The Black Church is the oldest social institution in the Black community and has played a significant role in the Black American experience by offering a space to develop Black oppositional consciousness. Despite the strong Black Christian tradition, a comprehensive review of the sociological literature on Black Christianity has yet to be conducted. The present article surveys extant literature and finds that two major frames are utilized when analyzing Black Christianity: (a) the Institutional‐level frame, which focuses on the Black Church as a social and cultural space, and (b) the Ideological‐level frame, which sees Black Christianity as a set of racialized attitudes, values, and beliefs. I rely on Avishai's concept of “Doing Religion” to argue the case for a new approach in framing this research and propose the use of an Individual‐level frame, which considers the agency of Black Christian actors by examining how they construct identity and embody faith. To illustrate the usefulness of the new frame, I provide an exemplar of Black Christian activist Bree Newsome Bass, highlighting the ways her faith informs her activism. By shifting the focus away from the Black Church as an institution and Black Christianity as an ideology, and instead centering the mechanisms Black Christian actors use to incorporate their faith into their everyday lives, sociological research on Black Christianity will be better equipped to provide insights into how religion informs racialized experiences in society.
American popular culture was established to appease a white audience and continues to operate in such a manner. This pervasive white gaze in the entertainment industry manifests in anti-Black depictions and ideologies. Black celebrities have resisted this distinct form of racial oppression by overtly affirming their Black identity in entertainment spaces. To further explore this phenomenon, the present article examines: How do Black celebrities employ unapologetic Blackness as an embodied resistance tactic to challenge racial inequality in pop cultural spaces? We analyze five cases of contemporary celebrity activism across various pop cultural platforms (YouTube, film, sport, music, and television) and find that just as race is socially constructed, varying across social locations, resistance to racial oppression also varies depending on the site in which it occurs. We further argue that Black celebrities’ embodied resistance converts pop cultural spaces into social movement scenes, thus transforming moments of entertainment into opportunities for political mobilization.
Sociologists have queried over the utility and effectiveness of generational analysis for some time. Here, the authors contend that intragenerational analyses are needed to critically and comprehensively make sense of the social world. Drawing on four presentations during the presidential session titled, “#NextGenBlackSoc: New Directions in the Sociology of Black Millennials,” the authors use Black Millennials as a case to illustrate how racializing generational studies can strengthen sociological research in four particular subdisciplines: Collective Behavior and Social Movements, Religion, Gender and Sexuality, and Family. They ultimately argue new analytic approaches are necessary to produce significant research on individuals and groups with complex intersectional identities and the particularities of their social experiences.
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