Imposter Christianity vs (DEI) Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, (CRT) Critical Race Theory, & Intersectionality

Imposter Christianity vs (DEI) Diversity,

Equity, and Inclusion, (CRT) Critical Race 

Theory, & Intersectionality

by R.E. Slater

July 26, 2022

DEI, CRT, and Intersectionality are explained here in the following three articles in non-politically polarizing language (unlike my own charged commentary, with apologies). I think you will find those articles helpful to read.

My Problem with Christian Denial & Obfustication

I've attended several universities in life. A very large, internationally ranked university for science, mathematics, engineering, IT, and general Humanities, Ancient History and Language studies. Then a private, conservative evangelical bible college for Psychology and Bible. Then a 3 year (it took me 4 years) M.Div. degree from the same school's Theological Seminary. And finally, 30/60 credits towards an MBA at a local state university.

This morning I became aware of my bible college (now a university in educational statue but still acting as a conservative private Christian college with its head planted firmly into the sand) firing 2/3's of its staff (42 persons) in order to clean house and wrap itself into the conspiritorial fellowships of neo-radical rightwing Republicanism and thereby actively decentering itself from such social issues as Christian humanities, humanism, social justice, and the ever evolving practices of civil, polyplural, multiethnic democracies. Gone are the olden days of penitance and service; in their place have come days of profanity and violence.

In so doing, my college, like so many other conforming Christian colleges, are going backwards in time against their historical progress forwards; backwards to their former selves to once again embrace varying forms of erring anti-abolition and anti-suffrage leagues known more commonly today as White Christian Nationalism. This then would be sympathetic forms of Christian white Supremacy seeking white cultural authoritarianism mixed with church-based theocracies of religiously interpreted dominionism over personal liberties:

"[White] Christian nationalism is Christian-affiliated religious nationalism seeks [religious dominion over] rightful civil liberties. Christian nationalists primarily focus on internal politics, such as passing laws that reflect their view of Christianity and its role in political and social life. In countries with a state Church, Christian nationalists, in seeking to preserve the status of a Christian state, uphold an antidisestablishmentarian position.

"Christian nationalists support the presence of Christian symbols and statuary in the public square, as well as state patronage for the display of religion, such as school prayer and the exhibition of nativity scenes during Christmastide or the Christian Cross on Good Friday.

"Christian nationalists draw support from the broader Christian right." - Wikipedia

I don't know about you but when's the last time you have experienced a fully healthy, fully blended church, seeking full congregational participation in polity, policy, and doctrine? Nope, me neither though I've been close to it several times. Just as perfect churches don't exist so I wouldn't recommend building a nation upon the church's example. It's not how I would envision a healthy, growing, Republican-based Liberal Democracy (see Wikipedia here for explanation) embracing social equality and justice for all - rather than for some if having the right color or having been assimilated into the right culture.

Using Opaque Christian Language Meaning Something Else

I next dived further into my Christian college's records along with it's contemporary history to discover it's leadership is willfully misusing Christian language. Thereby telling itself - and any who care to listen, such as its paying constituents - that Jesus is who they follow and worship. That diversity, equality, and inclusion is what they are all about. But by removing it's bible staff, faculty, and watching the outflow of non-whites out of its educational institution, it tells a different story. One that isn't as they say it is.

When reading through all these recent events of the college's newest statements, intentions, and actions, I noticed immediately the difficulty the institution was having with words they purposely were misconstruing so they could promote their own dogmatic church policies.

Words like toleration, social justice, and church missional work have become words playing into the conservative evangelical's fears of so called "liberalism" rather than a more proper fear of their own Christian associations, councils, synods, and fellowships' pell-mell flight into white Christian nationalism (WCN, aka "neo-rightwing republicanism").

Factually, flights into Christian revisional history cannot possibly begin to build upon evangelicalism's one time progress made over the years (1980s?) towards accepting, adapting, and learning to work within a multiracial democracy; nor, promote any decent global platform for Christian ministry in general.

Toleration is a Big Word with a Tricky Meaning for WCN's

Next I came to the authored books my college deemed important to the new president's resume and their hiring of him as I quickly came to the conclusion:

"Toleration" when used by WCNs can become an insipid term in the hands of disaffecting people or their dissenting groups. Such a word is intended as a derisional term to demean the other in everyway possible.

Importantly, as Christians following Jesus' example, we are to welcome and embrace difference... not to simply "tolerate" it as a different stream from white culture.

That said, my readers should know that Social Justice as expressed by DEI or CRT or even Intersectionality, is neither liberal nor marxist but the ethically right thing to do when placing emphasis on one's brothers and sisters rather than insisting on assimilating church members - as a rite of fundamental Christian passage - into the local white "Christian" culture so that "traditional" Christian whites might "tolerate" non-white cultures better:

The correct usage of terms, and honest declarations of purpose, are much better policies and more helpful to Christian mission than when claiming white privilege in usurping Scripture and faith under false ideologies of faith privilege.

Thus and thus, "Toleration" is a poisonous outlook and unhelpful in today's metamodern worlds of global exchange, eco-building, or conjoined human activities for humanity, equality, resource sharing, and justice. Like DEI and CRT, global intersectionality would be applauded by Jesus even if his children don't like it, fear it, and conspire against it with tricky self-righteous words like "toleration" betrayed by the users themselves trying to navigate their imposter faith with Jesus.

R.E. Slater

July 26, 2022

What is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)?

https://dei.extension.org/

Diversity is the presence of differences that may include race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic status, language, (dis)ability, age, religious commitment, or political perspective. Populations that have been-and remain- underrepresented among practitioners in the field and marginalized in the broader society.

Equity is promoting justice, impartiality and fairness within the procedures, processes, and distribution of resources by institutions or systems. Tackling equity issues requires an understanding of the root causes of outcome disparities within our society.

Inclusion is an outcome to ensure those that are diverse actually feel and/or are welcomed. Inclusion outcomes are met when you, your institution, and your program are truly inviting to all. To the degree to which diverse individuals are able to participate fully in the decision-making processes and development opportunities within an organization or group.

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THE CRITICAL RACE TO DEI

- MORE THAN A THEORY

article link

by Cherrie L. Davis

July 14, 2021

I am an expert on DEI. I am not sure why it started, but once I embraced it, I learned more. As I learned more, I was better able to help leaders forge a path that includes diversity in considering the best ways to create equitable workplaces. These workplaces foster creativity and innovation.

The study of race in America, critical race theory or CRT, has been an academic discipline that looks at history and law. The topic made headlines last September when former president Trump denounced it, however the academic study began in the 1940’s as scholars began piecing together events and timeframes that led to inequalities in post-emancipation United States.

I wrote recently about DEI and the confusion it can create. CRT is an addition to the alphabet soup that is bitter and uncomfortable to talk about—but we must talk about it. Not talking about it is what has gotten us to where we are, and it isn’t hearts and flowers all the time. In order to get to where we’re going, we need to understand DEI, CRT, and, to be poetic, what they mean to me (the DEI expert).

DEI, a ReCap

Diversity, equity, and inclusion. In a nutshell it is seeing differences and accepting those differences—some will call it being woke. When we address our differences, we can ask the natural questions: what is your culture (African American, Caribbean, Mexican, Pacific Islander, Chinese, Cambodian, Honduran)? Inclusion is not lumping all cultures into large generic buckets and accepting the stereotypes about them, not all Asians are good with numbers and not every Cuban can do magic with pork.

