Race and Religion

Author: Amos Yong
Publisher: CBE International

Is there a way forward beyond the dominant complementarian discourse at this nexus where a predominantly white North American evangelical Christianity has met racial and ethnic others, especially East Asians in the contemporary milieu?

Ist Antisemitismus eine Form des Rassismus oder handelt es sich um zwei völlig verschiedene Phänomene? Und gibt es Analogien zur Islamfeindlichkeit oder ist dieser Vergleich abwegig? Der Aufsatz zeichnet die international geführte Fachdiskussion um das Verhältnis verschiedener Ausgrenzungsmuster und Diskriminierungsformen nach.

Author: Alan G. Padgett
Publisher: CBE International

What is biblical equality? It is the belief that all people are equal before God and in Christ. All have equal responsibility to use their gifts and obey their calling to the glory of God. God freely calls believers to roles and ministries without regard to class, gender, or race. We believe this because the Bible and Jesus Christ teach it to us. That is biblical equality.

Eugenics frequently bridged religious and scientific aspirations for social betterment, while eugenic ideas and practices were promoted by a number of American ethnic and racial groups who belonged to different and even competing religious traditions. This essay explores the small and still nascent body of scholarship on eugenics and American religions. This scholarship reveals the important role that American religious expression played in the social dissemination of eugenic ideas and practice in the United States by demonstrating how a number of religious traditions –including Protestantism, Catholicism, African American Islam, and Reformed Judaism –shaped public acceptance of eugenics as a modern reproductive morality. Charting the appeal of eugenics across a spectrum of American religio-racial communities, this essay surveys emerging scholarship to argue that American religions had a direct impact upon the socially uneven and ideologically variable deployment of eugenic thought and practice in the United States.

“Alain Locke in His Own Words: Three Essays.” Edited and annotated by Christopher Buck and Betty J. Fisher. World Order 36.3 (2005): 37–48. 

Features four previously unpublished works by Alain Locke:
(1) “The Moon Maiden” (37) •
(2) “The Gospel for the Twentieth Century” (39–42) •
(3) “Peace between Black and White in the United States” (42–45) •
(4) “Five Phases of Democracy” (45–48).

Also included: Christopher Buck, “Alain Locke: Race Leader, Social Philosopher, Baha’i Pluralist.” Special Issue: Alain Locke: Dean of the Harlem Renaissance and Baha’i Race-Amity Leader. World Order 36.3 (2005): 7–36. 

*This special issue of World Order won the Religion Communicators Council’s 2006 DeRose-Hinkhouse Memorial Award of Excellence for excellence in religion communications and public relations (Class B. Periodicals—Single Issue, Magazine, National (B-1)).

This book is available in hardcover, paperback, or ebook formats. A discount code from UC Press is included in the  pdf. Here is the press's page on the book: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520356238/republican-jesus. A  Portuguese translation is in preparation with Editora 14.


Here's the cover description:

Jesus loves borders, guns, unborn babies, and economic prosperity and hates homosexuality, taxes, welfare, and universal healthcare—or so say many Republican politicians, pundits, and preachers. Through outrageous misreadings of the New Testament gospels that started almost a century ago, conservative influencers have conjured a version of Jesus who speaks to their fears, desires, and resentments.

In Republican Jesus, Tony Keddie explains not only where this right-wing Christ came from and what he stands for but also why this version of Jesus is a fraud. By restoring Republicans’ cherry-picked gospel texts to their original literary and historical contexts, Keddie dismantles the biblical basis for Republican positions on hot-button issues like Big Government, taxation, abortion, immigration, and climate change. At the same time, he introduces readers to an ancient Jesus whose life experiences and ethics were totally unlike those of modern Americans, conservatives and liberals alike.


More information about the book can be found at https://republicanjesusbook.com/.


"God Made Them Male and Female...and Eunuch" (an excerpt of chapter 5, "Family Values") is available at https://religiondispatches.org/god-made-them-male-and-femaleand-eunuch-why-the-biblical-case-for-binary-gender-isnt-so-biblical/.

An excerpt of the introduction to the book is available through UC Press here: https://content.ucpress.edu/title/9780520356238/9780520356238_intro.pdf

In this paper, the ‘Frame Problem’ in AI is mobilized as a trope in order to engage the ‘question’ concerning the inclusion and/or exclusion of Islam (and Muslims) from European – and, more broadly, ‘Western’ – society. Adopting a decolonial perspective, wherein body-political, geo-political and theo-political concerns are centered, the meaning and applicability of categorical dichotomies such as ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ and their relationship to the historical entanglement of ‘religion’ and ‘race’ in the formation of the modern world are interrogated in the context of understanding the nature of the relationship between Islam and Europe / ‘the West’. It is argued that the tendency within Western liberal democratic discourses to (1) frame the problem of Islamophobia and ‘the Muslim question’ in terms of misrepresentation – that is, misinformation, disinformation and ‘distortion’ of the flow of information – and (2) frame the issue of “Islam and Europe / ‘the West’” in terms of inclusion and/or exclusion of the members of a ‘religious’ minority into a post-modern, post-Christian / ‘secular’ polity circumvents disclosure of the violent historically-constituted structural background or ‘horizon’ against which such ‘options’ are generated. The essay concludes by sketching some possible decolonial responses to this critical and existentially-problematic state of affairs.

