Journal ArticleDOI
“Race Tests”: Racial Boundary Maintenance in White Evangelical Churches
Glenn E. Bracey,Wendy Leo Moore +1 more
TLDR
This paper found that social actors (i.e., clergy and congregants) play a central role in continuing racial segregation by executing "race tests" on people of color who attempt to gain entry to these spaces.Abstract:
How and why do nominally open organizations remain racially segregated in the post-civil rights era? What role do interpersonal interactions play in the perpetuation of segregation? Using ethnographic data gathered from seven, majority white, evangelical churches across four states, we find that social actors (i.e., clergy and congregants) play a central role in continuing racial segregation by executing “race tests” on people of color who attempt to gain entry to these spaces. Race tests are performances by white individuals and groups, in the presence of incoming people of color. They utilize racial microaggressions, playing on persistent racist stereotypes and/or histories of racial violence, to preclude or precondition people of color's participation in predominantly white social spaces. White actors in white social spaces initiate utility-based race tests to determine whether people of color are willing to serve the interests of whites in the space, or execute exclusionary race tests to coerce people of color into leaving the space. We provide examples of both types of race tests and discuss the role of such microaggressions and the racialized emotions at play in the reproduction of segregation in historically white social spaces like white evangelical churches.read more
Citations
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Racial Ideology or Racial Ignorance? An Alternative Theory of Racial Cognition:
TL;DR: In this article, a process-focused Theory of Racial Ignorance (TRI) grounded in Critical Race Theory (CRT) is proposed to address racial ignorance in social systems.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Politics of Religious Prejudice and Tolerance for Cultural Others
TL;DR: While some research argues that religious pluralism in the United States dampens conflict by promoting tolerance, other work documents persistent prejudice toward religious out-groups as discussed by the authors, and they address t...
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Christian America? Secularized Evangelical Discourse and the Boundaries of National Belonging
TL;DR: This paper analyzed how Americans of all religious backgrounds evaluate a secularized evangelical discourse (SED), a repertoire of political statements that are phrased in religiously nonparticularistic terms, but have roots in evangelical Christian history and epistemologies and have been politicized through social movements and party politics.
Journal ArticleDOI
White Space(s) and the Reproduction of White Supremacy
David G. Embrick,Wendy Leo Moore +1 more
TL;DR: In the past two decades, social scientists have begun to explicitly interrogate the racialized economic, political, cultural, and ideological mechanisms of social space as discussed by the authors, and this work is related to our work.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Stakes of Symbolic Boundaries
TL;DR: Sociological theories of symbolic boundaries (understandings of who belongs to in-groups and out-groups) and social boundaries (material stratification) argue both are related, but empirical analys...
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought
TL;DR: The authors argue that many Black female intellectuals have made creative use of their marginality to produce Black feminist thought that reflects a special standpoint on self, family, and society, and explore the sociological significance of three characteristic themes in such thought: (1) Black women's self-definition and self-valuation; (2) the interlocking nature of oppression; and (3) the importance of Afro-American women's culture.
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TL;DR: Using critical race theory as a framework, the authors provided an examination of racial microaggressions and how they influence the collegiate racial climate using focus group interview data from African American students at three universities.
Journal Article
Critical Race Theory, Racial Microaggressions, and Campus Racial Climate: The Experiences of African American College Students
TL;DR: Using critical race theory as a framework, this paper provided an examination of racial microaggressions and how they influence the collegiate racial climate using focus group interview data from African American students at three universities.
Journal ArticleDOI
Work in Progress Toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States
TL;DR: The authors argues that organized religion thrives in the United States in an open market system, an observation anomalous to the older paradigm's monopoly concept and argues that U.S. religious institutions are constitutively pluralistic, structurally adaptable, and empowering.
Journal ArticleDOI
Racial microaggressions and the Asian American experience.
TL;DR: There were strong indications that the types of subtle racism directed at Asian Americans may be qualitatively and quantitatively different from other marginalized groups.
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