Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• White, Carol Wayne

Titel

Black Lives, Sacred Humanity, and the Racialization of Nature, or Why America Needs Religious Naturalism Today

Ist Teil von

• American journal of theology & philosophy, 2017-09, Vol.38 (2-3), p.109-122

Ort / Verlag

West Lafayette: University of Illinois Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In September 2016, a first-year student at East Tennessee State University interrupted a Black Lives Matter protest on campus, parading in a gorilla mask. Clad in overalls and barefoot, the young man offered bananas to the protesting students, heckling them. When set within a wider historical context, this student's actions evoke a legacy of intimidation in which perceived differences attributed to certain humans are symbolized in terms of animal otherness. This mechanism of targeting certain groups as different and designating them as the Other has often included linking them to animals or objects that require managing, cleansing, or elimination. Further, and quite importantly, the relationship between antiblack racism and speciesism is not merely an analogical one. On the contrary, the dismissal of nonhuman sentience conditions the reduction of some human others to the status of mere animal life. Finally, with its capacious cosmology, religious naturalism also strengthens the case for addressing with concerted effort ecological degradation on various levels. Its theoretical claims alert us to the dangers of isolationist agendas that environmental justice advocates apparently resist.