2019 Annual Conference

CPAE CoConference: Research & Theory

Shared Concurrent Session (Approx. 12 or 20 minutes)

This interactive session discusses how religion is an attribute of race for certain groups in the US. This study focuses on US South Asian Americans (SAAs) and explores potential implications for other racial minority groups related to learning, classroom practices, and education policies.

This study will be helpful to adult and higher education researchers, teachers, practitioners, and graduate students who are interested in anti-racist praxis and engaging in conversations about race, religion, intersectionality, and justice.

Learners will be able to understand how religion is an attribute of race and how it complicates the dominant perspective on race in the US. Learners will also be able to articulate the implications of this complication as concerns learning, classroom practices, and educational policies.

Race and racism are complicated concepts. They are not the same conceptually, but as Goldberg (2009) argues, “they are deeply connected conceptually and politically” (p. 9). The participants in the study, US South Asian Americans (SAAs), experienced racism and exhibited racial prejudice themselves. For them, claiming a South Asian American identity, a distinct racial identity, was an agentic and resistant act, since they chose that identity and what constitutes that racial identity.

Religion was an attribute of race for most of the participants in the study. Participants equated Hinduism with being SAA and used this connection to identify and distinguish themselves in the black/white US racial landscape. Moreover, the SAA racial identity was an elite identity which conferred caste, religious, ethnic, and class privileges. Therefore, SAAs had a stake in maintaining this identity.

The presentation calls for a radical retheorizing of race (Loomba, 2009) since the SAA conceptualization of race is different from the dominant U.S. perspective. It decenters the dominant perspective and examines concepts of race, racism, and racialization in new ways (Gnanadass, 2016). Research participants’ stories will foster dialogues on race, anti-black racism and other forms of racism, and anti-racist praxis.

This will be an interactive session. Participants will actively engage in conversations about race, anti-black racism, and anti-racist praxis. The presenter will start with a brief presentation of the research findings using narrative quotes from study participants. The presenter will then discuss related future research on the relevance of this particular conceptualization of race (i.e. religion as an attribute of race) in the American South, and end with a Q&A asking the audience about their racialized experiences as it pertains to religion and how they used said issues to inform their learning and practice.