Race and Racial Ideology

By a wealth of indicators, ignorance appears a bona fide if often vexing social fact. Ignorance is socially constructed, negotiated, and pervasive; ignorance is often socially inevitable, even necessary; and, without a doubt, ignorance is socially consequential. Yet, despite its significance, ignorance has appeared a largely secondary concern among sociologists. Perhaps more perplexing, while sociologists of racism, power, and domination have long focused on the ways racial ideologies distort and mystify racial understanding to sustain white domination and systemic racism over time, we have done less to elaborate ignorance than is possible and warranted. Here, I join growing calls for a fully-fledged ‘sociology of ignorance,’ and argue antiracist and decolonial scholars have much to gain from and contribute to such an endeavor. This article traces the historical forebears of a ‘sociology of ignorance’ and explores ignorance as a social concept before turning to examine precedents and increasing attention to ignorance scholarship on racism, racial domination, and racialized non-knowing. Drawing from this work, I urge race-critical scholars take advantage of our unique position to advance theory and methodology surrounding ignorance and the social-cultural production of non-knowledge as a broader area of social inquiry.

This article offers a critical engagement of a 2016 essay published in Perspectives in Religious Studies that claims the pretribulational rapture is a racist doctrine promoting a "cosmic segregation" for white supremacists. Contrary to this claim, the article demonstrates not only the flawed research methodology employed in the original essay, but builds a positive case for rapture doctrine as historically providing hope for the most marginalized in society, motivation for adherents to engage culture, and ultimately serving as an antidote for oppression.

In this paper, I focus on the 1908 book Studies
in the American Race Problem, a collection of
essays by Mississippi planter Alfred Stone and
Massachusetts statistician Walter Willcox, in
order to examine the ways in which agricultural
industrialization was articulated as a racial project in the early 20th century. Notions of development and competition in agriculture were closely
tied to plantationist racial conceptions, and Studies in the American Race Problem evidences
the articulation of white supremacist racial
conceptions with liberal statistical practices which
examined race as a population-level phenomenon. This agrarian epistemology, articulated as
the interplay of individual racial defiiency and
population-level demographics, provides evidence
of an anti-Black investment in the notion of industry. Acknowledging anti-Blackness in the very
genealogy of agro-industry, I suggest, provides a
means to better understand subsequent agricultural development.

Abstract
This article presents three trajectories of research toward the deconstruction of capitalist ideology in Christian theology. It frames capitalism as the central material institution in the history of the Américas through reflection on Immanuel Wallerstein’s theory of the modern capitalist world-system. It then considers Aníbal Quijano’s theory of the coloniality of power, which emphasizes the role of racialization in the construction of capitalist laboring classes. Finally, the article considers Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation, which demonstrates how capitalist ideology is internalized by political subjects. It concludes that no theological subject is wholly free of the influence of capitalist ideology.

Resumen
Este artículo presenta tres trayectorias de investigación hacia la deconstrucción de la ideología capitalista en la teología cristiana. Enmarca el capitalismo como la institución central material en la historia de las Américas a través de la reflexión sobre la teoría del sistema-mundo capitalista moderno de Immanuel Wallerstein. Luego considera la teoría de la colonialidad del poder de Aníbal Quijano, la cual hace hincapié en el papel de la racialización en la construcción de clases trabajadoras capitalistas. Por último, el artículo considera la teoría de Louis Althusser sobre la interpelación, que demuestra cómo la ideología capitalista está internalizada por los sujetos políticos. El artículo concluye que ningún tema teológico está totalmente libre de la influencia de la ideología capitalista.

Resumo
Este artigo apresenta três trajetórias de pesquisa para a desconstrução da ideologia capitalista na teologia cristã. Enquadra o capitalismo como a instituição material central na história das Américas através da reflexão sobre a teoria do sistema-mundo capitalista moderno de Immanuel Wallerstein. Depois considera a teoria da colonialidade do poder de Aníbal Quijano, a qual destaca o papel da racialização na construção das classes trabalhadoras capitalistas. Finalmente, o artigo considera a teoria da interpelação de Louis Althusser, demonstrando como a ideologia capitalista é internalizada pelos sujeitos políticos. Conclui-se que nenhum assunto teológico está totalmente livre da influência da ideologia capitalista.

Directing attention to racial ignorance as a core dimension of racialized social systems, this article advances a process-focused Theory of Racial Ignorance (TRI), grounded in critical race theory and the philosophical construct white ignorance. TRI embodies five tenets – epistemology of ignorance; ignorance as ends-based technology; corporate white agency; centrality of praxis; and interest convergence. TRI’s tenets explain how racial ignorance reinforce white domination, attending to mechanisms of white knowledge evasion and resistance that facilitate racial reproduction – in everyday life, through institutions, and across societies more broadly. I illustrate TRI’s assets by comparison to an extant theory of racial cognition – color-blind theory (CBT). I argue TRI generates returns by shifting from racial ideology to racial ignorance, and from era-defined structures to ongoing historical processes; and demonstrate TRI’s unique capacity to explain and predict changes in dominant logics, supporting more strategic resistance.

In this article, I analyze the particularity of post-racial ideology in Brazil. I examine recent deployments of mixture and racial democracy as re-articulations of historically hegemonic versions of these ideologies that minimize the problem of racism, deny its systemic nature, and deem ethno-racial policies as threats to achieving nonracial belonging and citizenship. Drawing on scholarship on race and racism from the United States, Brazil, and elsewhere in Latin America, I delineate a relational framework for analyzing the post-racial and apply this framework to three examples of post-racial ideology. Through these examples, I illustrate the problematic logics shaping aggressive investments in the post-racial as future promise to the detriment of addressing the unequal effects racial difference presents for inclusion/exclusion today. The article asserts the necessity of mounting transnational and interdisciplinary theoretical, epistemological, and practical strategies to challenge the ways post-racial ideologies rearticulate racial hierarchies, maintain racial subordination, and delimit social change.

This paper addresses issues of centrality, marginality, and intercultural dynamics in psychology and religion from a historical perspective by examining how the category of primitivity in Sigmund Freud’s and Carl Jung’s psychological theories reflect not only their contrasting views on religion, but also their different identities – Jewish and German(-ic) Protestant respectively – in an age of increasing pan-German nationalism and anti-Semitism.  According to both psychologists, the term “primitive” refers to an early stage of psychological development that is indexed to race, meaning the dark-skinned “other” of the European colonialist and early anthropological imagination. In Jung’s theory, however, “primitive” peoples are also the living evidence for the primordial collective unconscious and its storehouse of “numinous” archetypal forces.  Furthermore, he describes “Jewish” psychology as “primitive” in the sense of infantile and collective, whereas the psychology of the “Germanic primitive” contains the kinds of tensions and potentialities that once gave birth to individual consciousness.