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Race Is Central to Identity for Black Americans and Affects How They Connect With Each Other

4/18/2022

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No matter where they are from, who they are, their economic circumstances or educational backgrounds, significant majorities of Black Americans say being Black is extremely or very important to how they think about themselves, with about three-quarters (76%) overall saying so.

A significant share of Black Americans also say that when something happens to Black people in their local communities, across the nation or around the globe, it affects what happens in their own lives, highlighting a sense of connectedness. Black Americans say this even as they have diverse experiences and come from an array of backgrounds.

Read more online at Pew Research.

For Black Americans, family and friends are a primary source of information on U.S. Black history

4/18/2022

Nearly nine-in-ten Black Americans say they are at least somewhat informed about the history of Black people in the United States, with family and friends being the single largest source of information about it, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey of Black adults.

Read more online at Pew Research.

Across religious groups, a majority of Black Americans say opposing racism is an essential part of their faith

11/20/2021

Worshippers attend a service at First Baptist Church North Tulsa on May 30, 2021, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

The intersection of race and religion has played an important role in the civic lives of Black Americans for more than two centuries. From hosting antebellum abolitionist meetings to serving as centers for social movements in the mid-20th century, Black houses of worship have often been the foundation from which public battles for freedom and racial equality have been waged. At the same time, race plays a fundamental and complex role in the religious and personal lives of Black adults, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.

Opposing racism is an integral part of religious identity for many Black adults. Three-quarters of Black Americans say that opposing racism is essential to their faith or sense of morality, a view that extends across faith traditions. Those who say that being Black is a very important part of their personal identity (78%) are more likely than those for whom being Black is less important (70%) to view opposition to racism this way.

Read more online at Pew Research.

Nine-in-ten Black ‘nones’ believe in God, but fewer pray or attend services

3/24/2021

RyanJLane via Getty Images

The share of Black Americans who do not identify with any religion is increasing, as is true among Americans overall. Still, the vast majority of religiously unaffiliated Black Americans believe in God and about half pray regularly, although few attend religious services, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.

And in guided, small-group discussions, unaffiliated Black adults expressed a distinction between believing in a higher power and engaging in practices common among religiously affiliated Black Americans.

Nine-in-ten Black “nones” – people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” – believe in God or another higher power, according to the survey. Among religiously affiliated Black Americans – those who adhere to Christian and non-Christian faiths – 99% believe in God.
Overall, “nones” make up 21% of Black U.S. adults. Most in that category say their religion is “nothing in particular” (18%), while far fewer describe themselves as agnostic (2%) or atheist (1%).

Read more online at Pew Research.

Faith and Religion Among Black Americans

3/24/2021

Delmaine Donson/Getty Images

Today, most Black adults say they rely on prayer to help make major decisions, and view opposing racism as essential to their religious faith. Also, predominantly Black places of worship continue to have a considerable presence in the lives of Black Americans: Fully 60% of Black adults who go to religious services – whether every week or just a few times a year – say they attend religious services at places where most or all of the other attendees, as well as the senior clergy, are also Black, according to a major new Pew Research Center survey.

Read the full report online at Pew Religion.

Amid National Reckoning, Americans Divided on Whether Increased Focus on Race Will Lead to Major Policy Change

10/6/2020

Members of Black Lives Matter are joined by hundreds of others during an evening protest. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

A series of high-profile incidents of police violence against Black Americans in recent months, including the killing of George Floyd and the shooting of Jacob Blake, have sparked nationwide protests, renewed calls for the removal of Confederate symbols and produced public condemnations of systemic racism from lawmakers, corporations, sports leagues and others. Yet many Americans are skeptical that this moment of racial reckoning will lead to major changes in the United States, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

The public is about evenly split on whether the increased focus on issues of race and racial inequality in the country in the past three months will lead to major policy changes to address racial inequality (48% say it will and 51% say it will not). A sizable share (46%) say this will not lead to changes that will improve the lives of Black people. And while a majority say the heightened attention to racial issues represents a change in the way most Americans think about these issues, just 34% say this represents a major change.

Read the rest online at Pew Social Trends.

Before protests, black Americans said religious sermons should address race relations

6/15/2020

Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post via Getty Images

For black Americans, faith and racial justice have long intersected. Throughout history, houses of worship served as central gathering places where black communities discussed political issues and civic action. This often took the form of protest strategy meetings and rallies. But political activism also infused the sermons, hymns and other religious content of many black congregations.
Given that tradition, black Americans and white Americans have differing views on the role that political topics such as race relations and criminal justice reform should play in religious sermons, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted earlier this year, before the killing of George Floyd and the ensuing protests.

Read the rest online at Pew Research.

Americans Have Positive Views About Religion’s Role in Society, but Want It Out of Politics

11/15/2019

Eamon Queeney/The Washington Post/Getty Images

A large majority of Americans feel that religion is losing influence in public life, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey. While some say this is a good thing, many more view it as a negative development, reflecting the broad tendency of Americans to see religion as a positive force in society.

At the same time, U.S. adults are resoundingly clear in their belief that religious institutions should stay out of politics. Nearly two-thirds of Americans in the new survey say churches and other houses of worship should keep out of political matters, while 36% say they should express their views on day-to-day social and political questions.

Read the rest online at Pew Religion.

