The Heart, Not the Face: A Civil-War-Era Tale and the Persistent Challenge of Race in Religious Education

Abstract

This article analyzes the 1863 pseudo slave narrative entitled Black and White; Or, the Heart, Not the Face by white Northerner Jane Dunbar Chaplin. The article sets this tale within the historical and literary context of “domestic abolitionism.” The logic behind the story is described as “sympathetic identification,” a perspective that, although elevating the slave protagonist, leaves unexamined white religious, aesthetic, cultural, and political assumptions. The article concludes with a reflection on the persistence of this logic in current Religious Education settings and offers advice for practitioners who desire to expand interracial and intercultural understanding.

The Reverend Peter W. Shafer, an ordained minister in the Free Methodist Church, is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology of education at the State University of New York at Buffalo, NY. He teaches, as an adjunct, at the University at Buffalo and at Roberts Wesleyan College. E-mail: [email protected]