I just got back to Philadelphia from a short trip up to Massachusetts this weekend, where I split time between plugging my new book in Boston and taking part in a panel called “Theorizing Race and Ethnicity in Theology and the Study of Religion” at Harvard University’s Divinity School. The Harvard panel proved to be one of those (sometimes rare) academic events that combined intellectual edification and soul-stirring inspiration.
Professor Ronald Thiemann, a scholar who studies the role of religious practices/beliefs in everyday public life, was our host, and he facilitated a discussion that ranged from a powerful “womanist” position on race and contemporary cultural politics (offered up by Texas Christian University Professor Stacey Floyd-Thomas) to a meticulous articulation of past and present scientific commitments to ideologically driven biologizations of race (courtesy of Harvard’s own Evelynn Hammonds).
Connecticut College’s David Kim offered his insightful take on the intractability of racial issues today. He had previously shared much of the same information with a few of Obama’s campaign strategists, along with some ideas about how to address racial issues as part of Obama’s presidential bid. (They didn’t heed most of his suggestions.)
Historian of religion David Carrasco, also at Harvard, emphasized the importance of regional specificity vis-à-vis questions of race/racism, especially given the fact that race and racism look markedly different in, say, the Deep South and the Southwest.
I am conducting ethnographic work on global Black Hebrewism right now, so I talked a little bit about that ongoing project. There are many examples of African Americans’ investments in Hebrewism, dating back to the 17th Century. One of the most compelling contemporary instantiations of such a reckoning of Black Hebraic identity would be “The African Hebrews of Jerusalem,” a group that left the United States in 1967 and is currently thriving in Israel’s Negev region. My take on the emigrationist group spurred a productive discussion and debate. I left the campus abuzz from all the challenging feedback provided by audience members and encouraged by the fact that Harvard’s Divinity School had even mounted such a provocative session at all.
The first email I received when I got to Logan Airport in Boston, just coincidentally, was from the SSRC. They were spreading the word about a new roundtable feature on their site, “Race in America,” which includes comments from political scientist Michael Dawson, anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz, historian Angela Dillard and many others. I just got a chance to read through material on the site today. It is worth checking out: www.ssrc.org/raceinamerica.
