they have changed or persisted over time. Yet surveying the history of the American church and racism leaves no doubt that race has exerted an undeniable influence on the way Christianity has developed in this nation.
At the same time, a survey focuses on breadth instead of depth. A high degree of selectivity goes into a historical survey, and more gets left out than put in.
Even though a survey approach poses several limitations, it also offers the opportunity to see long-term trends and change over time.
83 percent of black people say they “believe in God with absolute certainty” compared to 59 percent of Hispanics and 61 percent of whites. Additionally, 75 percent of blacks say “religion is very important” to them compared to 59 percent of Hispanics and 49 percent of whites.
Studying history forces people in the present to view people in the past as complex and contradictory figures.
There was a period, from about 1500 to 1700, when race did not predetermine one’s station and worth in society.
race-based stratification.
Centuries earlier the Scandinavians made landfall on the northern Atlantic coast in a failed colonization project.
European colonization, motivated by profit and predicated on unpaid labor.
wrote the laws and formed the habits that concentrated power in the hands of those they considered “white” while withholding equality from those they considered “black.”
As many as one-third of African slaves died within their first three years in the Americas.
Haiti and Jamaica, as well as South American countries such as Brazil, used millions of Africans to work on farms producing rice, sugar, and coffee. In fact, these other regions received far more enslaved persons than North America ever did.
An estimated ten to twelve million slaves were brought across the Atlantic, and the majority ended up in the Caribbean or South America.19
Slave women in North America had an average birthrate of 9.2 children, twice as many as those in Caribbean colonies.
racist attitudes and the pursuit of wealth increasingly relegated black people to a position of perpetual servitude and exploitation.
The indigenous population in America had been decimated by war and disease. Additionally, indigenous people proved to be difficult to control as enslaved workers because they often knew the landscape better than their European masters and could escape or count on help from their tribe.
European cultural standards.
Christianity had arrived in Africa through Egypt and Ethiopia in the third and fourth centuries.
Missionaries carefully crafted messages that maintained the social and economic status quo.
of liberation in the minds and hearts of their chattel. But Africans did not come to the American colonies devoid of spirituality. Many of them practiced the indigenous religions of tribes in West Africa, and a significant number were Muslim. Africans preferred their own forms of faith to that of their white enslavers.
a result of the Stono Rebellion, South Carolina passed the Negro Act of 1740. The act, which largely reiterated laws that had already been passed but not strictly enforced, prevented the enslaved from assembling in groups without white supervision, selling their own goods for profit, or learning to write.
the Collegiate School of Connecticut, now known as Yale University,
Slave owning signified status.
The US Constitution does not use the words slave or slavery, yet some scholars argue that it can be viewed as a proslavery document. “Of its eighty-four clauses, six are directly concerned with slaves and their owners. Five others had implications of slavery that were considered and debated by the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention and the citizens of the states during ratification,” writes David Waldstreicher.
property, enslaved people were valued for their physical aptitude and obedient attitudes.
interstate sales that occurred in the decades prior to the Civil War, 25 percent destroyed a first marriage, and 50 percent broke up a nuclear family. Oftentimes, children younger than thirteen years old were separated from their parents and sold, never to be reunited.
Even as they had their own children to look after, many enslaved women were also responsible for raising the children of their enslavers.
Black resistance to enslavement took multiple forms. Some slaves deliberately broke tools to delay their work. Others would set fires or pretend to be sick.
preaching and teaching would lead to insubordination and insurrection.
Under paternalistic Christianity, the slave plantation was seen as a household, with the male enslaver as the benevolent patriarch of both his family and his “pseudofamily” of enslaved black people.
Lincoln carefully explained, “I am not nor have I ever been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”
Rather than combatting racism, why not simply send people of other races far, far away?
It was impossible to deny that some form of unpaid labor had characterized the economy of virtually every society for thousands of years.
People believed in the superiority of the white race and the moral degradation of black people so strongly that they were willing to fight a war over it.
To date, North Carolina has over 140 Confederate monuments scattered in various public spaces. Texas has nearly 180 such pieces, and there are hundreds of others found in both northern and southern states.
There was a significant spike in monument construction from 1900 to the 1920s and a second explosion of Confederate flags and iconography from the 1950s to the 1960s.8 These periods coincided with intense seasons of racial conflict in the Jim Crow
These monuments not only memorialized Confederate soldiers, but they also inscribed white supremacy into the landscape of public spaces across the North and the South.
Nathan Bedford Forrest, the man who coordinated the butcher of black and white Union soldiers at Fort Pillow, went on to become the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
fused Christianity, nationalism, and white supremacy into a toxic ideology of hate.
Christianity with racism to create a nationalistic form of religion that excluded all but American-born, Protestant white men and women.
adding Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and bootleggers to its list of enemies and pariahs, in part because African Americans were less numerous in the North.”
myth of the Lost Cause positioned white women as the epitome of purity and vulnerability, and by contrast, black men came to symbolize raw lust and bestiality.
The process of convict-leasing began by entrapping black people, usually men but occasionally women, for minor offenses such as vagrancy, gambling, or riding a freight car without a ticket, and then saddling them with jail time and court fees. If the person could not pay the fee, as was often the case, they could have their sentence increased.
The convict-lease system made black inmates “slaves in all but name.”
Together with sharecropping, convict-leasing provided a way for white supremacists to methodically corral black people into the most menial jobs, depriving them of opportunities for economic advancement, and stripping them of their voting rights. Most notoriously, any perceived infraction of the Jim Crow codes could earn a black person “death by tree”—lynching.
Such voyeuristic and violent deaths represent the heinous apotheosis of American racism.