LOCKE, ALAIN

Christopher Buck, “Locke, Alain.” Encyclopedia of African American History. Edited by Leslie Alexander & Walter Rucker. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010. Pp. 224–227 (Vol. 1). 

ABSTRACT

History remembers Alain Locke (1885–1954) as the first African American Rhodes Scholar (1907) and, more famously, as the “dean” of the Harlem Renaissance (1919– 1934). Locke edited The New Negro (1925), acclaimed as the “first national book” of African Americans. In this way, Locke’s role is analogous to that of Martin Luther King: whereas King championed the civil rights of African Americans through nonviolent civil disobedience, Locke did so through a process known as “civil rights by copyright.” In the Jim Crow era, when blacks had no effective political recourse, Locke used the arts as a strategy to win the respect of the white majority and to call to their attention the need to fully democratize democracy and Americanize America by extending full equality to all minorities.

Recent scholarship has brought Locke back to life, and his philosophy of democracy, in particular, lends him renewed importance. Harvard, Harlem, Haifa—place names that represent Locke’s special involvement in philosophy, art, and religion—are keys to understanding his life and thought. Harvard prepared Locke for distinction as the first black Rhodes Scholar in 1907 and, in 1918, awarded Locke his PhD in philosophy, thus securing his position as chair of the Department of Philosophy at Howard University from 1927 until his retirement in 1953. Harlem was the mecca of the Harlem Renaissance, whereby Locke, as a spokesman for his race, revitalized racial solidarity and fostered the group consciousness among African Americans that proved a necessary precondition of the Civil Rights movement. Haifa is the world center of the Bahá’í Faith, the religion to which Locke converted in 1918, the same year he received his doctorate from Harvard. Until recently, this has been the least understood aspect of Locke’s life.

During the Jim Crow era, at a time when black people saw little possibility of interracial harmony, this new religious movement offered hope through its “race amity” efforts, which Locke was instrumental in organizing. These three spheres of activity—the academy, the art world, and spiritual society—converge to create a composite picture of Locke as an integrationist whose model was not assimilation, but rather “unity through diversity” (the title of one of his Bahá’í World essays).

This was originally an extended version of an invited talk prepared for the 2015 Society for the Scientific Study of Religion Annual Conference session entitled, "Navigating the Job Market: A Mentoring Session for Graduate Students." I have revised it with additional advice (now 3 years into a tenure track job), a recommended reading list, and hyperlinks to relevant information. I hope others can find anything in here helpful.

The “Whites as victims” motif in conversations about race has been well documented in recent decades. When discussing affirmative action hiring policies, a common belief expressed by Whites is that people of color have been permitted to progress unfairly at the expense of harder working Whites. Whites using this discourse see themselves as victims of a political process that ignores

Nineteenth-century observers who saw Charles Brockden Brown's writing as inferior to and imitative of William Godwin's often framed that judgment in a discussion of their relative ages in the eras of their greatest productivity. An anonymous essay on Godwin in the Attic Miscellany of October 1824, for example, deemed Brown " a close and successful copy-ist of the English sage's style " and discerned " community of thought in their views, moral, religious, and political. " This " resemblance, " the anonymous critic opined, coincided with the " gigantic original[ity] " of Brown's writing, which was attributable to his youth, a state he defined implicitly as helpless in its lack of cultivation: " his imagination runs riot with him " where " Mr. Godwin has a command over himself in the manner of his recital which Brown has not been able to copy " (132). 2 Writing sixty years later in the Atlantic Monthly, Thomas Wentworth Higginson deploys a similar valorization of mature self-control in his backhanded celebration of Brown's unprecedented influence, as a colonial American writer, upon his British contemporaries: Brown was " the first to exert a positive influence, across the Atlantic, upon British literature, laying thus early a few modest strands toward an ocean-cable of thought " (57). 3 Even as Higginson's literary patriotism leads him to praise a colonial who commanded the attention of British writers, he is unable to regard that attention as merited by Brown's aesthetic achievement. The real inferiority of Brown's unpolished and wild novels to those by British

