Interview: Glenn Bracey on ‘Race Tests’ and What Black Christians Risk in White Churches (Excerpt)
Nicola A. Menzie for Faithfully Magazine
Glenn E. Bracey is a professor of Sociology at Villanova University. Bracey specializes in critical race theory, social movements, and religion. In May 2017, the journal Sociological Inquiry published Bracey and Wendy L. Moore’s paper about a study he conducted between 2008 and 2011 involving White Evangelical churches. The paper was titled “Race Tests”: Racial Boundary Maintenance in White Evangelical Churches.”
As Faithfully Magazine reported online in April:
In his church visits and participation in homegroups/Bible studies, Bracey encountered what he described as numerous “utility-based tests” (does the person of color serve the church’s interests to appear “diverse?”) and “exclusionary race tests” from his White hosts. Of the latter, he explained: “When people of color were unwanted and/ or potentially threatened the boundaries of white institutional space (through their presence or their racial perspectives), white insiders in the churches employed exclusionary race tests to identify and repel people of color whose racial status, non-white customs, and/or racial politics disrupt the norms of white space.
During one of Bracey’s church visits, his White host caught herself as she blurted that her church had prayed for a Black man to join them. When he visited an all-White home Bible study, Bracey and a Hispanic man found themselves as the butt of a violent and racially-insensitive joke. The others in their group, however, had a great laugh at their expense. When Bracey visited another home for a different group gathering, his White hosts seemed startled to see that he was Black. While giving guests a tour of their home, Bracey’s Christian hosts [seemed eager to show off] their Confederate decorations.
You did the “Race Tests” study between 2008 and 2011 and restricted it to seven churches in Florida, Texas, Indiana and Illinois. Did you revisit or update any information to account for the gap in years before your paper was published?
On the one, let me say racism is entrenched in us and frankly, the things that make racism change aren’t common enough for there to be mass changes in how racism operates in churches. You’ll notice that in the article I cite several pieces where the data collection is more recent and some of them are quantitative, so they’re much larger studies that look across multiple churches and they’re consistent with what I find.
In terms of questions of recency, I think in general the literature has covered that. For me, in particular, I was doing a long ethnographic study, so this particular piece is only about the work I did gaining access to those churches. But when I gained access to those churches, I was then in there for months, sometimes over a year, and that takes time, and the travel and all those sorts of things take time.
What motivated you to take a look at this particular issue?
My mentor in graduate school (was) Joe Feagin at Texas A&M (University) who is a renowned race scholar. When he used to have meetings with his graduate students, maybe once a week, one of his other students (discussed how she) was conducting studies in churches. I was, in my meetings with him, telling him about some of the stories that are in that article [“Race Tests”]. She said, “Yeah, I’ve seen similar things in the churches that I’ve been (to),” which is what clued me into that this is a general pattern that spreads across regions. So, in seeing that other researchers were recognizing the same thing, that let me know that maybe this is a particular kind of tactic that the churches use to police people of color, especially Black bodies in these churches.
In the paper you describe yourself as a Christian of color with a long history in White churches.
I’m an African-American man. I was in my late 20s when I did the work — so don’t do the math. In terms of my involvement in churches, I served for five years as a lay minister in a church. I preached Sunday sermons, I organized our evangelism teams, I raised money. Our church went from 80 people to 450 by the time I left and about half of those were people that I had either directly evangelized into the church or the people that I discipled had brought in.
Continue reading at https://faithfullymagazine.com (paywall).
