Centering Black Catholic Religio-Racial Identity, Revealing White Catholicism

In New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration, Judith Weisenfeld presents numerous instances when members of religio-racial movements contested the racial classificatory system provided by the federal government and confronted state administrators with their own alternative religio-racial identities. For Weisenfeld, these sorts of exchanges highlight, first and foremost, Black agency in religio-race making. But, as she indicates, they also make visible the contours of religio-racial whiteness as state administrators struggled to defend the status quo. In this article, I focus on how Black contestation and confrontation with racial hierarchy can reveal the racial whiteness operating beneath the surface of normative "religion." This article draws on sources ranging from a police surveillance report to angry letters from white Catholics in order to argue that Black Catholics interrupted the presumed normativity of white Catholic religious life and, in so doing, revealed white Catholicism as a racial formation.