Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter

Description

Black Lives Matter, like its predecessor movements, embodies flesh and blood through local organizing, national and global protests, hunger strikes, and numerous acts of civil disobedience. Chants like “All night! All day! We’re gonna fight for Freddie Gray!” and “No justice, no fear! Sandra Bland is marching here!” give voice simultaneously to the rage, truth, hope, and insurgency that sustain BLM. While BLM has generously welcomed a broad group of individuals whom religious institutions have historically resisted or rejected, contrary to general perceptions, religion neither has been absent nor excluded from the movement’s activities.

This volume has a simple, but far-reaching argument: religion is an important thread in BLM. To advance this claim, Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter examines religion’s place in the movement through the lenses of history, politics, and culture. While this collection is not exhaustive or comprehensive in its coverage of religion and BLM, it selectively anthologizes unique aspects of Black religious history, thought, and culture in relation to political struggle in the contemporary era. The chapters aim to document historical change in light of current trends and current events. The contributors analyze religion and BLM in a current historical moment fraught with aggressive, fascist, authoritarian tendencies and one shaped by profound ingenuity, creativity, and insightful perspectives on Black history and culture.
 

Introduction
Christopher Cameron & Phillip Luke Sinitiere

Part One: Historical Foundations
1. A Secular Civil Rights Movement?: How Black Power and Black Catholics Help Us Rethink the Religion in Black Lives Matter
Matthew J. Cressler
2. Beyond De-Christianization: Rethinking the Religious Landscapes and Legacies of Black Power in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter
Kerry Pimblott
3. MOVE, Mourning, and Memory
Richard Kent Evans
4. Black Lives Matter and the New Materialism: Past Truths, Present Struggles, and Future Promises
Carol Wayne White
5. The Faith of the Future: Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism
Christopher Cameron

Part Two: Contemporary Connections
6. Death, Spirituality, and the Matter of Blackness
Joseph Winters
7. "A Song That Speaks the Language of the Times: Muslim and Christian Homiletic Responses to the Black Lives Matter Movement and the Need for a Spiritual Vocabulary of Admonition
Marjorie Corbman
8. "Islam Is Black Lives Matter: The Role of Gender and Religion in Muslim Women's BLM Activism
Iman AbdoulKarim
9. The Need for a Bulletproof Black Man: Luke Cage and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, and Religion in Black Communities
Alex Stucky
10. The Sounds of Hope: Black Humanism, Deep Democracy, and Black Lives Matter
Alexandra Hartmann
11. Black Lives Matter and American Evangelicalism: Conflict and Consonance in History and Culture
Phillip Luke Sinitiere

Index

Sujets

• Black Studies
• Civil Rights
• Histoire
• Africana studies
• Afro-American religion
• African American studies
• Civil and political rights
• African American
• Black Power
• History
• Black

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 15 août 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826502094
• Langue: English

