Racial Reconciliation Research Articles

Remembering the dead, reconciling the living:

Rituals advancing reconciliation often do so by recalling a shared history or proposing a shared future. Racial reconciliation in the United States and recovery from the clergy sexual abuse crisis must reckon with how the past can be justly remembered. The George Floyd Global Memorial in Minneapolis, Minnesota, occupies a space of remembrance, raising up a representative victim of police violence as a symbolic ancestor. The All Saints’ and All Souls’ Day monastic liturgies at St John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, remember the dead and a future that transcends contemporary divisions. This article will explore how gestures toward an eschatological future in both of these memorial rites frame the memory of the past and mediate the relationship between the living and the dead amid a fragile movement towards reconciliation.

Opportunity Hoarding and Elite Reproduction: School Segregation in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract School integration is an important indicator of equality of opportunity and racial reconciliation in contemporary South Africa. Despite its prominence in public and political discourse, however, there is no systemic evidence on the levels and patterns of school segregation. Drawing on the literature on the post-apartheid political settlement and sociological theories of opportunity hoarding, we explain how the small White minority and, to a lesser extent, the new Black middle class monopolized access to South Africa’s most prestigious schools following the abolition of de jure segregation in 1994. Using the 2021 Annual School Survey—an administrative dataset covering all South African schools—and the 2019 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study school survey, we find very high levels of school segregation along racial as well as socioeconomic lines. White students almost exclusively attend former White schools, have little exposure to the low-income Black majority, and are vastly overrepresented in elite public and private schools. We argue that in South Africa and other contexts with under-resourced education systems, elite capture of the few high-performing schools serves to reproduce race and class privilege.

A Western Pocahontas: Myth, Reality, and Memorialization for Spotted Tail’s Daughter, Mni-Akuwin

Abstract In March 1866, the Sicangu (Brulé) Lakota chief Spotted Tail brought the body of his seventeen- or eighteen-year-old daughter, Mni-Akuwin, to Fort Laramie. She had died somewhere in the Powder River country. Before she died, she had asked her father to bury her among the Whites at the fort. Her subsequent scaffold burial in the post cemetery was an unusual mix of military display, Christian rites, and Lakota traditions; and the events surrounding it became a dramatic episode in the story of Native-White relations and western settlement. Almost 140 years later she was memorialized at the fort, a National Park Service site, as a symbol of racial reconciliation. The story of Mni-Akuwin has been told and retold many times through the years, often as a romantic tragedy comparable to the story of early Jamestown and the much-celebrated Pocahontas. The two Native women had a surprising amount in common, including what we know and don’t know about them, what has been ascribed to their motives, and how they have been championed as defenders of European colonists and non-Native settlers. Indian princess mythology, with its insistence on innocence, purity, romantic purpose, and tragedy, has been vital to the persistence of this view—a perspective that has often put reconciliation in the service of White supremacy, dispossession, and rejection of Native culture. As the Mni-Akuwin story illustrates, reconciliation can be problematic.

Seeking Reconciliation through Historical Truth: Frank X Walker’s Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers

Abstract: In this article, I explore how Frank X Walker’s Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers (2013), his thirteenth book and fourth collection of historical poetry, reckons with the past. By conducting extensive archival research, tapping into collective memory, and imagining how real people from history—especially the widow and the assassin of Medgar Evers—might have felt, Walker helps his readers and country begin to heal. Walker’s creative process includes rigorously asking what if Byron De La Beckwith, the white supremacist who murdered Medgar Evers, had found a way through life without hate? And through the perspective of Myrlie Evers, Medgar’s widow, Walker wonders what if she could embrace forgiveness? By uncovering Medgar Evers, whose life has often been overlooked, Walker restores this heroic man to the spotlight, thus contributing to his explicit goal of racial reconciliation.

The toll of supervising from an anti-racist framework: reflections from a qualitative study

ABSTRACT Persistent race-based disparities in all domains of the US indicate the insidious nature of anti-Black racism. The helping professions have an opportunity to assist individuals and communities in working toward racial reconciliation and healing. Anti-racist and anti-oppressive practice standards represent one means to do so. Supervisors play a critical role in guiding anti-racist clinical practice and modeling these tenets. Little empirical scholarship exists around the strategies for supervising from this framework. Understanding these experiences help inform how to support anti-racist supervisors interpersonally and organizationally. Findings from a grounded theory qualitative study with social work supervisors shed light on these experiences.

