In 2014 I began teaching an Elizabethtown College course called "The Bible and Race in the USA." It's a seminar driven by a question about how discourses like "Bible," "race" and "America" inform each other to the extent that we can hardly unweave them. There's a craftiness to textuality that we quickly forget all that … Continue reading The Bible and Race in the USA: An Introduction to Contexts
In this edition in our Reading Race and Criminality series, Dr. Brad Stoddard examines the history and politics that frame Florida's experimentation with faith-based prison reform.
Rhetorics of “law and order” have returned with a vengeance in the 2016 US Presidential Debate. Sowing the Seed is going to repost pieces from its Summer 2016 Reading Race and Criminality series in an attempt to deepen the discussion. Emily Soltys builds on Matthew Kuraska’s piece, to look at the role of media and language in discussing the … Continue reading Mediating Perceptions of Race and Criminal Justice in America
Racial inequality is a well-known problem across the United States, but people rarely know how or why these numerous socio-economic gaps were created and allowed to persist between humans with simple differences in physical characteristics. In fact, the racial disparities that we observe today find their origin from the inception of a country that set forth that all men are created equal. But recent research suggests that many citizens may inherently believe otherwise.
By definition, students are committed to forming an awareness of these constructions. Do they have to abandon using the term? No. But they should think carefully about what they intend by doing so, especially when trying to convey their observations, questions, and arguments to others.