Extrait

Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter
SERIES EDITORS
Brandon Byrd, Vanderbilt University
Zandria F. Robinson, Rhodes College
Christopher Cameron, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
BLACK LIVES MATTER. What began as a Twitter hashtag after the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin has since become a widely recognized rallying cry for black being and resistance. The series aims are twofold: 1) to explore social justice and activism by black individuals and communities throughout history to the present, including the Black Lives Matter movement and the evolving ways it is being articulated and practiced across the African Diaspora; and 2) to examine everyday life and culture, rectifying well-worn “histories” that have excluded or denied the contributions of black individuals and communities or recast them as entirely white endeavors. Projects draw from a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences and will first and foremost be informed by “peopled” analyses, focusing on everyday actors and community folks.
RACE, RELIGION, & BLACK LIVES MATTER
Essays on a Moment and a Movement
EDITED BY
Christopher Cameron and Phillip Luke Sinitiere
Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennesee
Copyright 2021 Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved
First printing 2021
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cameron, Christopher, 1983- editor. | Sinitiere, Phillip Luke, editor.
Title: Race, religion, and Black Lives Matter : essays on a moment and a movement / Christopher Cameron and Phillip Luke Sinitiere, eds.
Description: Nashville : Vanderbilt University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021007082 (print) | LCCN 2021007083 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826502070 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780826502063 (paperback) | ISBN 9780826502094 (epub) | ISBN 9780826502100 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Black lives matter movement—Religious aspects. | African Americans—Civil rights. | African Americans—Religion. | Civil rights—Religious aspects. | Race relations—Religious aspects. | Religion and social problems—United States. | United States—Race relations.
Classification: LCC E185.615 .R21325 2021 (print) | LCC E185.615 (ebook) | DDC 323.1196/073—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007082
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007083
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction by Christopher Cameron & Phillip Luke Sinitiere
PART ONE: HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS
1. A Secular Civil Rights Movement?: How Black Power and Black Catholics Help Us Rethink the Religion in Black Lives Matter
Matthew J. Cressler
2. Beyond De-Christianization : Rethinking the Religious Landscapes and Legacies of Black Power in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter
Kerry Pimblott
3. MOVE, Mourning, and Memory
Richard Kent Evans
4. Black Lives Matter and the New Materialism: Past Truths, Present Struggles, and Future Promises
Carol Wayne White
5. The Faith of the Future: Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism
Christopher Cameron
PART TWO: CONTEMPORARY CONNECTIONS
6. Death, Spirituality, and the Matter of Blackness
Joseph Winters
7. “A Song That Speaks the Language of the Times”: Muslim and Christian Homiletic Responses to the Black Lives Matter Movement and the Need for a Spiritual Vocabulary of Admonition
Marjorie Corbman
8. “Islam Is Black Lives Matter”: The Role of Gender and Religion in Muslim Women’s BLM Activism
Iman AbdoulKarim
9. The Need for a Bulletproof Black Man: Luke Cage and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, and Religion in Black Communities
Alex Stucky
10. The Sounds of Hope: Black Humanism, Deep Democracy, and Black Lives Matter
Alexandra Hartmann
11. Black Lives Matter and American Evangelicalism: Conflict and Consonance in History and Culture
Phillip Luke Sinitiere
Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Vanderbilt University Press director Gianna Mosser for supporting this project from the beginning and for shepherding its progress through a particularly challenging pandemic year. Her wisdom, insight, and good cheer improved this book. We appreciate her long-time support of both our scholarship and the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). It is truly an honor to work together again. We are grateful to other Vanderbilt University Press staff who helped to bring this book to fruition: Joell Smith-Borne, Betsy Phillips, Jenna Phillips, Cynthia Yeager, and Brittany Johnson. We are also pleased that this book is part of the Black Lives and Liberation Series. Thanks also goes to the two anonymous readers; their suggestions helped to refine the book’s argument and strengthen the connections between and across the chapters. Finally, we are immensely grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with so many brilliant scholars whose chapters comprise this volume. Their excellent work has shed new light on understanding of BLM, its history, and its ongoing significance.
Introduction
Christopher Cameron & Phillip Luke Sinitiere
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement began in 2013 when a Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman of Trayvon Martin’s murder. Yet the movement symbolizes far more than the moment of Martin’s death. It signals a new moment of opposition and insurgency against white supremacy’s intended goal of disciplining blackness and Black people. Perhaps ironically, BLM emerged against the backdrop of the Obama era, during the tenure of African American attorney general Eric Holder, and in the midst of a vast expansion of the surveillance state, a long-standing tool of anti-Black repression. The early twenty-first century’s saturation with neoliberalism often renders even some purportedly progressive people and/or movements resolutely complicit in structures of exploitation, extraction, and violence. Given such realities, BLM demands recognition of the dignity of Black life while it mobilizes protest for policy change, including the reorganization of resources for a more just and equitable world. It requires the apprehension of police brutality and insists on justice for state actors who perpetuate, fund, and support anti-Black violence.
BLM’s genesis as a hashtag by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi marks the historical moment of its creation as an organization and as a movement in the digital era. At the same time, BLM has deep roots in struggles for Black liberation and in one regard extends the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s. BLM, like its predecessor movements, embodies flesh and blood through local organizing, national and global protests, hunger strikes, and numerous acts of civil disobedience. Chants like “All night! All day! We’re gonna fight for Freddie Gray!” and “No justice, no fear! Sandra Bland is marching here!” give voice simultaneously to the rage, truth, hope, and insurgency that sustains BLM. If BLM’s contemporary presence connects politically to earlier eras of Black liberation struggles, then it follows that religion is a key variable in the movement’s overall work and history.
BLM has generously welcomed a broad group of individuals whom religious institutions have historically resisted or rejected. Yet, contrary to general perceptions, religion has been neither absent nor excluded from the movement’s activities. For example, BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors practices a West African Yoruba religious tradition known as Ifa. She has found in the tradition’s spirituality a source of existential strength in Black freedom work. “When you are working with people who have been directly impacted by state violence and heavy policing in our communities,” she states, “it is really important that there is a connection to the spirit world.” Drawing a connection between religious ideas and religious practice in the context of activism and cultural production, she said, “People’s resilience, I think, is tied to their will to live, our will to survive, which is deeply spiritual. . . . I don’t believe spirit is this thing that lives outside of us dictating our lives, but rather our ability to be deeply connected to something that is bigger than us. I think that is what makes our work powerful.” 1 Opal Tometi also uses the language of resilience and love in conjunction with what she calls “faith practices” from the Christian context in which she was raised. Her father, a Nigerian immigrant, is a pastor in Arizona at a church called Phoenix Impact Center. Tometi cites religion as one of the inspirations behind her activist work on behalf of immigrants and for people of color: “I’m a believer, I believe in Jesus as a revolutionary person . . . that’s my grounding.” 2 Growing up, Alicia Garza identified with her stepfather’s Jewish heritage. 3 More recently, she described the act of writing as a spiritual experience. For Garza, spirituality expressed through this form of creative labor is corporeal, it is embodied. “I tingle, my body electric with a spirit that moves from my chest, down my arms, into my fingers. . . . For me, writing is a spiritual practice. It is a purging, a renewal, a call to action I am unable to defy.” 4 Tometi, Garza, and Cullors’s comments show that BLM is not a wholly secular movement; aspects of institutional religion and faith commitments commingle with spiritual practices of materi