The battle for curriculum: arrested semantics and reconciling racism with Critical Race Theory and Ethnic Studies

ABSTRACT US Republican lawmakers continue their nationwide crusade against Critical Race Theory because it unsettles the racial state. We argue that the partisan attacks on Ethnic Studies and CRT are motivated by White American fears of racial reconciliation. An honest review of our racial past and present through a critical race lens would upset the United States’ centuries-long colonial racial project, whose maintenance and containment are dependent on an enduring system of a hierarchical racial order grounded in White supremacy. Attacks on Ethnic Studies and CRT are about US political society preserving racial meaning in the US, by which safeguarding their entitled position within the racial order. The latest political tactic in educational policy to maintain White privilege is to empty meaning from racial categories, particularly the term ‘White’, through a colorblind linguistic subterfuge we call ‘arrested semantics’. As members of civil society, students and community members continue to mobilize to wrestle away political control over their education. Civil society continues to be a potent force against White supremacy, especially in the struggle for Ethnic Studies – whose curriculum is grounded in the premise that race has been the central organizing principle in US nation-state building. Indeed, US political society’s wealth-building capacity – and therefore sociopolitical and economic positioning, is predicated by the current racial order. We believe the reconciliation of racism will only occur by naming those agents who perpetuate racist policies and practices. Critical Race Theory and Ethnic Studies employ unequivocal language that can help us to identify the agents upholding White supremacy.

Catholic Republicanism in America

Recently, so-called Catholic “postliberal” conservatives have condemned the American regime as fundamentally liberal and, hence, parasitic on pre-liberal institutions. I argue that this view unduly conflates liberalism and republicanism and thereby confuses an ideology with the principles of the regime. American Catholic clergy have historically condemned liberalism in favor of a Catholic republicanism. This trend began with the political thought of Charles Carroll of Carrollton and Bishop John Carroll who advocated for republican government in conjunction with “conciliarism” in the Church. Archbishop “Dagger” John Hughes of New York condemned “nothingarianism,” an early form of liberalism, while also arguing that Irish minorities were capable of republican self-rule during the School Controversy of 1840–43. Later, during the 1880s and 1890s, Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul, Minnesota, condemned liberalism, but also provided an alternative vision of post-Civil War racial reconciliation and of Catholic patriotism. Even as he disparaged liberalism, Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen rescued the “Americanism” condemned by Pope Leo XIII in 1899 to argue against totalitarian states of the twentieth century, while, at the same time, Fr. John Courtney Murray, no liberal, sought a religious truce in America in favor of common political action in areas of agreement. In short, these clergy opposed liberalism, but they couched their opposition in terms of support of the American Republic, often arguing that the Catholic Church, especially in parochial schooling, provided the best foundation for good government. However, the recent decline of hierarchical support of Catholic republicanism has led to the present disillusionment of American Catholics, who are at risk of turning to reactionary politics to their own peril.

Performing blackness: a composite counterstory of direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry testing

ABSTRACT The industry of genetic ancestry testing (GAT) uses biotechnology to generate new performances of genetic, cultural, and ethnoracial identity. Based on interviews and focus groups with Black GAT customers, this composite counterstory narrates the familial, institutional, and political contexts of Black GAT identity negotiation. This article highlights how conceptions of Blackness are constrained and enabled by the everyday nature of racism, the omnipresence of anti-Black data surveillance, familial narratives, and the allure of institutional racial reconciliation attached to commercialized genomics. This counterstory illustrates the salience of narrative in the construction of the racial and genetic self.

Living the Dream: The Contested History of Martin Luther King Jr. Day by Daniel T. Fleming