It is now well-known that the narrative of religion's demise was quite mistaken. In reflecting on this, I myself am interested less in that religion continues to be relevant but more in how it should be relevant-an "ethics of belief", if you will. 1 By an "ethics of belief" I mean an ethical orientation of religious belief in view of not merely the ongoing publicness of religion but just how religion has been carried into the public. Now, the way I want to get there is by working within the problem itself through thinking after the intersection of apophatic mysticism and Ricoeur's "second naïveté", taking my cue from philosophy's retrieval of mystical resources and my own conviction of Ricoeur's ability to speak intelligently into the contemporary terrain. Here I draw an intimate connection between the "substructure" of both the apophatic gesture and the second naïveté and therein expose a "relation of opacity" that in both attempts to keep the finite/infinite dialectic tau(gh)t in productive tension. But ultimately I claim that opacity itself has been racialized through a transmogrification of the relation between finitude and infinitude in the modern self, and from this I explain the pathologized way in which the religious often shows up in the public sphere. I conclude by outlining how an ethics of a second naïveté can recover the "productive darkness" of the mystical self, but only by embracing the tragic.

Released by publisher online:
eBook Preview PDF (front matter, Chapter 1, and References),
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780429023088

Baha’i Faith: The Basics
By: Christopher Buck
Edition: 1st Edition
First Published: 2021
eBook Published: 27 November 2020
Pub. location: London
Imprint: Routledge
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429023088
Pages: 262 pages
eBook: ISBN9780429023088
Subjects: Humanities

Bahá’í Faith: The Basics provides a thorough and accessible introduction to a fascinating, independent world religion. Examining its historical development, current “community-building” efforts and the social contributions of the Bahá’í Faith in the world today, this introduction covers:

• Beliefs: Bahá’í spiritual teachings.
• Principles: Bahá’í social teachings.
• History: Bahá’u’lláh and his covenant.
• Scripture: Bahá’í sacred texts and inspired guidance.
• Institutions: The Bahá’í Administrative Order.
• Building community: What Bahá’ís do.
• Social action: Bahá’í social and economic development projects.
• Public discourse: The Bahá’í International Community.
• Vision: Foundations for a future golden age.

With features including a glossary of terms, and references to the Bahá’í writings throughout, this is the ideal text for students and interested readers wanting to familiarize themselves with the Bahá’í Faith.

Reviews
"This excellent, beautifully organized introduction provides an accurate and unusually rich entré into a relatively new and still somehow frequently misunderstood religion. The author, Christopher Buck, is a leading scholar of the Baha'i religion. His book is richly enhanced with quotations from official translations of the Baha'i sacred writings, insights into the formation of distinctive Baha'i institutions and rare glimpses of key moments in Baha'i intellectual history from an introduction to the influential African-American Baha'i philosopher, Alain Locke (d. 1954) known as 'the father of the Harlem Renaissance', to a discussion of the more recent development of the Ruhi Institute process. This introduction goes beyond existing textbooks in both scope and detail. It will be warmly welcomed by researchers and students of the Baha'i Faith."

Todd Lawson, University of Toronto, Canada

Christopher Buck is an independent scholar and former professor at Michigan State University, USA; Quincy University, USA; Millikin University, USA; and Carleton University, Canada.

The event of 9/11 divided the timeline of a race (with respect to Muslims) into two time intervals, before and after 9/11. This essay gives insights into the movie “My Name is Khan” and the reality of an entire race (Muslims) with respect to social discrimination, portraying them as terrorists and treating them as the “others” after the 9/11 incident.

Christopher Buck, “’Abdu’l-Baha’s 1912 Howard University Speech: A Civil War Myth for Interracial Emancipation.” ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s Journey West: The Course of Human Solidarity. Edited by Negar Mottahedeh. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. 111–144. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9781137032010.0009.

EXCERPT:

In his 1912 Howard University speech, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá invoked the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation in essentialist terms, anchored in historical generalizations, as a rhetorical strategy for promoting interracial emancipation. Abolition of slavery was a first step in the progressive emancipation of African Americans within color-bound American society. Slavery’s roots run deep in American history, and are yet to be fully extirpated. They extend, in more subtle forms, down to the present. Racism is a ghost of the slaver’s psyche, and legislation alone cannot eradicate the problem. Something profoundly different is needed to significantly steer social history in a new direction. This is what makes ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s 1912 sojourn in America of such historical import. . . .

To recapitulate, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in his Howard University speech, emphasized the personal sacrifice of Northern whites for Southern blacks in the course of the Civil War, and that African Americans (as the descendants of emancipated slaves) should therefore be grateful to whites in kind. In so saying, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá invoked history (or a certain view of it) in order to make history—by completing the unfinished work of the Emancipation Proclamation. . . .

And so it is that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá tasked the whites with a mission equal to the objectives of the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction in achieving what was (and is) still undone, to “endeavor to promote your [i.e. African Americans’] advancement and enhance your honor.” Such interracial unity entails more than fostering interracial camaraderie. Advancement is required. Actual progress must be fostered, for it is this “advancement” that “will be the cause of love (sabab-i maḥabbat).” In other words, doing “good” (by tangible actions) is a precondition for “goodwill” (as an intangible feeling). This, indeed, was the mission of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909, as an interracial endeavor. . . .

