This episode begins with the conveyance of wisdom from two African American women who are scholars of religion. First, Dr. Anthea Butler on how and why protest works. Then, Dr.Shannen Dee Williams on the history of racism in the Catholic church and the need to listen to black activists. Brad and Dan then discuss the awry symbolism of Trump's photo op, the hypocrisy of invoking Romans 13, comparisons to 1968, Trump's polling numbers. They finish by discussing the 3rd Amendment, We the People Populism, and the difference between police and military.
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AXIS MUNDY AXIS MUNDY Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor, Religious Studies, Skidmore College, and I'm here with my co-host, I'm Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Well Dan, we recorded together last Friday.
It feels like a decade since then.
It has truly been a week that is hard to put into words and one I'm sure people will write.
I'm sure in 20 years we will have books on We'll have 300 page books that are just on this week, honestly.
I really think that's possible.
From coronavirus stuff to everything that kicked off just about a week ago in terms of protest and uprising, President Trump's photo op, So on and so forth, and we're going to try to jump into as much of that as we can.
I wanted to start today just by highlighting the work of some scholars who I think have some great insight into some of the things that are happening today, and they are Black women, and they are religion scholars who have really provided Some fantastic sort of insight into some of the histories and context of what's happening here.
I want to start with Anthea Butler, Dan.
Anthea Butler is a professor at UPenn, in many ways kind of the pioneer for religion scholars like us doing public scholarship.
And she wrote a piece a couple years ago, 2018, called We Know Protests Work, So Why Aren't We Protesting?
And this is just a nice reminder for anyone in your life, friends, who's saying, oh, protests don't matter and they don't actually change things.
Go read Anthea Butler's short piece in the HuffPost.
She really points out how we can look long term, we can look short term.
We can look at protests for women's suffrage, we can look at the Civil Rights Movement, we can look at protests against the Vietnam War.
And what she says is, look, what's often lost is the results of those protests.
Women got the vote, the Civil Rights Act of 64, the Voting Rights Act of 65 were passed, and the U.S.
withdrew from Vietnam in 1973.
She points to contemporary protests across the world.
She points to one in particular in Korea, That were a sustained protest against President Park and what happened?
Those protests helped remove President Park.
Here's what she says.
I'm going to quote her, "Sustaining effective large-scale protest requires a clear symbol.
In the Korean case that I just mentioned, it's President Park and a clear goal.
A new book titled History Teaches Us to Resist by UPenn history professor Mary Frances Berry chronicles how resistance and protest through 20th century America have reshaped the political Using the March on Washington, anti-Vietnam protest, and the anti-apartheid movement as examples, Berry writes that it's important to realize that resistance works, even though it does not achieve all of the movement's goals and that movements are always necessary.
I cited Thea Butler here a day before.
A million folks are expected in DC, Dan, for a protest tomorrow.
And as the sustained protests continue to happen all over the country, I think her piece is helpful for putting some of that in context.
Anyway, I have another thing I want to highlight here, but any thoughts on that?
The only thing I was going to highlight is if people think the protests don't work, just ask themselves why those whose entrenched power are threatened by protests are so threatened by them.
It's not because they're afraid of Target stores being ransacked or, you know, dumpster fires or something like that.
It's because they know that they work, right?
Protests are undertaken by people whose rights are denied, are violated, are just said to be non-existent, and they demand those rights, and it's precisely because they work That entrenched powers, in this case, primarily white powers in the U.S., are so opposed to them.
So, they wouldn't be opposed so much if they weren't effective and if they didn't work.
And you're right, Butler's work is fantastic with this.
I want to highlight work by Judith Wiesenfeld, who's a professor at Princeton.
And what seems like a century ago, in 2012, she wrote a piece for Religion and Politics.
And there, the piece is titled, Post-Racial America?
And what she does is highlight how to talk about a post-racial America is unhelpful on a number of levels.
One of them is the fact that it overlooks how African Americans have used their racial, I'm sorry, their religious identities to combat racial violence and racism.
And she says here in the article, their challenge to the logic of race in America was political and that most were interested in gaining full citizenship rights.
But their alternative approaches were inseparable from religious commitment.
In seeking to become post-racial in the sense they rejected conventional American categories, members of some groups took routes to understanding their place in wartime America that led them to embrace a different set of racial categories, and others rejected race entirely in favor of religious sense of self.
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