Televised redemption: Black religious media and racial empowerment

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.