CRT, which we will get to, focuses on race in America, but DEI looks at gender, ability, age, religion, and other differences among people. Learning the unique things about a person allows them to be who they are without trying to fit into a prescribed box that either doesn’t belong to them or that may be true of other people of their culture but is not true of them. When people can be fully who they are, they are able to produce their best work and isn’t that what we as leaders want to provide?

Getting Critical (in Theory)

Critical race theory takes an accurate look at American history. It studies painful parts of US history, primarily the ways black people, descendants of slaves as well as black immigrants, are treated in the US.

As you might imagine, that creates some tension within the race whose history has been predominant—Anglo Saxons aka white people. It also creates a necessity to unlearn what we’ve been taught and relearn things like Reconstruction, violence towards black people, and how practices like convict labor created new forms of slavery.

CRT got its push into the forefront of academia in the mid 1980’s when scholars began researching governmental policies and legal cases. The research led to a difficult realization in research-based spheres, a truth many of us knew for a long time—the law is not neutral and that there is more than one correct answer for legal cases. CRT looks at post-abolition systems in the United States, how they favor whites, and how seemingly good intentions changed to bend the arc of justice back to where it always was.

This challenge to the status quo opens the door for people of color to consider their status and work to improve their cultural value and social standing. The very idea is contentious. The truth, however, is that history is written by the victor. CRT is looking at US history to identify places where liberty and justice was not for all and to empower people to move forward to create the country of equality alluded to at the start of our nation.

Intersectionality—Big Word, Important Mission

The convergence of race in US history and embracing diversity is the place of another academic word: intersectionality. If diversity is so great and critical race theory is an integral piece of DEI—which we’ve agreed is leadership goals–then shouldn’t we encourage CRT? At the intersection of these 2 ideas is the hard work that needs to be done. CRT forces us to face our dark past and accept that our history is not the amalgam of people lifted from the jungles of Africa to come to the new land where their mistreatment was rewarded by freedom.

The biggest debates are happening in Board of Education meetings across the country. Parents want to prevent the ugly parts of history from being taught before their students can understand it or they simply do not want it taught at all. By the time we see it in our workplaces, how we got to this moment matters little. What matters is how we address it and what we do to move forward in our common humanity, providing inclusive and equitable workplaces for everyone (enter the words of your HR DEI statement here).

There is nothing new about DEI or CRT. When CRT became soundbites taken out of context, it became the critical focus of our divided political state. In truth, we have been working on the move forward since the mid 1980’s. Maybe, though, we have been trying to be too easy on ourselves. We have tried to do the work of DEI without looking at why we need it. CRT focuses on race, but the questions at the intersection of the two are the same: How have we historically treated people? Have we used laws to validate our action or inaction? Have we let what we’ve been taught lead our thoughts, right or wrong? Ouch. Are you more afraid of losing your power to gain equity? Or, do you have to work to overcome beliefs about your culture before you can even begin to begin to create your best work? Are you exhausted? I’m a DEI expert and I’m exhausted—but the work must go on.

This is where honest, uncomfortable conversations need to happen. They need to happen with you to prevent the kind of heated arguments that we are seeing in the news now in your breakrooms.

Shift Points:

• You know you. Consider what you think you may need to unlearn.

• Accepting our past in its entirety is the key to moving forward together.

• Everyone has overcome something. Be vulnerable enough to hear and to share with others.

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INTERSECTIONALITY: WHAT IS IT

AND WHY IT MATTERS

https://vpfo.ubc.ca/2021/03/intersectionality-what-is-it-and-why-it-matters/

MARCH 8, 2021

At UBC we believe excellence cannot be achieved without inclusion. But how we are included is shaped by how we present ourselves, the ways we are seen by others, the systems and norms of our campus, and how they all intersect. For the VPFO to meet our objectives around operational excellence, we each need to develop our understanding of people’s unique experiences, opportunities, and barriers.

What is intersectionality?

Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American civil rights advocate and professor at UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, talks about intersectional theory

Kimberlé Crenshaw is an American civil rights advocate and professor at both the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School. Kimberlé has created a way to think about our identities and how we experience the world called intersectionality.

Intersectionality is a framework that describes how our overlapping social identities relate to social structures of racism and oppression. Intersectionality merges many identity markers, including race, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, ethnicity, religion, disability, and more, to create a more truthful and complex identity.

For example, a queer black woman may experience the world on the basis of her sexuality, gender, and race — a unique experience based on how those identities intersect in her life.

Why is it important?

Intersectionality is directly tied to oppression. Oppression is the force that allows, through the power of norms and systems, the unjust treatment or control of people. Intersectionality shows us that social identities work on multiple levels, resulting in unique experiences, opportunities, and barriers for each person. Therefore, oppression cannot be reduced to only one part of an identity; each oppression is dependent on and shapes the other.

Understanding intersectionality is essential to combatting the interwoven prejudices people face in their daily lives.

What can I do?

By reflecting on our own identities, their intersections, and practice being mindful we can become better allies for marginalized groups or better able to articulate our own experience.

Click the image for a larger view

This wheel diagram, the Wheel of Power/Privilege, is a simplified way to reflect on the many intersecting identities and power structures that we all engage with. Consider how your social identities play into your privilege. What areas sound like you? What types of privilege aren’t on the wheel? How are others you work with represented on the wheel?

Learning about intersectionality and how it affects all of us, both in our work and personal lives, allow us to respectfully communicate with peers, and deepens our understanding of the ways in which diversity, equity, and inclusion are relevant to our community.

To learn more about intersectionality, you can watch this TEDx talk by Kimberlé Crenshaw or read this Intersectionality Report by Ontario Association of Interval & Transition Houses.

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Kristin Du Mez: How White Evangelicals Corrupted
a Faith and Fractured a Nation

Nov 2, 2021

Hollywood’s strong men icon, portrayed by actors like John Wayne and Mel Gibson, have coopted core biblical teachings such as loving one’s neighbors and enemies, adding a militant battle cry. Mainstream evangelical leaders preach a “mutually reinforcing vision of Christian masculinity – of patriarchy and submission, sex and power.” 

In her NYT best-seller, Jesus and John Wayne, Kristin Du Mez traces how a militant ideal of white, Christian manhood has come to pervade evangelical popular culture in America. She argues this has led to the hero worship of Donald Trump, who embodies the ideal of militant masculinity, protector and warrior.

Cambridge Forum welcomed Du Mez to talk about her book with historians Jon Butler and Jemar Tisby. This talk is part of the Cambridge Forum’s THE SEARCH FOR MEANING, a 3 part series looking at the benefits and failures of organized religion in the US.

GBH Forum Network ~ Free online lectures: Explore a world of ideas. 

See our complete archive here: http://forum-network.org

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A supporter of then-President Donald Trump prays outside the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in Washington.

An 'imposter Christianity' is threatening

American democracy

Analysis by John Blake, CNN

Sun July 24, 2022

(CNN)Three men, eyes closed and heads bowed, pray before a rough-hewn wooden cross. Another man wraps his arms around a massive Bible pressed against his chest like a shield. All throughout the crowd, people wave "Jesus Saves" banners and pump their fists toward the sky.

At first glance, these snapshots look like scenes from an outdoor church rally. But this event wasn't a revival; it was what some call a Christian revolt. These were photos of people who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, during an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The insurrection marked the first time many Americans realized the US is facing a burgeoning White Christian nationalist movement. This movement uses Christian language to cloak sexism and hostility to Black people and non-White immigrants in its quest to create a White Christian America.