The advancement of African Americans was an integral element in the progress of America as a nation, and so there is a strong argument that the development of its own social capital was in the nation’s enlightened self-interest. Here, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s rhetorical strategy was to establish a clear basis, anchored in American history, for overcoming entrenched antagonisms in favor of reciprocal appreciation in the interests of interracial harmony and cooperation. In that sense, the accuracy of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s historical generalizations is quite beside the point, as the focus was on fostering racial healing and solving America’s racial crisis. . . .

On February 1, 2012, Cornel West, professor of African American Studies and Religion, Princeton University, expressed his appreciation of the Bahá’í efforts to foster ideal race relations: “When you talk about race and the legacy of white supremacy, there’s no doubt that when the history is written, the true history is written, the history of this country, the Baha’i Faith will be one of the leaven in the American loaf that allowed the democratic loaf to expand because of the anti-racist witness of those of Baha’i faith.” (“Cornel West praises work of Baha’is in establishing Racial Unity” (February 1, 2012). Professor West here recognizes the leavening influence of the Bahá’ís in the history of race relations in America. . . .

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s 1912 Howard University speech was for then, yet it has a message for us now as well: It could be said that in his Howard speech, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá invited his audience to build on history by making history, in commencing a new era of global solidarity.

https://www.academia.edu/29904876/_Abdu_l-Baha_s_1912_Howard_University_Speech_A_Civil_War_Myth_for_Interracial_Emancipation_2013_

“The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely-held belief in critical race theory that “race” is a category without purchase before the modern era.

Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon law, statuary, illustrations, religious commentary, and architectural features—the study considers racial thinking, racial law, racial formation, and racialized behaviors and phenomena in medieval Europe before the emergence of a recognizable vocabulary of race.

One focus is how a political hermeneutics of religion—so much in play again today—enabled the positing of fundamental human differences in biopolitical and culturalist ways to create strategic essentialisms demarcating human kinds and populations. Another focus is how race figures in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe (beginning as Latin Christendom) in this time.

Part I—“Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages”—surveys the current state of race theory, and puts in conversation race studies and medieval studies, fields that exist on either side of a vast divide.

Part II—“Locations of Medieval Race”—identifies and analyzes specific concretions of medieval race, while continuing to develop the theoretical arguments of Part I.

“Hayden, Robert.”
Christopher Buck and Derik Smith
Oxford Research Encyclopedia (2019)

Subject: North American Literatures
Online Publication: Updated on 26 April 2019. 

Summary and Keywords
Robert Hayden was made poet laureate of Senegal in 1966 and ten years later became America’s first Black poet laureate. He was acclaimed as “People’s Poet” early in his career, but he was largely ignored by the American literary establishment until late in life. In his poetics of history and his nuanced representations of black life, Hayden’s art showed that the African American experience was quintessentially American, and that blackness was an essential aspect of relentlessly heterogeneous America. As he figured it in his late-in-life poem, “[American Journal],” national identity was best metaphorized in “bankers grey afro and dashiki long hair and jeans / hard hat yarmulka mini skirt.” Hayden’s archetypal efforts to demonstrate the kaleidoscopic quality of both black and American identity produced an art that transcended propagandistic categories of race and nation, and pathed the way for a large cadre of late 20th and early 21st century poets who, like Hayden, understand themselves to be simultaneously black and American, but ultimately human.

Keywords: Robert Hayden, poetry, poet laureate, Black Arts Movement, national identity, African American, Bicen­tennial, Baha’i

This article redresses the interpretative lacunae of historians' conceptions of Nazi racism by overcoming their attempts to comprehend it from either a secular/scientific or a religious/theological perspective. Drawing on a variety of anthropological, philosophical, and political-theoretical works, the article illustrates how Nazi racial ideas were formulated not only in accordance with the latest discoveries in the field of human heredity, but also in correspondence to contemporary debates over secularization, value-free science, and biological determinism. It argues that the Nazi conception of race constituted a new form of religiosity, which did not draw on supernatural beliefs or theological narratives, but rather on vitalist-oriented metaphysics, shifting the object of faith from the transcendent realm of God to the immanent sphere of racial inward-ness. Redefining faith in vitalist-existentialist terms corresponded with the Nazi aspiration to overcome the fragmentation of modernity, overturn the nihilistic threat posed by materialist society, and carry out a spiritual renaissance built upon immanent-biological foundations.

