Race consciousness alone, not doctrine, drove black Baptists’ separate identity from whites

Evidence

Church doctrine and religious symbolism did not prove to be divisive issues. It was race consciousness alone that prompted black Baptists to re-define and re-present themselves differently from white Baptists. Blacks fostered an ideal of community that affirmed mutual identification and self-determination. Their sense of community approximated Benedict Anderson’s discussion of nationalism,+ where he defines nation as “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” In the case of black Baptists, the “imagined community” was racially bounded and its sovereignty was perceived as free of white control—hence black denominational hegemony. Across the South and the nation, black men and women of different ages and classes, and personally unknown to one another, perceived and sought to realize a common destiny distinct from that of whites. Their community was also imagined, since tensions and conflicts between black men and women coexisted alongside assumptions of a “deep, horizontal comradeship.” — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 248

Categorization

• XREF: Anderson’s imagined communities applied to a racially bounded religious denomination. — connects to: White Baptist exclusion over slavery drove black Baptists to form their own national convention — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 44; Denied inclusion within white institutions deepened black Baptist separatism — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 247; Black Baptist women held a double consciousness of simultaneous separateness and alliance — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 390 (+4 more)
• DEFINE: Clarifies that even an internal ‘imagined community’ papered over real gender tensions.

Broader Connections

• Black Baptist women’s separatism drew on both race and gender consciousness. #qualifies (0.80) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 334
• Black Baptist women held a double consciousness of simultaneous separateness and alliance #expands (0.78) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 390
• Rising racial solidarity among black Baptists ran parallel to rising gender consciousness among women #corroborates (0.75) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 709
• Mississippi segregationists’ racism was sincerely rooted in their Baptist theology, not hypocrisy #complicates (0.74) — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, 117
• Black racial identity is externally imposed before it is self-chosen #complicates (0.72) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 340