Читать книгу White Christian Privilege - Khyati Y. Joshi - Страница 24

This chapter has provided examples of Christian normativity and privilege as individuals experience it. It is perhaps the least invisible part of the larger superstructure of White Christian supremacy. Christians’ social power to define what is normal excludes, degrades, and harms religious minorities. The preeminence of European and Protestant influences in US culture is not just a vestige of colonialism. It is the product of centuries of social policy since then, all influenced by shifting notions of Whiteness and Christian identity. Enduring cultural norms have affected US immigration and naturalization policy since the First Congress convened in Washington. Muslims, for example, were not the first minority religious or racial group to face the kind of bias described above: Native Americans and Japanese Americans, among others, were earlier targets. Their differing appearance and beliefs implied that they were dangerous and they were rounded up, excluded, interned, or killed as a result.

Now that we have begun to see through the optical illusion of “religious freedom” in the United States, and to understand that Whiteness and Christianity coexist and mutually support each other, we will explore the social and legal history that got us here. Understanding that history will enable us to better understand the situation today. This begins with seeing the path from the European origins and American manifestations of the dichotomy between Christian and heathen through the nineteenth-century experiences of Catholic, Jewish, and Orthodox immigrants. It continues with a ride on the twentieth century’s legal roller-coaster from banning Asian immigration and stripping some Asians of their US citizenship in the roaring twenties, through to the emergence of the most diverse wave of American immigration yet after 1965. We will then see how all these developments created a twenty-first-century social and political environment in which unprecedented diversity has led to a new backlash that is redefining Americanness yet again.