In diesem Aufsatz werden die interpretativen Lücken innerhalb der unter Historikern gängigen Konzeptionen des nationalsozialistischen Rassismus beseitigt, indem deren Versuche, diesen entweder von einer säkularen/wissenschaftlichen oder einer religiös/theologischen Perspektive zu begreifen, überwunden werden. Mit Hilfe einer Vielfalt von anthropologischen, philosophischen und politisch-theoretischen Arbeiten illustriert der Aufsatz, wie nationalsozia-listische Ideen über Rasse nicht nur in Übereinstimmung mit den jüngsten Entdeckungen in den Forschungen zu menschlicher Vererbung, sondern auch in Bezug auf zeitgenössische Debatten über Säkularisierung, wertfreie Wissenschaft und biologischen Determinismus formu-liert wurden. Dabei wird argumentiert, dass die nationalsozialistische Konzeption von Rasse eine neue Form der Religiosität darstellte, die nicht auf einem Glauben an das Übernatürliche oder theologischen Narrativen beruhte, sondern vielmehr auf einer am Vitalismus orientierten Metaphysik: das Objekt des Glaubens wurde vom transzendenten Reich Gottes zur immanenten Sphäre rassischer Innerlichkeit verschoben. Diese Neudefinition von Glauben in vitalistisch-existentialistischen Begriffen korrespondierte mit dem Ziel der Nationalsozialisten, die Fragmentierung der Moderne zu überwinden, die durch die materialistische Gesellschaft bedingte Bedrohung durch den Nihilismus abzuwenden und eine, auf einer immanent-biologischen Fundierung beruhende, geistige Renaissance durchzuführen.

The thesis of this essay is that racism in Australia has explicitly Christian roots. In particular, these roots find their beginnings in the European story of Christendom. To defend that claim, the essay does three things. First, it traces the history of racism in Australia, mapping how immigration policies and practices regarding assimilation following the Second World War expose longstanding commitments to the idea of an Australia that is both “white” and “Christian.” Second, it explores how the roots of such racism intersect with and are sponsored by the “biological heresy” of Christendom and its practice of both politicizing and making “barbarians” of “the other.” Finally, it offers three brief theological reflections on the possibilities of an alternative Christian witness amidst the conditions mapped in the first two sections. Here the concerns are with conceptions of power, with what it means to speak of the Christian community as “the body of Christ,” and with the theological task itself.

Buck, Christopher. “Alain Locke and Cultural Pluralism.” Search for Values: Ethics in Baha’i Thought. Edited by Seena Fazel and John Danesh. Los Angeles: Kalimat Press, 2004. Pp. 94–158.

African American philosopher Alain Locke is arguably the most profound and important Western Bahá’í philosopher to date. Except for one 1979 article in a Bahá’í periodical, scholarship on Locke has neither seriously taken into account his Bahá’í identity nor the Faith’s influence on his work. The present study, based largely on archival sources, contributes to research on this “missing” dimension of Locke’s complex life and thought. It examines Locke’s worldview as a Bahá’í, his secular perspective as a philosopher, and the synergy between his confessional and professional essays. This study also argues that Locke had a fluid hierarchy of values—of loyalty, tolerance, reciprocity, cultural relativism and pluralism (the philosophical equivalent of “unity in diversity”)—and that this hierarchy represents a progression and application of quintessentially Bahá’í ideals. Locke’s distinction as a “Bahá’í philosopher” may therefore be justified on ideological as well as historical grounds. Locke “translated” Bahá’í ideals “into more secular terms” so that “a greater practical range will be opened up for the application and final vindication of the Bahá’í principles” in order to achieve “a positive multiplication of spiritual power.”

“The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely-held belief in critical race theory that “race” is a category without purchase before the modern era.

Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon law, statuary, illustrations, religious commentary, and architectural features—the study considers racial thinking, racial law, racial formation, and racialized behaviors and phenomena in medieval Europe before the emergence of a recognizable vocabulary of race.

One focus is how a political hermeneutics of religion—so much in play again today—enabled the positing of fundamental human differences in biopolitical and culturalist ways to create strategic essentialisms demarcating human kinds and populations. Another focus is how race figures in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe (beginning as Latin Christendom) in this time.

Part I—“Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages”—surveys the current state of race theory, and puts in conversation race studies and medieval studies, fields that exist on either side of a vast divide.

Part II—“Locations of Medieval Race”—identifies and analyzes specific concretions of medieval race, while continuing to develop the theoretical arguments of Part I.

This essay proposes a new approach to the history of race and religion: that of simultaneously constructive and destructive comparison. It offers historical sketches of two biocultural processes, one in medieval Christianity (Iberia/Spain) and one in medieval Islam (Maghreb/North Africa), each of which can fruitfully be understood as ‘racializing’. Of each it asks similar questions. First, how did episodes of mass conversion or spiritual migration affect thinking about the heritability of certain characteristics within these religions? In
other words, did such episodes effect something that today we might call the racialization of religion? Second, how do these episodes relate to each other? Can we speak of their histories in terms of origins, or of a causal or genealogical relationship to each other? Can we say that any of the three religions involved in these episodes – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism – ‘invented race’ or practiced race-making?

