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DividedByFaithMichael Emerson and Christian Smith:

A major problem in understanding race relations in the United States is that we tend to understand race, racism, and the form of racialization as constants rather than as variables. This view has grave implications.

Racism, for instance, is often captured best in people’s minds by the ideology and actions of the Ku Klux Klan: an overt doctrine of racial superiority—usually labeled prejudice—that leads to discrimination.

Based on this unchanging standard, racism is viewed as an irrational psychological phenomenon that is the product of individuals, and is evidenced in overt, usually hostile behavior. It is the driving force behind anything negative about race relations. Using this perspective, social scientists devise survey questions meant to measure the level of racism in a society, such as “Whites have a right to keep blacks out of their neighborhood,” or “How strongly would you object if a member of your family brought a black friend home for dinner?” Based on this approach, they conclude that racism is declining, since a smaller percentage of people over time respond in a prejudiced fashion. The interpretation? Because racism is seen as driving racial problems, race matters less for shaping social life and life opportunities.

But things look different when we see that the form of racialization changes. Suppose we were still using a standard that was set in relation to slavery. Making the same assumption about racism that we do today, we would assume that slavery is the result of racism (even though, as noted above, racism was an ideology created to justify slavery, not vice versa). If we were designing ways to measure racism in the antebellum era, we might measure racism as the level of agreement with statements like, “Darkies are happier being slaves,” “Colored people are more like children than adults,” “Africans are not fully human,” and “It is God’s will that Anglos be masters, and Africans be slaves.”

If we used this unchanging standard, we would find that the farther removed from 1865, the smaller the percentage of people agreeing with such statements. Again, using present-day logic, we would conclude that racism and the race problem were declining, and indeed, say by 1955, we would conclude it had nearly disappeared. But our hindsight is clear. By 1955, the problems of race and the racial hierarchy had not disappeared at all. The forms had changed to be sure, but so ever-present were the problems that major social movements and upheavals resulted.

These upheavals ushered in a new era of race relations in the United States—the post-Civil Rights era. Our understandings of race relations, however, remain stuck in the Jim Crow era, leading us to mistaken conclusions—racism is on the wane, and racial division and the racial hierarchy are but historical artifacts.

– from Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America

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