Browsing by Subject "Racism"

Objective: Few studies have examined the disproportionate use of restraints for Black adults receiving emergency psychiatric care. This study sought to determine whether the odds of physical and chemical restraint use were higher for Black patients undergoing emergency psychiatric care compared with their white counterparts.

Methods: This single-center retrospective cohort study examined 12,977 unique encounters of adults receiving an emergency psychiatric evaluation between January 1, 2014, and September 18, 2020, at a large academic medical center in Durham, North Carolina. Self-reported race categories were extracted from the electronic medical record. Primary outcomes were the presence of a behavioral physical restraint order or chemical restraint administration during the emergency department encounter. Covariates included age, sex, ethnicity, height, time of arrival, positive urine drug screen results, peak blood-alcohol concentration, and diagnosis of a bipolar or psychotic disorder.

Results: A total of 961 (7.4%) encounters involved physical restraint, and 2,047 (15.8%) involved chemical restraint. Models with and without a race covariate were compared by using quasi-likelihood information criterion (QIC) scores; in each instance, the model with race performed better than the model without. Black patients were more likely to be physically (adjusted odds ratio [AOR]=1.35; 95% confidence interval [CI]=1.07–1.72) and chemically (AOR=1.33; 95% CI=1.15–1.55) restrained than white patients.

Conclusions: After adjusting for measured confounders, Black patients undergoing psychiatric evaluation were at higher odds of experiencing physical or chemical restraint compared with white patients, which is consistent with the growing body of evidence revealing racial inequities in psychiatric care.

There is widespread evidence that health disparities between whites and blacks in the U.S. cannot be fully explained by inter-group socioeconomic differences. Further, research shows that racism plays a significant role in explaining racial health disparities. However, there is less research that attends to what psychosocial and socioeconomic resources may be protective of black middle-class health over time. My research starts to fill this gap by examining whether racial identity and childhood socioeconomic status are protective of black health over time.

In Chapter 2, I use data from the American Changing Lives Study (ACL) and examine whether a strong racial identity is a protective mechanism in the relationship between racism and two health outcomes: self-rated health and depressive symptoms. My findings suggest that whether racial identity is protective depends on the health outcome and the frequency of racism respondents experience. My results also indicate that middle-class is not consistently a protective factor for black health.

In Chapter 3, I use data from the National Survey of American Life (NSAL) and the ACL to investigate whether childhood socioeconomic status is associated with adult health for blacks, and particularly black women. I argue that relative childhood socioeconomic advantage is more important for disadvantaged race and race/gender groups. Further, using an intersectional approach, I argue that it is most important for black women. My findings indicate that the association of childhood socioeconomic status and adult health is significant for blacks, but not whites. I also find that childhood socioeconomic status is especially important for black women.

ABSTRACT

In The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observed,If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Jesus is clear that what comes from our hearts defiles us, and that our propensity for sin against God and others is deep inside us. Stereotypes that polarize run deep, as do attitudes from which bad behavior develops. Racism and attitudes of white supremacy are much in conversation within the church today. Books on racism, its causes, and its consequences abound. By comparison, there much less exploration of why the sin of racism exists and what causes it. Complacency about racism and white privilege afflicts the laity and the clergy alike within the American church, and its complacency in fulfilling the commandments to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves lies at the root of racism. Another word for this complacency is acedia, the root sin at the heart of racism and the role it plays in racism. This topic is relevant to my own ministry because I am white and part of the systemic racism in American culture, and because the church in which I serve is the Episcopal Church, which is predominantly comfortable and white, and I serve in a congregation and diocese that mirror that reality. The longer I study and contemplate acedia, the more clearly I see the turn away from God and God’s creation that defines the source of our “lack of care,” our acedia, at the heart of our racism. Racial reconciliation is difficult for the church, and the church is affected deeply by the lack of reconciliation found there. The presenting problem is the need for racial reconciliation in the church and the church’s difficulty in accomplishing it. This thesis offers a history of racism and a thorough consideration of acedia and its part in racism and white supremacy. Reconciliation, per 2 Corinthians 5:14-21, is explored, as are other texts from the New Testament that pertain to the issue of reconciliation and relationships between people of differing ethnoracial groups. The work on racial reconciliation of Ibrahim Kendi and Jonathon Augustine is explored. The root problem of acedia is considered in light of the scriptures and the work of contemporary authors. Finally, the spiritual disciplines that are effective in dealing with acedia are offered, as well as a mechanism for racial reconciliation based on one’s work overcoming acedia.

