Mission Statement
The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion was launched in 2010 as a peer-reviewed journal that prioritizes the scholarship of communities of color in terms of both authors published and data/research explored. The JRER understands “religion” to be inextricably a feature of social identity that impacts perspectives on “race” and “ethnicity,” which serve as powerful modifiers to the study or understanding of religion. In sum, these perennially relevant topics cannot be studied in isolation. At the same time, the social weight of dominant modes of race and religion, and its relationship to scholarship, continue to adversely impact scholars of color in terms of publishing opportunities, the rank and importance such opportunities are assigned by many institutions and promotion committees, and the relative accessibility of this scholarship for communities outside of the academy. As the publishing arm of the Society of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion, the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion seeks to address these challenges by serving as a site of intense intellectual rigor, methodological plurality and interdisciplinarity, useable theory, and rich, diverse research topics and data, all while prioritizing the publishing of communities of color that live and work at the nexus of race, ethnicity, and religion (as well as a variety of other salient identities, including gender, sex, sexuality, region, income, etc.). Towards these ends, the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion seeks to:
1. Challenge the prevailing assumption that the present religious scholarly landscape, which is rooted in Eurocentric thought, is the pinnacle of academic excellence;
2. Provide an epistemological preference to the perspectives emanating from the disenfranchised and dispossessed to raise issues concerning which type of engaged praxis we should employ;
3. Move beyond the false assumption that religious perspectives constructed by Euroamericans are normative;
4. Create a space where religious scholars of color can study both their oppression and that of their communities as a network of interdependent histories;
5. Deconstruct the false walls that separate natural allies; and
6. Explore how separate marginalized communities are part of competing and overlapping systems of oppression, and thereby are complicit with disenfranchising other groups of people.
The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion assembles the best voices and insights from communities of color, promotes interdisciplinary and innovative investigation, and embraces new technologies of dissemination and empowerment.