Coloring the Christian Left

Abstract

Chapter 2 utilizes Thurman’s biography to comment on the ways in which a dynamic minority point of view pushed the otherwise White-dominated Christian Left to take on a more pluralistic and tolerant identity in the 1920s and 1930s. In line with Du Bois’s theory that minorities have a special insight, or “second sight,” to critique dominant culture, the chapter emphasizes how Thurman and his peers merged the concerns of the colored cosmopolitan community—the “darker peoples” that lived under Western imperialism and American Jim Crow—with the concerns of the Christian spiritual cosmopolitan community whose ideology strived to transcend social position.