*Designated as an exemplary master's project for 2015-16*

Background

Methods

Results

Conclusion

In our work, we suggest that racial discrimination in hiring decisions can take on different forms. Specifically, we argue that when prejudiced individuals discriminate against Black job candidates, they are not only discriminating because they hold individual negative biases about Black people. They are also – and perhaps primarily – motivated to perpetuate the current racial hierarchy. And, in order to do so, they support hiring candidates – be they Black or White – who will not disrupt a system where White people continue to be systematically advantaged. In this distinct form of discrimination – which we call racial hierarchy-based discrimination, prejudiced individuals can display a preference for hiring a Black candidate who wants to uphold the racial hierarchy over a White candidate who wants to disrupt it. Across eight experiments, we document this type of discrimination. Our results also show evidence for biased evaluations across the racial prejudice spectrum. That is, both low and high prejudice individuals can be strategic in how they pursue their goals of disrupting or maintaining the racial hierarchy. We end with a discussion of how racial hierarchy-based discrimination can lead to the appearance of racial progress, all the while keeping in place a racial power structure that systematically disadvantages Black Americans.

One of the most significant problems facing the doctrine of salvation is that it's been tied to a word foreign to its very nature: self-improvement. The dissertation articulates an idea of change that is inherent to the idea of salvation that resists and that fortifies us against the idea of improvement rooted in patriarchal commitments. It is an attempt to critically analyze the doctrine of salvation by asking the most pressing question facing it at this moment: is salvation good for women? It’s a constructive re-thinking of what the doctrine means in light of women’s bodies and the fundamental problem of improvement and self-improvement. Within 20th century protestant American contexts, the doctrine of salvation has often been structured in ways that equate self-improvement with salvation. Furthermore, the expectation for this salvific “work” plays out differently across different kinds of bodies, aligning itself with oppressive hierarchies. This kind of improvement is different from both the change initially experienced in salvation and improvements made as the believer enters into the communal reality of being a Christian. The idea of self-improvement as a salvific act presupposes an isolated self that will be cleaned up. This self becomes the white masculine. I argue in this project that the performance of redeemed masculinity (a saved man) is articulated by means of ideas of self-improvement and in turn ideas of self-improvement articulate a redeemed femininity (a saved woman) calibrated to masculinist longings for control and power. Evangelical theology articulates ideas of masculinity within a doctrine of salvation as the outworking of the effects of salvation, or being saved. That is, Christians demonstrate faithfulness by approximating, perpetuating and defending a particular vision of masculinity that depends upon self-improvement. This conflation of self-improvement with the work of salvation depends on the existing (and continuing) inadequacy of the believer. This refracts through existing hierarchies of oppression such that those who are oppressed require more improvement. Thus, the doctrine of salvation has become unrecognizably entangled with social mechanisms that validate and perpetuate cultural hierarchies of oppression.

As a theological quandary, the questions theologians have struggled over are threefold: 1. Who enacts self-improvement, God or the human, or some combination of both? 2. What does an improved Christian look like and who must see the performative embodiment of this improvement? 3. What defines the content that people should approximate in their improvement? The problem emerges at the place of the surface for women, in terms of the formation of a loss of optic control whereby men are positioned as the fundamental observer/approver of the faithful self. If regimes of improvement constitute agency (Foucault), and if such regimes have been seized by women, especially women of color for emancipatory possibilities, then what are we to make of the idea of improvement for doing political, social, economic, and theological work? My project explores the problems and possibilities of salvation and improvement in their theological and related registers. The dissertation ultimately pivots on the question: can the doctrine of salvation itself be saved from its entanglement with self-improvement or its patriarchal commitments?

