justice
- American Exceptionalism, Celebrate Recovery, essays, faith, justice, Life Recovery Skills, musings, racism, writing
What Is the Home That Shuts Its Doors to You?
ETA: I misnamed Ms. Ally Henny in this article & have corrected it. My apologies for misnaming her. I follow people in social media, and try hard to follow people who give me insight into their worlds that I don’t see. I follow people all over the world, mostly English speakers (but I throw in other languages and attempt to puzzle out their meaning with translation tools). Most of the people I follow are here in North America, specifically in the United States of America, and one them recently posted a blog entry about “Leaving Home.” (You can read it here: https://thearmchaircommentary.com/2019/09/22/leaving-home/) It is the story of Ally Henny and…
- American Exceptionalism, Celebrate Recovery, Contests, essays, faith, flash fiction, justice, Life Recovery Skills, musings, writing
When You Fall
I write and edit for a living, and I write for fun. I have a few novels in progress, with one released (so far); I write short stories and poems; I develop short screenplays and radio scripts, some which have been performed. That’s an incredibly heady feeling—to see your words expressed through actors on a stage or from a microphone! Often my stories and scripts come from a prompt as part of a competition. The poems are just extra—no one wants to read my poetry which is their sad loss. I try to be authentic and real, and I work hard—danged hard!—on creating characters who ring true, who speak like…
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Of Course I’m Racist
I don’t think I’ve ever been called a racist—not because I’m not, but because the people in my life are simply too kind and too gentle, and treat me as if I’m terribly fragile. But I will say, with the same level of clear-eyed truth about being in recovery for my addictions, that I am a racist. Thoroughly dipped and dyed, all the way through, head to heart, sole to soul, from earliest memory until today. Being called a racist will not kill you. It might sting because it attacks your self-image of being “not a racist.” Actually being a racist is what kills you. It deadens you to humanity.…
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A Non-Traditional Blessing
Text composed by Sister Ruth Fox, OSB, from the Sacred Heart Monastery in Richardton, North Dakota, in 1985.
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 29: Intent and Impact
The process of "waking up white" isn't just to be aware of whiteness. It is to wake up, and then to leave it. To go to something that's better and more life-affirming and full of health. And to not even be sure where the destination is, but with the calm assurance that it's out there.
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Moral Switzerlands
This is a prescient verse from 3000 years or so ago: “And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Joshua 24:15, AV White people are gonna have to choose, every single time. Every single time we choose complacency and choose safety and choose white solidarity we are choosing wickedness and cruelty and destruction. Whether we want to be honest about…
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Juneteenth, Reparations, and What Do I Do About It?
Today is June 19th, a day when we remember that our American experiment with freedom included over 200 years of enslavement for Africans stolen and sold to white slavers. Today is the day when HR#40, a bill to set up a commission to study reparations, was introduced for discussion in a House subcommittee hearing. And today I considered the long and winding road of my own presence in America. I have a history, y’all. My father’s family came to America in the early 1700s from England—the region where Matlock, Derbyshire sits. The family split early into Northern and Southern branches, with one group leaving for North and West, from North…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 6: From Confusion to Shock
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 27: Living into Expectations
This was a fascinating chapter for me, in that I hadn’t really dived into this before: what is it that we thought about ourselves when we were young that has somehow determined who we are as adults, based upon the choices we made from youth to adulthood. I was talking about this today on the bus with a friend. In high school the guidance counselors said “You can pretty much do whatever you want—you have no one specific passion.” And I’ve done that in life, settling on my current career of doing something interesting in tech while I wait for something to pique my interest elsewhere. I’ve done all sorts…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 26: Surviving Versus Thriving
In this chapter Ms. Irving recalls a famous experiment conducted in 1968 by Ms. Jane Elliott on a class of third graders, and then repeated in other circumstances with adults in various settings, including corporate settings where the participants came in order to learn about prejudice and race issues—and yet they were unable to process their experiences and feelings even though they knew they were there for such training and understanding. The experiences of discrimination overruled their intentions and their self-knowledge. “I’ve had plenty of moments where I’ve felt underappreciated, invisible, or misunderstood. I can’t imagine feeling that way most of the time at school, at work, on the train,…
- #WakingUpWhite, American Exceptionalism, challenges, faith, history, justice, Life Recovery Skills, work
#WakingUpWhite Chapter 25: Belonging
This chapter is about the tendency of white folks to feel like they belong everywhere. Ms. Irving focuses on the school environment, because she was a volunteer or participant at so many levels, including being on committees to help bring about and embrace “diversity.”
