Wrestling with Human Diversity: A Comparative Typology Between Racism and Religion

The American Civil War was a conflict over the institution of slavery, dominant in the South and threatening to spread to the new territories of the expanding United States. Today, however, the so-called ‘Lost Cause’ movement offers an unapologetic white supremacist view of humankind, while insisting that the war had nothing to do with slavery. In response to persistent American racism, the scholar Ibram X. Kendi suggests a typology of attitudes toward human diversity, culminating in ‘anti-racism’. Juxtaposing Kendi’s model with Alan Race’s well-known typology of responses to religious diversity may clarify and strengthen each of the two.