En los orígenes de la nación chilena se ocultan una serie de elementos raciales que pueden remontarse a muchos años antes de su establecimiento formal como institución política. Las ideas de “raza” y “racismo” son el eje central sobre el cual el autor intenta analizar dichas retóricas de inferiorización, provenientes tanto de la ciencia, de la política, como de las prácticas culturales de los siglos XVII, XVIII y principalmente del XIX.

Se trata de un trabajo transdisciplinario, que se fundamenta en una revisión crítica de fuentes primarias de la época y de una extensa literatura secundaria proveniente de la historia de la cultura, de la ciencia, la antropología social y cultural, así como de la filosofía.

No se trata de una obra de historia, ni menos de antropología, solo es un intento por pensar o cartografiar nuestro pasado colonial (y poscolonial) como un ejercicio de conceptualización que nos permita cuestionar aquello que se denomina “identidad chilena”.






El contrato colonial de Chile
Ciencia, Racismo y Nación

Por

Patricio Lepe-Carrión





Tabla de contenidos

Tabla de contenidos 2
Tabla de ilustraciones 5
Siglas 6
Introducción 7


Primera Parte: Colonialidad del poder en el reino de Chile
1. Civilización y barbarie: la ‘diferencia colonial’ 13
1.1. Cartografía conceptual de la dicotomía 13
1.1.1. Genealogía de la ‘barbarie’, como ausencia de la razón deliberativa 13
1.1.2. Aristóteles: ‘deliberación’ y esclavitud natural 14
1.1.3. La barbarie, ‘diferencia’ y construcción del Otro 16
1.2. La Junta de Valladolid: la naturalización de las diferencias en el siglo XVI 19
1.2.1. La polémica de los naturales 19
1.2.2. La construcción de la ‘barbarie’ americana 20
1.2.3. Bartolomé de Las Casas y el encubrimiento de la ‘diferencia cultural’ 25
1.2.4. El re-descubrimiento del logos deliberativo: los nativos también pueden ser educados 28
2. La construcción del sujeto colonial en el Chile del siglo XVII 31
2.1. La sedimentación de la ‘diferencia colonial’ en la ‘guerra defensiva’ 32
2.2. Una frontera geográfica, subjetiva y epistémica: la ‘zona de contacto’ 35
2.3. Colonialidad: idea de totalidad, y miradas micropolíticas 40
2.4. La raza como eje articulador de la matriz colonial de poder 43
2.5. Los diagramas de soberanía y disciplina 44
2.6. Una frontera de seducción 47
2.7. El ‘Sermón en lengua de Chile’: orígenes del racismo epistémico 49
2.8. Pedagogía jesuita: individuación y emulación. Disciplina en la Ratio Studiorum 52

Segunda Parte: Taxonomías proto-raciales de la Ilustración

3. Época clásica, y el ‘no lugar’ en la instrumentalización política de los saberes científicos 58
3.1. El Ego Conquiro condición del Ego Cogito 59
3.1.1. Del escepticismo sobre la existencia del bárbaro, al escepticismo metódico cartesiano 60
3.1.2. La objetivación del ‘cuerpo’ como ‘naturaleza’ 61
3.2. Episteme y gubernamentalidad 63
3.2.1. Las tres epistemes 63
3.2.2. La episteme clásica, y su discontinuidad con el Renacimiento 64
3.2.3. La episteme clásica y La Hybris del punto cero 65
3.2.4. La razón de Estado (ratio status) 68
3.3. Biopolítica borbónica: la aparición de la ‘razón de Estado’ en España y Chile durante el siglo XVIII 69
3.3.1. Gobierno de las poblaciones 69
3.3.2. El Censo como ciencia del Estado 72
3.3.3. De la razón al racismo de Estado 74
4. La ‘historia natural’ en el orden y casificación etnoracial de la humanidad 76
4.1. Dios creó, Linneo puso en orden (Deus creavit; Linnaeus disposuit) 78
4.1.1. La escritura universal 78
4.1.2. El género Homo, y la especie Homo Sapiens 80
4.1.3. Cuerpo bello, alma buena. Un primer acercamiento a la kalokagathía 82
4.2. El conde de Buffon, y el dinamismo en la Escala de los Seres 83
4.2.1. La cuestión de la especie: temporalización de la Gran Cadena del Ser 83
4.2.2. Los efectos del clima y el ambiente en la formación de las razas 87
4.3. América es un continente débil y degenerado 89
4.4. Juan Ignacio Molina: el científico que persuadió a Immanuel Kant 93
4.4.1. Molina, el primer científico chileno 93
4.4.2. La incomodidad del criollo, y su arremetida contra los ‘antiamericanistas’ 94
4.4.3. Boroa, un pueblo de chilenos europeizados 96
4.4.4. Chilenos de sangre pura, criollos, y los mestizos bastardos 99
5. Clasificación racial en la filosofía ilustrada. El caso de Immanuel Kant 103
5.1. Luces y sombras de la ‘ciudad criolla’ 103
5.2. Los intermediarios del universalismo 108
5.3. Del racismo al racialismo 110
5.4. El concepto de ‘raza’ en Kant 112
5.5. Mapa racial: el lugar de los ‘americanos’ 117
Excurso: Kant, colonialismo, y el nuevo encubrimiento 122

