Racism

Systemic racism refers to the practice of unjustly bestowing enrichment and privileges on certain groups in society on the basis of their ethnicity or race while simultaneously discriminating against and belittling other groups. While racism need not be associated with religion, racist views are often a part of a broader cultural pattern that has religious dimensions.

Racism on both a personal and a societal level is found in many cultures and has been a feature of American society since its early years, when White people were regarded as the only legitimate citizens within society, to the exclusion of Native Americans and African Americans, the latter being brought to the United States as slaves.

The trajectory of racism in the United States has encompassed a broad range of social and psychological dimensions related to racism on the part of Whites: racist ideologies, attitudes, perceptions, emotions, habits, and institutions of U.S. society. Systemic racism has solidified privileged material, social, and ideological realities that are reproduced across generations of White communities while simultaneously disadvantaging and alienating communities of color.

The systemic racist foundation of the United States was secured through the genocide of indigenous peoples and theft of Indian lands, combined with a capitalist economic system that generated wealth through the enslavement of people of African descent. The initial unequal trajectories of the White and Black communities have resulted in a persistent reality where White Americans have sat at the top of a castelike social hierarchy with Black Americans and the relatively few remaining American indigenous communities disproportionately represented the bottom.

The reformed Christian thought preached by the Pilgrims and their descendants was used later in history in the White conception of “manifest destiny,” to simultaneously rationalize slavery and anti-Indian genocide and to teach enslaved workers and indigenous peoples that their oppressed status in the New World was “God's will.” Because the enslaved workers were stripped of all cultural attachments and personal identity, they assimilated on a marginal basis into a dominant White society that dictated their spoken language, religious teachings, and interpretations of the New World around them. Still, exposure to biblical interpretations preached by White church members that all people are equal in the eyes of God ironically provided a divine authority that served as a powerful source of counterframe development for those African Americans held in bondage. Resistance counter-frames are those that reject inequalities and refuse to recognize unjust surroundings and circumstances as morally acceptable.

While initially, religious thought was the primary means used to develop and reinforce anti-racist counterframes among the enslaved, later inspiration from the secular and political realms came during the Revolutionary War, on the proclamation of the Declaration of Independence. Governed by civil rulings explicitly separated from [Page 1046]the church, the political doctrines of this era held that all citizens of a new United States should be guaranteed inalienable rights and freedoms. Though in the same exclusionary vein as the religion preached by oppressors, only those who were socially defined as “free persons” across the next century would be counted as U.S. “citizens,” entitled to the privileges, rights, benefits, and freedoms declared by the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Those rights and protections did not extend to indigenous peoples or enslaved workers, who were nonpersons. Despite the racist barriers, the first Black Christian churches emerged in the late 18th century, after the Revolutionary War and the proclamation of the Declaration of Independence.

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