US-E AntiRacism · Catholicism and the “Negro Question”: Religion, Racism, and Antiracism in a Transnational Perspective (United States and Europe, 1934-1968)

Catholicism and the “Negro Question”: Religion, Racism, and Antiracism in a TransnationalPerspective (United States and Europe, 1934-1968)

US-E AntiRacism investigated how the Roman Catholic Church responded to anti-Black racism from the age of ‘overtly racist regimes’ to decolonisation, the civil rights era, and 1960s modernisation. In particular, it focused on Catholic ‘interracialism’ as a specific third way between (Nazi-style) racism and militant antiracism appealing to universal human rights. These are the essential questions addressed by the project: • How and why did interracialism become a common tenet in Catholicism? • Did interracialism change Catholic race thinking? • When did Catholic antiracism begin? Catholic antiracism is often taken for granted. Racist views of Catholics have been regarded as something foreign to Christian universalism which ascribes to the status quo or to the mainstream biological theories. US-E AntiRacism seeks to reverse this ‘cultural captivity’ thesis, in the awareness that the Catholic stance towards identity politics and the #BLM global movement are best understood by looking at the way (and the limits) religious agencies historically handled the topic of race and Blackness. This research project had three main objectives: (1) The reconstruction of Catholic interracialism as a global network. (2) The examination of interracialism as a particular way of antiracism, i.e. its key-concepts, images, practices, and paradoxes on both sides of the Atlantic. (3) Writing a cultural history of Catholic antiracism, i.e., illustrating the Catholic evolution in the struggle for racial justice (from ‘interracialist’ to ‘antiracist’). Scholarly debate has often been polarised between the cliché of natural Catholic antiracism and a broad definition of white supremacy as embedded in Western Christianity. As regards the conclusions of the action, the research program enhanced a nuanced interpretative framework aiming at: (a) revisiting the notion of racism as a cultural construct itself, gaining currency in the face of the German völkisch doctrine; (b) laying out an ‘epistemological’ history of how the Catholic Church has contributed to the conceptualisation of the antinomy racism/antiracism; (c) addressing ‘interracialism’ not just as a label referring to the history of American Catholicism and desegregation, but as a wider pattern which was shaped between the two sides of the Atlantic through mutual exchanges of ideas.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз