I had the opportunity to write a short piece for to a dialogue on the Movement for Black Lives that went live today on the Social Science Research Council's popular religion blog, The Immanent Frame. My contribution is a short and revised excerpt from a long essay that will appear in the January issue of the journal Public Culture.
As a longtime follower of both The Immanent Frame and Public Culture, I am glad to have occasion to contribute to each of these intellectual communities. Here's a short excerpt from my essay, which is titled, "#BlackLivesMatter and the heterodox history of Afro-Protestantism":
"Though it is commonly identified as “not your grandfather’s Civil Rights movement,” #BlackLivesMatter is a bit of the old and the new at once. The Movement for Black Lives has earned this moniker, in part, because social media has been key to both the content and form of its organizing practices. Hashtags are made both to stage demonstrations and perform the work of memorialization (i.e. #SayHerName). Its novelty is also associated with a strident critique of what Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham named as the “politics of respectability.” This disavowal signals alienation from traditional black institutions, even as it advances a vision of racial justice that embraces class, gender, and sexual difference . . . "
You can find my complete essay and the entire discussion by clicking here:
http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2016/09/22/religion-secularism-and-black-lives-matter/
