writing the journey
Loving your neighbor does mean holding them accountable to our common principles and common humanity, and it does mean that there is a time when the consequences of violence and terror and destruction will be paid by those who commit the acts.
Warning your neighbor away from the actions is a way to show love by warning them away from the consequences.
We have the Constitutional right to peacefully assemble, to petition the Government to listen to and respond to our grievances, and the right to say what we will without prohibition. (James Madison, primary author of the First Amendment
We just do not allow Black people in America to just exist. To be. To be learning and growing. To make mistakes and then figure out the way forward. To be children who are innocent and who love fun, who are mischievous and scared and reluctant to admit they’re scared. To boast and exaggerate, to hide and crawl away. To try new things and even reject them. Or to discover their talents and pursue their interests to become fulfilled in life.
Jim Crow is an evil, yes, and many of us have a social response of “that’s so terrible.”
But we do not want to admit how terrible it was and is again.
We are a country of people proud to be Americans but so ashamed of our actual history that we erase it and suppress it from being taught and learned and seen.
Some seventeen years ago now a man I didn’t much know but with whom I sparred asked a question of me that changed the course of my life: “You do know that I’m Black?”
Yesterday I was talking with my Haitian friends in Haitian Creole for about an hour as we were planning how to set up our class to teach Haitians how to speak American English. Per my request, they talked a little more slowly and with fewer idioms than usual (although they did throw in an idiom that I got right away with my brain rapidly connecting the imagery with cultural aspects of Haiti, and man did that feel good that I did that!).
I’ve come to know many Haitians who are delightfully unique in their outlook on life as they are in their accents and vocabulary, which gives me no end of headaches as I try to figure out yet another idiom or unique word play I need to understand so that I can grasp their meaning.
Adventures in translation This was my “wrapped the chain around the axle” moment today. My assignment this month is to … More
Why does the world exist the way it does that a people confined to a third of an island in the Caribbean are seen as less-thans? How do they grapple with the faith that comes from white people to their land, given to them to give them hope, and yet used as a tool by those same white people to call them despicable names and degrade them?
I had already decided to make my order entirely in Haitian Creole. Which was a good choice, because the staff at the restaurant were not speaking English.
The oppressing side in its acts of oppression is doing wrong by nature. There is no “just” oppression. Whether it is cruel or superficially “kind,” oppression is wrong and cannot be redeemed either by language or a reduction in cruelty.
How do I make my faith work anymore (and maybe it never did) when such a very Christian nation seems incapable of seeing the violence we are initiating, celebrating, and dismissing, often while claiming the name of Jesus?
You want to terrify politicians? Take away their signs of power which are “respect” and obedience and decorum and complacency. Trip them up, make a point to oppose them at every turn, continuously point out their failures, and continuously refuse to accord them the power to silence you.
That Good Samaritan did a good thing to someone in distress, and if the story stops there, then we have learned a good lesson, right?
But what the story doesn’t tell us in the background, and doesn’t tell us “the rest of the story.”
Perhaps white people’s thoughts and prayers and good intentions aren’t enough when their Black friends are asking for love and dignity.
White people, do not go into Black spaces to help change the conversation or add your very important opinion. It is just not the time and place for that.
The vision of Jesus for empire Christianity in our Sunday Schools and sermons and theologies is really an irrelevant Jesus who does not match the Jesus of the texts.
For the vast, vast majority of people, “deconstruction” is a good thing. Deconstruction can result in something far different and, in my opinion, far better than, white Evangelical Christianity.
Sometimes the arts can entertain us. Disney has surely figured out that formula. But sometimes . . . the arts can open something up to us that we didn’t ever think we needed to see and learn.
Betty White, a white woman in an industry that empowered only white men, stood up for what’s right. It cost her the job that she loved. But she did it, not “anyway,” but “because.” She did it because of her own moral integrity.
The book’s subtitle hints at what’s to come: we are all granted some level of privilege in life that others do have; those who have the most privilege are called to use that privilege
I had to read this slowly, thoughtfully, with many pauses and breaks. There have been books I’ve read through in … More
These are the stories of Black women living lives as Black women with no one else as their betters, let alone their equals.
There seems always to be that moment when the white participant says something that is simply too much to handle.
We learn, slowly, how to gather the people around us who will care for us and who will give us some space in their own lives.
CRT is about systems, not individuals. Systems are developed as shortcuts for lengthy processes so that we don’t spend all our time trying to figure out how to hand multiple situations and not have disparate outcomes.
I’ve read many books this year, some of them similar to his in that they are life stories. This is the first one that I finished where I wanted to have more.
