America's Use of Biblical Passages to Form Racial Identities

Since the importation of the first African captives in the sixteenth century, a unique and bilateral discourse has subsequently evolved as a means of legitimizing the perpetuation of unconscionable power relationships on the one hand, and reconciling an imposed ethos of subjugation (and indeed horror) on the other.

This dichotomy of discourses, of white legitimization and black reconciliation, has taken as authority its definitive cultural text: the Bible. Nonetheless, their experience sculpted the course of their exegesis; without specific racially-based rulings in scripture with which to be guided, interpretation took a decidedly creative turn, and in fact was used to bolster polarized arguments of, variously, the inherent inferiority or maleficence of non-whites and the coming redemption and exaltation of blacks.

We will examine these racio-religious discourses through the lens of three essays on the subjects of pre-Civil War mythoracial ideology, black identity formation via exegesis and certain religious trends within the African-American community, and the modern white supremacist Christian Identity movement, respectively. In the course of this investigation we will arrive at certain conclusions concerning both the methodology and merits of these essays and what insights might be gleaned from the coalescence of these thematically tied topics.

Eddie Glaude, in his "Myth and African American Self-Identity", argues that typological ethonogenesis, or communal identity formation stemming from biblical typology, gave the first Protestant settlers to North America a sense of manifest destiny as connected to the formation of Israel in the Old Testament, replete with a story of

persecution from without (Glaude 31). While it's unclear what if any the long-term implications of this original tie-in to Biblical myth were, Glaude makes explicit the basic if not often articulated philosophy of these first noble pioneers: "We are indeed the New Israelites. America is the New Canaan. That is, unless you're black" (32).