Editorial: A Space for Hard Conversations on Race, Racism, Anti-Racism, and Religious Education

Journals like this one cannot always be immediately responsive to significant contemporary events, even when such events relate to the very scope and mission of the publication. This is largely because any given issue of the journal takes shape far in advance of the time it goes to print. But the past year's intensification of racial tensions and race-based violence around the globe demanded that we make space in our journal to look at the connections between race, racism, anti-racism, and religious education. These topics have been a significant priority within the Religious Education Association in recent years (Steering Committee of the REA Board 2016; Tran 2015), called forth by realities within which religious educators work. Across 2016 we have witnessed a continuation of racial violence in the U.S., and unfolding tragedies of massive global migration in relation to violence and warfare around the world in which race/ethnicity and religion play a major role. It thus seems imperative in this context to interrupt business as usual, and to start the new journal year with this special issue focused on the intersections of race, racism, and anti-racism in religious education.

Such intersections, while hardly comprising new terrain for scholar-practitioners of religious education, contain difficult ambiguities: there is good anti-racist work within RE, yet it is not the case that religious education always moves in the direction of justice, and sometimes even well-intended efforts to dismantle racism end up reproducing it in the very structures and pedagogies engaged to overcome it. While many scholars work specifically on liberatory pedagogies and power relations, the absence of a sustained self-critical conversation about race creates a null curriculum in religious education as a field, in which we teach and communicate as much by what remains unspoken or absent as we do by our explicit scholarship. The call for papers for this special issue of Religious Education sought to invite participation in such a conversation, asking authors to consider race, racism, and anti-racism in religious education not only from the stance of religious education's contributions toward social change, but also self-critically, from an awareness of the field's complicity in racial injustice. Recognizing that the United States has its own peculiar, complex history of racism, this call for papers also invited persons from various international contexts to address race, racism, and religious education as it appears in those places. Sadly, although our pool of submissions for the issue was strong, none of the papers came from contexts outside of the U.S., perhaps indicating that the very nomenclature of race and racism has become tied to the U.S. context in ways that make it difficult for those in other locations to see their own situations within this framework. In addition, all of the articles submitted for this special issue come out of the Christian religious tradition, a divergence from our usual intentional practice of religious diversity, and one occasioned by the simple fact of those who responded (or did not) to the call for papers. It would be a gift to the journal's readership and to the work of religious education if some scholars from other contexts and religious traditions would offer their work on this topic for consideration in future issues of the journal, so that we all might gain a fuller perspective on this important matter.

This journal issue opens with the work of David Evans and Tobin Miller Shearer, two teachers of race and religion in predominantly white institutions of higher education, in search of pedagogical principles to prepare white students to become allies in anti-racism work. They challenge ideas such as classrooms as “safe spaces,” and address the ways that “white fragility” (DiAngelo 2011) becomes an impediment to student learning. Barbara Fears critiques the lack of attention to race and racism in Christian education curricula on the grounds that its absence prevents persons from recognizing the role of race/racism in their religious identity formation, as well as from taking responsibility for the ways their religion participates in perpetuating racial divisions in society. Fears offers the Underground Railroad as a corrective model for contemporary religious education. Courtney Goto's article performs the very situation it addresses: the only article that does not consider racism primarily in terms of Black–White relations, Goto looks toward the possibility of moving “beyond the Black–White binary of U.S. race relations” in how religious education addresses racism. She invites religious educators to consider how the exclusive framing of race and racism within this binary shapes perceptions of race, theology, and practices of relating to others, and her constructive work offers an educational activity as one alternative model. Mary Hess's critique of the field of religious education for inadequate attention to race concentrates particularly on the power of white privilege to limit deep engagement with the discomfort that addressing racism entails. As a way to frame her thoughts, Hess names the legal activist Brian Stevenson as a mystic (“one who lives ordinary life through transfigured perception”), drawing on his work for specific practices that can assist white religious educators in “confronting and dismantling systems of racialization.” Like Evans and Shearer, Hess finds Robin DiAngelo's notion of “white fragility” to be salient, viewing it as an aspect of formation into whiteness that perpetuates white supremacy. Willie James Jennings invites readers to consider alternatives to how education has been imagined in the West within its colonial history. He calls for reform not only in how one imagines the (racialized) educated subject, but also in the vocation of teaching itself, with “a vision of the teaching life that would challenge the racial antagonisms of the Western world,” through what he calls “a pedagogy of belonging.” Almeda M. Wright's article completes this special issue as she interrogates theological and religious education among African Americans for how it may function as mis-education, inculcating self-distain by devaluing their religions and traditions. Book reviews by Ronnie Prevost, Tanya Eustace, Alexandria Egler, Jeffrey Nelson, Elizabeth Corrie, and Fred Edie follow the articles. Our author-colleagues provide us with some remarkable work to shape a complex conversation that must continue into the future.

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