Reviewed by: Living the Dream: The Contested History of Martin Luther King Jr. Day by Daniel T. Fleming Marvin T. Chiles Living the Dream: The Contested History of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. By Daniel T. Fleming. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. [x], 326. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6781-2.) Civil rights historiography began in the 1950s with biographies of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a genre known to experts as King studies. The social history movement of the 1970s shifted civil rights historiography toward a focus on Black female activists, the grass roots, and litigation. However, more recent discussions about memorialization have allowed Daniel T. Fleming to reintegrate King studies into the field in Living the Dream: The Contested History of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Fleming assures readers that, like King’s life, the holiday “has a history of its own”—a history interconnected with America’s transition from the civil rights era to the age of antiracism (p. 11). King’s legacy is riveted to the meaning of his birthday as a national holiday. Moreover, King has been “co-opted by all” as a symbol showing how far America has or has not moved beyond racism (p. 4). Fleming sides with Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, and others in seeing civil rights memorialization as a social commentary about the movement’s successes and failures in the present. He distinguishes himself, however, by focusing solely on the man whose persona defined the original course of the modern civil rights movement and its historiography. Black activists, including King’s widow Coretta Scott King, fought to make King’s birthday a nationally celebrated holiday from the aftermath of King’s death in 1968 to the 1990s. Conservatives opposed these efforts because of King’s known ties to communism and criticism of the American government. Thus, “holiday activists” downplayed King’s radical past and promoted him as a nonviolent proponent of America’s highest ideal of racial equality (p. 21). By the time King’s birthday became a national holiday in 1983 (it was first observed on January 20, 1986), King was no longer thought of as a radical, and neither was the civil rights movement discussed as an incomplete project. Rather, King was held up as a symbol of American exceptionalism during the Cold War. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush cemented King’s new legacy by “downplay[ing] King’s Blackness” and promoting American global and economic hegemony as “Living the Dream” King had envisioned (pp. 66, 72). [End Page 392] This consensus about King’s legacy ended in the 1990s. President William J. Clinton used King’s holiday to promote federally funded community service programs and to celebrate America’s multiculturalism. Beginning in 1996, Dexter Scott King, the civil rights leader’s second son, monetized his father’s intellectual property, rendering King’s legacy an extension of the neoliberal policies that defined the 1990s. At the turn of the millennium, President George W. Bush evoked King’s name to champion American hegemony and racial reconciliation, just as the first President Bush had years prior. And as Barack Obama framed his own election to the presidency as King’s dream coming into full form, grassroots activists evoked King’s holiday to platform his forgotten radical advocacy for antipoverty priorities and antimilitarism after national tragedies in the 2010s. President Donald J. Trump went out of his way to embrace King as well, but from the reconciliationist perspective cultivated in the 1980s. As different people used King to push their political agendas, his legacy became more distorted and contested. The King holiday is less understood today than it has ever been because holiday activists willingly sacrificed King’s radical legacy for Black representation in America’s memorial landscape. A presentist history about King should have more in-depth discussion of America’s refusal to end poverty and segregation. Nevertheless, Fleming uses the King holiday to show that desires for racial reconciliation collapsed under the weight of good intentions set out by whites and Blacks alike. This is the book’s most important message. This jargon-free volume is very accessible to both...

Religion and race relations in America: Focusing on Christian Evangenicals

Religion and race relations in America: Focusing on Christian Evangenicals Since the second half of the 20th century, several movements based on religion have developed in American society to improve race relations. These include the “racial reconciliation” movement, the “social justice” movement, the “civil disobedience” represented by Jim Wallis, and the “multiracial congregation” movement. Here, Kazunobu Horiuchi explores how several movements based on religion have developed in American society to improve race relations.

Racial and Religious Convergences and Divergences among Christian Students’ Approaches to Color‐Blindness, Color‐Cognizance, and Race in Christian Organizations

AbstractDrawing on survey data of Christian students (N = 4261) enrolled at 11 colleges that are part of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, we examine color‐blindness, different types of color‐cognizance, and views on race in Christian organizations. We find significant differences between students of color and White students in color‐blindness and color‐cognizance but find racial convergence in the importance of racial reconciliation. Net of controls, greater evangelical orthodoxy is associated with color‐cognizant views that perceive prejudicial treatment against White people, undercut the experiences of people of color, and is associated with more positive views of Christian organizations’ roles in race relationships. Concurrently, upper year students differ significantly from first years in their racial attitudes and views on race in Christian organizations, suggesting that Christian education may shape racial views positively. Our findings have implications for theorizing how evangelical Christianity and evangelical colleges maintain and challenge color‐blindness and White supremacy.

Sonic Histories: Reckoning with Race through Campus Soundscapes

Abstract: The sounds of the college campus raise important questions of participation, identity, privilege, disability, and marginalization. During the 2019–2020 academic year, three university instructors from distinct disciplines (music, history, and political science) and a student research assistant (history) used sound as a method for inquiring into contested and erased sites on the campus of Western Carolina University, a regional comprehensive university located in the southeastern United States. The project came to be called Sonic Histories. Paid student volunteers were led on a soundwalk and completed three online questionnaires that engaged questions of race and belonging on campus. This study presents findings on how students experience and interpret contested and erased sites through sounds heard and imagined. Sonic Histories explores two central questions. Historically, whose voices have been included and whose have been excluded on college campuses? How can sound promote awareness of racialized spaces and, in turn, achieve social engagement? The authors challenge the triumphant narrative of campus histories, which highlights racial reconciliation and progress while eliding the ways predominantly white campuses still exclude minorities. By re-centering minority voices in campus spaces, the authors explore the systemic exclusion of minorities that has occurred on college campuses across the country. At a time when places of higher education are refining and developing their commitment to diversity and inclusivity—while assessing their past in honest ways—the Sonic Histories project builds upon ongoing initiatives to position the college campus as a scholarly community that lives up to its democratic ideals of inclusion.

