I cannot, in truth, begin to dive into this week’s readings without comparing them to the wonderful article I read in the space between last week’s class and today. While reading how Hammon believes that “[God] has commanded us to obey, and we ought to do it cheerfully and freely” (Sernett 36), I could not help but draw parallels to the article written by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the October 2017 Issue of The Atlantic.

In his analysis of the election of Donald Trump, he relates several of his points to the myth of a disillusioned white working-class rallying together to vote for Trump. Why, Coates argues, is it not natural for black working-class voters to have turned to Trump as an alternative, people who have also suffered in an economic downturn? It is because of a racism that is only considered “incidental to his rise” (Coates). Coates divulges that “indeed, the panic of white slavery lives on in our politics today. Black workers suffer because it was and is our lot. But when white workers suffer, something in nature has gone awry.”

Parallels to the readings this week abound. In Raboteau’s reading, we see the flickers of recognizing African-Americans as human beings, however human beings who are enslaved, are shut down by white slaveowners who are terrified of the equivalency. They consider it an insult to regard these people as, well, people. And thus, the egalitarian nature of the Christianity they so feared passing to their slaves was perverted to ensure that Afro-Americans could never construe themselves as equals to Euro-Americans.