A report from a team of clergy, scholars and advocates — sponsored by two groups that advocate for the separation of church and state — concluded that this ideology was used to "bolster, justify and intensify" the attack on the US Capitol.

Demonstrators pray outside the US Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021.

Much of the House January 6 committee's focus so far has been on right-wing extremist groups. But there are plenty of other Americans who have adopted teachings of the White Christian nationalists who stormed the Capitol — often without knowing it, scholars, historians, sociologists and clergy say.

White Christian nationalist beliefs have infiltrated the religious mainstream so thoroughly that virtually any conservative Christian pastor who tries to challenge its ideology risks their career, says Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of the New York Times bestseller, "Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation."

"These ideas are so widespread that any individual pastor or Christian leader who tries to turn the tide and say, 'Let's look again at Jesus and scripture,' are going to be tossed aside," she says.

The ideas are also insidious because many sound like expressions of Christian piety or harmless references to US history. But White Christian nationalists interpret these ideas in ways that are potentially violent and heretical. Their movement is not only anti-democratic, it contradicts the life and teachings of Jesus, some clergy, scholars and historians say.

Samuel Perry, a professor of religious studies at the University of Oklahoma who is authority on the ideology, calls it an "imposter Christianity."

Here are three key beliefs often tied to White Christian nationalism.

A belief that the US was founded as a Christian nation

One of the banners spotted at the January 6 insurrection was a replica of the American flag with the caption, "Jesus is My Savior, Trump is My President."

Erasing the line separating piety from politics is a key characteristic of White Christian nationalism. Many want to reduce or erase the separation of church and state, say those who study the movement.

One of the most popular beliefs among White Christian nationalists is that the US was founded as a Christian nation; the Founding Fathers were all orthodox, evangelical Christians; and God has chosen the US for a special role in history.

This painting chronicles lawmakers' signing of the Constitution of the United States in 1787.

These beliefs are growing among Christians, according to a survey last year by the Barna Group, a company that conducts surveys about faith and culture for communities of faith and nonprofits. The group found that an "increasing number of American Christians believe strongly" that the US is a Christian nation, has not oppressed minorities, and has been chosen by God to lead the world.

But the notion that the US was founded as a Christian nation is bad history and bad theology, says Philip Gorski, a sociologist at Yale University and co-author of "The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy."

"It's a half truth, a mythological version of American history," Gorski says.

Some Founding Fathers did view the founding of the nation through a Biblical lens, Gorski says. (Every state constitution contains a reference to God or the divine.)

But many did not. And virtually none of them could be classified as evangelical Christians. They were a collection of atheists, Unitarians, Deists, and liberal Protestants and other denominations.

A Trump supporter holds a Bible as he gathers with
others outside the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The Constitution also says nothing about God, the Bible or the Ten Commandments, Gorski says. And saying the US was founded as a Christian nation ignores the fact that much of its initial wealth was derived from slave labor and land stolen from Native Americans, he says.

For evidence that the United States was founded as a secular nation, look no further than the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, an agreement the US negotiated with a country in present-day Libya to end the practice of pirates attacking American ships. It was ratified unanimously by a Senate still half-filled with signers of the Constitution and declared, "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on Christian religion."

Does this mean that any White Christian who salutes the flag and says they love their country is a Christian nationalist? No, not at all, historians say. A White Christian who says they love America and its values and institutions is not the same thing as a White Christian nationalist, scholars say.

Gorski also notes that many devout Black Americans have exhibited a form of patriotism that does not degenerate into Christian nationalism.

American social reformer and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, circa 1880.

Gorski points to examples of the 19th century abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Both were devout Christians who expressed admiration for America and its founding documents. But their patriotism also meant that "they challenged the nation to live up to its highest principles, to become a place of freedom, equality, justice and inclusion," he says.

The patriotism of White Christian nationalists, on the other hand, is a form of racial tribalism, Gorski says.

"It's a 'My tribe. 'We [White people] were here first. This is our country, and we don't like people who are trying to change it or people who are different' form of nationalism," Gorski says.

A belief in a 'Warrior Christ'

Videos from the January 6 attack show a chaotic, tear-gas-soaked scene at the Capitol that looked more like a medieval battle. Insurrectionists punched police officers, used flagpoles as spears and smashed officers' faces against doors while a mob chanted, "Fight for Trump!" The attack left five people dead and nearly 140 law enforcement officers injured.

The incongruity of people carrying "Jesus Saves" signs while joining a mob whose members are pummeling police officers leads to an obvious question: How can White Christian nationalists who claim to follow Jesus, the "Prince of Peace" who renounced violence in the Gospels, support a violent insurrection?

A protester holds up a Bible amid the crowd storming the
US Capitol Rotunda in Washington on January 6, 2021.

That's because they follow a different Jesus than the one depicted in the Gospels, says Du Mez, who is also a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University — a Christian school — in Michigan. They follow the Jesus depicted in the Book of Revelation, the warrior with eyes like "flames of fire" and "a robe dipped in blood" who led the armies of heaven on white horses in a final, triumphant battle against the forces of the antichrist.

White Christian nationalists have refashioned Jesus into a kick-butt savior who is willing to smite enemies to restore America to a Christian nation by force, if necessary, Du Mez and others say.

While warlike language like putting on "the full armor of God" has long been common in Christian sermons and hymns, it has largely been interpreted as metaphorical. But many White Christian nationalists take that language literally.

Read more from John Blake:

• They grew up surrounded by racism. But early on they chose a different path

• This traffic stop between a Black man and a White state trooper began with fear. It ended with a surprising act of kindness

• The evangelical church faces a 'state of emergency' over the pandemic and politics, Andy Stanley says

• White supremacy, with a tan

• They lost their loved ones to Covid. Then they heard from them again

That was clear on January 6. Some insurrectionists wore caps emblazoned with "God, Guns, Trump" and chanted that the blood of Jesus was washing Congress clean. One wrote "In God We Trust" on a set of gallows erected at the Capitol.

"They want the warrior Christ who wields a bloody sword and defeats his enemies," says Du Mez. "They want to battle with that Jesus. That Jesus brings peace, but only after he slays his enemies."

And that Jesus sanctions the use of righteous violence if a government opposes God, she says.

"If you deem somebody in power to be working against the goals of a Christian America, then you should not submit to that authority and you should displace that authority," she says. "Because the stakes are so high, the ends justify the means."

Supporters of then-President Donald Trump gather on the Ellipse
near the White House to hear him speak on January 6, 2021.

That ends-justify-the means approach is a key part of White Christian nationalism, says Du Mez. It's why so many rallied behind former President Trump on January 6. She says he embodies a "militant White masculinity" that condones callous displays of power and appeals to Christian nationalists.

But with few exceptions, White Christian nationalists do not accept this "militant masculinity" when exhibited by Black, Middle Eastern and Latino men, Du Mez writes in "Jesus and John Wayne." Aggression by people of color "is seen as a threat to the stability of home and nation," she writes.

Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson echoed this double standard last year when he said on a radio talk show that he never really felt threatened by the mostly White mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6.

"Now, had ... President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned," Johnson said.

Johnson later elaborated, saying "there was nothing racial about my comments-- nothing whatsoever."

This embrace of a warrior Christ has shaped some White evangelicals' attitudes on issues ranging from political violence to gun safety laws.

A survey last year by the Public Religion Research Institute revealed that of all respondents, White evangelicals were the religious group most likely to agree with the statement, "true American patriots might have to resort to violence in order to save the country."