(Re) imagining the Problem of Racism: An Evangelical Response to Racism

This article aims to re-imagine and offer an evan­ge­lical response to the problem of racism that is not di­choto­mous, but holistic, where racism is understood both as an individual and structural sin, leading to a balance between racial reconciliation and racial justice that needs to be con­sistent­ly practiced. This research indicates that evangelicals generally do not yet have a holistic imagination to understand racism. Hence efforts to fight this persisting problem are still one-sidedly inclined toward racial reconciliation. For this purpose, this article begins by analyzing the common yet problematic understanding and response by some evangelicals who emphasize racism as only an individual sin and racial reconciliation as a solution. The next step is to describe the importance of imagination, namely the capacity to con­cept­u­al­ize the problem of racism in its entirety by involving sensitivity to racist situations, interpretation of Scripture with virtues, and introspection of our position toward racism—all of which are used to understand the dual nature of racism and response against it. In the end, as I demonstrate that racism is both an individual and structural sin, evangelical churches thus need to strike a balance between racial reconciliation and racial justice if they want to handle the problem of racism well.

Engaging Racial Equity

Abstract This article explores the contours of an emerging pentecostal political theology of race that is framed by a quest for racial equity and racial justice that is reflected in early Black-led pentecostal interracialism, expressed in the Racial Reconciliation Manifesto, guardrailed by a theology of just-power, and informed potentially by equity as a hermeneutic to reread Scripture. A pentecostal political theology of race, then, could be a discursive construct that can orient the church and society toward racial justice in dismantling systems of racial injustice and erecting new ecclesial and societal structures of racial justice.

Transnational Exchange in World Christianity: Racial Reconciliation in the Newfrontiers Network of Churches, 1979–2010

This article demonstrates how transnational encounters and exchanges can shape and re-shape Christian beliefs and practices in a globalising world. It does this using the example of a transnational network of neo-charismatic churches called Newfrontiers that was founded in the small towns of Sussex during the 1970s but, by 2011, encompassed almost 850 churches in over sixty countries. Drawing on extensive primary research, this article shows how the theological and practical commitment of Newfrontiers churches to racial reconciliation and the building of diverse congregations was forged over thirty years through encounters between British, South African and Ghanaian Christians.

When the Margins Talk Back

Communication theory reminds us that listening is always interrogative, relational, and never without politics. The articles in this collection are the first attempt to witness as listeners to what young people have shared in this research, amplifying a “youth ecclesiology” (Benjamin Conner), the prophetic ministry of young people (Justin Forbes), the importance of aesthetics in confronting dehumanization (Katherine Douglass), the disruptive call of listening itself (Michael Mather), the persistent gaps in theologizing racial reconciliation (Kermit Moss), and the provocative love of Jesus (Megan DeWald). To this witness, I further probe how it is that marginal agitation can be found deeply faithful, draw out its theological contributions, and attempt to behold, yet not coopt, that radical openness that both Peter and Paul reveal to us as so slippery, subversive, and decentering. In other words, it is critical that theologians and congregations at the center not so much “let” the margins push back, because that fetishizes them, all the while subtly maintaining the center, but adopt the confessional mode that Conner, DeWald, Douglass, Forbes, Mather, and Moss lay out, while also witnessing to a Jesus, a God, and a Spirit that prod and agitate and transgress, because this God is at the margins, too.

If Not Now, When? A Call to End Social Work’s Tolerance of White Supremacy in the Academy

Despite ethical responsibilities to dismantle systems of oppression, White supremacy ideologies and practices are still inundated in social work academe to the detriment of Black, Indigenous, Latino, and Persons of Color (BILPOC) communities and faculty dedicated to teaching the next generation of critical scholars, activists, and clinicians. Four themes are introduced to exemplify how the academy remains overpowered by the need to sustain the status quo of White power. In the first theme, social work’s long-standing history of omitting BILPOC experiences in curricula is discussed. The second theme characterizes social work’s legacy of omission via inaction to address unjust governmental practices at the U.S. Southern border, thereby perpetuating the cycle of White power. Cementing these positions, we shift the discussion to the inherent pressures within the academy that prizes productivity above all else, perpetuating the culture of White supremacy. In turn, spaces to engage in creative thinking and teaching to dismantle systems of oppressions are limited. Lastly, we discuss the increasing pressure to produce “eurocentric” rigorous scientific knowledge takes precedence at a time when we must place equity and fairness on equal footing. For each of these four themes, we offer suggestions for how to create spaces for racial reconciliation, healing, and equality.