The practical outworking of a doctrine of salvation enmeshed with self-improvement affects people differently. The way women are taught to imagine faithfulness forms them in obedience to a masculine gaze and masculinist forms of self-evaluation. That is, Christian obedience has been articulated from the site of men who determine the content of women’s obedience and position themselves as the evaluators of it. In this instantiation of masculine-determined obedience, women’s faithfulness is understood in reference to male desires. The dissertation suspects that not only do these practices of improvement get translated as the work of salvation (i.e., faithfulness), but that they are internalized into the subject’s own identity. Thus, women’s obedience is equated with a certain kind of gender performativity that is coded theologically. Further, because this obedience-as-improvement registers as a salvific operation, women not only willingly participate within it on occasion, but often perpetuate it amongst themselves (e.g., mothers teaching daughters). The entanglement of this kind of improvement with Christianity’s notions of salvation and the biblical exhortation to “work out of your salvation” (Phil. 2:12) severely complicates notions of agency for those participating within it. This proves especially problematic for feminist, queer and black thought.

When biology becomes theology in this way (faithfulness is determined by gender performance), it over-determines all humans into racially gendered categories that define faithfulness according to these categories. That is, faithfulness takes on the tone of improving oneself into one particular kind of man or woman, an ideal. Theologically, the question of the ideal human is often answered Christologically, interpreting Jesus Christ as Savior and ideal man. Rosemary Radford Ruether has analyzed the way sexism infiltrated Christology and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza extended this analysis to include how Christology used and legitimized other forms of oppression. How has this entanglement with an oppressive ideal affected women’s bodies, how they understand their faith and how they practice faithfulness? Further, how do Schüssler Fiorenza and Radford Ruether’s analyses of Christology and oppression play across other registers of subject identity (e.g., race, sex, orientation, etc.)?

Salvation from Self-Improvement: A Feminist Theology enters this conversation by giving unprecedented attention to the role of self-improvement within the doctrine of salvation. These representations also reveal the content of who should improve and how and establish who will be evaluating this improvement. It connects this alignment to women’s experience of their body. Ultimately, the dissertation contributes to the budding field of theology of bodies, utilizing feminist and womanist scholarship to develop ideas of faithfulness and identity not rooted in self-improvement.The purpose of this dissertation is to expose how self-improvement became entangled with Christian notions of salvation, such that faithfulness looks like self-improvement calibrated to masculine visions of the human. The dissertation looks toward the constructive turn for conceiving of a doctrine of salvation not entrenched in self-improvement, but it is also conscientious of “saving” the doctrine via the same problematic technology of improvement.

Description of Methodology and MaterialsThe dissertation is primarily a textual analysis with some elements of historical archival research. Largely following the methodology of systematic theology, this dissertation engages a variety of texts analyzing their theory, historical location, the author’s biography, and how the text engages or reflects its cultural setting. The dissertation pays special attention to the subject location of the theologians it engages as a performance of its methodological argument that patriarchy attempts to present certain texts as objective or universal truths. By situating theological texts within the author’s broader socio-political existence, the dissertation attempts to undermine this patriarchal tendency. Beyond this, the dissertation largely functions as a theory driven analysis of the cultural manifestation of patriarchy and offers explorations of its practical manifestations.

The materials used are all texts and include feminist, queer, theological, womanist, philosophical, and exegetical. Non-theological philosophy informs much of the theoretical analysis of patriarchy and how it functions culturally. These texts are incorporated into the standing theological framework and then analyzed for how these systems became incorporated within theology and theological doctrine.

