Abstract
Race, gender, and class are three markers of difference—or examples of projected social “irregularity”—serving to frame the United States for better than 300 years. These three are categories of imposed social meaning and placement worn on the human body but also constitutive of that body. In a word, the body is a bio-chemical reality (a physical reality that is born, lives, and dies) upon which social codes (e.g., race, gender, class, and sexuality) are layered. But it is also a social reality (a “something” spoken through language into existence) that is defined by these constructs.
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See, for example, Katie Reilly, “Here Are All the Times Donald Trump Insulted Mexico,” Time Magazine (August 31, 2016) at http://time.com/4473972/donald-trump-mexico-meeting-insult/; Janell Ross, “From Mexican rapists to bad hombres, the Trump campaign in two moments,” Washington Post (October 20, 2016), at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/20/from-mexican-rapists-to-bad-hombres-the-trump-campaign-in-two-moments/?utm_term=.d402f5eb8381. The most graphic endorsement and mimicking of Trump’s xenophobia came from the group Hillary Clinton labeled a “basket of deplorables”: http://www.bbc.com/news/av/election-us-2016-37329812/clinton-half-of-trump-supporters-basket-of-deplorables.
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See, for example, the manner in which the Book of Genesis has been used to justify disregard of people of African descent and certain modalities of sexuality: the alleged “Curse of Ham” in Genesis 9:20-27 and “Sodom and Gomorrah” in Genesis 19:1-29.
- 3.
Some of these ideas were first presented in February 2017, during my Martin Luther King , Jr., lecture at Claremont School of Theology. I explore them in various forms and other locations, including “In the Wake of Obama’s Hope: Thoughts on Black Lives Matter, Moralism and Re-imagining Race Struggle”, in Juan Floyd-Thomas and Anthony Pinn, editor. Religion in the Age of Obama (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).
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See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (New York: Routledge, 1966/2002).
- 5.
Some of this information and that related to Black Lives Matter is drawn from Anthony B. Pinn, “On Struggle In Our Historical Moment,” Huffington Post, July 12, 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anthony-b-pinn/on-struggle-in-our-histor_b_10930544.html. I continue this line of reasoning in several pieces, including Pinn, “In the Wake of Obama’s Hope: Thoughts on Black Lives Matter, Moralism and Re-imagining Race Struggle,” in Juan Floyd-Thomas and Anthony Pinn, editor. Religion in the Age of Obama (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).
- 6.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015).
- 7.
I have in mind Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1991).
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- 10.
This information reflects my wrestling with humanist activism as presented in When Colorblindness Isn’t the Answer: Humanism and the Challenge of Race (Charlottesville: Pitchstone Publishing, 2017).
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Pinn, A.B. (2018). Introduction. In: Pinn, A. (eds) Humanism and the Challenge of Difference. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94099-1_1
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