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 24: Everyone Is Different; Everyone Belongs
We need to do the right things when we can, but it is critically important that we continually reevaluate whether we're really doing the right things. We might not be able to wait until we have all the data before we try to make changes, but we absolutely must be willing to reexamine our efforts and even our understandings.
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 23: Diversity Training
More than having a map, a method, and motive, grasping what race and racialism in America will involve something deeper than just a way to work things out.
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 22: Why Do I Always End Up with White People?
Ever wonder why it is that even when good people want to fix things, nothing really gets fixed but a lot of talk passes by? I grew up in the fabulous 50s and 60s, and I remember the talk on how we were well on on way to fixing racism. “Just a little while longer,” I heard, “and we’ll get this discrimination eliminated. Just a few years more and all God’s children will be playing together.” Spoiler: It didn’t happen that way. The effort needed to make change happen is much, much great than the effort needed to think about making change happen. We can wish all we want. We…
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The Charlottesville Declaration
From the founding of this nation until the present hour, the idolatry of whiteness has been a pro-death spirit within our republic. I did not see this earlier, but I think it’s important to proclaim—loudly, confidently—that the gospel in America is the eternal gospel of God, of recognition and repentance and restoration.
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#Waking Up White Chapter 21: Straddling Two Worlds
This chapter is unbelievably relevant, especially in light of the post I put up not six hours ago about my past (“News and Updates”) as well as my essay on Medium (“My Journey into Blackness”). While I was in process of rethinking my thoughts and recalibrating my actions according to my values, I was using the online persona “Between Two Worlds.” My own feelings were much like what Ms. Irving relates in this chapter, and I can say I experienced many of the same things she did in the struggle to find who I was and where I belong. “Having my new friends ridicule my old world confused me. I…
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News and Updates
So here’s what’s going down… Some of you might know that I’ve been thinking about and writing about issues of race and equality for a long time. I’ve been vocal about my beliefs and vocal about my insistence that we all must repent and change. A few months ago an online publication, Our Human Family, reached out to me to begin writing for them. They had been reading my work and were interested in what I was saying, and they considered my work to be helpful and healing for the conciliation of us all. As they put it in their mission statement, “OUR HUMAN FAMILY exists as a safe digital…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 20: My Robin Hood Syndrome
“You know, we’re trying to focus on programs that serve Boston’s inner-city youth. If you could develop a vision that includes that population, we’d be more interested in supporting you.” This is an intriguing chapter, and one that is perhaps the turning point from comfort into awareness. The author is given great power and influence, and then is tasked to “go do something good for people.” Intriguing because the attempt was made, but here, at the beginning, perhaps the attempt went wrong when there wasn’t an inquiry into what is needed and how versus what do I think is needed and how can I help? Us white people “doing good”…
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There Are No Racists
I’m involved in a group that’s digging into American white racism, and I gotta say, there are times when I feel so discouraged that I feel like giving up. It’s too hard, it’s too much to deal with, it’s so overwhelming—and no one’s really a racist, anyway, except for maybe some white people in the South with CBFs on their pickup trucks. Or something. What I saw was some white people saying “Is it really helpful to call anyone a ‘racist,’ when that could just push them away from wanting to change? Calling someone ‘racist’ isn’t going to get us anywhere, and besides, you might be tempted to call me…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 18: Color-blind
We talk about the things that are important to us, or we talk about the things that are completely unimportant to us in order to avoid talking about the important things that threaten us. Intimacy threatens us. Empathy scares us. Accountability scares us. Responsibility and connected-ness provoke us. In our heart of hearts, with our bosom friends, we may, if we are very, very fortunate, have a brush with intimacy or reality. Race in America scares us white people. Scares the bejesus from us. I see things we do to ameliorate the pain and the fear. We talk over it. We deny it. We claim it’s not us. We say…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 17: My Good People
