Holier Than Thou: Discussion of Hoard and Bland’s “How Am I Responsible?”: Evangelical White Rage and the Interpassive Perpetration of White-Body Supremacy

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper presents a brief sociocultural review of the development of the twentieth-century American Christian evangelical movement and its relationship to racism and structural racial inequality. It traces the evangelical movement’s hostility toward the organized civil rights movement, which it linked with the Soviet communist threat to Christianity and to American democracy; its organized legal opposition to the civil rights legislation of the 1960s which challenged its racist and discriminatory policies; and its increasingly powerful and organized political alliance with a Republican Party eager to harness white resentment of Black advancement, in order to gain and maintain power. Against the backdrop of this history, I critique Hoard and Bland’s mischaracterization of Carol Anderson’s (2016) concept of “white rage” as a symptom of Perpetration Induced Traumatic Stress and their formulation of interpassivity as perpetration.