ARGC Statement on Anti-Black Racism

The American Religions in a Global Context Initiative at Stanford deplores in the strongest possible terms anti-Black racism and racial violence. We condemn the brutal murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Manuel Ellis, David McAtee, and so many others. Black Lives Matter.

We hold that police brutality is not an aberration but a symptom of a system of racial oppression whose impacts are felt every day, not least in the academy itself. As scholars and students of religion in the United States and/in the world, we commit ourselves to recognizing and analyzing racism not as a “contaminant of modernity,” but rather as “constitutive of what we understand by western liberal-democracies,” as Barnor Hesse has argued (“Im/Plausible Deniability”). We seek to understand the ongoing relationship between religion and race and the links between religious bigotry and racism. We seek to analyze how the global contexts of race have, in the words of Sylvester Johnson, “structured the political rule of Europeans over non-Europeans,” a rule that has often been couched in terms of religious oversight (African American Religions, 1500-2000). And we learn from the work of Judith Weisenfeld to witness how different communities have appealed to religious systems of meaning to claim new religio-racial identities and combat racial injustice (New World A-Coming).

We are indebted to and grateful for the field-changing work of these and other Black scholars, from whom we have learned and continue to learn so much. For a sampling of resources on African American religions, and religion and race in the United States and its global contexts, please see:

• Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, Electric Santeria: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion (Columbia University Press, 2015)
• Wallace Best, Langston’s Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem (New York University Press, 2017)
• Wallace Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952 (Princeton University Press, 2007)
• Keisha Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018)
• Vaughn Booker, Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century (New York University Press, 2020)
• Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2021)
• Anthea Butler, Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World (University of North Carolina Press, 2007)
• J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford University Press, 2008)
• N. Fadeke Castor, Spiritual Citizenship: Transnational Pathways from Black Power to Ifá in Trinidad (Duke University Press, 2017)
• CERCL Collective, Embodiment and Black Religion: Rethinking the Body in African American Religious Experience (Equinox Publishing, 2017)
• Yvonne Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (University of California Press, 2003)
• James Cone, Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian (Orbis Books, 2018)
• James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Orbis Books, 2011)
• Valerie Cooper, Word, Like Fire: Maria Stewart, the Bible, and the Rights of African Americans (The University of Virginia Press, 2012)
• Edward E. Curtis, The Call of Bilal: Islam in the African Diaspora (University of North Carolina Press, 2014)
• Edward E. Curtis, Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960-1975 (University of North Carolina Press, 2006)
• Edward E. Curtis, Islam in Black America: Identity, Liberation, and Difference in African-American Islamic Thought (State University of New York Press, 2002)
• Keri Day, Unfinished Business: Black Women, the Black Church, and the Struggle to Thrive in America (Orbis Books, 2012)
• Keri Day, Religious Resistance to Neoliberalism: Womanist and Black Feminist Perspectives (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016)
• Curtis Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (Oxford University Press, 2008)
• Marla Frederick, Colored Television: American Religion Gone Global (Stanford University Press, 2015)
• Marla Frederick, Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (University of California Press, 2003)
• Eddie S. Glaude Jr., An Uncommon Faith: A Pragmatic Approach to the Study of African American Religion (University of Georgia Press, 2018)
• Eddie S. Glaude Jr., African American Religion: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2014)
• Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2000)
• Michael A. Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (Cambridge University Press, 2005)
• Barnor Hesse, “Im/Plausible Deniability: Racism’s Conceptual Double Bind” (Social Identities, Volume 10, No. 1, 2004)
• Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale University Press, 201)
• Sylvester Johnson, African American Religions, 1500-2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
• Sylvester Johnson, The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)
• The Journal of Africana Religions
• Nyasha Junior, Reimagining Hagar: Blackness and Bible (Oxford University Press, 2019)
• Nyasha Junior and Jeremy Schipper, Black Samson: The Untold Story of an American Icon (Oxford University Press, 2020)
• Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States
• Charles Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Fortress Press, 1986)
• Vincent Lloyd, Religion of the Field Negro: On Black Secularism and Black Theology (Fordham University Press, 2018)
• Vincent Lloyd, Black Natural Law (Oxford University Press, 2016)
• LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant, Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women (Duke University Press, 2014)
• Lerone Martin, Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Shaping of Modern African American Religion (NYU Press, 2014)
• Yolanda Pierce, Hell without Fires: Slavery, Christianity, and the Antebellum Spiritual Narrative (University Press of Florida, 2005)
• Anthony Pinn, The African American Religious Experience in America (Greenwood Press, 2006)
• Anthony Pinn, ed., African American Religious Cultures (ABC-CLIO, 2009)
• Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (Oxford University Press, 2004 (rev. ed.))
• Albert J. Raboteau, Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans (Oxford University Press, 1999) 
• Carolyn Moxley Rouse, John L. Jackson, Jr., and Marla F. Frederick, Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment (New York University Press, 2016)
• Josef Sorett, Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2016)
• Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism (Zondervan 2019)
• Jonathan L. Walton, Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism (New York University Press, 2009)
• Judith Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration (New York University Press, 2016)
• Judith Weisenfeld, Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949 (University of California Press, 2007)
• Judith Weisenfeld, African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905-1945 (Harvard University Press, 1997)
• Cornel West with Christa Buschendorf, Black Prophetic Fire (Beacon Press, 2014)
• Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Westminster Press, 1982)
• Joseph R. Winters, Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress (Duke University Press, 2016)
• Thelathia Nikki Young, Black Queer Ethics, Family, and Philosophical Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)