There are also some White Christian nationalists who believe the Second Amendment was handed down by God.

Gun rights activists carrying semi-automatic firearms pose for a photograph
in the state Capitol Building on January 31, 2020, in Frankfort, Kentucky.

Samuel Perry, co-author of "Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States," wrote in a recent essay that among Americans surveyed who believe "The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation," over two-thirds rejected the idea that the federal government should enact stricter gun laws."

"The more you line up with Christian nationalism, the less likely you are to support gun control," wrote Perry. "Guns are practically an element of worship in the church of white Christian nationalism."

A belief there's such a person as a 'real American'

In the 2008 presidential election, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin introduced a new term to the political discourse. She talked about "the real America" and the "pro-America areas of this great nation." Since then, many conservative political candidates have used the term "real Americans" to draw contrasts between their supporters and their opposition.

Such language has been co-opted into a worldview held by many White Christian nationalists: The nation is divided between "real Americans" and other citizens who don't deserve the same rights, experts on White Christian nationalism say.

Republican vice presidential nominee Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin speaks
at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Gorski, author of "The Flag and the Cross," says he found in his research a strong correlation between White Christian nationalism and support for gerrymandering—an electoral process where politicians manipulate district lines to favor one party or, some critics say, race over another. He found similar support among White Christian nationalists for the Electoral College, which gives disproportionate political power to many rural, largely White areas of the country.

When White Christian nationalists claim an election was stolen, they are reflecting the belief that some votes don't count, he says.

"It's the idea that we are the people, and our vote should count, and you're not the people, and... you don't really deserve to have a voice," Gorski says. "It doesn't matter what the voting machines say, because we know that all real Americans voted for Donald Trump."

Why White Christian nationalism is a threat to democracy

Those who want the US to become a Christian nation face a huge obstacle: Most Americans don't subscribe to their vision of America.

The mainstreaming of White Christian nationalism comes as a growing number of Americans are rejecting organized religion. For the first time in the US last year, membership in communities of worship fell below 50%. Belief in God is at an all-time low, according to a recent Gallup poll.

A parishioner bows his head to pray while celebrating midnight Mass
at St. Patrick's Cathedral on December 24, 2021, in New York City.

Add to that the country's growing racial and religious diversity. People who identify as White alone declined for the first time since the census began in 1790, and the majority of Americans under 18 are now people of color.

On the surface, White Christian nationalism should not be on the ascent in America.

So White Christian nationalists look for salvation from two sources.

One is the emboldened conservative majority on the US Supreme Court, where recent decisions overturning Roe vs. Wade and protecting school prayer offer them hope.

Critics, on the other hand, say the high court is eroding the separation of church and state.

Not all Christians who support the high court's overturning of Roe v. Wade and its school prayer decision are White nationalists. For example, plenty of Roman Catholics of all races support racial justice yet also backed the overturning of Roe.

But White Christian nationalists are inspired by those decisions because one of their central goals is to erase the separation of church and state in the US.

A recent study concluded that five of the justices on the Supreme Court are the "most pro-religion since at least World War II," and that the six conservative justices are "all Christian, mostly Catholic," and "religiously devout."

The sun sets in front of the Supreme Court on June 28, 2022, in Washington.
A Supreme Court decision last month overturned the landmark
 Roe v. Wade ruling and erased a federal right to an abortion.

While some Americans fear the dangers of one-party rule, others like Pamela Paul, a columnist, warn of the Supreme Court instituting one-religion rule.

"With their brand of religious dogma losing its purchase, they're imposing it on the country themselves," she wrote in a recent New York Times editorial.

Gorski, the historian, says White Christian nationalism represents a grave threat to democracy because it defines "we the people" in a way that excludes many Americans.

"The United States cannot be both a truly multiracial democracy -- a people of people and a nation of nations -- and a white Christian nation at the same time," Gorski wrote in "The Flag and the Cross." "This is why white Christian nationalism has become a serious threat to American democracy, perhaps the most serious threat it now faces."

The other source of hope for White Christian nationalists is a former occupant of the White House. Their devotion to him is illustrated by one of most striking images from the January 6 insurrection: A sign depicting a Nordic-looking Jesus wearing a red "Make America Great Again" hat.

If Trump returns to the presidency, some White Christian nationalists may interpret his political resurrection as divine intervention. His support among White evangelicals increased from 2016 to 2020.

And what the men carrying wooden crosses among the Capitol mob couldn't achieve on January 6, they might yet accomplish in 2024.

Smithstonian - Race in America

RACE IN AMERICA

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM | June 4, 2020, 11:47 a.m.

In a short essay published earlier this week, Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch wrote that the recent killing in Minnesota of George Floyd has forced the country to “confront the reality that, despite gains made in the past 50 years, we are still a nation riven by inequality and racial division.”

Amid escalating clashes between protesters and police, discussing race—from the inequity embedded in American institutions to the United States’ long, painful history of anti-black violence—is an essential step in sparking meaningful societal change. To support those struggling to begin these difficult conversations, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture recently launched a “Talking About Race” portal featuring “tools and guidance” for educators, parents, caregivers and other people committed to equity.

“Talking About Race” joins a vast trove of resources from the Smithsonian Institution dedicated to understanding what Bunch describes as America’s “tortured racial past.” From Smithsonian magazine articles on slavery’s Trail of Tears and the disturbing resilience of scientific racism to the National Museum of American History’s collection of Black History Month resources for educators and a Sidedoor podcast on the Tulsa Race Massacre, these 158 resources are designed to foster an equal society, encourage commitment to unbiased choices and promote antiracism in all aspects of life. Listings are bolded and organized by category.

Historical Context

Between 1525 and 1866, 12.5 million people were kidnapped from Africa and sent to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade. Only 10.7 million survived the harrowing two month journey. Comprehending the sheer scale of this forced migration—and slavery’s subsequent spread across the country via interregional trade—can be a daunting task, but as historian Leslie Harris told Smithsonian's Amy Crawford earlier this year, framing “these big concepts in terms of individual lives … can [help you] better understand what these things mean.”

Shackles used in the transatlantic slave trade (NMAAHC)

Take, for instance, the story of John Casor. Originally an indentured servant of African descent, Casor lost a 1654 or 1655 court case convened to determine whether his contract had lapsed. He became the first individual declared a slave for life in the United States. Manuel Vidau, a Yoruba man who was captured and sold to traders some 200 years after Casor’s enslavement, later shared an account of his life with the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which documented his remarkable story—after a decade of enslavement in Cuba, he purchased a share in a lottery ticket and won enough money to buy his freedom—in records now available on the digital database “Freedom Narratives.” (A separate, similarly document-based online resource emphasizes individuals described in fugitive slave ads, which historian Joshua Rothman describes as “sort of a little biography” providing insights on their subjects’ appearance and attire.)

Finally, consider the life of Matilda McCrear, the last known survivor of the transatlantic slave trade. Kidnapped from West Africa and brought to the U.S. on the Clotilda, she arrived in Mobile, Alabama, in July 1860—more than 50 years after Congress had outlawed the import of enslaved labor. McCrear, who died in 1940 at the age of 81 or 82, “displayed a determined, even defiant streak” in her later life, wrote Brigit Katz earlier this year. She refused to use her former owner’s last name, wore her hair in traditional Yoruba style and had a decades-long relationship with a white German man.

