Jesuits and Race: A Global History of Continuity and Change, 1530–2020 ed. by Nathaniel Millett and Charles H. Parker (review)

Reviewed by: Jesuits and Race: A Global History of Continuity and Change, 1530–2020 ed. by Nathaniel Millett and Charles H. Parker Kelly L. Schmidt Jesuits and Race: A Global History of Continuity and Change, 1530–2020. Edited by Nathaniel Millett and Charles H. Parker. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2022. 298pp. 68. 00. Memory is short. As recently as the Cold War, Jesuits were largely not progressives on issues of race (although each era has its occasional outliers) ; nevertheless, today Jesuits are often recognized and remembered as being at the forefront of social justice movements. Recent initiatives by the Jesuits to address their histories as enslavers and exploiters of Indigenous and African Americans have begun to resurface the Society's more complicated historical relationships with race, leading to a host of new scholarship on the subject. Jesuits and Race furthers these examinations of the contours of the Jesuits' role in global developments concerning race from the order's founding in the sixteenth century through the twentieth century. The anthology has no marked division of chapters, nevertheless the work cleanly divides into two sections, with six chapters on Old Society Spanish and Portuguese Jesuits grappling with questions of difference as they established missions around the globe, followed by three chapters on Jesuits dealing with issues of racism in the nineteenth-and twentieth-century United States. End Page 79 The first six chapters explore the ways Jesuits began to shape conceptions of race as they expanded their global mission from Europe to Asia and Latin America. Several chapters build well upon one another, showing the methods by which Jesuits applied questions of difference in early encounters in one part of the globe to other colonial missionary projects. Erin Kathleen Rowe's chapter analyzing Jesuit Martin de Roa's seventeenth-century argument that Black bodies retain their color in the afterlife logically builds upon Emanuele Colombo's preceding chapter which discusses the ontological questions that early Jesuits contended with regarding the full worthiness of New Christian candidates to the order with Jewish or Muslim ancestry. Succeeding chapters show how early Jesuits' stance towards New Christians echo throughout subsequent responses to skin tone, religious, ethnic, and cultural difference. While the Jesuits' fervor for the salvation of souls (regardless of ethnic and racial differences) permitted the initiation of non-Europeans into Christianity, their aforementioned biases prevented Jesuit missionaries from acknowledging the full dignity of Asians, Africans, and Native Americans on the temporal plane, justifying and extending practices of servitude and unfree labor. Particularly strong is J. Michelle Molina's assessment of Jesuit instructions for running a hacienda, which demonstrates how continence and containment were pivotal in managing Jesuits' "care" of laborers' religious and moral lives while controlling their labor. However, Molina's account sometimes flippantly discusses serious subjects and, in some areas, fails more critically to analyze dimensions of power at play with a Jesuit managing labor, moral, and religious life—including by violent means—among enslaved and hired Indigenous and African laborers. For example, Molina interprets the separate containment of young enslaved "maidens" to avoid "grave problems" and "conserve. . . their virtue and integrity" as a "complex mode of virtue marking that confers spiritual status" and an honorific for these girls while overlooking allusions to the girls' perceived promiscuity (147-8). A closer reading of the manual suggests that the regulations carefully shift blame to the girls for any risk of sexual transgression while intending to protect the Jesuit's purity and reputation. The remaining three chapters sharply pivot from the nineteenth to twenty-first century United States, exploring the erasure of Saint Louis University's history of slavery over the twentieth century, the halting efforts to integrate African Americans into the Jesuit order and its institutions marginally improved by Jesuit Superior General Pedro Arrupe's 1967 call to address U. S. racism, and the Cold War anti-racist activism of Jesuit George Dunne. Curiously, the editors included "The Memory of Slavery at Saint Louis University, " originally published in 2016, without updates to account for the university's 2018 bicentennial End Page 80 history book or the substantial scholarship and efforts (albeit fraught) on the part of the Jesuits and the university to. . .