Conclusions DrawnThe dissertation finds that patriarchy has infiltrated the Christian doctrine of salvation such that it requires self-improvement calibrated to patriarchal interests. It terms the product of this infiltration patriarchal soteriology. Patriarchy has accomplished this by conflating two things: conversion with approximation and Christ with the masculine ideal. When Christians confuse conversion with approximation, then both their freedom and theological orientation shift away from Christian values. While conversion signals the possibility of transformation and change, approximation (as described in this dissertation) indicates work toward change as a requirement. Approximation indicates lack that must be corrected and functions as a mechanism that communicates the work must always continue. This continuous work simultaneously reinforces the subject’s continued inadequacy. Approximation also indicates a goal to which Christians attempt to move toward. While this sounds reminiscent of the Christian value to be like Christ, approximation is predicated on inadequacy that must be corrected rather than the relational freedom proclaimed in Christianity. In this sense, approximation establishes a hierarchical system where Christians can be evaluated on the extent of their lack. Within the patriarchal system, this lack gets read through many registers including race, gender, ableism, intellectualism, etc. The dissertation narrows this analysis of patriarchy’s ordering of bodies to consider how this emerges in race and gender. The second conflation describes the content of what Christians are approximating under patriarchal soteriology.

By conflating Christ with the masculine ideal, patriarchy establishes a theological foundation for its arrangement of bodies and teaches Christians that confirmation to this system is an act of faithfulness. Christ as a masculine idea equates Christ’s masculine qualities with holiness. Thus, patriarchy depicts Christ as a young, white, strong, male. This is the shift of biology becoming theology and it informs how certain bodies should improve in order to become more holy. When the masculine ideal is actually what Christians are approximating, however, what is actually happening is the patriarchal ordering of bodies (e.g., women submit to men, men lead, whiteness rules, etc.). Both of these conflations provide a theological justification for patriarchy’s existence and perpetuation.

Against patriarchy’s infiltration into the Christian imagination, the dissertation conceives of three strategies theology can use: anti-patriarchal christology, fugitive theology, and interrelationality. Anti-patriarchal christology uses a lens informed by patriarchy as a system to analyze biblical texts. It operates on the assumption that God is invested in deconstructing systems of oppression (like patriarchy) and as such Christ demonstrates clear actions to this end. Fugitive theology invites reinterpretation, expansion, imagination into the work of theology in order to resist patriarchy’s ever-expanding colonial grasp. Lastly, interrelationality emphasizes the commonality between all creatures, thereby challenging the legitimacy of an ideal figure or the sovereign self.

To this end, Salvation from Self-Improvement: A Feminist Theology contributes to the emerging fields of theology of bodies, theology of entanglement and critical whiteness studies. It deconstructs Christianity’s entanglement with patriarchy and offers a constructive turn for how Christians can imagine a doctrine of salvation that does not reproduce patriarchal oppression.

One of the most significant problems facing the doctrine of salvation is that it's been tied to a word foreign to its very nature: self-improvement. The dissertation articulates an idea of change that is inherent to the idea of salvation that resists and that fortifies us against the idea of improvement rooted in patriarchal commitments. It is an attempt to critically analyze the doctrine of salvation by asking the most pressing question facing it at this moment: is salvation good for women? It’s a constructive re-thinking of what the doctrine means in light of women’s bodies and the fundamental problem of improvement and self-improvement. Within 20th century protestant American contexts, the doctrine of salvation has often been structured in ways that equate self-improvement with salvation. Furthermore, the expectation for this salvific “work” plays out differently across different kinds of bodies, aligning itself with oppressive hierarchies. This kind of improvement is different from both the change initially experienced in salvation and improvements made as the believer enters into the communal reality of being a Christian. The idea of self-improvement as a salvific act presupposes an isolated self that will be cleaned up. This self becomes the white masculine. I argue in this project that the performance of redeemed masculinity (a saved man) is articulated by means of ideas of self-improvement and in turn ideas of self-improvement articulate a redeemed femininity (a saved woman) calibrated to masculinist longings for control and power. Evangelical theology articulates ideas of masculinity within a doctrine of salvation as the outworking of the effects of salvation, or being saved. That is, Christians demonstrate faithfulness by approximating, perpetuating and defending a particular vision of masculinity that depends upon self-improvement. This conflation of self-improvement with the work of salvation depends on the existing (and continuing) inadequacy of the believer. This refracts through existing hierarchies of oppression such that those who are oppressed require more improvement. Thus, the doctrine of salvation has become unrecognizably entangled with social mechanisms that validate and perpetuate cultural hierarchies of oppression.