Linked fate between and within racial groups

8/16/2019

Residents participate in a service of prayers and hymns for peace in advance of a planned white supremacist rally and counter-protest in August 2017 in Knoxville, Tennessee. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

How much do people feel that what happens to members of their own racial or ethnic group affects what happens in their own lives? What about what happens to other groups? Known among researchers as “linked fate,” this sense of connectedness was originally used to explain persistent Democratic voting bloc patterns among black Americans. More recently it has been used to examine not only how closely connected black Americans feel toward one another, but also connectedness between and among other racial groups.

Read the rest online at the Pew Research.

Race/Gender/Class/Media 4.0

4/22/2019

Race/Gender/Class/Media 4.0 is out! Consider adopting this book for your classes if you're teaching on race and media (tv, movies, music, social media, etc.) or checking it out if you want a theory-based but easy to read book on the subject.

My piece is in section 6.4, "Not Just Jezebel: Black Women, Nicki Minaj, and Sexualized Imagery in Rap Music". To learn more about the book and purchase, click here.

Race in America 2019

4/19/2019

(iStock photo)

More than 150 years after the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States, most U.S. adults say the legacy of slavery continues to have an impact on the position of black people in American society today. More than four-in-ten say the country hasn’t made enough progress toward racial equality, and there is some skepticism, particularly among blacks, that black people will ever have equal rights with whites, according to a new Pew Research Center survey...

Read the full report online at Pew Social Trends.

Black men are less religious than black women, but more religious than white women and men

10/9/2018

People attending a 2017 service dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. pray and hold hands. (Reza/Getty Images)

Research has shown that men in the United States are generally less religious than women. And while this pattern holds true among black Americans – black women tend to be more religious than black men – black men are still a highly religious group. In fact, black men are not only more religious than white men, but they also tend to be more religious than white women, a Pew Research Center analysis shows. Black men are also more religious than Hispanic men and at least as religious as Hispanic women on a number of key indicators of religious observance.

About seven-in-ten (69%) black men say religion is very important to them, compared with 80% of black women. But black men place more importance on religion than white women (55%) and Hispanic women (65%), according to the 2014 Religious Landscape Study.

Read the rest online at Pew Research.

My Favorite Feminist

4/5/2018

Maria Miller Stewart

At SIUE, I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology, but I am also affiliated with our wonderful (and FUN) Women's Studies program. Recently, the program started a blog series on faculty's "Favorite Feminist Heroes". The blog post below is my entry from that series. To follow the blog, visit: https://siuewmst.wordpress.com/wmst-blog/

My favorite feminist is Maria Miller Stewart. Often, feminism is viewed within various aspects of black nationalist ideology as a white invention; as something that is foreign and inconsistent with black freedom movements. Likewise, popular stories of women’s political history in the U.S. often start with the “first wave” at the end of the 19th century. However, Maria Miller Stewart was a free black woman living in Boston in the 1830s and the first American woman to give a public lecture on social justice issues to mixed race and mixed gender audiences.

This is important, given that elite black women of her day were consigned to literary or temperance societies if they wanted to do political work. Stewart is important because she becomes a forerunner of the black feminist tradition that we usually locate in the 1960s and 70s. In 1831, she published “Pure Principles of Morality” in the ladies section of William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper “The Liberator”. (Note that Stewart knew and worked with Garrison in the abolitionist movement a full decade before Frederick Douglass met him). In “Pure Principles”, Miller speaks directly to black women of her day, imploring them about the need for them to be leaders. She stated,

Possess the spirit of independence. The Americans do, and why should not you? Possess the spirit of men, bold and enterprising, fearless and undaunted…

She continues a year later in her “Lecture at Franklin Hall”,

Who shall go forward, and take off the reproach that is cast upon the people of color? Shall it be a woman? If it is thy will, be it even so, Lord Jesus!”

Stewart was so bold and searing in her critiques of black male leaders (many of whom she viewed as lazy) that her growing unpopularity forced her to leave Boston in 1833. During her farewell speech at the African Masonic Temple, the mostly male crowd jeered and threw rotten tomatoes at her. What could she have said to anger them so much?

Had those men amongst us, who have had an opportunity, turned their attention as assiduously to mental and moral improvement as they have to gambling and dancing, I might have remained quietly at home, and they stood contending in my place.

Stewart basically claps back at these leaders, arguing that if you all were about your business you could be on the lecture circuit advocating for the race and I could have been at home! As the popular saying goes, she had time that day! She pulled no punches, she critiqued ineffective male leadership, and fiercely advocated for black women to recognize their ability to lead. And she did it while many of the men whom we hail as great abolitionists were still toiling on plantations. She did it a full 130 years before the dates in history where we typically introduce the topic of black feminism into our reading lists and courses on black politics. She is an unsung feminist hero.

Want to read more about Dr. Cox’s favorite feminist, Maria Miller Stewart? Check out this page about Miller at the Connecticut Hall of Fame!

We Need More Than Pink Cleats

9/20/2014

Every October the NFL, in partnership with the American Cancer Society, adorns itself in pink to raise awareness about and funds for breast cancer. Via their NFL Pink website, the league encourages women to make a “crucial catch” and to know that “annual screening saves lives.” Amidst these messages are videos and stories of women who are currently enmeshed in the fight against the disease. The implicit message here is that the NFL recognizes its female fan-base and appears to be dedicated to a cause that might impact a significant number of their lives. Despite recent criticism that the NFL profits from their Pink campaign, the visual spectacle resulting from the NFL’s use of pink cleats, towels, and goal posts is impressive.

And yet these efforts do nothing to assuage my increasing disgust with the league and the androcentricity that governs U.S. professional sports in general. Several recent issues involving current and former NFL players have left me watching sports television less and less.

Read the rest on The Feminist Wire.

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