Matilda McCrear died in 1940 at the age

of 81 or 82. (Newcastle University)

How American society remembers and teaches the horrors of slavery is crucial. But as recent studies have shown, many textbooks offer a sanitized view of this history, focusing solely on “positive” stories about black leaders like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Prior to 2018, Texas schools even taught that states’ rights and sectionalism—not slavery—were the main causes of the Civil War. And, in Confederate memorials across the country, writes historian Kevin M. Levin, enslaved individuals are often falsely portrayed as loyal slaves.

Accurately representing slavery might require an updated vocabulary, argued historian Michael Landis in 2015: Outdated “[t]erms like ‘compromise’ or ‘plantation’ served either to reassure worried Americans in a Cold War world, or uphold a white supremacist, sexist interpretation of the past.” Rather than referring to the Compromise of 1850, call it the Appeasement of 1850—a term that better describes “the uneven nature of the agreement,” according to Landis. Smithsonian scholar Christopher Wilson wrote, too, that widespread framing of the Civil War as a battle between equal entities lends legitimacy to the Confederacy, which was not a nation in its own right, but an “illegitimate rebellion and unrecognized political entity.” A 2018 Smithsonian magazine investigation found that the literal costs of the Confederacy are immense: In the decade prior, American taxpayers contributed $40 million to the maintenance of Confederate monuments and heritage organizations.

Carte-de-visite of women and children in a cotton field, c. 1860s (NMAAHC)

To better understand the immense brutality ingrained in enslaved individuals’ everyday lives, read up on Louisiana’s Whitney Plantation Museum, which acts as “part reminder of the scars of institutional bondage, part mausoleum for dozens of enslaved people who worked (and died) in [its] sugar fields, … [and] monument to the terror of slavery,” as Jared Keller observed in 2016. Visitors begin their tour in a historic church populated by clay sculptures of children who died on the plantation’s grounds, then move on to a series of granite slabs engraved with hundreds of enslaved African Americans’ names. Scattered throughout the experience are stories of the violence inflicted by overseers.

The Whitney Plantation Museum is at the forefront of a vanguard of historical sites working to confront their racist pasts. In recent years, exhibitions, oral history projects and other initiatives have highlighted the enslaved people whose labor powered such landmarks as Mount Vernon, the White House and Monticello. At the same time, historians are increasingly calling attention to major historical figures’ own slave-holding legacies: From Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, William Clark of Lewis and Clark, Francis Scott Key, and other Founding Fathers, many American icons were complicit in upholding the institution of slavery. Washington, Jefferson, James Madison and Aaron Burr, among others, sexually abused enslaved females working in their households and had oft-overlooked biracial families.

A stereograph of the slave market in Atlanta, Georgia (NMAAHC)

Though Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, the decree took two-and-a-half years to fully enact. June 19, 1865—the day Union Gen. Gordon Granger informed the enslaved individuals of Galveston, Texas, that they were officially free—is now known as Juneteenth: America’s “second independence day,” according to NMAAHC. Initially celebrated mainly in Texas, Juneteenth spread across the country as African Americans fled the South in what is now called the Great Migration.

At the onset of that mass movement in 1916, 90 percent of African Americans still lived in the South, where they were “held captive by the virtual slavery of sharecropping and debt peonage and isolated from the rest of the country,” as Isabel Wilkerson wrote in 2016. (Sharecropping, a system in which formerly enslaved people became tenant farmers and lived in “converted” slave cabins, was the impetus for the 1919 Elaine Massacre, which found white soldiers collaborating with local vigilantes to kill at least 200 sharecroppers who dared to criticize their low wages.) By the time the Great Migration—famously chronicled by artist Jacob Lawrence—ended in the 1970s, 47 percent of African Americans called the northern and western United States home.

Conditions outside the Deep South were more favorable than those within the region, but the “hostility and hierarchies that fed the Southern caste system” remained major obstacles for black migrants in all areas of the country, according to Wilkerson. Low-paying jobs, redlining, restrictive housing covenants and rampant discrimination limited opportunities, creating inequality that would eventually give rise to the civil rights movement.

“The Great Migration was the first big step that the nation’s servant class ever took without asking,” Wilkerson explained. “ … It was about agency for a people who had been denied it, who had geography as the only tool at their disposal. It was an expression of faith, despite the terrors they had survived, that the country whose wealth had been created by their ancestors’ unpaid labor might do right by them.”

Systemic Inequality

Racial, economic and educational disparities are deeply entrenched in U.S. institutions. Though the Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal,” American democracy has historically—and often violently—excluded certain groups. “Democracy means everybody can participate, it means you are sharing power with people you don’t know, don’t understand, might not even like,” said National Museum of American History curator Harry Rubenstein in 2017. “That’s the bargain. And some people over time have felt very threatened by that notion.”

Instances of inequality range from the obvious to less overtly discriminatory policies and belief systems. Historical examples of the former include poll taxes that effectively disenfranchised African American voters; the marginalization of African American soldiers who fought in World War I and World War II but were treated like second-class citizens at home; black innovators who were barred from filing patents for their inventions; white medical professionals’ exploitation of black women’s bodies (see Henrietta Lacks and J. Marion Sims); Richard and Mildred Loving’s decade-long fight to legalize interracial marriage; the segregated nature of travel in the Jim Crow era; the government-mandated segregation of American cities; and segregation in schools.

An undated sterograph of black soldiers returning from

France after fighting in World War I (NMAAHC)

Among the most heartbreaking examples of structural racism’s subtle effects are accounts shared by black children. In the late 1970s, when Lebert F. Lester II was 8 or 9 years old, he started building a sand castle during a trip to the Connecticut shore. A young white girl joined him but was quickly taken away by her father. Lester recalled the girl returning, only to ask him, “Why don’t [you] just go in the water and wash it off?” Lester says., “I was so confused—I only figured out later she meant my complexion.” Two decades earlier, in 1957, 15-year-old Minnijean Brown had arrived at Little Rock Central High School with high hopes of “making friends, going to dances and singing in the chorus.” Instead, she and the rest of the Little Rock Nine—a group of black students selected to attend the formerly all-white academy after Brown v. Board of Education desegregated public schools—were subjected to daily verbal and physical assaults. Around the same time, photographer John G. Zimmerman captured snapshots of racial politics in the South that included comparisons of black families waiting in long lines for polio inoculations as white children received speedy treatment.

Seven of the Little Rock Nine, including Melba Pattillo Beals, Carlotta Walls LaNier,

Jefferson Thomas, Elizabeth Eckford, Thelma Mothershed-Wair, Terrence Roberts

and Gloria Ray Karlmark, meet at the home of Daisy Bates. (NMAAHC, gift of

Elmer J. Whiting, III ©Gertrude Samuels)

In 1968, the Kerner Commission, a group convened by President Lyndon Johnson, found that white racism, not black anger, was the impetus for the widespread civil unrest sweeping the nation. As Alice George wrote in 2018, the commission’s report suggested that “[b]ad policing practices, a flawed justice system, unscrupulous consumer credit practices, poor or inadequate housing, high unemployment, voter suppression and other culturally embedded forms of racial discrimination all converged to propel violent upheaval.” Few listened to the findings, let alone its suggestion of aggressive government spending aimed at leveling the playing field. Instead, the country embraced a different cause: space travel. The day after the 1969 moon landing, the leading black paper the New York Amsterdam News ran a story stating, “Yesterday, the moon. Tomorrow, maybe us.”