“How it was possible that I was both a ‘good person’ and utterly clueless.” It’s possible because being “good” does not mean “also smart” or “also educated” or even “also aware.” I’m good. I do good things. I have good intentions. Even when I was actively participating in conservative politics that were leading to the destruction of the oppressed, I was good because I had good thoughts and good intentions. Being good isn’t anything unless it’s coupled with intelligent action, and intelligent action isn’t good if it sets a priority upon intention rather than impact. Hand to God, I am ashamed and embarrassed by my words and actions to people…
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The Whisper of the Wind Without Words
My goodness, how deeply this spoke to me this morning: “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if…
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Enough
If you don’t know by know I’m a believer and follower of Jesus Christ, then I’ve done a damned poor job of making my faith explicit, and for that I’m sorry. I believe in Jesus the son of God, true God of true God, born, lived, died, and risen. But with that said, I stand with my brothers and sisters in the Muslim Ummah right now as we all are reeling in shock from the latest atrocities of white supremacist terrorism that’s being done in the name of Jesus Christ and for the followers of Jesus Christ. It is an abomination. Full stop. If your church is teaching that whiteness…
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When the Past Tries to Reclaim the Present
Last night the hemlock tried to nail the house again. This time it failed. We live in an area that is mixed rural and forest. Just down the street is the river, and across the river is an escarpment that’s the outlier of the Cascades. Western Hemlock, Douglas Fir, and Big Leaf Maple are the most common big trees here, with scattered alder and cottonwood in the understory, especially of disturbed land. The trees used to grow big here—we started as a logging and milling town until we ran out of trees, then switched to agriculture—hops and dairy as the most common. Now we still have some dairy farms, but…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 14: ZAP!
The fact that the playing field is not level means that life experiences are not merely different, but unequal and unfair. This is a hard concept to hold on to. Theoretically I understand it, but essentially I ignore it. And yet, every so often I hear the stories and hear the pain. I take for granted that everyone has a life like mine—you simply do the work required and you are rewarded. This is extremely not so. I’ve made it a point to not bring up personal stories from now on that involve people without their permission, and as a result I’ve removed about half of my blog entries. (The…
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Words and Deeds
This is short today, and a freebie: it matters that we use words. It matters that we listen to what people are saying. It matters that we think deeply about what we experience and what we hear, and even that we think about what we write or say. Words tell us things that can generally be understood in the same way by most people. (Yeah, there’s a philosophical argument that no one experiences the same experience, whether it’s from words or from interactions, but in my view there’s a general idea that we can understand even though we appreciate it with different emphases.) Words help me process my feelings or…
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#WakingUpWhite Chapter 12: Icebergs
“One of the breakthroughs I had … was understanding the degree to which I tend to align what I see and hear with my underlying beliefs.” You know, this is a great opener to help us understand how it all happened with us, the good people. I presume that most white people think they’re good people, and therefore just assume that they can’t be either racist or contributing to racism. “I don’t generally feel negative emotions about people of color, and generally don’t think negative thoughts about them.” How could anyone be contributing to racism or even be a racist themselves if they don’t have overt emotions and thoughts? We…
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Green Books, Black Lives, and White History
I’m reading some interesting responses to “The Green Book,” which, if you have been in a cave in Thailand for the past six months, is a movie about a white racially antagonistic chauffeur who ferries around a black musician. There have been complains, and their have been counter-complaints, largely on the line of “it’s just a movie.” (I have written elsewhere about how our entertainment does matter. A movie is never just a movie.) The complaints about the movie itself might be due to what’s in this article, about a slice of history that is used as a prop for another story entirely. I researched the meaning of the Green…
