Page - 100 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/01

100 | Elham Manea www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 91–110 concepts of rights and justice. Women’s rights have been violated with impunity on these very grounds. Let me explain. Culture does change. Consider the fact that between 1877 and the mid-1960s, the Jim Crow caste system was quite acceptable in the South in the United States. The system treated blacks as a degenerate caste and second-class citizens; it excluded them from public transport and public facilities, from serving on juries and from entering certain jobs and neighbourhoods. And it severely regulated social interactions between the races. During that period it was quite normal to have sepa- rate hospitals, prisons, schools, churches, cemeteries, and public accommodations for blacks and whites. These laws and policies were sustained by a whole range of religious, educational, and “scientific” discourses. A mainstream Christian interpre- tation at the time taught that “whites were the Chosen people, blacks were cursed to be servants, and God supported racial segregation”.29 At every educational level, scientists (craniologists, eugenicists, phrenologists and social Darwinists) bolstered the belief that blacks were innately inferior to whites, intellectually and culturally. The media did their share by routinely referring to blacks as “niggers, coons, and darkies”, and by reinforcing “anti-black stereotypes”.30 At the time both blacks and whites were governed by cultural norms on how they should interact. For instance, a black male could not offer his hand to a white male, as such a gesture implied social equal- ity. Under no circumstance was a black male to offer to light the cigarette of a white woman, an act that implied an intimacy that might be punished by lynching.31 Fifty years ago, that culture of racial discrimination was acceptable in parts of the United States. Many white people considered the Jim Crow caste system to be, in Taylor’s words, “who we are, where we are coming from”; as such, it was “the background against which our tastes and desires and opinions and aspirations make sense”.32 When others began to demand changes in these laws – and thus in this ele- ment of the way of life in the South – white people perceived these demands as tanta- mount to imposing an “imitation of anyone else’s life” and corrupting a “certain way of being human that is my way”.33 I know I am being provocative here. But if we are to take Taylor’s argument about authenticity, identity, and culture at face value, white people in the Southern states were, and perhaps still are, born racist. That was the “way they are”. Racism and a belief in their superiority over blacks was “inherent in the way they give meaning to their lives” and as such we should cherish their “distinctness, not just now but forever”. After all, “that was their culture”.34 Does this mean we should aspire to 29 Pilgrim 2014. 30 Pilgrim 2014. 31 Pilgrim 2014. 32 Taylor 1994, 30. 33 Taylor 1994, 30. 34 Taylor 1994, 30.