Fifty years after the Kerner Report’s release, a separate study assessed how much had changed; it concluded that conditions had actually worsened. In 2017, black unemployment was higher than in 1968, as was the rate of incarcerated individuals who were black. The wealth gap had also increased substantially, with the median white family having ten times more wealth than the median black family. “We are resegregating our cities and our schools, condemning millions of kids to inferior education and taking away their real possibility of getting out of poverty,” said Fred Harris, the last surviving member of the Kerner Commission, following the 2018 study’s release.

The Kerner Commission confirmed that nervous police and National Guardsmen

sometimes fired their weapons recklessly after hearing gunshots. Above, police

patrol the streets during the 1967 Newark Riots. (© Bud Lee, Collection of the

Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture)

Today, scientific racism—grounded in such faulty practices as eugenics and the treatment of race “as a crude proxy for myriad social and environmental factors,” writes Ramin Skibba—persists despite overwhelming evidence that race has only social, not biological, meaning. Black scholars including Mamie Phipps Clark, a psychologist whose research on racial identity in children helped end segregation in schools, and Rebecca J. Cole, a 19th-century physician and advocate who challenged the idea that black communities were destined for death and disease, have helped overturn some of these biases. But a 2015 survey found that 48 percent of black and Latina women scientists, respectively, still report being mistaken for custodial or administrative staff. Even artificial intelligence exhibits racial biases, many of which are introduced by lab staff and crowdsourced workers who program their own conscious and unconscious opinions into algorithms.

Anti-Black Violence

In addition to enduring centuries of enslavement, exploitation and inequality, African Americans have long been the targets of racially charged physical violence. Per the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative, more than 4,400 lynchings—mob killings undertaken without legal authority—took place in the U.S. between the end of Reconstruction and World War II.

Incredibly, the Senate only passed legislation declaring lynching a federal crime in 2018. Between 1918 and the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act’s eventual passage, more than 200 anti-lynching bills failed to make it through Congress. (Earlier this week, Sen. Rand Paul said he would hold up a separate, similarly intentioned bill over fears that its definition of lynching was too broad. The House passed the bill in a 410-to-4 vote this February.) Also in 2018, the Equal Justice Initiative opened the nation’s first monument to African American lynching victims. The six-acre memorial site stands alongside a museum dedicated to tracing the nation’s history of racial bias and persecution from slavery to the present.

A house left smoldering after racial unrest broke out in Springfield,

Illinois, in 1908 (Sangamon Valley Collection, Lincoln Library)

One of the earliest instances of Reconstruction-era racial violence took place in Opelousas, Louisiana, in September 1868. Two months ahead of the presidential election, Southern white Democrats started terrorizing Republican opponents who appeared poised to secure victory at the polls. On September 28, a group of men attacked 18-year-old schoolteacher Emerson Bentley, who had already attracted ire for teaching African American students, after he published an account of local Democrats’ intimidation of Republicans. Bentley escaped with his life, but 27 of the 29 African Americans who arrived on the scene to help him were summarily executed. Over the next two weeks, vigilante terror led to the deaths of some 250 people, the majority of whom were black.

In April 1873, another spate of violence rocked Louisiana. The Colfax Massacre, described by historian Eric Foner as the “bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction era,” unfolded under similar circumstances as Opelousas, with tensions between Democrats and Republicans culminating in the deaths of between 60 and 150 African Americans, as well as three white men.

Between the turn of the 20th century and the 1920s, multiple massacres broke out in response to false allegations that young black men had raped or otherwise assaulted white women. In August 1908, a mob terrorized African American neighborhoods across Springfield, Illinois, vandalizing black-owned businesses, setting fire to the homes of black residents, beating those unable to flee and lynching at least two people. Local authorities, argues historian Roberta Senechal, were “ineffectual at best, complicit at worst.”

During the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, mobs destroyed almost 40 blocks
of a neighborhood known as "Black Wall Street." (Library of Congress)

False accusations also sparked a July 1919 race riot in Washington, D.C. and the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, which was most recently dramatized in the HBO series “Watchmen.” As African American History Museum curator Paul Gardullo tells Smithsonian, tensions related to Tulsa’s economy underpinned the violence: Forced to settle on what was thought to be worthless land, African Americans and Native Americans struck oil and proceeded to transform the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa into a prosperous community known as “Black Wall Street.” According to Gardullo, “It was the frustration of poor whites not knowing what to do with a successful black community, and in coalition with the city government [they] were given permission to do what they did.”

Over the course of two days in spring 1921, the Tulsa Race Massacre claimed the lives of an estimated 300 black Tulsans and displaced another 10,000. Mobs burned down at least 1,256 residences, churches, schools and businesses and destroyed almost 40 blocks of Greenwood. As the Sidedoor episode “Confronting the Past” notes, “No one knows how many people died, no one was ever convicted, and no one really talked about it nearly a century later.”

Economic injustice also led to the East St. Louis Race War of 1917. This labor dispute-turned-deadly found “people’s houses being set ablaze, … people being shot when they tried to flee, some trying to swim to the other side of the Mississippi while being shot at by white mobs with rifles, others being dragged out of street cars and beaten and hanged from street lamps,” recalled Dhati Kennedy, the son of a survivor who witnessed the devastation firsthand. Official counts place the death toll at 39 black and 9 white individuals, but locals argue that the real toll was closer to 100.

A watershed moment for the burgeoning civil rights movement was the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till. Accused of whistling at a white woman while visiting family members in Mississippi, he was kidnapped, tortured and killed. Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, decided to give her son an open-casket funeral, forcing the world to confront the image of his disfigured, decomposing body. (Visuals, including photographs, movies, television clips and artwork, played a key role in advancing the movement.) The two white men responsible for Till’s murder were acquitted by an all-white jury. A marker at the site where the teenager’s body was recovered has been vandalized at least three times since its placement in 2007.

Family members grieving at Emmett Till's funeral (NMAAHC)

The form of anti-black violence with the most striking parallels to contemporary conversations is police brutality. As Katie Nodjimbadem reported in 2017, a regional crime survey of late 1920s Chicago and Cook County, Illinois, found that while African Americans constituted just 5 percent of the area’s population, they made up 30 percent of the victims of police killings. Civil rights protests exacerbated tensions between African Americans and police, with events like the Orangeburg Massacre of 1968, in which law enforcement officers shot and killed three student activists at South Carolina State College, and the Glenville shootout, which left three police officers, three black nationalists and one civilian dead, fostering mistrust between the two groups.

Today, this legacy is exemplified by broken windows policing, a controversial approach that encourages racial profiling and targets African American and Latino communities. “What we see is a continuation of an unequal relationship that has been exacerbated, made worse if you will, by the militarization and the increase in fire power of police forces around the country,” William Pretzer, senior curator at NMAAHC, told Smithsonian in 2017.

Police Disperse Marchers with Tear Gas by unidentified photographer, 1966

(Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History

and Culture, Gift of Howard Greenberg Gallery)

Protest

The history of protest and revolt in the United States is inextricably linked with the racial violence detailed above.

Prior to the Civil War, enslaved individuals rarely revolted outright. Nat Turner, whose 1831 insurrection ended in his execution, was one of the rare exceptions. A fervent Christian, he drew inspiration from the Bible. His personal copy, now housed in the collections of the African American History Museum, represented the “possibility of something else for himself and for those around him,” curator Mary Ellis told Smithsonian’s Victoria Dawson in 2016.

Other enslaved African Americans practiced less risky forms of resistance, including working slowly, breaking tools and setting objects on fire. “Slave rebellions, though few and small in size in America, were invariably bloody,” wrote Dawson. “Indeed, death was all but certain.”