As a theological quandary, the questions theologians have struggled over are threefold: 1. Who enacts self-improvement, God or the human, or some combination of both? 2. What does an improved Christian look like and who must see the performative embodiment of this improvement? 3. What defines the content that people should approximate in their improvement? The problem emerges at the place of the surface for women, in terms of the formation of a loss of optic control whereby men are positioned as the fundamental observer/approver of the faithful self. If regimes of improvement constitute agency (Foucault), and if such regimes have been seized by women, especially women of color for emancipatory possibilities, then what are we to make of the idea of improvement for doing political, social, economic, and theological work? My project explores the problems and possibilities of salvation and improvement in their theological and related registers. The dissertation ultimately pivots on the question: can the doctrine of salvation itself be saved from its entanglement with self-improvement or its patriarchal commitments?

The practical outworking of a doctrine of salvation enmeshed with self-improvement affects people differently. The way women are taught to imagine faithfulness forms them in obedience to a masculine gaze and masculinist forms of self-evaluation. That is, Christian obedience has been articulated from the site of men who determine the content of women’s obedience and position themselves as the evaluators of it. In this instantiation of masculine-determined obedience, women’s faithfulness is understood in reference to male desires. The dissertation suspects that not only do these practices of improvement get translated as the work of salvation (i.e., faithfulness), but that they are internalized into the subject’s own identity. Thus, women’s obedience is equated with a certain kind of gender performativity that is coded theologically. Further, because this obedience-as-improvement registers as a salvific operation, women not only willingly participate within it on occasion, but often perpetuate it amongst themselves (e.g., mothers teaching daughters). The entanglement of this kind of improvement with Christianity’s notions of salvation and the biblical exhortation to “work out of your salvation” (Phil. 2:12) severely complicates notions of agency for those participating within it. This proves especially problematic for feminist, queer and black thought.

When biology becomes theology in this way (faithfulness is determined by gender performance), it over-determines all humans into racially gendered categories that define faithfulness according to these categories. That is, faithfulness takes on the tone of improving oneself into one particular kind of man or woman, an ideal. Theologically, the question of the ideal human is often answered Christologically, interpreting Jesus Christ as Savior and ideal man. Rosemary Radford Ruether has analyzed the way sexism infiltrated Christology and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza extended this analysis to include how Christology used and legitimized other forms of oppression. How has this entanglement with an oppressive ideal affected women’s bodies, how they understand their faith and how they practice faithfulness? Further, how do Schüssler Fiorenza and Radford Ruether’s analyses of Christology and oppression play across other registers of subject identity (e.g., race, sex, orientation, etc.)?

Salvation from Self-Improvement: A Feminist Theology enters this conversation by giving unprecedented attention to the role of self-improvement within the doctrine of salvation. These representations also reveal the content of who should improve and how and establish who will be evaluating this improvement. It connects this alignment to women’s experience of their body. Ultimately, the dissertation contributes to the budding field of theology of bodies, utilizing feminist and womanist scholarship to develop ideas of faithfulness and identity not rooted in self-improvement.The purpose of this dissertation is to expose how self-improvement became entangled with Christian notions of salvation, such that faithfulness looks like self-improvement calibrated to masculine visions of the human. The dissertation looks toward the constructive turn for conceiving of a doctrine of salvation not entrenched in self-improvement, but it is also conscientious of “saving” the doctrine via the same problematic technology of improvement.

Description of Methodology and MaterialsThe dissertation is primarily a textual analysis with some elements of historical archival research. Largely following the methodology of systematic theology, this dissertation engages a variety of texts analyzing their theory, historical location, the author’s biography, and how the text engages or reflects its cultural setting. The dissertation pays special attention to the subject location of the theologians it engages as a performance of its methodological argument that patriarchy attempts to present certain texts as objective or universal truths. By situating theological texts within the author’s broader socio-political existence, the dissertation attempts to undermine this patriarchal tendency. Beyond this, the dissertation largely functions as a theory driven analysis of the cultural manifestation of patriarchy and offers explorations of its practical manifestations.