Tercera Parte: "Nobleza y plebe: residuos simbólicos durante la pos-colonia"

6. Biopolítica borbónica en chile: el discurso antropológico sobre la ociosidad, el vagabundaje, y su objetivación en el mestizaje 128
6.1. Representación moderna de la pobreza 128
6.2. Pública prosperidad, movilidad social y las incomodidades de la ‘nobleza’ 130
6.3. El mestizaje como fuente de vagabundaje 135
6.4. Higienismo y racismo de Estado 137
7. El color de las clases sociales chilenas 139
7.1. Otros contextos, otras categorías 139
7.2. La ‘raza’ en la formación de las clases sociales chilenas 140
7.3. Aristocracia chilena y selección racial 143
8. Imaginando la ‘nación’ 147
8.1. Lugares de enunciación y traducción 147
8.2. ‘El peso de la noche’; el lado oscuro de la Patria 149
8.2.1. El nativo de papel 150
8.2.2. Independencia/Civilización, o Modernidad/Colonialidad 152
8.3. Iustración y ‘libertad’. Legitimación de las diferencias innatas 156
8.4. La infancia de Chile, y el tutelaje de los ‘padres’ criollos 159
8.5. Los ‘negros’ desean la esclavitud, no la libertad 162
9. Dimensión simbólica de las clases sociales: ‘escenificación’ y ‘apariencia’ 166
9.1. La obsesión por el ‘origen’ 166
9.2. El simbolismo de la prosapia criolla 169
9.3. El delirio de ‘ser percibido’ como noble 172
Conclusión: El contrato colonial de Chile 175
Bibliografía 177

Christopher Buck, Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy. Los Angeles: Kalimat Press, 2005. Pub date: July 3, 2005. ISBN-13: 978-1890688387. ISBN-10: 189068838X. L

In print. (Order from Kalimat Press: http://www.kalimat.com/Locke.html.)

REVIEWS
•  Derik Smith. World Order 38.3 (2006/2007): 42–48. (Published in 2008.): ”Christopher Buck’s recent book, Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy, is a welcome addition to the literature on early twentieth-century American and African American culture. But, perhaps more important, Buck’s study is a significant contribution to scholarship on the history of the Bahá’í Faith in the United States. … Any future study of Locke must necessarily make its way through Christopher Buck’s Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy. The scholar forcefully proves his thesis that, in Locke’s thinking, philosophy and religious belief operated as synergistic terms. He has shown that the Bahá’í Faith was integral to Locke’s life and ideology. …  Yet, after reading Buck’s work, it is difficult to imagine Locke the philosopher rapt in prayer. Of course, this is not a shortcoming of the book. Rather it is an indication that, while he may have wanted to portray a more pious figure, Buck maintains the vow he made in his introduction to Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy “to constrain any grandiose claims on Locke as a Bahá’í.”

• M. Anthony Fitchue. Journal of African American History 92.1 (Winter 2007): 131–133: “But the jewels in this book are unmistakable. … Clearly, Buck has given voice to the men and women who not only put the Baha’i faith first in their lives, but also left key documents, personal letters, notes, and memoranda related to the life of philosopher Alain LeRoy Locke for future researchers to ponder and use for years to come.”

• William P. Collins. Insights (Library of Congress Professional Association Newsletter) 38.1–3 (Jan–Oct 2006): 10–12: “Both of these books [Lights of the Spirit and Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy] go a long way toward correcting the historians’ failure to note the important role played by the Bahá’í Faith and prominent African-American Bahá’ís in the struggle for racial equality in the United States.”

Summary of activities by various faculty at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School to engage the school on behalf of broadening our ethnic diversity in good ways. The activities described here underpinned a subsequent faculty retreat on the topic (led by Tienou, Cha, and Priest), and laid foundations for the subsequent publication (2007) by Oxford University Press of the book "This Side of Heaven: Race, Ethnicity, and Christian Faith," to which various Trinity faculty members contributed, a book edited by Robert Priest and Alvaro Nieves.