One of the few successful uprisings of the period was the Creole Rebellion. In the fall of 1841, 128 enslaved African Americans traveling aboard The Creole mutinied against its crew, forcing their former captors to sail the brig to the British West Indies, where slavery was abolished and they could gain immediate freedom.

An April 1712 revolt found enslaved New Yorkers setting fire to white-owned buildings and firing on slaveholders. Quickly outnumbered, the group fled but was tracked to a nearby swamp; though several members were spared, the majority were publicly executed, and in the years following the uprising, the city enacted laws limiting enslaved individuals’ already scant freedom. In 1811, meanwhile, more than 500 African Americans marched on New Orleans while chanting “Freedom or Death.” Though the German Coast uprising was brutally suppressed, historian Daniel Rasmussen argues that it “had been much larger—and come much closer to succeeding—than the planters and American officials let on.”

The lasting legacy of the Greensboro Four (above from left: David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Jibreel Khazan and Joseph McNeil) was how the courageous moment grew

to a revolutionary movement. (Wikimedia Commons)

Some 150 years after what Rasmussen deems America’s “largest slave revolt,” the civil rights movement ushered in a different kind of protest. In 1955, police arrested Rosa Parks for refusing to yield her bus seat to a white passenger (“I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment that I couldn’t take it any more,” she later wrote). The ensuing Montgomery bus boycott, in which black passengers refused to ride public transit until officials met their demands, led the Supreme Court to rule segregated buses unconstitutional. Five years later, the Greensboro Four similarly took a stand, ironically by staging a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter. As Christopher Wilson wrote ahead of the 60th anniversary of the event, “What made Greensboro different [from other sit-ins] was how it grew from a courageous moment to a revolutionary movement.”

During the 1950s and ’60s, civil rights leaders adopted varying approaches to protest: Malcolm X, a staunch proponent of black nationalism who called for equality by “any means necessary,” “made tangible the anger and frustration of African Americans who were simply catching hell,” according to journalist Allison Keyes. He repeated the same argument “over and over again,” wrote academic and activist Cornel West in 2015: “What do you think you would do after 400 years of slavery and Jim Crow and lynching? Do you think you would respond nonviolently? What’s your history like? Let’s look at how you have responded when you were oppressed. George Washington—revolutionary guerrilla fighter!’”

Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X wait for a press conference on

March 26, 1964. (Photo by Universal History Archive / Getty Images)

Martin Luther King Jr. famously advocated for nonviolent protest, albeit not in the form that many think. As biographer Taylor Branch told Smithsonian in 2015, King’s understanding of nonviolence was more complex than is commonly argued. Unlike Mahatma Gandhi’s “passive resistance,” King believed resistance “depended on being active, using demonstrations, direct actions, to ‘amplify the message’ of the protest they were making,” according to Ron Rosenbaum. In the activist’s own words, “[A] riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear?… It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. ”

Another key player in the civil rights movement, the militant Black Panther Party, celebrated black power and operated under a philosophy of “demands and aspirations.” The group’s Ten-Point Program called for an “immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people,” as well as more controversial measures like freeing all black prisoners and exempting black men from military service. Per NMAAHC, black power “emphasized black self-reliance and self-determination more than integration,” calling for the creation of separate African American political and cultural organizations. In doing so, the movement ensured that its proponents would attract the unwelcome attention of the FBI and other government agencies.

Peaceful protestors march down Constitution Avenue and the National Mall on August 28, 1963. (Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of James H. Wallace Jr, © Jim Wallace)

Many of the protests now viewed as emblematic of the fight for racial justice took place in the 1960s. On August 28, 1963, more than 250,000 people gathered in D.C. for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Ahead of the 50th anniversary of the march, activists who attended the event detailed the experience for a Smithsonian oral history: Entertainer Harry Belafonte observed, “We had to seize the opportunity and make our voices heard. Make those who are comfortable with our oppression—make them uncomfortable—Dr. King said that was the purpose of this mission,” while Representative John Lewis recalled, “Looking toward Union Station, we saw a sea of humanity; hundreds, thousands of people. … People literally pushed us, carried us all the way, until we reached the Washington Monument and then we walked on to the Lincoln Memorial..”

Two years after the March on Washington, King and other activists organized a march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery. Later called the Selma March, the protest was dramatized in a 2014 film starring David Oyelowo as MLK. (Reflecting on Selma, Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch, then-director of NMAAHC, deemed it a “remarkable film” that “does not privilege the white perspective … [or] use the movement as a convenient backdrop for a conventional story.”)

Organized in response to the manifest obstacles black individuals faced when attempting to vote, the Selma March actually consisted of three separate protests. The first of these, held on March 7, 1965, ended in a tragedy now known as Bloody Sunday. As peaceful protesters gathered on the Edmund Pettus Bridge—named for a Confederate general and local Ku Klux Klan leader—law enforcement officers attacked them with tear gas and clubs. One week later, President Lyndon B. Johnson offered the Selma protesters his support and introduced legislation aimed at expanding voting rights. During the third and final march, organized in the aftermath of Johnson’s announcement, tens of thousands of protesters (protected by the National Guard and personally led by King) converged on Montgomery. Along the way, interior designer Carl Benkert used a hidden reel-to-reel tape recorder to document the sounds—and specifically songs—of the event.

Civil rights leaders stand with protesters at the 1963
March on Washington.  (U.S. Archives)

The protests of the early and mid-1960s culminated in the widespread unrest of 1967 and 1968. For five days in July 1967, riots on a scale unseen since 1863 rocked the city of Detroit: As Lorraine Boissoneault writes, “Looters prowled the streets, arsonists set buildings on fire, civilian snipers took position from rooftops and police shot and arrested citizens indiscriminately.” Systemic injustice in such areas as housing, jobs and education contributed to the uprising, but police brutality was the driving factor behind the violence. By the end of the riots, 43 people were dead. Hundreds sustained injuries, and more than 7,000 were arrested.

The Detroit riots of 1967 prefaced the seismic changes of 1968. As Matthew Twombly wrote in 2018, movements including the Vietnam War, the Cold War, civil rights, human rights and youth culture “exploded with force in 1968,” triggering aftershocks that would resonate both in America and abroad for decades to come.

On February 1, black sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker died in a gruesome accident involving a malfunctioning garbage truck. Their deaths, compounded by Mayor Henry Loeb’s refusal to negotiate with labor representatives, led to the outbreak of the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike—an event remembered both “as an example of powerless African Americans standing up for themselves” and as the backdrop to King’s April 4 assassination.

Though King is lionized today, he was highly unpopular at the time of his death. According to a Harris Poll conducted in early 1968, nearly 75 percent of Americans disapproved of the civil rights leader, who had become increasingly vocal in his criticism of the Vietnam War and economic inequity. Despite the public’s seeming ambivalence toward King—and his family’s calls for nonviolence—his murder sparked violent protests across the country. In all, the Holy Week Uprisings spread to nearly 200 cities, leaving 3,500 people injured and 43 dead. Roughly 27,000 protesters were arrested, and 54 of the cities involved sustained more than $100,000 in property damage.

In May 1968, protesters constructed “Resurrection City,” a temporary settlement

made up of 3,000 wooden tents. (Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum

of African American History and Culture, Gift of Abigail Wiebenson & sons,

John, Derek & Sam in honor of John Wiebenson)

In May, thousands flocked to Washington, D.C. for a protest King had planned prior to his death. Called the Poor People’s Campaign, the event united racial groups from all quarters of America in a call for economic justice. Attendees constructed “Resurrection City,” a temporary settlement made up of 3,000 wooden tents, and camped out on the National Mall for 42 days.