The materials used are all texts and include feminist, queer, theological, womanist, philosophical, and exegetical. Non-theological philosophy informs much of the theoretical analysis of patriarchy and how it functions culturally. These texts are incorporated into the standing theological framework and then analyzed for how these systems became incorporated within theology and theological doctrine.

Conclusions DrawnThe dissertation finds that patriarchy has infiltrated the Christian doctrine of salvation such that it requires self-improvement calibrated to patriarchal interests. It terms the product of this infiltration patriarchal soteriology. Patriarchy has accomplished this by conflating two things: conversion with approximation and Christ with the masculine ideal. When Christians confuse conversion with approximation, then both their freedom and theological orientation shift away from Christian values. While conversion signals the possibility of transformation and change, approximation (as described in this dissertation) indicates work toward change as a requirement. Approximation indicates lack that must be corrected and functions as a mechanism that communicates the work must always continue. This continuous work simultaneously reinforces the subject’s continued inadequacy. Approximation also indicates a goal to which Christians attempt to move toward. While this sounds reminiscent of the Christian value to be like Christ, approximation is predicated on inadequacy that must be corrected rather than the relational freedom proclaimed in Christianity. In this sense, approximation establishes a hierarchical system where Christians can be evaluated on the extent of their lack. Within the patriarchal system, this lack gets read through many registers including race, gender, ableism, intellectualism, etc. The dissertation narrows this analysis of patriarchy’s ordering of bodies to consider how this emerges in race and gender. The second conflation describes the content of what Christians are approximating under patriarchal soteriology.

By conflating Christ with the masculine ideal, patriarchy establishes a theological foundation for its arrangement of bodies and teaches Christians that confirmation to this system is an act of faithfulness. Christ as a masculine idea equates Christ’s masculine qualities with holiness. Thus, patriarchy depicts Christ as a young, white, strong, male. This is the shift of biology becoming theology and it informs how certain bodies should improve in order to become more holy. When the masculine ideal is actually what Christians are approximating, however, what is actually happening is the patriarchal ordering of bodies (e.g., women submit to men, men lead, whiteness rules, etc.). Both of these conflations provide a theological justification for patriarchy’s existence and perpetuation.

Against patriarchy’s infiltration into the Christian imagination, the dissertation conceives of three strategies theology can use: anti-patriarchal christology, fugitive theology, and interrelationality. Anti-patriarchal christology uses a lens informed by patriarchy as a system to analyze biblical texts. It operates on the assumption that God is invested in deconstructing systems of oppression (like patriarchy) and as such Christ demonstrates clear actions to this end. Fugitive theology invites reinterpretation, expansion, imagination into the work of theology in order to resist patriarchy’s ever-expanding colonial grasp. Lastly, interrelationality emphasizes the commonality between all creatures, thereby challenging the legitimacy of an ideal figure or the sovereign self.

To this end, Salvation from Self-Improvement: A Feminist Theology contributes to the emerging fields of theology of bodies, theology of entanglement and critical whiteness studies. It deconstructs Christianity’s entanglement with patriarchy and offers a constructive turn for how Christians can imagine a doctrine of salvation that does not reproduce patriarchal oppression.

