The Color Line, Race, and Caste: Structures of Domination and the Ethics of Recognition

Abstract

The Black Lives Matter movement has been trying to awaken the rest of the United States to its failure to recognize systemic racism, anti-blackness, and white supremacy. With a keen awareness of racism as structural, this article first considers the pervasiveness of systemic racism in the church and then investigates how in the United States anti-blackness was first documented as the color line, then as racism, and now as caste. Recognizing these social structures, it concludes by considering virtues and practices that could help in decentering the dominant caste in its expression of white supremacy.