Race and Religion

Coming into this, I had a similar analysis to Nye’s, that race is a colonial construct that was created to perpetuate colonialism. I’ve always tried to avoid class-reductionist theory in my political views, and thus ideas like this have been pretty present in my thoughts for a while. On the other hand, Dr. Kendi’s chapter presented a much more interesting viewpoint, to me, at least. No offense to Nye, but the perspective of a black academic is probably preferable here, and he provided an insight I hadn’t really gotten before, of how much blackness is a part of the lives of those who are.

Kendi demonstrated through his brutal interrogation of the early history of race theory just how intertwined much of humanity’s history of that time is with race. It was something I hadn’t really stopped to consider before. I obviously knew people were racist and did awful things due to that belief, but I never accounted for the scope of it. Even something as simple as a name, Henry, is tainted in Kendi’s view, and I tend to agree with him on that.

I’d never really contemplated how race fits with religion, aside from pointing out that Jesus was brown to the occasional racist evangelical online, however, and I’m excited to dig more into that later.