This dissertation uses film to explore shifts in conceptions of race, cultural identity, and national belonging in Germany from the 1950s West Germany to contemporary reunified Germany. Through the analysis of several German productions featuring black characters in major narrative or symbolic roles, it identifies narrative and cinematic techniques used to thematize and problematize popular German conceptions of race and racism and to utilize race as a flexible symbolic resource in defining specific identity borders. The dominant discourse around the concept of race and its far-reaching implications has long been impeded by the lack of a critical German vocabulary. This gap in mainstream German language is in large part a consequence of the immutable association between “race” (in German, Rasse) as a term, and the pro-Aryan, anti-Semitic dogma of National Socialist ideology. As Germany struggles to address racism as a specific problem in the process of its ongoing project to rehabilitate national identity in a post-colonial era indelibly marked by the Second World War, the films discussed in this work — Toxi (R.A. Stemmle, 1952), Gottes zweite Garnitur (P. Verhoeven, 1967), Angst essen Seele auf (R.W. Fassbinder, 1974), Die Ehe der Maria Braun (R.W. Fassbinder, 1979), Alles wird gut (Maccarone, 1998) and Tal der Ahnungslosen (Okpako, 2003) — provide evidence of attempts to create counter-discourses within the space of this language gap.

Using approaches based primarily in critical race and film studies, the following work argues that these films' depictions of racism and racial conflict are often both confined by and add significant new dimension to definitions of Blackness and of conceptions of race and racism in the German context. These attempts at redefinition reveal the ongoing difficulties Germany has faced when confronting the social and ideological structures that are the legacy of its colonialist and National Socialist history. More importantly, however, the films help us to retrace and recover Germany's history of resistance to that legacy and expand the imaginative possibilities for creating coalitions capable of affecting social change.

Considerable attention is being given to the growing problem of the racial wealth gap in the United States of America. Understanding this chasm requires a critique of the government’s imprimatur on the institution of slavery, the legalization of Jim Crow, and the myriad of ways institutional racism has been suffused into the fabric of America , directly impacting African Americans ability to acquire and accumulate wealth. After the official end of slavery in 1865, the Emancipated were promised a type of reparations in the form of “40 acres and a mule.” However, with the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, his successor Andrew Johnson rescinded the order, forcing blacks into quasi-slavery in the form of vagrancy laws, sharecropping and convict leasing. Then, the next fifty years of Jim Crow segregation effectively allowed the country to improvise new ways to subjugate blacks into a new caste system with alternative laws at the hands of the political and economic elite, this was especially prevalent in those areas once reliant upon slave labor. Blacks were routinely subjected to literacy tests, black codes, vagrancy laws, poll taxes and grandfather clauses, which were meant to restrict political participation, economic inclusion and social integration, lasting from 1877 well into the 1950s. This research proposes that the commodification of black bodies served as the underpinning of American capitalism, and demonstrates how slave labor across the South, benefitted other parts of the country, even the world, and served as the driving force behind an emerging national economic system. The amalgamation of two-hundred and forty-six years of enslavement, ninety years of legalized Jim Crow segregation, sixty years of separate but equal and thirty-five years of racist housing policies, locked generations out of economic opportunity and gave rise to ubiquitous pathologies across the nation. These and other injustices were supported by local municipalities and bolstered by the United States Federal Government, which warrants a substantial justice claim. In 1989, the late John Conyers (D-MI.) began presenting a bill before the House of Representatives to develop a commission to merely study the social effects of slavery, segregation and its continuing economic implications. The bill has remained tabled in the House of Representatives for the past thirty years. In a historic move in 2019, a group of panelists were able to present cogent arguments before the House of Representative, debating the pros and cons of reparations, however since the landmark hearing, no further action has been taken on the matter. This research aims to justify a reparations program by establishing the myriad of ways historical kleptocracy, state-sanctioned segregation and federally supported laws set the stage for the current and ever-growing racial wealth gap. To construct this argument, I draw upon historical, sociological, theological and political scholarship, in an effort to establish the United States of America has yet to atone for the moral injury of slavery and should be held culpable for its lingering effects. Therefore, I propose the federal government should be held responsible for acknowledging, redressing and bringing closure to these and other reprehensible acts, and a mea culpa is only one step toward national healing and wholeness. I utilize Walter Rauschenbusch’s work, Christianizing the Social Order which examines the symbiotic relationship between Christianity and social reform, as he critiqued the economic conditions of his day and argued for radical social, political, and economic changes in the structures that crippled the vulnerable and the underserved. His understanding of reform and justice could play a vital role in moving the Church and the nation toward penance. In this work, I propose that reparations are not only a moral claim but a biblical and theological mandate, that will be analyzed and synthesize through past and contemporary scholarship. I will conclude with the idea that reparations are the only actionable recourse that will effectively close the racial wealth gap, in order to facilitate wholeness for the American descendants of slaves. This research will conclude that cumulative injustices leveraged against Blacks have had damaging effects on the present, and many of the injustices were supported and sanctioned by the United States Federal Government and executed by state legislatures. Therefore, my research argues that the federal government should be held culpable for the current social, political and economic damages experienced by contemporary African Americans.