Toward critical race tourism: valuing counter-narratives and endarkened storywork

In this article, we argue for tourism scholars to amplify the stories and lived experiences of traditionally silenced groups through the adaption of critical race theory (CRT) toward a framework of Critical Race Tourism. Critical Race Tourism includes a specific focus on counter-storytelling, endarkened storywork, and regular engagement of interest convergence. We believe Critical Race Tourism can contribute to racial reconciliation and healing, particularly during a time of a global pandemic, that exacerbates systems of marginalization and oppression. Using a Critical Race Tourism framework is about realizing the potential of thick, rich data of everyday lived experiences from marginalized communities in order to enrich the theoretical, empiricism, and scholarly insights offered by academic writing. We begin by defining CRT and describe the employment of and application within tourism studies. We introduce the framework of endarkened storywork, which responds to the sustainability and justice challenges resulting from past, current, and future inequities for BIPOC communities. We close with implications for tourism contexts and research.

What's Love Got to Do With It? Christianity, Africanism, and Privilege in Marilynne Robinson's Jack

Abstract: Jack was the only beacon of hope in a step toward racial reconciliation in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead novels. Unfortunately, in Robinson's latest novel, Jack , Jack remains the static selfish, destructive, unreliable wanderer who is ill fit to combat racial discrimination, and thus unsuitable for Della. This article aims to examine why Jack and Della's relationship was destined for failure at its inception. The failure and impracticability of their interracial relationship becomes apparent upon explication of historical Christian passivism and separatism, Marilynne Robinson's American Africanist treatment of race relations, and Jack's use of his white privilege.

Undoing the Knots: Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness by Maureen H. O’Connell

Reviewed by: Undoing the Knots: Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness by Maureen H. O’Connell Donna Toliver Grimes III As the Catholic Church in the United States works to confront the scourge and sin of racism, the timeliness of Undoing the Knots: Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness cannot be overstated. In the sea of contemporary books, podcasts and other platforms grappling with racism in the United States, this is a fresh scholarly exposure through one White Catholic’s personal racial exploration. It stands apart from courageous confessions about slaveholding ancestors and accounts of anxious introductions between African American and White family members. Usually, these stories are rooted in the rural South. Yet, situated in the northern city of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection, this is a bold launch into racism as embedded in good families and the church we love. O’Connell’s book credibly calls out “Anti-Blackness” among Irish American Catholics, their clergy and bishops. Anti-Blackness adds a fine point to the race discussions that we need today in our Catholic [End Page 65] parishes, schools, houses of formation, and organizations; in our families; and between God and ourselves. If we seem to upgrade racism jargon every few years, this book demonstrates that “Anti-Blackness” lays hands on the heart of the matter. Help us, Holy Spirit! Beginning with Irish Catholic sacramentality as a basis for racial reconciliation is intriguing and raised a few questions. Do twenty-first century Irish American Catholics harbor memories of their ancestors’ penitential ritual of rounding (14)? How could rounding or other lament practices serve Irish/White Catholics today? Gardeners and farmers may relate to the author’s detailed grafting metaphor as a description of becoming White Americans (62). Technical descriptions of the grafting process reveal the growth of Anti-Black posturing happening in the family, church, and society concurrently. Although excellent research could not reconstruct ancestors’ racial decisions, it offers sufficient indications that racial issues were among the concerns of five generations who ultimately chose group and self-interest over alliances with African Americans. New immigrants who were Irish and Catholic learned from their priests, employers, and preceding arrivals that “[W]hite disputes could be more easily settled if there were Black bodies on the bargaining table” (48). Is the above quote more or less relevant today? Is racial mercy a form of unearned grace? How is racial mercy related to others in “their chaos”? What spiritual practices open us to receive God’s racial mercy? The Upper Room of Whiteness begs the question of interactions with the women, children and maybe servants off-stage in that sanctuary? How is the hopeful message of our call for more than “being good and giving back” being activated? Donna Toliver Grimes United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Copyright © 2022 American Catholic Historical Society