“While we were all in a kind of depressed state about the assassinations of King and RFK, we were trying to keep our spirits up, and keep focused on King’s ideals of humanitarian issues, the elimination of poverty and freedom,” protester Lenneal Henderson told Smithsonian in 2018. “It was exciting to be part of something that potentially, at least, could make a difference in the lives of so many people who were in poverty around the country.”

Racial unrest persisted throughout the year, with uprisings on the Fourth of July, a protest at the Summer Olympic Games, and massacres at Orangeburg and Glenville testifying to the tumultuous state of the nation.

The Black Lives Matter marches organized in response to the killings of George Floyd, Philando Castile, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and other victims of anti-black violence share many parallels with protests of the past.

Protesters demonstrate on June 2, 2020, during a Black Lives Matter

protest in New York City. (Photo by Johannes Eisele / AFP via Getty Images)

Football player Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the national anthem—and the unmitigated outrage it sparked—bears similarities to the story of boxer Muhammad Ali, historian Jonathan Eig told Smithsonian in 2017: “It’s been eerie to watch it, that we’re still having these debates that black athletes should be expected to shut their mouths and perform for us,” he said. “That’s what people told Ali 50 years ago.”

Other aspects of modern protest draw directly on uprisings of earlier eras. In 2016, for instance, artist Dread Scott updated an anti-lynching poster used by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the 1920s and ’30s to read “A Black Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday.” (Scott added the words “by police.”)

Though the civil rights movement is often viewed as the result of a cohesive “grand plan” or “manifestation of the vision of the few leaders whose names we know,” the American History Museum’s Christopher Wilson argues that “the truth is there wasn’t one, there were many and they were often competitive.”

Meaningful change required a whirlwind of revolution, adds Wilson, “but also the slow legal march. It took boycotts, petitions, news coverage, civil disobedience, marches, lawsuits, shrewd political maneuvering, fundraising, and even the violent terror campaign of the movement’s opponents—all going on [at] the same time.”

Intersectionality

In layman’s terms, intersectionality refers to the multifaceted discrimination experienced by individuals who belong to multiple minority groups. As theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw explains in a video published by NMAAHC, these classifications run the gamut from race to gender, gender identity, class, sexuality and disability. A black woman who identifies as a lesbian, for instance, may face prejudice based on her race, gender or sexuality.

Crenshaw, who coined the term intersectionality in 1989, explains the concept best: “Consider an intersection made up of many roads,” she says in the video. “The roads are the structures of race, gender, gender identity, class, sexuality, disability. And the traffic running through those roads are the practices and policies that discriminate against people. Now if an accident happens, it can be caused by cars traveling in any number of directions, and sometimes, from all of them. So if a black woman is harmed because she is in an intersection, her injury could result from discrimination from any or all directions.”

Understanding intersectionality is essential for teasing out the relationships between movements including civil rights, LGBTQ rights, suffrage and feminism. Consider the contributions of black transgender activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, who played pivotal roles in the Stonewall Uprising; gay civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, who was only posthumously pardoned this year for having consensual sex with men; the “rank and file” women of the Black Panther Party; and African American suffragists such as Mary Church Terrell and Nannie Helen Burroughs.

All of these individuals fought discrimination on multiple levels: As noted in “Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence,” a 2019 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, leading suffrage organizations initially excluded black suffragists from their ranks, driving the emergence of separate suffrage movements and, eventually, black feminists grounded in the inseparable experiences of racism, sexism and classism.

A photo taken at a Free Huey Newton Rally in 1968 with five of the six women

identifiable—Delores Henderson, Joyce Lee, Mary Ann Carlton, Joyce Means and

Paula Hill—provides testament to those who actualized the daily operations of the

Black Panther Party. (NMAAHC, gift of the Pirkle Jones Foundation, ©2011

Pirkle Jones Foundation)

Allyship and Education

Individuals striving to become better allies by educating themselves and taking decisive action have an array of options for getting started. Begin with NMAAHC’s “Talking About Race” portal, which features sections on being antiracist, whiteness, bias, social identities and systems of oppression, self-care, race and racial identity, the historical foundations of race, and community building. An additional 139 items—from a lecture on the history of racism in America to a handout on white supremacy culture and an article on the school-to-prison pipeline—are available to explore via the portal’s resources page.

In collaboration with the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, the National Museum of the American Indian has created a toolkit that aims to “help people facilitate new conversations with and among students about the power of images and words, the challenges of memory, and the relationship between personal and national value,” says museum director Kevin Gover in a statement. The Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center offers a similarly focused resource called “Standing Together Against Xenophobia.” As the site’s description notes, “This includes addressing not only the hatred and violence that has recently targeted people of Asian descent, but also the xenophobia that plagues our society during times of national crisis.”

Ahead of NMAAHC’s official opening in 2016, the museum hosted a series of public programs titled “History, Rebellion, and Reconciliation.” Panels included “Ferguson: What Does This Moment Mean for America?” and “#Words Matter: Making Revolution Irresistible.” As Smithsonian reported at the time, “It was somewhat of a refrain at the symposium that museums can provide ‘safe,’ or even ‘sacred’ spaces, within which visitors [can] wrestle with difficult and complex topics.” Then-director Lonnie Bunch expanded on this mindset in an interview, telling Smithsonian, “Our job is to be an educational institution that uses history and culture not only to look back, not only to help us understand today, but to point us towards what we can become.” For more context on the museum’s collections, mission and place in American history, visit Smithsonian’s “Breaking Ground” hub and NMAAHC’s digital resources guide.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture recently

launched a "Talking About Race" portal. (Alan Karchmer)

Historical examples of allyship offer both inspiration and cautionary tales for the present. Take, for example, Albert Einstein, who famously criticized segregation as a “disease of white people” and continually used his platform to denounce racism. (The scientist’s advocacy is admittedly complicated by travel diaries that reveal his deeply troubling views on race.)

Einstein’s near-contemporary, a white novelist named John Howard Griffin, took his supposed allyship one step further, darkening his skin and embarking on a “human odyssey through the South,” as Bruce Watson wrote in 2011. Griffin’s chronicle of his experience, a volume titled Black Like Me, became a surprise bestseller, refuting “the idea that minorities were acting out of paranoia,” according to scholar Gerald Early, and testifying to the veracity of black people’s accounts of racism.

“The only way I could see to bridge the gap between us,” wrote Griffin in Black Like Me, “was to become a Negro.”

Griffin, however, had the privilege of being able to shed his blackness at will—which he did after just one month of donning his makeup. By that point, Watson observed, Griffin could simply “stand no more.”

Sixty years later, what is perhaps most striking is just how little has changed. As Bunch reflected earlier this week, “The state of our democracy feels fragile and precarious.”

Addressing the racism and social inequity embedded in American society will be a “monumental task,” the secretary added. But “the past is replete with examples of ordinary people working together to overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges. History is a guide to a better future and demonstrates that we can become a better society—but only if we collectively demand it from each other and from the institutions responsible for administering justice.”

*Editor’s Note, July 24, 2020: This article previously stated that some 3.9 million of the 10.7 million people who survived the harrowing two-month journey across the Middle Passage between 1525 and 1866 were ultimately enslaved in the United States. In fact, the 3.9 million figure refers to the number of enslaved individuals in the U.S. just before the Civil War. We regret the error.