How Black Christians, Muslims, and Jews have used media to prove their equality, not only in the eyes of God but in society. The institutional structures of white supremacy-slavery, Jim Crow laws, convict leasing, and mass incarceration-require a commonsense belief that black people lack the moral and intellectual capacities of white people. It is through this lens of belief that racial exclusions have been justified and reproduced in the United States. Televised Redemption argues that African American religious media has long played a key role in humanizing the race by unabashedly claiming that blacks are endowed by God with the same gifts of goodness and reason as whites-if not more, thereby legitimizing black Americans' rights to citizenship. If racism is a form of perception, then religious media has not only altered how others perceive blacks, but has also altered how blacks perceive themselves. Televised Redemption argues that black religious media has provided black Americans with new conceptual and practical tools for how to be in the world, and changed how black people are made intelligible and recognizable as moral citizens. In order to make these claims to black racial equality, this media has encouraged dispositional changes in adherents that were at times empowering and at other times repressive. From Christian televangelism to Muslim periodicals to Hebrew Israelite radio, Televised Redemption explores the complicated but critical redemptive history of African American religious media.

The Penn School of Social Policy and Practice enjoys a reputation as Penn's social justice school, for its faculty actively strives to translate the highest ideals into workable programs that better people's lives. In this election year, as Americans debate issues like immigration, crime, mass incarceration, policing, and welfare reform, and express concerns over increasing inequality, tax policy, and divisions by race, sex, and class, "SP2," as the school is colloquially known, offers its expertise in addressing the pressing matters of our day. The practical solutions on offer in this volume showcase the judgment and commitment of the school's scholars and practitioners, working to change politics from blood sport to common undertakings. Contributors: Cindy W. Christian, Cynthia A. Connolly, Dennis Culhane, Ezekiel Dixon-Román, Malitta Engstrom, Kara Finck, Nancy Franke, Antonio Garcia, Toorjo Ghose, Johanna Greeson, Chao Guo, David Hemenway, Amy Hillier, Roberta Iversen, Alexandra Schepens, Phyllis Solomon, Susan B. Sorenson, Mark Stern, Allison Thompson, Debra Schilling Wolfe.

Harlem is one of the most famous neighborhoods in the world--a historic symbol of both black cultural achievement and of the rigid boundaries separating the rich from the poor. But as this book shows us, Harlem is far more culturally and economically diverse than its caricature suggests: through extensive fieldwork and interviews, John L. Jackson reveals a variety of social networks and class stratifications, and explores how African Americans interpret and perform different class identities in their everyday behavior.

New York's urban neighborhoods are full of young would-be emcees who aspire to "keep it real" and restaurants like Sylvia's famous soul food eatery that offer a taste of "authentic" black culture. In these and other venues, authenticity is considered the best way to distinguish the real from the phony, the genuine from the fake. But in "Real Black", John L. Jackson Jr. proposes a new model for thinking about these issues - racial sincerity. Jackson argues that authenticity caricatures identity as something imposed on people, imprisoning them within stereotypes: an African American high school student who excels in the classroom, for instance, might be dismissed as "acting white." Sincerity, on the other hand, as Jackson defines it, imagines authenticity as an incomplete measuring stick, an analytical model that attempts to deny people agency in their search for identity. Drawing on more than ten years of ethnographic research in and around New York City, Jackson offers a kaleidoscope of subjects and stories that directly and indirectly address how race is negotiated in today's world - including tales of book-vending numerologists, urban conspiracy theorists, corrupt police officers, mixed-race neo-Nazis, and gospel choirs forbidden to catch the Holy Ghost. Jackson records and retells their interconnected sagas, all the while attempting to reconcile these stories with his own crisis of identity and authority as an anthropologist terrified by fieldwork. Finding ethnographic significance where mere mortals see only bricks and mortar, his invented alter ego, Anthroman, takes to the streets, showing how race is defined and debated, imposed and confounded every single day.