Racial and cultural in-betweenness meet in the consulting room: the case of ‘Anna’

An upper-middle-class black woman, who grew up adapting to a white-dominated environment, entered the consulting room of a multicultural ‘white-passing’ analyst, and here unique emotional experiences were reflected in dream images of racial disorganization, internal racism, and identity confusion. While sorting through the analysand’s internal dynamics, the external world erupted in May 2020 with the murder of George Floyd, catapulting both analysand and analyst (and the nation) into a transformative confrontation with their mutual, deep-seated woundings of American racial and cultural inequities. The analysand’s racial complexity directly impacted the analyst’s ‘white-passing’ privilege, bringing into question established classifications of American whiteness. Overlapping dynamics and experiences as ‘in-betweeners’ and ‘outsiders’ – a black woman subsumed by a white-dominated society and an immigrant refugee acculturated to American life – provided a common exilic ground for mutual understanding and mirroring. The analyst explores the racial and multicultural straddling that served as a lens into the analysand’s fragmented racial identity during the eruption of American racial unrest.     

What is being revealed in 2020?

The Covid-19 pandemic is exposing how humans have long related to nature, and revealing aspects of classism and racism that have long been ignored. Drawing on spiritual resources, such as Luther, might the polarizing, self versus other tendencies be overcome and the long pandemic rooted in economic class and racism more effectively addressed today? Can this result in a “new normal”?     

The Crystallization of Contemporary Racial Prejudice across the Lifespan

The conventional wisdom is that racial prejudice remains largely stable through adulthood. However, very little is known about the development of contemporary racial attitudes like symbolic racism. The growing crystallization of symbolic racism through the lifespan is tested using two data sets that measure the stability, consistency, and predictive validity of symbolic racism in samples ranging in age from young adults to the elderly. The results provide evidence that the crystallization of symbolic racism generally takes on a curvilinear trajectory across the lifespan, showing that it is already largely crystallized by voting age, that it continues to crystallize still further through adulthood and that it begins to decline in coherence in late adulthood. The results generally provide evidence confirming early speculations of symbolic racism theorists concerning the crystallization of symbolic racism across the lifespan and are discussed in terms of different theoretical perspectives on the relationship between aging and attitudes more generally.     

Christ’s Love in the Midst of Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed vividly the pandemic of economic inequality, the pandemic of racism, and the pandemic of climate catastrophe. This article explores what it means to manifest Christ’s love, moving the world, in the midst of these pandemics. It begins by recalling firm faith claims on which to build a response, moving on to “reading” the context of these four pandemics, noting five signs of the times as guides for discerning how to respond. It concludes with four suggestions regarding gospel-grounded response: (1) seeking to address one of these pandemics without deep attention to the others is dangerous; (2) the four pandemics converge in a holy call to economic restructuring; (3) the movement toward a moral economy is not an impossible dream; and (4) religion, including the World Council of Churches, has a crucial role to play. They are suggestions, in other words, about the form of Christ’s love moving the world in the midst of these pandemics.     

Case Study

No abstract available for this article.     

Perceiving Racism in Ambiguous Situations: Who Relies on Easy-to-Use Information?

Abstract

In situations that are ambiguous with regard to the presence of discrimination, how do people arrive at their conclusions that discrimination has (or has not) taken place? This question was examined from a motivated social cognition perspective via the interaction of two factors: the prototype effect—the notion that ambiguously discriminatory behavior is more likely to be perceived as discriminatory when the executor is prototypical and the need for cognitive closure—the tendency to jump hastily to and seize on an answer. Results provided replicating evidence of the prototype effect among European American participants but not among African American participants. Specifically, European Americans were likely to perceive ambiguously racist behavior enacted by a prototypical executor (i.e., a White person) as more discriminatory than the same behavior exhibited by a non-prototypical executor (i.e., a Black person). African American participants, on the other hand, showed no reliance on this simple cognitive heuristic. Furthermore, results showed that European Americans with a higher need for cognitive closure were more likely to rely on the easy-to-use information offered by prototypes. These findings are discussed from a motivated social cognition perspective.     

Considerations for an Inclusive Global Theological Education

This article considers the role of theological education in developing the ministry of the church and the need for it to be relevant to the realities and needs of the people it is to serve. The article considers three factors – racism, imperialism, and tribalism – that influence theological education in different ways. It then turns to a consideration of African‐American womanist theology and African women's theology – as reflected in the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians – and the similarities between these two approaches as expressions of liberation theology and their relevance for inclusive global theological education.     

Reparations and the Rectification of Race

Positive law and problems with identifyingbeneficiaries confine reparations for U.S.slavery to the level of discourse. Within thediscourse, the broader topic of rectificationcan be addressed. The rectification of slaveryincludes restoring full humanity to our ideasof the slaves and their descendants and itrequires disabuse of the false biological ideaof race. This is not racial eliminativism,because biological race never existed, but moreimportantly because African American racialidentities and redress of present racism arebased on lifeworlds of race in contrast withwhich the biological idea has been an externalimposition.