A brief account of how Columbia Bible College became the first white institution of higher education in South Carolina voluntarily to racially integrate. This is a shorter version of an account also treated in a lengthier article "Sharing the Gospel in a Racially Segregated Society: The Case of Columbia Bible College, 1923-1963," which appears in the Oxford Univ. Press book "This Side of Heaven: Race, Ethnicity, and Christian Faith" (2007, edited by R. Priest and A. Nieves).

While the contemporary world has been heralded as being “post-racial”, we can look all-around to see evidence that this assertion is not only flawed but false. Religion is generally blamed as the key culprit for the escalating conflicts igniting the world over which threatens peace. Yet, rarely is secularism and the void created in its midst carefully analyzed in this context. The historical roots of this problem are more remote than postmodernism and modernism. However, secularism has fractured the way that human identity has been understood throughout time which eclipses the integral relationship between human diversity and religious pluralism.

Sectionalism denotes the division of a country, such as the United States, into sections based on shared cultures, religions, and racial, economic, and political identities. These sections then compete, putting their interests over those of the other sections. In the case of the United States, one of the most significant sectional conflicts was the Civil War, where North and South battled due to conflict over racial, economic, religious, and political differences. However, sectional conflict can be seen as early as British colonialism during which time the colonies competed with each other and with their governments in Europe and later as other sections such as the West developed its own characteristics and interests. Religion and race were frequently at the core of sectional conflicts, in everything from the Revolutionary War, the drafting of the Constitution, the failure of compromise regarding slavery, and the intermittent battles with Native Americans over land and religious practice to the emergence of the West and the great immigration and religious innovation that took place there. In all these cases, sections constructed identities in which race and religion were fundamental and were also significant points of contention. Even today, at the beginning of the 21st century, sectionalism continues with geographic sections still battling for dominance, and cultural sections square off in what is commonly called the culture wars.

This chapter identifies a substratum of self-titled "professors of Oriental and African mystic science" who collaborated with each other and created new identities in the context of the marketplace, the Marcus Garvey movement, Orientalism, and influences as diverse as occultism, Spiritualism, Pentecostalism, Freemasonry, Anglo-Israelism, Judaism, and
Islam. The specter of African Americans adopting and using Orientalism puts a different twist on the concept.  The discourse of civilization was rarely simply rejected or resisted outright; rather it was recycled and reformulated. For at least some African Americans, adopting Orientalist identities could express anti-imperialist political sympathies, expand personal freedom, and even allow criticism of the West's conceit to be more civilized and technologically superior to the rest of the world.

Black Orientalists triangulated between dark and light by reaching outside of America, in an attempt to overcome American racism and criticize the dominant discourse of civilization.  The work shows that Harlem's networks of religious practitioners used religious, magical, and ideological systems to help create Black Israelism, Rastafarianism, Father Divine's movement, and some early forms of Black Islam. Orientalism is a construct that can help us to reconceptualize and reconnect many of the "Black Gods of the Metropolis."  Read in the larger contexts of the Harlem Renaissance and the migration of rural
peoples into the quickened pace of Northern cities, this approach suggests that there was a rich substratum of working class cultural creativity that deserves to be read into the history of the literary and artistic Harlem Renaissance.  It challenges us to think of working class African Americans not merely as workers or migrants, but as organic intellectuals capable of voicing their own dreams, mysticism and religions that were articulate responses to the key concerns of the age.

This paper analyzes the rhetorical function of the tropes of love and sex in the quintessential break up song, ‘‘I Used to Love Him,’’ from Lauryn Hill’s multi-platinum 1998 album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Through a textual analysis that emphasizes the recurrent tropes of synecdoche and metaphor, I argue that, despite the song’s seemingly liberating and empowering message, its conception of love is rooted in movements towards new forms of domination as opposed to self-actualization. This critical examination of a black love relationship within hip hop’s myriad mediated representations of loveless black sex contributes to the resurgent interest in discourses on love.

There's the tendency today to judge the premodern period by contemporary moral standards. This especially happens in the areas of race and racism studies. Many looking through of lens of US historical race taxonomy often misapprehend the source of discriminatory treatment in Arabia of the prophetic era. In their view, color---especially blackness---alone served as the single basis for social disenfranchisement in a putatively "white" Arab world. The truth, however, is much more complex than this, considering the fact that many non-
"black" Arabs were also persecuted, just as many "black" Arabs were themselves the persecutors of these supposed "racial" minorities. This paper complicates the claim that discrimination in ancient Arabia was tied to the difference in color between the Arabian oppressed and the oppressor classes. Tribal affiliation and/or former slave status were, actually, more important contributors to maltreatment and disenfranchisement.

This essay traces a genealogy of the modern concept of race, and modern racism, in relationship to the intellectual shifts that led to the secularization of knowledge during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Through an analysis of the evolution of the central concept of " The Great Chain of Being " from the Classical through Medieval and Early Modern periods, I argue that the decline of religion in the West was a necessary condition for the rise of modern conceptions of race and racism.