Considerable attention is being given to the growing problem of the racial wealth gap in the United States of America. Understanding this chasm requires a critique of the government’s imprimatur on the institution of slavery, the legalization of Jim Crow, and the myriad of ways institutional racism has been suffused into the fabric of America , directly impacting African Americans ability to acquire and accumulate wealth. After the official end of slavery in 1865, the Emancipated were promised a type of reparations in the form of “40 acres and a mule.” However, with the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, his successor Andrew Johnson rescinded the order, forcing blacks into quasi-slavery in the form of vagrancy laws, sharecropping and convict leasing. Then, the next fifty years of Jim Crow segregation effectively allowed the country to improvise new ways to subjugate blacks into a new caste system with alternative laws at the hands of the political and economic elite, this was especially prevalent in those areas once reliant upon slave labor. Blacks were routinely subjected to literacy tests, black codes, vagrancy laws, poll taxes and grandfather clauses, which were meant to restrict political participation, economic inclusion and social integration, lasting from 1877 well into the 1950s. This research proposes that the commodification of black bodies served as the underpinning of American capitalism, and demonstrates how slave labor across the South, benefitted other parts of the country, even the world, and served as the driving force behind an emerging national economic system. The amalgamation of two-hundred and forty-six years of enslavement, ninety years of legalized Jim Crow segregation, sixty years of separate but equal and thirty-five years of racist housing policies, locked generations out of economic opportunity and gave rise to ubiquitous pathologies across the nation. These and other injustices were supported by local municipalities and bolstered by the United States Federal Government, which warrants a substantial justice claim. In 1989, the late John Conyers (D-MI.) began presenting a bill before the House of Representatives to develop a commission to merely study the social effects of slavery, segregation and its continuing economic implications. The bill has remained tabled in the House of Representatives for the past thirty years. In a historic move in 2019, a group of panelists were able to present cogent arguments before the House of Representative, debating the pros and cons of reparations, however since the landmark hearing, no further action has been taken on the matter. This research aims to justify a reparations program by establishing the myriad of ways historical kleptocracy, state-sanctioned segregation and federally supported laws set the stage for the current and ever-growing racial wealth gap. To construct this argument, I draw upon historical, sociological, theological and political scholarship, in an effort to establish the United States of America has yet to atone for the moral injury of slavery and should be held culpable for its lingering effects. Therefore, I propose the federal government should be held responsible for acknowledging, redressing and bringing closure to these and other reprehensible acts, and a mea culpa is only one step toward national healing and wholeness. I utilize Walter Rauschenbusch’s work, Christianizing the Social Order which examines the symbiotic relationship between Christianity and social reform, as he critiqued the economic conditions of his day and argued for radical social, political, and economic changes in the structures that crippled the vulnerable and the underserved. His understanding of reform and justice could play a vital role in moving the Church and the nation toward penance. In this work, I propose that reparations are not only a moral claim but a biblical and theological mandate, that will be analyzed and synthesize through past and contemporary scholarship. I will conclude with the idea that reparations are the only actionable recourse that will effectively close the racial wealth gap, in order to facilitate wholeness for the American descendants of slaves. This research will conclude that cumulative injustices leveraged against Blacks have had damaging effects on the present, and many of the injustices were supported and sanctioned by the United States Federal Government and executed by state legislatures. Therefore, my research argues that the federal government should be held culpable for the current social, political and economic damages experienced by contemporary African Americans.

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion