Race, Religion, and Politics

Many authors hope events will make their book timely. Few could be more perfectly timed than Race, Religion, and Politics: Toward Human Rights in the United States. As this review was coming together, the country was reeling from the massacre of thirty-one Americans by two disaffected white males. Although explanations of what incubated such hatred in these men may be complex, one thing is clear: a hatred of others festered inside them. The El Paso shooter, “inspired” by the massacre of fifty-one Muslims at prayer in a Christchurch, New Zealand mosque, sought “to shoot as many Mexicans as possible”; he believed authorities should “send them back.” This book chronicles the slow march of hate across American history long before white nationalist groups became increasingly brazen and dangerous. It advances two ideas. First, a “nexus of race, politics, and religion” works to entrench oppression. In Mitchem’s words, they form an interwoven, embedded power matrix.... Whether through quarrels about affirmative action or voting suppression, through acts of domestic terrorism or the persistence of macroaggressions, white racism seems to be infused into our twenty-first-century political system. ... [S]uch events are not unconnected but fit in the frame of a larger, social, intersectional construction that supports and maintains oppressions. (p. 1)

Criminology · Hatred · Human rights · Immigration · Nationalism · Nationality · Oppression · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Race (biology) · Racism · Sociology · Terrorism · White (mutation) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies