Lecturer in the Comparative Study of Religions Dr. Diana Murtaugh Coleman gave a presentation, “Righteousness, Resentment, and Religion in this Time of Plague,” on her research on state violence at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Western Region conference in March in the panel “American Religion and Racial Justice.”
Abstract: Drawing on literatures that address the historical and contemporary impact of state violence deployed against BIPOC and their communities, I will analyze the strategies of resistance and empowerment employed by groups like BLM, the Poor Peoples Campaign, Chicanos for la Causa, Salud America, and the NDN Collective, as I interrogate the ways in which particular religious framings of oppression and resistance-often emerging within white Christian Nationalist spaces-are implicated in reproducing structural violence. Some forms of violence manifest in ways that are obvious: militarized policing, voter disenfranchisement, and broken court systems, but other forms of violence are opaque and subject to redaction or reduced to mere immutable fact devoid of historical context especially during public discourse about COVID19: lack of access to clean water, food deserts, unaffordable housing, low wage “essential” jobs, and underfunded schools. Jean Amery’s memoir contributes to my thinking about the animating and sustaining power of resentment (and rage) after harm to oneself and one’s community.