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Nov. 2, 2020 - Straight White American Jesus
07:00
Religion, Roots, and Black National Identity with Richard Newton

In an episode recorded as part of a public lecture at Skidmore College, Brad speak with Dr. Richard Newton about his new book, Identifying Roots: Alex Haley and the Anthropology of Scriptures. They discuss how Haley's book Roots and the ensuing TV mini-series marked a new chapter in telling the story of Black Americans, how Roots became the "Black family Bible," and what it means in regard to our current cultural moment. Professor Newton explains how the story has become a sacred narrative about American national identity and how its legacy reverberates in contemporary movements for racial justice.  Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/ Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC Order Brad's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163 SWAJ Apparel is here! https://straight-white-american-jesus.creator-spring.com/listing/not-today-uncle-ron To Donate: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/BradleyOnishi Venmo: @straightwhitejc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Axis Mundi
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College, and we have an incredibly special episode right now.
We're taping in front of a live Zoom audience, and we're doing so with our guest, and that is Dr. Richard Newton, who is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Alabama.
So, Dr. Newton, I'll just say thanks for joining me, and thanks for being here with some of my Skidmore colleagues, Skidmore students, and Skidmore community.
Thank you for having me.
I'm really excited to be with you virtually, and maybe next time we can do it in person.
Yeah.
Well, this is your second time being here on the show.
You were part of our very ad hoc and somewhat rushed episode on what people thought, what religion scholars thought about Trump's Bible photo op a couple of months ago, but it's wonderful to have you back to talk about your brand new book and your book is Identifying Roots Alex Haley and the Anthropology of Scriptures.
It is just out from Equinox and it's a fantastic text and we're gonna jump into it here in a second.
I want to tell people about you though before we do that.
You are, as I said, a faculty in religion at the University of Alabama.
You received your PhD, Critical Comparative Scriptures, at Claremont Graduate University.
Research interests are actually incredibly varied, everything from theory and method in religious studies to the anthropology of scriptures.
You've published, you know, Dr. Newton, you've published Journal of Biblical Literature, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, and other places, and you are always writing and blogging and engaging with folks at Sowing the Seed, Fruitful Conversations in a Religion, Culture, and Teaching.
So, You're all over the place.
I see you on social media often.
I sometimes wonder when you're sleeping, but we're really happy to have you back.
Let me start by saying thank you to my department here at Skidmore College in Religious Studies, our Chair, Professor Eliza Kent, and those others who have joined us tonight.
It's really fun to merge straight white American Jesus and everything we do here with my life and work at Skidmore, so this is a really fun kind of thing for me.
With all of that said, Richard, let's jump into your book and what you're up to.
Your book is one of those books that's on one thing, and it's on a lot of things.
It's on roots, Alex Haley's roots, and I'm going to ask you to tell us a little bit about that in a minute.
But through your examination of roots, you really are able to address a host of things, from how scriptures, sacred texts, are formed and made, I want to get into all of that, and so in order to do it, we need to know what Roots is.
racism, our cultural moment when it comes to the movement for black lives, and so on and so forth.
I want to get into all of that.
And so in order to do it, we need to know what Roots is.
There's some of us who are old enough, and I'm not going to identify my birthday nor those of my colleagues, but I will say there are some of us who are old enough to remember Roots and remember some of the ways it was just a cultural phenomenon.
However, many other folks were just not old enough for the book to, when the book first appeared, or the miniseries.
So, can you just give us like a minute on how Roots was a true phenomenon?
In the mid 70s in ways that maybe are unsurpassed since then.
Yeah, and it's a it's an interesting question because I wasn't there for it.
And that's perhaps why I chose to study it at one level that I am studying roots because there's a level at which I had to know about this thing that I didn't get to experience firsthand.
And the thing that I didn't get to experience was this sort of roots phenomena or what a lot of media commentators called Haley's Comet.
So, in 1976, in the American Bicentennial, an African-American journalist by the name of Alex Haley, who was a popular magazine writer, especially in sort of conservative elements like Reader's Digest, Saturday Evening Post, and the like, wrote this
Saga, 800 page saga on the history of his family going back to his enslaved ancestor by the name of Kunta Kinte who was taken from the Gambia during his sort of teen years and was brought to the port of Annapolis in Maryland where he was given the name Toby by slave masters there who had purchased him and he tried to run three times and on the third time his foot was chopped off and in
Dealing with the sorrow and the struggle that comes with all of the things I just described, he determined that he could create a sort of New World tribe that led all the way to Alex Haley, who was able to tell this story and recover it from oral history and archives to share with the world, to say that Black people actually do have a past, and if you know where you came from, then you can go absolutely anywhere.
You have this incredible phrase in the book, you say that Roots was a social media moment before there was social media.
And so, can you just help us understand that?
How was this received in a way that was just sort of Beyond any categories that we had up to that point.
Yeah, so the book came about in the fourth quarter of 1976 and was the top selling book except for All the President's Men by Woodward and Bernstein.
And so it was, it just flew off of shelves.
All the advanced copies, all the first run, just people were lining up all around like bookstore corners to get this book.
The closest thing I can imagine at this point is like Harry Potter parties or something like that.
That, like, this was the book you had to have and get that physical copy.
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